Metal clashed against metal, the usual sounds. Then came the sound of something new, something that caught everyone’s attention. A lighter, higher resonance. Almost a clinking chime as Dante caught Marcus’s sword against his metal bracelet, deflecting the blow in a most unexpected manner. Dante’s sword darted forward and Marcus leaped back. The burly warrior gazed down at the neat cut that gaped open his shirt front, exposing the muscled slabs of his belly. The white skin itself was uncut.
“Neat trick.” Marcus grinned, teeth bared, his dark eyes lighting up with the pleasure of a worthy challenge. “Let’s see you do that again, boy.” He lunged forward, a big bear of a man, his full power and weight behind the thrust. The high chiming clink sounded again as Dante deflected the blade past him with his right wrist guard. A quick turn and twist like the steps of a ballet, a lethal one, and Dante was suddenly behind Marcus, the edge of his own sword stopped a hair’s breadth away from the thick neck.
Complete silence for one long moment, then big, bullish Marcus dropped his weapon. “And I’m dead.” He turned around slowly, unarmed. “Witch’s tit,” Marcus said, grinning. “That’s some real nice moves you’ve got there, Dante boy. Course, you’d be minus a hand now, if your aim with those fancy cuffs was off by a tad.”
“True,” said Dante, lowering his sword. “Lucky, I guess.”
“Lucky, my balls,” muttered Jayden. He and Quentin had stopped their fighting to watch the other two. As had all the rest of the men the moment that first clinking chime had sounded in the air.
“You fight like the Lacedaemons of old,” said Chami, my chameleon. He was tall and boyishly slender, but his voice held the chill of death, stilling everyone. “You are descended from that line?” He asked the question of Nolan, with whom he had been sparring.
“Yes,” Nolan replied, eyeing the smaller man warily. “It is not common knowledge among the other Queens I served. But Queen Mona Lisa knows of my lineage.”
He’d only told me in a bid for his sons, casting it out as enticement for me to take them into my bed. Or maybe Nolan hadn’t tried to hide it from me simply because I’d already seen the unusual, distinctive manner in which they fought.
“Of all the Queens, she is one you should have kept this knowledge from,” Chami said. His words puzzled me as much as they did Nolan.
“Why do you say this, Chameleo?” Nolan asked, calling Chami by his full name. A name that stated what Chami was, and what he did. Chameleon. Assassin.
“You do not know, do you?” Chami asked.
“Explain yourself, chameleon.”
Chami turned his gaze back to me. “Mona Lisa. If you will please show him your hands.”
Feeling something almost like dread well up in me, I lifted my hands and turned my palms out to him. When Nolan caught sight of the pearl-like moles nestled in my palms, his sun-darkened face whitened, became ash pale. He looked from me to his son. To Dante, who watched us with his pale blue eyes glittering and gleaming like shards of ice melting beneath the sun’s brilliant light.
Chami quoted the following words in an almost singsong manner, reciting them like an old familiar song. “With pale eyes touched by the faint color of the sky, the fierce son of Barrabus slew our heart, our hope, our Warrior Queen.”
Hearing that name, Barrabus, something tingled to life within me. It was a name I’d never heard before. By the same token, deep in the soul of me, I knew and recognized it somehow.
The charged tension between Chami and Nolan suddenly grew thicker, more threatening. Reacting to that incipient promise of violence, Tomas and Aquila moved swiftly in front of me, as did Dontaine, though he looked as confused as everyone else. It was like watching a play that had suddenly, unexpectedly, veered away from its usual dialogue and storyline. Only Nolan looked as if he understood it. And Dante. From whom men were protecting me—as if he were some horrible threat.
“Chami,” I said, trembling from something right there, hovering on the cusp of my awareness, tickling my memory, but still just beyond reach. “Explain this. What’s going on?”
It was Dante who answered. The words he spoke were almost lyrical, and his voice, fully recovered now, was smooth and rich, a sharp contrast to the harsh stillness of his face, the bitter fierceness of his glittering eyes. “Long ago on another planet, in another world, in a time of great strife among our people, there rose a Queen named Mona Lyra. She bore the marks of the moon’s blessing in her hands. The Moon Goddess’s tears, they were called, given to her by a mother crying over the blood being shed by her children, one against another, crystallized and captured in a woman’s hands, giving her great gifts and powers as healer and fighter both. A Warrior Queen.”
The first time I’d met Gryphon, he had spoken of such women in the past bearing the same marks as I. Women who had been both blessed and cursed by their gifts, I remembered.
“What does that have to do with you?” I asked. “With us?”
“Damian, the son of Barrabus, was a warrior with eyes of silver touched by the sky.” Dante smiled, a humorless gesture, as I looked at his eyes, noted their color. “He slew Mona Lyra, killed the last Warrior Queen, and was cursed for it, he and his descendants. By the sword they would live and die. Damned, in an endless cycle of life and death, never ending. Reborn each time into an ever diminishing line of those who carried his blood. His curse was to see his line die slowly out, killing his heart as surely as he had cut down theirs. Lacedaemon was one of his descendants.” The line from which Dante and his family descended. The line that had been cursed.
I pushed passed Aquila and Tomas, and if my hands shook and my heart beat rapidly, it did not show in my steady voice. “You speak of legends, Dante. Of people that may or may not have existed. It’s just a story. It has nothing to do with us.”
“You are wrong,” Dante said, speaking as softly and gently as the breeze that blew across our skin. “I remember killing you.”
ELEVEN
WITH DANTE’S WORDS, over a hundred swords were suddenly raised up against him. The promise of violence hummed in the air and was reflected in Dante’s silver-blue eyes. All it would take to ignite it would be for him to lift his blade, the sword that was currently gripped loosely in his hand, the sharp tip resting on the ground.
Something flickered in his eyes, and I knew he was going to do it.
There was power in the ground where we stood. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of times before a Queen had called down the moon’s light here, and her people had Basked in the glowing rays. It was a sacred circle of light, of power. Of blood spilled on the ground in practice. Of challenges called and met here.
I’d stood here once, and called down those lunar rays. Drawn down those butterflies of renewing light. And that once had made this place mine. It recognized me, accepted me, embraced me. This place, this clearing, was mine even more than the house where we slept and ate. This was my place of power.
I called upon it now, drew upon it deliberately, and the land answered me, wrapped me up in invisible strands of past and present power. All the authority that was mine, given to me, claimed by me, filled my voice as it rang out sharply in the suddenly still night. “Hold! Stand down, everyone.”
There were times when I felt like I was stumbling around in the dark. As if I had tripped and fallen, and a crown had accidentally tumbled down on top of my head. Oftentimes, I felt as if I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, that I was not worthy. But all that confusion, indecisiveness, and inadequacy fell away. Here and now, in this moment, with the power and authority of this sacred ground thrumming through me, I was Queen as I had never been before. And I knew what was in my men’s heart. Every single one of them, even Dante’s. Especially his.