Demon's Fire by Emma Holly Read Free Book Online Page A

palace didn’t exist yet, even as a wish in her mind. She was all thirst, all hunger, all desperate drive to survive. Outcast that she was, she knew the drive was futile. If the desert didn’t kill her now, it would soon.
    Such was her state that she thought she was dreaming when the walls first spoke.
    Goddess, they said. You have returned.
    They belled inward to embrace her as if they were alive, turning to a tarlike liquid that was filled with stars.
    And then it was Beth whom the walls embraced. A basso note rumbled through her bones, lower than the lowest horn ever blown. Colors and patterns flowered behind her eyes. She should have been frightened, but the capacity for that emotion had been drained from her. She felt more purely female than she ever had, desiring and desirable. As the walls pressed up against her, her body twitched and grew wet.
    Goddess, murmured the chamber. This is for you.
    Stars began to spin around her, celestial clockwork older than the sand. Stars couldn’t tell time, of course, and yet Beth sensed these stars had been waiting for her, mindlessly patient down the centuries, hoping only to fulfill the purpose for which they’d been designed. That purpose was to make her better, to make her capable of birthing children who would survive the dark age ahead.
    Odd sensations twanged through her nerves. She would have fallen had the clinging walls not cradled her upright. She breathed in stars and blackness, scented of cinnamon. The dark curled in teasing fingers between her legs, almost physical, almost causing a release. She reached to let the tickling deeper, her body straining to feel more of the sweet, slippery caress…until her every cell seemed to explode and reform itself.
    Beth was on her knees, breathing in great, quick gulps, her torch fallen to the matte black floor. Her muscles trembled as she tried to throw off whatever had caused the strange vision. The door was open, not closed as she’d imagined, and the surfaces of the room were perfectly solid. Shaking, she fumbled for the torch, got to her feet and tottered out. Her legs felt odd, like someone else’s legs rather than her own. The wall slid shut at her exit, the section of the ceiling that had descended now rising up with the faintest hiss.
    She could not see a single crack to show where the stones had moved.
    She was alone in the queen’s chamber, so weakened by shock that the torch was nearly too heavy for her to hold. However long she’d been in the other room, her stay had not alerted Lord Herrington.
    That didn’t just happen, she told herself.
    She looked up and found the slender wooden rod still hanging from its hook.
    Every one of her siblings would have sworn this situation was typical: Tell Beth not to do something, and she was sure to leap straight into trouble. In this case, no one even had to tell her. She’d known instinctively not to pull that thing.
    I hallucinated what happened. I was dreaming about that demon and Charles, and being left alone in here must have been more than my nerves could take. I’m a simple, Ohramese girl who isn’t used to foreign goings-on.
    Regardless of the cause of her experience, whether it was fear or ghosts or poisons lingering in the ancient air, her nerves compelled her to yank the whiplike rod from its holding place. Hardly able to bear touching it, she shoved it into a corner beneath a rug. One of Herrington’s workers would find it eventually. Until they did, Beth didn’t have to think about whatever she had or had not done.

THREE
    Tou stumbled out of the secret chamber onto the sand, gasping for breath in the thick, baked air. Her knees gave way, pitching her forward onto a dune. Surprisingly, the sun felt good, calming the palsy that shook her limbs. She let herself roll onto her back to soak in the warmth, then tore off what shreds remained of her poorly made orphan’s robes. She wanted nothing between her and the golden radiance—never mind how infernally hot