17. The Work of Utter Darkness and the Shifting of Tides
17. THE WORK OF UTTER DARKNESS AND THE SHIFTING OF TIDES
~ RUSH ~
In my many decades of life, I’d witnessed situations that had made my essence shudder and recoil more often than I cared to recall. Even in Amarantos, as its drake, I hadn’t been able to nullify the queen’s influence. Her reach, like insidious tentacles, slunk all across the mirror world, poisoning everyone and everything it touched.
Once she forced me to live at court, her many horrors were inescapable. Everywhere I looked, her influence tainted her subjects and the land, her putrid touch just beneath the surface of whatever pretty picture she orchestrated—never sufficient to fully conceal the stench of her involvement.
I’d considered myself immune to shock. There was nothing she could do that would surprise me anymore.
How wrong I’d been.
This , this was so much worse than anything I’d ever imagined she’d do. This was worse than death, a cruelty only a person without heart or essence could carry out. This was the work of utter darkness.
Hiroshi, Ryder, and West were as stunned as I was. The four of us stood together, gawping at the myriad cells the dragon’s fire illuminated. When the beast ran out of breath, near darkness settled around us once more, barely interrupted by the power of my lumoon, which was like the light of a single candle compared to the beam of radiance provided by the dragon.
“There are so many of them,” Ryder uttered softly. “How can there be so many of them? How could we not’ve known?”
“There might be more beyond where we could see,” Hiroshi said. “We don’t know how far this pit extends.”
“It could span the entire length of the palace,” West said.
The palace of Embermere was huge. It had begun as an identical match to the one in the Golden Forest, home to the ruling royal elves. Legend told us it had been resplendent and that it opened its doors to all fae to celebrate the coming and going of the seasons. Its interior had been designed to accommodate the aristocracy from all corners of Faerie.
“The underground caverns could be even bigger than topside,” I added. “She could’ve dug deeper, farther.”
Silence descended heavily on our shoulders as we considered the range of implications of what we’d discovered. The dragon of such beautiful burnt orange waited, its stare wrapping around me as if it could make out not only my body in the dim gloom, but also my squeezing, aching heart—the half-dead lump that had endured what I’d done to Elowyn.
“We have to know how far it goes, how many of them there are,” Hiroshi said with an urgency that was also simmering in my own blood, readying to boil.
“We have to get them out of here,” West insisted.
“What happened to all your”—Ryder’s tone turned mocking—“ the dragons are killers with a taste for fae ? King Erasmus wiped them all out for good reason ?”
“Fuck Erasmus, and fuck the queen,” West snarled so bitterly it was easy to understand all he meant by that one statement.
The royals of Embermere had lied to us and used us and manipulated us to our breaking points. Fuck, I’d stabbed my own beloved in the heart just so she could escape the damned queen!
No more . No fucking more.
“We have to get them out of here,” I said. “We have to get every single one of them out. And every fae in that prison too, every human she has as a slave. We need to free them all. We can’t wait.”
It was I who couldn’t wait. All at once, I realized I couldn’t wait a second longer, not to do what was right, not to go after my mate, to beg her forgiveness and hope she’d be able to understand I’d done the only thing I’d known how to in order to spare her a worse fate.
“You know we can’t do that, not yet,” Ryder said.
“Come on, Ry,” West grunted. “We can’t just keep looking the other way.”
“What’s wrong with all of you? You see a dragon?—”
“Dozens of dragons,” West corrected. “At least.”
“Yeah, dozens of dragons,” Ryder went on, “and suddenly you forget our years of strategy? Every sacrifice we’ve made? Need I remind you how many there’ve been, and how serious some of them were? Ramana, for example?”
“I don’t fucking need you to remind me of Ramana’s sacrifice,” West snapped. “I think of it every second of every cursed day of my life without her.”
“Then you know what we have to do.”
I knew as well or better than any of them. Even so, “We still can’t just leave them.”
“How’s this any different than her torturing the shit out of fae day in and day out?” pressed Ryder, who wasn’t usually the only voice of calm reason among us. “It’s not.”
But it was. Somehow, this horror was worse than the many that had come before it. Could the beast have truly responded to my silent plea and spared me from either murdering four innocents or betraying my feigned allegiance to the queen?
No, if anyone might have a connection to the fierce creatures, it would be Elowyn, not me. She was the one who understood.
“They’re just...” Hiroshi trailed off for a breath. “They’re magnificent. Even cut to hell and back, they’re so magnificent. There’s no way they could be the evil beasts the royals make them out to be. I’m sure of it. They’re all the good the mirror world is supposed to be and isn’t.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Ryder said.
But of course it did. So very much.
“We’re already on borrowed time. With the shaking over, she and Ivar and Braque’ll be scampering back soon. The feethles will find them to tell on us. Every one of them’s a total suck-up. They’ll be searching for her just to turn us in.”
