The archer queen the arc.., p.1
The Archer Queen (The Archer Princess Book 3), page 1
The Archer Queen is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, incidents and locations are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locations or persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2023 by E. P. Bali
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This first edition published in 2023 by
Blue Moon Rising Publishing
www.ektaabali.com
ISBN ebook: 978-0-6455686-8-4
Paperback: 978-0-6456909-6-5
Hardcover: 978-0-6456909-7-2
Paperback (Pastel Edition): 978-0-6456909-8-9
Hardcover (Pastel Edition): 978-0-6457846-6-4
Illustrated Cover design by Carly Diep
Naked Hardcover by Etheric Designs
Map artwork by Najlakay
Chapter Art by Etheric Designs
Book Formatting by E.P. Bali with Vellum
The author acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of the land where this book was written. We acknowledge their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respects to their Elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples today.
A NOTE ON THE CONTENT
I care about the mental health of my readers.
This book contains some themes you might want to know about before you read.
They are listed at www.ektaabali.com/themes
For those of us who yearn for happy endings.
CONTENTS
1. Altara
2. Rani
3. Altara
4. Altara
5. Pia
6. Altara
7. Zale
8. Pia
9. Malika
10. Altara
11. Altara
12. Zale
13. Altara
14. Zale
15. Pia
16. Altara
17. Altara
18. Altara
19. Zale
20. Altara
21. Altara
22. Malika
23. Altara
24. Zale
25. Altara
26. Pia
27. Altara
28. Altara
29. Altara
30. Zale
31. Altara
32. Altara
33. Rani
34. Altara
35. Malika
36. Altara
37. Zale
38. Altara
39. Pia
40. Rani
41. Altara
42. Altara
43. Zale
44. Malika
45. Pia
46. Zale
47. Altara
48. Pia
49. Rani
50. Altara
51. Pia
52. Zale
53. Altara
54. Altara
55. Altara
56. Altara
57. Altara
58. Altara
59. Altara
60. Zale
61. Malika
62. Altara
63. Rani
Epilogue: ZALE
Epilogue: Altara
Afterword
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by E.P. Bali
1
ALTARA
He sat on a throne of twisted black metal, the armrests made of the skulls of old demonic kings with curled horns. Alabaster hands rested atop the skulls, his body hidden by a robe of midnight shadow. Six blood-red eyes set in that cadaverous face looked out over the sea of demons, fallen to their knees in submission.
Sometimes they called him the Reaper. Other times, the Green General or Emperor. More recently, God.
The entire hall was silent, and that was the worst thing of all because demons were never silent, not in the time that I had observed them in the week we’d spent in the demon realm. I stood at the base of the high steps with Zale by my side. He was always by my side now, always angled towards me, snarling at anyone who got too close, always aware of my every movement, my every breath. Tonight, his tattooed, muscled torso was splattered with demon blood, the black of it melding with the black ink on his skin, making him look like a whole new sort of monster. On the other side of the throne steps stood Atax and Raen, the former similarly splattered with blood and the latter ever-clean, despite the fact they’d both killed tonight.
Before us, Kai knelt over the newly dead demon king. It was lucky I’d had the forethought to braid his hair back because his entire face and body was smeared with black splashes. Where Raen was a clean killer and Atax a brutal one, Kai was a messy, chaotic whirlwind of death. And carving out a demon’s heart was no clean task.
Determinedly, I kept my eyes forward and away from my youngest brother-in-law, my hand clasped in front of me in an effort to stop the trembling.
My father would have called it the veteran’s tremble. It was memory, biting and aching and severed of all reason. It was not me on that floor, after all. Not me being cut open by the Butcher. It was just Kai. It was just Kai. It was just Kai.
The shadows surrounded me, a layer of spider silk clinging to my body like a second skin. Before, those shadows protected me from the world, pulling me down into the abyss of my own doom until I could barely function. I’d let them control me. Let them take me over.
Now, I commanded them. Now, I was the one in control.
And I let them surround me like a weapon.
The air was thick with sour demon odour and sweat, but luckily for me, my shadows muffled my smelling ability too. I was a wraith, once again, and my husband, a monster of the night; cruel, vicious and cold. Cold most of all.
Zale stood as a king did, for nothing could ever take away the kingly grace from that warrior’s body, but he somehow managed to move discreetly closer to me. A tiny change in the angle of his torso and I suddenly felt safe. Here, in this hall of hundreds of demons, that should have been impossible, and yet my hands stopped trembling and my heart slowed to a steady thump.
Kai leapt to his feet with a small giggle and held the whole bloody heart of the demon king for all to see. A prize. The cost of not falling in line. The demons all looked up at him, thrust their fists in the air, and roared.
The ground beneath my feet vibrated as Kai turned around and ran up the steps to the black throne and bent on one knee, presenting the Reaper with the still warm black heart.
