Cara knew who it would be.

With the Horned One—the patron of lone Heroes, the god of the lone warrior—ensconced at their end, it could only be Her.

It could only be that goddess who could don the night as casually as others might shrug on a cloak.

It was the Morgana.

And yet—despite the certain knowledge that turned her bones to stone and her blood to liquid frost—Cara still wasn’t prepared when She rose from her place at the feast table to saunter down the long hall toward them.

Cara’s eyes focused, relaxed, and focused again as She clothed the long dead bones, making them move and glide in front of them with the sinuous ease of a dancer.

The Morgana stopped two paces from them, a goblet hanging from her fingers.

Cara closed her eyes, shook her head as if to clear it of a mirage. Laughter rose to fog her mind.

“Oh ho, so you would deny your disturbance, little adventurer?” The Morgana’s voice rasped like paper pages flicking through themselves, glided like a serpent in the grass. “You, who woke me from my nap? And I was having such a nice dream, too.”

She raised Her goblet, and Cara saw without seeing the wine that flowed between bone jaws and full red lips the jeweled hue of blood.

“We—” Cara had to stop and cough against the bone-dust that seemed to stifle her words. “We didn’t mean to disturb you, Lady.”

Cara mentally prodded the prone form behind her. Talking with gods was supposed to be Dayton’s job, not hers!

The goddess sighed and propped one fist against an ample hip, angles and curves clashing. “Ach, well, it was time and past for me to wake, in any case.”

She shot a look full of empty space and liquid blue light toward the prone form that continued to sit at the feast table. “I see that He’s already up and about. I wonder that He didn’t wake me.”

Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

The Morgana then turned her gaze on Cara, who stiffened under its weight. “Perhaps you might tell me what has passed?”

“I… what do you want to know, Lady?” Dammit, Dayton! Stop groveling!

But he seemed frozen in obeisance behind her.

The goddess’s stare seemed to bore into Cara’s soul. (It probably did.) “Who rules in Beiran now? Is it still the Augustan line, or have they been replaced?”

The Morgana looked at Cara—through her, beyond her to something that Cara knew she wouldn’t be able to see even if she turned.

After a moment, She sighed—a long, gusty breath that made the webs tremble and wisps of Cara’s hair fly back from her face. “Ahh, yes, so he does. Little Kassandre. I wonder, will she hold the kingdom? Should she?”

She gestured toward Cara with her goblet, making the light-wine tremble and drip over its fluted edge. “What say you, bold one?”

“I… I couldn’t say. Surely you would know?”

She drew back, startled, and Cara locked her knees in place to keep her upright.

After a moment of eternity, She began to laugh, long and low and deep.

“My reach does not go as far as once it did. But…”

The Morgana tilted her skull, night-raven locks traced in violet spilling past her shoulder. “Yes. You’ll do. You haven’t fainted yet, though not for want of trying. Too stubborn by half, you are. And there’s something… familiar…”

She chuckled in what Cara might have thought self-deprecation, if She hadn’t been who She was…. what She was.

“I’m still half addled by dreams, and you’re fair blinded by yours. Time will tell, as it always does. But for now, I think you’re too entertaining to shepherd on to the next stage. In fact…”

The Morgana held out her goblet to Cara. It pulsed with a shadowed-rimed light that matched Cara’s heartbeat.

“Take it, mortling. Take it with my blessing and favor, and let me learn how my realm has faired beneath the yoke of my sister and brother. It is time and past for me to be abroad, and I will need servants.”

Cara stared at the goddess’s hand, Her bones covered with a glove of flesh and gold-tipped talons.

She motioned impatiently towards Cara, and its contents nearly spilled again.

Instinctively, Cara reached for the goblet to keep it from tipping, and felt her fingers touch the stem just as the liquid light bubbled over.

It oozed against her left hand, seeping into her skin to beat a new tempo into her veins.

The light sang hot and bright through her blood, thawing the chill that had settled into her bones from the moment she’d entered the room.

Cara sighed, her body feeling as though it had sunk into a hot spring pool.

The goblet’s stem lengthened, widened, and grew more sturdy under her grip, though no heavier.

The Morgana smiled a skeleton grin and offered Cara a mock-salute before She sank back into shadows weighed down by the mountain-pyramid above.

The purplish blue unlight lingered for a moment before vanishing in favor of the mortal-torches’ last ember-glows, highlighting Dayton’s attempt to merge with flagstones and Cara gripping the hilt of a newly forged sword in a crypt full of corpses.