Guarding the Goddess Read online

  But he’s not just some commoner—he’s an off-worlder, a little voice in her head reminded her. What about an heir? What about having a Sacred Blue girl-child to carry on the line and one day take the crown?

  Ellina knew the little voice was right but there was something nagging her about it—some piece of information she might have heard at a time when she was too young to fully understand it. She had a feeling that if only she could remember it, they could resolve this last difficulty and Ty could stay on as her consort.

  Except he doesn’t want to, the relentless little voice pointed out. Tisa was right—there’s something else—some other reason he doesn’t want to be with you. And whatever it is, it’s so big as to be almost insurmountable.

  It seemed a hopeless business. Ellina knew she ought to give it up and stop being ridiculous. After all, just a few days ago she’d thought of her Kindred bodyguard as stiff and unapproachable and the idea of him being her consort and forming a binding and life-long bond with her would never have occurred to her.

  How she wished she still felt and thought that way! Instead, her heart ached like a sore tooth—a dull, constant throb that wouldn’t go away no matter how she tried to make it.

  Ty wants to go—he wants to leave me, she told herself sternly. I always knew that his assignment here was temporary. I need to get over it—need to let him go.

  But it was much easier advice to give than to take.

  “Here we are, Your Highness,” one of the guards said and Ellina looked up and saw that she was standing in front of a heavy iron-wood prison door.

  The entrance to the dungeons.

  “Let me make sure it’s safe, Your Majesty,” Ty said with a frown, stepping in front of her as the door swung open. “I don’t like this part of the palace—it’s too isolated.”

  Ellina doubted they were in danger—Ty had insisted on taking the entire company of Chorkay soldiers he had trained to be her new Royal Guard. Her new guards were now seasoned veterans who had proved both their loyalty and bravery in the “Battle of the Grand Promenade,” as the assassination attempt was being called. Surely surrounded by such competent warriors they would be safe, even deep in the dungeons.

  But she found she didn’t care enough to protest. Instead, she nodded dully and stepped aside, letting the big Kindred go first.

  Ty did so, watching carefully to make certain the way was clear before she came behind him. They descended a steep flight of stone stairs lit only by glowing torches, until at last they reached the bottom.

  “So you admit to planning the attack upon the Potentate?” A familiar voice floated through the echoing stone corridors of the dark, dank space.

  “Why should I deny it?” hissed a sibilant voice and Ellina recognized the unmistakable accent of someone from the Southern Continent.

  They rounded the corner and found themselves looking into a stone cell with a wooden table in the center. The table was bolted to the floor and the prisoner, in turn, was chained to the table with Lord Kikbax sitting across from him.

  The High Priest was glaring at the prisoner, who was indeed from the Southern Continent—Ellina could tell just from looking at him.

  There had been dissidents and rebels on the Southern Continent almost from the time it was first settled. Ellina thought it was probably because there was no shelter there, to speak of. Rather than being a vast desert, like the Northern Continent of Helios Beta, the Southern Continent was a great swamp.

  The marshy landscape didn’t allow the inhabitants there to burrow under the ground and build beneath the surface, as the Chorkay had been doing for generations. As a result, the people who lived there were constantly exposed to the harmful radiation of the blue giant sun Helios Beta orbited.

  The damaging ultraviolet rays turned Chorkay skin from shades of blue and green to an ugly, brownish-purple and also blinded the third eye. Even the chewchies of the Southern Continent were affected, having lost all their fur and grown scales as a defense against the merciless heat and destructive radiation.

  Ellina’s grandmother had tried to get the settlers on the Southern Continent to come back to the Northern Continent, where it was safe and protected. But her offer of peace had been soundly rebuffed.

  “Why do you think we left in the first place?” the leader—Azurel Ekopane had demanded of her grandmother. “Because we can’t stand being ruled by a woman!” He had spat on the ground at her feet—an insult to the Potentate which could have meant death if her grandmother hadn’t been lenient. “Better to stay in the South—to be baked by the heat and ruined by the radiation than to live one more minute under female rule!” he had declared.

  Grandmother had let him go back to the Southern Continent—though perhaps she shouldn’t have been so merciful, Ellina thought now. For there had been nothing but trouble from the Southern Continent ever since.

  It wasn’t known for certain, but it was suspected that Ekopane had been behind the assassination of her parents. And since it had been an assassin from the Southern Continent who had attempted to kill both her and Grandmamma at her coronation ceremony, Ellina wasn’t exactly inclined to feel lenient when she looked at the prisoner chained to the table in the interrogation room.

  “Your Majesty!” Kikbax exclaimed, getting ponderously to his feet when he saw Ellina in the doorway. “Only see what we have found—the mastermind behind the plot to kill your most royal and noble self at the Grand Promenade!”

  “And kill her I would have—and still will—when next I get the chance!” the prisoner spat. His brownish-purple skin looked like a wound that covered his entire body, Ellina thought with a shiver of revulsion and his third eye was shrunken and cloudy—clearly he could see nothing with it. The chewchie which screeched his hatred at her from the prisoner’s head was scaly instead of fluffy, as a proper chewchie ought to be. Its coloration was somewhere between mud and refuse and it seemed to radiate all the hatred the prisoner from the Southern Continent felt for her.

  “The only one who’s going to die is you, scum!” Lord Kikbax thundered, pointing a finger at the prisoner as his chewchie jumped and screeched on top of his head. “How dare you speak so of the Goddess in the Flesh?”

  “Lies!” the prisoner spat. “Y’res the Fourth, is nothing but an imposter! Everyone knows a female can’t rule effectively or well! Helios Beta should be ruled by a male—by my master, Azurel Ekopane! Long may he live!”

  Ty leaned in close, his fists planted on the wooden table, his eyes glowing red with rage.

  “I’ll tell you who’s not going to live very long and that’s you, you filthy bastard,” he growled. “Keep my Lady’s name out of your mouth if you don’t want me to gut you here and now!”

  The prisoner flinched back but glared up at Ty unrepentantly.

  “Who are you, off-worlder?” he spat. “Some foreign mercenary the ‘Goddess’ here hired because she can’t trust her own guards? Well maybe that’s because they know that real males ought to be ruled by another male! Not a weak, diseased whore of a female! She—”

  But before he could finish his hateful words, his head suddenly exploded in a splatter of purple and red and gray that made Ellina jump and gasp.

  At first she was certain it was Ty who had shot him but when she looked closer, she saw that it was Lord Kikbax holding the blaster.

  “Forgive me, Your Majesty,” he said, when he saw her looking. “But I could not allow that filthy scum to speak so of my Potentate.” And he bowed low, as though he had only been doing his job.

  “That was really fucking foolish,” Ty growled, turning to glare at the priest as he wiped the prisoner’s brains off his cheek where they had splattered. “What if he had cohorts? You should have saved your righteous wrath, priest, until we had all the information we could get out of him!”

  The High Priest drew himself up indignantly.

  “How dare you?” he exclaimed. “Do you not know that speaking in such a disrespectful way to the Potentate is a crime punishabl