Seduced by Darkness (Dark Court Rising) by Bec McMaster

Author:Bec McMaster [McMaster, Bec]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lochaber Press Pty Ltd
Published: 2021-02-25T18:30:00+00:00

7

ISKVIEN

If Mother was surprised by my smile when I greeted Maren, and the easy grace with which I signed my name to a marriage contract between Aska and Asturia, there’s no sign of it on her face as she leads us into the heart of the Hallow.

I keep waiting for the lash to fall but it occurs to me that the reason she doesn’t suspect something devious in my heart is because I’ve never dared openly defy her before.

She thinks me cowed.

We climb toward the Hallow.

It’s a nexus point where leylines meet, and we used it to arrive here yesterday morning. The power of the Hallow can be used as a portal, except one is bound by the leylines. You can only travel to another nexus point, another Hallow.

It’s also the place where the Seelie Alliance meets whilst at the queensmoot, and there is to be a gathering of the heads of the alliance.

The gently sloping hill is capped with ruins, with the Hallow right in the center. It’s a sacred place and to spill blood here is forbidden. Each queen is allowed to bring five guards only, and the space around the Hallow has been cleared for two hundred yards around it so that any threat can be seen coming.

The enormous standing stones of the Hallow cast ominous shadows as we walk between them.

Some still bear lintels; enormous wedges of stone somehow hauled on top of a pair of sentinel stones. Other lintel stones lie cracked and shattered at their feet. Some of the scholars at the Akvaran University in Aska have tried to study this Hallow, and believe they’ve found the quarry where the stone came from—nearly a hundred miles away from this place.

Nobody has been able to fathom how the otherkin who once ruled this world managed to get those stones into place. Their tools were primitive, their magics bound to the Hallows and their gods. And yet the floor of this particular Hallow is polished slate so smooth it almost seems like an obsidian mirror. Bronze glyphs are etched into the stone, and research has proven that on certain nights of the year, moonlight will spill through little holes in the sentinel stones to create a perfect circle of moonlight on each glyph.

It wasn’t just a portal to the otherkin.

It wasn’t just a place of worship and sacrifice.

It was also a calendar of all the celestial events, and right now, the little circle of moonlight lights up the glyph that corresponds with Lammastide—or as some of the Askans refer to it, Lughnasadh.

Five golden thrones have been brought into the Hallow.

We’re the last to arrive.

“Greetings, Adaia,” calls Queen Maren, her smooth dark hair tumbling in a silken fall over her shoulders. A black crown circles her head, the points akin to a spear. She’s rumoured to be the most beautiful woman in the world, and if she’s not, then she’s very close to the top of the list.

Lucidia of Ravenal slouches in her chair, looking irritable. She

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