Dammit , he was right.
“And that’s assuming we didn’t set off some other alarm without realizing it. And at some point, fresh pygmy ogres will arrive to change shifts, and even they aren’t stupid enough not to figure out, at the very least, that the others are dead.
“We can’t get any of the dragons out. Not up that narrow staircase, no way. They’re huge. The only way out for them is to fly up to the wall illusion, and have you seen this one’s wings? Even if we managed to get one of our top healers down here, and I have no idea how we’d manage that, the dragon would take a good long while to heal from all that damage. And I think we can assume she hasn’t been keeping all her other ‘pets’ in cages just to take perfect care of them.”
With each reason to abandon the creatures, my heart sank farther and farther, until it thumped through my heels, urging me to run while we still could, betraying my true desires.
“Besides, this dragon’s being cool with us, but who’s to say the others will be? They’ve been locked up and, let’s be real, almost certainly tortured. They’ll be savage. They could lash out at us, and probably will. We’d be dragon food, and then who’ll save the realm? Sure, Roan would survive, and maybe Gadiel’ll get out on his own someday”—he snorted at the unlikelihood of that—“but what chance does Roan stand all on his own against her?
“And have you forgotten about Larissa, Rush? If you’re not there to kiss the queen’s ass, you really think she’ll keep sending Braque with his potions to keep her going? Larissa’ll be dead.”
Instinctively, I growled, and the injured dragon near us shifted. I had to be more careful.
“You want to ever see Elowyn again?” Ryder pressed. “If you want a single fucking chance of that, we’ve got to play this smarter. We’re the only ones willing to give everything to save this fucking awful place. What we need to do is … we need to run, and we need to do it right the fuck now.”
When Hiroshi, West, and I didn’t take a single step back toward the stairwell, he added more gently, “Look, guys, my skin’s crawling too. If we could right now, in a heartbeat, I’d set all the dragons free. But if we’re going to be of any use to anybody, we need to move. Now . We’ve already been playing with fire. The queen might be upstairs right now, ready to slice off our balls and munch on them for a tasty snack.”
“Really, Ry?” West whined. “Could ya not give me that visual?” He adjusted himself with a noisy rustle of fabric and leather. “My balls are already pissed at me for all the idiotic shit we’ve been doing lately.”
“Idiotic shit,” Ryder repeated, “yes, if we stay here, we’ll deserve to die for our idiocy, and we won’t have saved a single fae or creature.”
My jaw clenched hard enough to crack stone, but I managed to grit out a reluctant, “Fine. But as soon as we get up there, I’m heading out to find Elowyn. I’m done waiting and plotting. The dragons need her.”
“Yeah, yeah, the dragons need her. Right . Come on, Rush. You’re maybe the smartest one of all of us.”
“Hey,” West protested right away, but then he shrugged sheepishly, something he rarely did. “What about Hiro?”
“By dragonfire, West! Stop being a whiny bitch.” Ryder’s glare then pinned me. “Of all of us, you’re the most important. You’ve got the queen’s eye.”
I grimaced. “How could I ever forget?”
“And you’re still in the Fae Heir Trials. The magic of the trials should still be on you. You need to compete in the Nuptialis Probatio, finish out the trials, get yourself a wife and become king already. Now , are we gonna keep standing around with our heads up our asses, or are we gonna give ourselves a fighting chance?”
“Damn you, Ry,” West grumbled. It was as close of an admission that Ryder was right as he’d get from West.
Hands up once more, dodging charred pygmy ogre and dragon parts, I sauntered slowly toward the dragon, again mindful to have my lumoon keep pace with me so my face wouldn’t appear menacing.
“What are you doing?” West asked with a happy lilt that suggested he was once more wary of the dragon’s reactions.
“Just gonna do some reassuring,” I answered evenly.
“Well, do it from here, man!” To the others, he muttered: “It’s like he’s doing it to give me a heart attack.”
Obviously I wasn’t, but his point was valid enough. I drew to a stop halfway between my friends and the wounded beast.
“Hey,” I started, pretending I was talking to Bolt. As feisty and strong-willed as the stallion was, I knew he’d never hurt me. When I’d sent him on the journey with Elowyn, I’d asked him to look out for her as well as he did me.
“We want to help you”—I flicked a look toward the occupied cells—“and the others too. We will help you. We’ll get you all out of here. But we can’t yet. We have to leave now so we can figure out how to do it.”
The dragon merely stared back at me. Deep, dense shadows completely concealed its dark eyes. Not even a glimmer revealed whether or not it absorbed my words.
“Do you understand me?”
“Of course it doesn’t understand you. It’s a beast,” West grumbled. “A killer beast, at that. Can we go, already?”
“Rush,” Ryder added. “We gotta run.”
