Fae Reckoning (Royals of Embermere #5)

1. By a Dragon’s Tender Swinging Balls, by a Baby Dragon’s Slimy Phlegm

ELOWYN

The air was a stifling, oppressive black. I attempted to draw in a breath of it beyond a suffocating weight. I sucked through my nose, gaped through my mouth—and pulled in only an incomplete, insufficient inhale.

A mass as large and dense as a boulder compressed my chest and belly, immobilized my arms and legs, and sent agony racing up and down my battered body. For too many panicked seconds I wondered if I’d failed. Perhaps I hadn’t properly activated the mysterious map that glowed an eerie crimson along my body. After all, I’d only guessed as to how it worked. I was unaware both of its origin and meaning. Maybe I’d only imagined the connection I’d felt to Rush across the murderous forest to the faraway palace. Last I’d seen him, he didn’t remember who I was—or who I was to him.

Had I succeeded in transporting my friends and myself away from the queen? Or had I condemned us all to her hideous vengeance?

I dragged in a mostly empty, ragged breath and forced open my eyes. It was still dark, but stars winked in my vision. Someone groaned somewhere, far beyond the throbbing in my body. The boulder slowly asphyxiating me shifted to one side, and I rasped in a loud, jagged inhale that wasn’t enough but was still better—I’d fucking take it.

Encircling me, more grunts and groans filled the elusive air.

“By a dragon’s tender swinging balls,” wheezed a voice I’d recognize anywhere despite its uncommonly thready nature.

Xeno . My oldest friend.

“Get the fuck off her, Bolt,” he croaked, his voice growing stronger.

Bolt? Rush’s horse was the one killing me slowly when the queen would fell thousands of her own subjects for that privilege?

“Get off,” Xeno snarled, but the command lacked the dragon protector’s usual power.

Bolt’s massive body merely twitched.

More stars twinkled in my vision, stretching toward each other, connecting into bright patches, chasing away the darkness. At least they were pretty.

Xeno grunted with effort, and Bolt slid off me a few inches.

My immediate breath was a desperate, croaking gasp.

“Guys,” Xeno called in the opposite direction. “Help me. Bolt’s crushing Elowyn.”

Was he hurt? Xeno was a shifter, and usually strong as a bull, enough to maneuver a horse on his own.

More groans preceded scuffing—and then Bolt was pushed off me. The horse did nothing to soften his fall, sliding to land beside me with a dull thud.

“Wyn. Wyn, you okay?” Xeno asked, urgency crispening his voice.

I could only breathe and blink away the stars. They gradually receded, and eventually I blinked up into Xeno’s face. His brow was furrowed, his lips pinched tight. His hair was shaggier than when I’d left him so abruptly in the Wilds, the dark strands long enough to curl around his chin had they not been stuck to each other in thick clumps, possibly still from the umbracs’ gunky poison I’d survived alongside him.

“Wyn…” he repeated, before glancing behind him. “Shit. I think she got hurt. She’s not saying anything.”

“She was already hurt.” That was Edsel, though he sounded as rough as rolling thunder.

Xeno’s hand grazed my shoulder while he scrutinized my body. Even with my vision restored to normal, it was still dark, but Xeno was part dragon. He’d be noticing the great damage my body had suffered since the magic of the Fae Heir Trials had yanked me away from him.

“Wyn,” he uttered yet again, this time in a concerned whisper barely audible above the many groans that filled the space like a chorus. Where were we, anyway?

“I’m fine.” But my assurance was too weak, too faint, and Xeno’s brows and lips only pinched harder. “I’ll be fine,” I amended, unsure whether it was true. How many times could a woman be crushed before she was too broken to be repaired?

At least one more fucking time.

I cleared my uncomfortably dry throat and nodded, ignoring tugging wounds. “X, I’m fine. Promise.”

The surprise encounter with the queen in the forest coalesced into distinct scenes I could examine, and my eyes widened in terror. I went to propel myself to sitting, failed utterly, and told Xeno, “Saffron. By blazing sunshine, tell me he’s alright.”

The dragonling had been curled around my back before the map had—apparently—succeeded in taking us … well, wherever the hell this dark room was. From my prone vantage point, I could distinguish dilapidated wooden walls, a dirt floor, and not much else. It was like arriving all over again in the hidey-hole where the queen had hidden my mother for most of my life.

Xeno was jerking his head left and right, presumably looking for Saffron. My still heaving chest tightened.

His shoulders relaxed as he smiled softly. “He looks okay. Just dazed. I’ll check on him in a minute. You look worse than he does.”

I chuckled grimly, and it hurt. “Thanks,” I rasped .

“Worse, but still beautiful,” he murmured, maybe just to himself. “Always so incredibly beautiful.”

Uncertain what to say to the man who wanted something from me I couldn’t give him, I pushed up onto my hands, slowly this time. “Did everyone make it?”

Varied shapes that resembled bodies were slumped across what was most definitely a dirt floor.

Xeno joined me in studying the shadowed forms. “I don’t know who all was there with us. Everything happened so fast, and I was mostly focused on you.”

I glanced at him just to smile gratefully, but got back to examining silhouettes: Hiroshi, Ryder, and West weren’t quite as large as Xeno, but the three warriors were broader and taller than Reed. The three slowly shifting shapes looked like Rush’s friends, those he considered brothers, one crouched, one sitting, the other standing, their heads pointed our way.

A male a tad taller than I bent over a squat figure with as much hair on its face as on its head. Reed and Roan, then.

