The God King’s goblet, its solid stem crunched with visible finger indentations, smashed into the wall beside Seth’s head.
He felt the hair at his temple move with the forceful wind of the clattering object.
The God King’s expression hadn’t changed from the congenial gaze of genuine curiosity and open-hearted good humour that it usually wore, but his eyes, his violet orbs, had turned black. The sockets had filled with the midnight sky he loved to stare into from the observatory in the Glass Manor’s tallest tower.
Seth’s muscles had gone rigid. His spine aching with the effort of keeping him upright when the King’s force of personality, his insidious kindness, made Seth’s knees want to buckle and his head press to the floor in supine supplication. There were others in the chamber, gathered in the eaves of the tree, where the darkness coalesced with the collective weight of their shadows, growing in fear, in awe, and some in an anger that reflected what the God King wasn’t displaying, in spite of it thrumming under his amused gaze.
Seth’s eyes broke contact with the God King’s for a second, and he looked to the wall beside his head. Cracked, broken shards of mural clung for the sake of their lives to the indent the goblet had left when it smashed the glass and stone. A tableau in honour of the strength the King’s body somehow kept mostly in check.
“Look at me,” the King’s voice whispered, and it carried through the room, implanting in the skin, in every pore of Seth’s shape.
When he did turn to look, the King was centimetres of his face, his hair slowly falling around his shoulders again, as if it had been caught in violent winds, and his eyes, his dark, depthless holes, bored into Seth’s.
The seconds that followed blurred together as Seth felt pain explode in his face, his body crumbling as he was pushed, shunted, no, struck. The ground met his shoulder. His arm had tried to break his fall, and had broken something, but not the downward momentum, which rattled through him as his voice spilt out in a cry of pain.
Something warm and wet seeped into his eye. He shook his head to blink it away.
There was the sound of laughter in the room, echoing, tinkling like a glass bell.
Saskia.
She’d stepped out of the shadow, and her eyes met Seth’s blurring ones as he tried to shake away the blood, only making it worse, half of his vision almost entirely obscured.
“He knows nothing of their betrayal, Father,” she whispered as she came close, bending to look into Seth’s face.
For once, he thought he could see pity there. But she was the viper among them, the black widow, the many-legged vile thing that lurked to ensnare and devour.
Why, then, should she bother to spare him the God King’s fury?
Seth took a slow breath in, forcing it to be silent, to hide his rampaging fear, and he looked up.
The King’s face was turned to her, then to him. There was a quiet question, an unasked request for more information.
“I didn’t know,” Seth breathed.
He didn’t. How could he have? His family, his friends, conspiring? Against Ashur de Babylonia? The King to whom Seth’s mother had sworn such absolute loyalty? She’d sent him, night after night, to sit at Ashur’s feet, to learn from him, to, one night, become like him. Mut would never had been part of such a thing. Nor would the others. And if they had… Seth would have known.
Wouldn’t he?
The King had come to kneel in front of him, and Seth’s heart thudded like a thousand drum beats. His fingers clawed into the stone beneath them, and his eyes sought something that even remotely felt human in the King’s gaze.
Ashur smiled.
He pressed cold, unyielding lips to Seth’s face, to the stinging cut at his eyebrow, and the touch of a tongue licked the wound’s edges, sending rippling signals of pain down into Seth’s jaws.
He clenched them. Looked up.
The tongue was too long, curling, and pink, and it undulated.
Beads of blood were traveling to the God king’s lips as if he summoned them there with the force of his will alone. His fangs flashed in the dim light of the blue flames that graced the walls.
His hands touched Seth’s face, cupping it, turning it up to look at him. His black eyes were expressionless, but a smile touched his lips.
“I know that you had nothing to do with it,” the King said. His voice was a coalition against Seth’s senses. “And that, alone, will be enough to save you.”
His face came closer. He turned Seth’s head to one side. Lips brushed Seth’s neck, then his ear.
“But it will not save your family,” Ashur whispered.