But even feeling their urgency, knowing the risks only increased the longer we delayed, I waited. My tattoos flared to light with the pressing need to have he or she comprehend we weren’t abandoning them to this hideous fate. They weren’t alone anymore. However long it took us, we’d return for them.
“I give you my word of honor,” I persisted, maybe stupidly. “If it’s within my power to return and set you free, I will. I promise.”
Finally, the creature inhaled deeply, and Ryder, West, and even Hiroshi yelled at me to run.
I didn’t.
It was more reckless than perhaps anything I’d ever done, and I damn well knew it.
But the dragon wouldn’t harm me. I didn’t understand how I was so certain, but I was. Enough to bet my life on it.
Perhaps it was simply because, after what I’d done to Elowyn, a part of me didn’t feel worthy of living any longer. Or maybe I didn’t want to. It was easier to leave and not experience the constant torment of seeing her beautiful face, twisted in her belief of my betrayal, play over and over in a loop in my mind.
I tuned out my friends’ alarm and focused only on the feeling of setting the stunning beasts free. My tattoos shone so brightly, sweeping across my bare hands and up my neck, that I could make out the dragon’s eyes.
Dark as the deepest depths of any lake, they were steady. Calm. Aware.
Pained .
Then the dragon again turned and, with a steady stream of fire, illuminated the captives. This time, their faces were pressed up against the bars, as if they too were aware the tides were shifting.
And they were. They had to be.
I’d accept nothing less. This couldn’t be how things were going to be.
A chorus of whines and whimpers that reminded me of little Saffron, out of sync and full of torment, wove toward us from the cages.
“We’ll remember,” I assured the dragons.
It was an easy promise to keep. The dozens of dragons would join my catalog of memories I’d rather forget but refused to. They were what kept me going. When I felt like giving up beneath the insurmountable odds of destroying a queen with the power of an entire fae land at her disposal, the reminders kept me moving in the right direction.
For Elowyn.
For Larissa.
For Ramana.
For every unlucky bastard born here instead of into the harmony of Faerie.
For every prisoner trapped here.
When the dragon’s fire again faded, I simply nodded, backed up without taking my eyes from the beast, then joined my brothers in sidestepping slain bodies and running up the seemingly eternal stairwell. As my thigh muscles burned, no evidence of pygmy ogres reached us. They were either all asleep in their quarters somewhere down one of the shoot-off passageways, or they were elsewhere in the palace, which, as far as I knew, they never left.
We sprinted across the plankway, the stone vibrating with our hurried steps, then waited for Ryder to hack Braque’s illusion. After several minutes, quiet but for our heavy breathing, we were through the wall. In under a minute, we updated Gadiel, who was as aware of the risks as we were and didn’t ask for us to delay, then raced up the spiraling staircase.
We didn’t stop running until we were alone in one of the many concealed interior tunnels of the palace.
West was the one to stop us. “Wait,” he said on a deep exhale, trying to slow his breath. “Gimme a minute.”
We lined up along a wall without another word until our breathing was back to normal. The only thing to reveal that we’d just run for our lives was the sweat soaking our bodies and clothing.
Unable to delay any longer, we chose to emerge not in the throne room where we’d first entered the tunnels, but in a distant hallway that lined residential quarters of the aristos, but none of ours.
We ran smoothing hands over our hair, tugged down our tunics, and wiped at the sweat coating our brows.
I exited first. After scanning the hall, I beckoned the others out. Together, we stalked with purpose and rounded the corner?—
Running smack into Millicent of Potesantos, who, incongruously, appeared to have possibly been waiting for us—though I couldn’t guess how she’d known we’d appear here when we ourselves hadn’t until minutes before.
Her face split with a grin so hungry, so wicked, it conjured the memory of her in feethle form, lapping up still warm blood at the queen’s feet.
“Well, well, well,” she drew out theatrically, and my pulse jumped in my neck. “What do we have here?”
West tsked , then huffed. “Whatever other trite nonsense you might want to lob our way, don’t. We have more important things to do right now than deal with you.”
Her grin only widened, exposing teeth that, even in her person form, were too sharp. “Oh, I know you’ll have more important things to do.” She batted her lashes in more measured artifice. “Just as soon as I tell the queen that what she’s so long suspected is true.”
My pulse stopped bouncing around my neck to still entirely. After all we’d sacrificed, after all we’d done, this is how it’d end? Through the intervention of a petty, power-grabbing girl desperate to climb the ladder of aristocratic hierarchy?
We should kill her now before she got the chance to betray us. No one would miss her. The queen would forget about her quickly enough.
“You were having a foursome,” she announced triumphantly. “You’re all sweaty and flushed, and your clothes are askew.”
Greedily, she licked her lips. “Her Majesty will want to know right away.” She giggled. “Then she’ll want you all in her bed.”
Her eyes met my stare. “You most of all.”