With their dragon feet, the two goblins were unmistakable as they hunched their heads together. The granddoody and gran’gobbler reunited at last.

The sizable frog-like shape hunkering behind them and emitting a wobbly waawaa told me Bertram had made the trip with us. I spotted Saffron behind him, his wings outstretched as if to steady himself. If the dragonling wasn’t bounding toward me yet, then Xeno was right, and he was dazed. I’d make my way over to him as soon as I was sure I could stand.

“Zafi?” I called out, not seeing the tiny parvnit anywhere.

A protesting moan much too loud for her size rose from the area of Bolt’s head. “I’m here,” she squawked. “By a baby dragon’s slimy phlegm, whaddyou do to us?”

If she had the energy to gripe, she was well enough.

I muttered, “That’s everyone except for…” I looked all around. Some blocky shapes lined a wall farthest from us. I glanced up. The ceiling was darker than anywhere else, its surface irregular.

“Where’s the black dragon?”

In response, the “ceiling”—which turned out not to be ceiling at all—surged upward with a mighty unfurling of muscles and wings, and broke apart the roof with a terrifying crunch that sent wood and whatever else one built a roof out of hurtling in all directions.

It was a small yet significant bit of fortune: none of us suffered injury graver than some scrapes, cuts, and splinters, even though some pieces of shrapnel had lodged in what remained of the walls that surrounded us.

The debris had settled to reveal a large room that led into an adjacent chamber. The black dragon stood half inside, half outside the structure, his huge wings extended over our heads in lieu of a roof. Despite the veined and leathery canopy of his wings, the sun was rising, and its rays snaked around the dragon to illuminate our surroundings.

Saffron once again cradled in my arms. It was, I was beginning to comprehend, the only place he felt truly safe. The queen had ordered him taken from Nightguard as leverage against me. It was entirely my fault she’d locked him in the fae dungeon and otherwise terrorized him. But maybe Saffron didn’t realize that, or maybe it was the intention he counted. The little guy surely knew I’d do everything in my power to defend him.

I kissed the crest atop his head that marked him as a male. Still soft, it would harden as he aged. “You’re such a smart boy. You knew to get off my back before we landed.”

He part grumbled, part purred, causing me to consider if it had been sheer happenstance that I hadn’t landed on him. With Bolt on top of me, Saffron might not have survived. The constant danger had stunted the dragonling’s growth. He was nearly six months old. He should have been as large as me, and certainly more formidable, not nestled in my arms like an infant.

Xeno hummed from beside us, likely also thinking that mere chance had kept any of us from getting hurt. He ran both hands across his hair to shake off the dust and small pieces of wood, but quickly gave up, grimacing.

“I take it you haven’t had a bath since I last saw you,” I said.

“Nope.” His smile was purposefully too big, his eyes maniacally wide. “It’s been … fragrant, crusty, and fucking itchy living in my skin.”

I glanced at the others. While it was true the black dragon’s eruption upward had pushed the worst of the roof outside the building, we were all looking varying degrees of worse for wear. Even Zafi’s acorn hat was askew as she hovered in place, her wings a blur behind her and her eyes darting in all directions to anticipate any new danger.

“I know the feeling,” I commented absently. “I haven’t felt at ease in my skin in ages.”

Xeno took a step toward me. I was already walking away. Everyone was standing now, even Bolt. I followed Ryder, West, and Hiroshi as they stalked past more of the same crates that had been stacked in the first shack in which I’d accidentally landed after traveling via the map branded across my body. I’d been so very close to death then. I hadn’t known if I’d survive.

Many of the wounds, where monsters had swiped, sliced, clawed, and taken a bite out of me, still stung, but my body was starting to respond in familiar, more graceful ways. Thank sunshine for the advanced healing of the fae now that my magic was fully unbound—and for Edsel’s constant ministrations.

Cradling Saffron to my chest as he ran a sandpaper- rough tongue along my neck, I crossed an open threshold into the other room, to where the upper part of the wall was now missing. Hiroshi and Ryder were inside, standing stock-still in front of a line of beds. All five were filled with hauntingly motionless bodies. Thin blankets marked physiques too slight to be anything but those of children—at most teenagers. I swallowed down a sudden revulsion that pushed bile up my throat. It was the identical setup employed upon my mother. The queen must be draining these children as she had Odelia.

West loomed over one of the beds. His shoulders were rounded, his mouth agog, closing only to gape open again. He slammed to his knees with a crack against wood and a shudder of his back that took me a moment to identify as a sob—from the drake who’d been raised to lead an entire clan and stoically shoulder its burdens. He clutched the leg of the person in the bed so fiercely I worried he’d crush their frail bones, then bowed his head, dropping his forehead to the dingy mattress.

Saffron trembled in my arms as if he sensed the potency of West’s emotions. Like lightning crackling, they electrified the spot where we stood, building up for a momentous strike. Goosebumps pebbled up and down my arms, the fine hairs along my nape stood on end.

Ryder and Hiroshi slowly approached, each eventually resting a hand upon their friend: Ryder upon West’s arm, Hiroshi against his neck .

“I can’t believe it,” Ryder murmured.

Reverently, though I didn’t comprehend why, I crossed the room, avoiding the gaunt and haunted bedridden faces I passed. I felt the presence of others behind me but didn’t turn to look, captivated by the scene unfolding before us.

“How?” Hiroshi whispered, withdrawing his hand from West to cup his mouth. “How is this even possible?”

West was the only one to answer, a lone word like an answered prayer.

“Ramana.”