Zale and I turned to look as the crowd behind us snarled and roared in their guttural demon voices. The Reaper inclined his head to Kai and patted his cheek with a sort of fondness that grated at my insides. Kai’s cheeks were round with his grin before the Reaper took the heart in one hand and set it alight with vibrant green flames.
“All hail the Reaper!” Raen cried.
“Reaper. Reaper. Reaper.”
The message it sent was clear. To disobey meant something worse than death. It meant annihilation.
The Reaper stood and Kai scampered back down the steps to come and stand next to Zale and I. Unable to look at Kai, somehow still sweet as a child, I watched the Reaper raise his arms to signal quiet.
The crowd obeyed like obedient dogs.
Without a visible mouth, the Reaper’s voice appeared inside our minds. “The demon realm is mine.” It was rasping, cold and quiet, like a chilled knife against the brain. “The Dark Fae Realm is mine. And soon, the Human Realm will fall to me.” I tried not to stiffen against this information. Tried not to remember that my sister had been there, in Black Court with her new husband, Drakus Silverhand. “He who holds the Quartz Quarry holds the power of the continent. Together, we will unite human, demon and fae in a new utopia under my name. My power will be infinite. My empire will reign supreme.” He pointed to Zale with one long finger and my husband turned around to face the demons. I followed suit.
“Ashzale Boneweaver will lead the forces to take the Ellythian Isles. With human mages as our slaves, I will be unstoppable.”
Sounds of surprise and excitement tittered amongst the demons. They had not expected this, I realised. Demons had been trying to take Ellythia for two thousand years and had been unsuccessful. Once, it had been a fanciful dream for them. But now, with Zale?
Zale’s voice rung out deep and commanding. “Under my command, the Reaper will take Ellythia!”
The roar was deafening and all I could do was sink further into my shadows.
We departed that demon palace, following the Reaper outside into the forever-dark of the Demon Realm. The sky glowed a dull rust red through the smoky wisps of my shadows, as if the very sky were bleeding along with the old, rebel king of this court.
My husband and his brothers were silent, lethal warriors who now obeyed every command their black hearts and the Reaper gave them. There was murder in their hearts and violence in their veins and the power they bore was unlike anything I’d ever felt. It made me want to flee, but at the same time, it drew me closer to them.
The Reaper headed towards the chariot he travelled in, stationed just outside the black palace. It was a golden-green flying vehicle made for war, thick metal twisted into demonic and fae patte
Zale and Raen had flown in next to him, with me on Zale’s back and Atax and Kai on Raen’s massive black raven form. Zale refused to have anyone except me seated upon him, and despite what was no doubt a heavy load to carry, Raen never showed any sign of strain during flight.
As Zale and Raen prepared to shift, the Reaper’s voice rung out in our heads. “Princess Altara will ride with me.”
I tensed at the same time Zale did. But his response was not out of retaliation. As his mate, a primitive part of him wanted me to always be at his side. But he now defected to the Reaper as his personal god. Every order the Reaper gave, Zale was only happy to obey, that black bond sharp and strong between them. Zale reached down and pressed his lips to my neck—a silent reminder of his claim to me.
Suppressing a sigh, I followed the Reaper to his chariot and climbed in to stand by him. The smell of burnt flesh singed my nose, and I allowed a tendril of smoke to hover over my upper lip. The smell receded, but the Reaper’s heavy, malevolent force weighed me down like a foreign, suffocating blanket.
He flicked the reins of his chariot and the two monstrous zekar stallions lurched into a rabid gallop, their wings angled behind them. I gripped onto the gilded edge of the chariot with fierce knuckles to avoid keeling over while my witch’s boots kept my legs in place.
With powerful downward beats of their wings and the zing of the Reaper’s sour magic, we ascended into the air, the demons below cheering and stomping their feet. Nausea roiled in my stomach, but I determinedly held firm, focusing on the mating mark on the back of my right hand, Zale’s blue-eyed tiger.
I’d come to discover that it liked to change and move. To my delight, and much like Zale, the tiger turned on my hand and bounded up my wrist and onto my arm. Sometimes, I had to search for it on my body, but she would come into view like she knew I was looking and settle back down upon my hand. I wondered if Zale knew, but no doubt he would find it satisfying that his mark was roaming my body, just as possessive as he.
The real Zale flew close behind us in his eagle form, and I felt his eyes burning on my back as we flew, the golden thread between us humming with irritation at our distance.
It was unnatural, how the sky here was always dark and starless, and I could almost understand why the demons wanted to leave this place and colonise above ground. They might not be able to survive the daylight, but at least the stars might have been a comfort.
“What can you tell me about Saraya Voltanius?” The Reaper asked in a husky voice that hit my eardrums with a very real scrape.
My head snapped towards him, and not even my extensive court training could stop my mouth from gaping.
In place of the six-eyed monstrosity was a strikingly handsome fae prince, six and a half feet tall, with green swirling eyes, a perfect aquiline nose, and a smirking, masculine mouth. He really was a fae prince, I realised. Had been once, anyway.
The malefic, predatory feeling remained, however, and any person with sense enough would never miss the evil presence behind those eyes. I gulped, reminding myself that if he wore a mask for me now, it was only because he was trying to appeal to my womanly instincts.
Tough luck on that one; no man had ever come close to Zale’s lethal masculine beauty.
I cleared my throat to answer his question and turned to look out at the flying zekar. So, he wanted information on my sister, that was interesting. “My sister is like me, I suppose. A warrior born and bred.”
“She is not like you.” His voice bore a cold sort of melody that chilled my insides. “Though you are both like me in your own way.”
I stopped myself from raising my brows. And gagging. “How so?”
“Her husband is a being made to be a fulcrum upon which the time shifts. Upon which destiny shifts.”
It was almost poetry, and this news was very surprising. “Her husband?”
“Drakus Silverhand is a creature of destiny. Saraya Voltanius is his mate. His equal. The other half of the coin. She is essential.”
The way he spoke about her made my neck prickle. My older sister had always seemed like the sort of person who was… well, invincible. She took the pain of our stepmother for so long. Endured and yet still remained strong. I supposed it made sense that she was mate to a creature like Drakus.
“That makes sense,” I admitted. “She always had an air of power to her.”
“And then there is you.”
My stomach fell at his tone, and then he turned to look at me and I felt as if my very organs had been put out on a table for his inspection. I remained so still that I thought I might disappear into nothing.
“You and I are the same because you have the same seed of darkness I was born with. You know pain, Altara Yasani Boneweaver.”
My mother’s name in his voice made me want to retch. A sacred name made into a curse. But I abated my anger.
“Even now, you fight it. There is a darkness in you that will never be destroyed. I must thank the Butcher for it. Without him, you would not be here with me, fighting for our freedom.”
A sharp pain in my palm was the only thing that told me my fingernails were cutting into it.
“You want to kill him.” A low chuckle. “In my new world, Altara, the weak get eaten by the strong. If you can kill him, I will bless it.”
A shiver crawled down my spine, and not in a good way. He thanked the Butcher, and yet he would approve of my revenge. The thought made bile rise in my throat at the pure evil in that. The Reaper approved of me. Tears burned the back of my eyes, but I would die before I let them fall, here in the Reaper’s fucking chariot.
“Turn from your Goddess to me,” he continued. “And you will have more power than she could ever give you.”
Not in one million fucking years.
2
RANI
If Umali, the raging Goddess, was the chaos that came before the end, Cholnayak, the crone, was the end. She was the great eternal force that existed before everything began and the latent power who lies in silent repose after everything ends. It is she who stands at the Gates of Death with her mighty scythe, ready to welcome souls into eternity.
I found my solace in the arms of her temple and the White Widows who ruled it, with their quiet strength, dedication to the dead, and understanding eyes. But no matter how diligently I cleaned, how hard I meditated, or how carefully I tended to the bodies of the dead, my nightmare remained the same.
Worse still, the High Priestess of Cholnayak demanded I sit in her temple office and tell her about it.
“What is it that you see?” asked the high priestess, Othar Dhumvar, her grey eyes fixing me to the spot like Cholnayak’s own scythe where I sat in her bare bones office. There was nothing much in it, as was the way of the renunciate. A plain wooden table and two chairs with a single framed sketch of Cholnayak on the wall behind her, silver eyes always assessing.
“It’s always the pure green field of my parent’s estate,” I said dully. “It was dotted with daisies by the river. Sometimes Yulara and I would dangle our feet in there.” I wouldn’t normally go into so much detail, but the high priestess insisted upon hearing it all. And I found in the telling of it, a little of the wound inside of me softened. “And then it was as it happened. I was walking along the riverbank as the sun set. Some of the village boys were sailing little boats on the river, but they were collecting them up to start making their way home. Vasi remained behind when he saw me. He had one of those big smiles that showed all of his little teeth. A sweet boy.” I sighed, rubbing my eyes. Making me repeat this over and over again was, in truth, also getting a little tiring. “And then we were alone. It was getting dark, so, in the dream, I said something like, ‘Let’s get home. Your mother will have my head if you are home after dark.’ But he just looked up at me like I was… I don’t know, like I’m everything he wanted to be, and he says, ‘But if I’m with you, I won’t ever be in danger.’ That’s the worst of it, because before I know it, I’m on my knees, and Vasi is all floppy in my arms, one of my own metal spikes spearing him right through the middle.” I swallowed the lump in my throat and met the high priestess’ eyes.
