TWENTY
T he king retired after I’d fallen asleep.
A relief, I realized as he pulled my body unnecessarily tight against his the following morning to vanish us to Skeleton Mountains. That stupid picnic had corroded something vital in my brain, and I wasn’t sure I would have denied any further efforts he made to sway me.
My breakfast threatened to leave me as the void of shadowed wind spun us to a knee-jarring stop upon a stone ledge overlooking the innards of a mountain. Rope fencing surrounded the small lookout.
A pit loomed below.
I thought the lookout was a landing point for vanishing until I heard a faint growl and scratching. The echo climbed the dirt and rock walls of the cavernous mountain.
I wasn’t given time to glimpse what lurked deep down in the darkness. Vane clasped my hand, to steady me, it seemed, and led me through a tunnel carved into the earth and stone.
Fire flickered from torches in the steel beams, illuminating figures behind a window up ahead. The king knocked once upon the glass door to a room built into the mountainside. Some type of command center, I surmised, as we entered, and uniformed faeries looked up from long rows of desks.
They all rose, bowing and then returning to the maps and reports spread before them. All except one muscular male with blond hair shorn close to his tattooed scalp.
“Commander Kreyts,” Vane said.
The commander bowed to me, and I nodded in greeting. Though the display of respect didn’t match the look in his storm-gray eyes, nor the thin press of his beard-lined lips.
Vane didn’t miss it either, his hand squeezing mine ever so slightly. “I thought it pertinent to show Princess Mildred the power we’ve accrued since my father’s demise.” That gave me pause before he asked, “Any updates?”
The commander glanced at me. He was uncomfortable sharing anything in my presence. I understood, yet I was glad when he did. “Most of last season’s hatchlings will be ready to join the fleet before the next moon.”
Fleet.
As ice-cold dread spiraled through my veins, true joy morphed the king’s features into something alluringly distracting. He ran his free hand over his hair, which he’d bound in a low ponytail at his nape. “May we see?”
Again, the commander hesitated. “They might not take kindly to a stranger, even with you there.”
“Then they are not ready.”
With that, Vane led me through a door at the end of the room. It opened onto a bridge made of rock, steel, and wood built into the side of the mountain.
As soon as the door closed behind us, a screeched roar stilled my feet.
Between the twin mountains, a ravine yawned. It widened in places and narrowed perilously in others. Two advancing pytherions navigated it expertly, turning and twisting their long, serpentine bodies. Water sprayed from a touch of claws. Wind whipped at my unbound hair as they soared past hooting and hollering faeries below.
Warriors, I realized, training upon a large expanse of flat rock. Their laughter and grunts and curses traveled through the ravine. Gazing up, I found more perched upon the cliffsides surrounding us and watching from bridges and windowed rooms above.
Perhaps I should have expected it. I’d known these mountains were home to The Boneland’s military. But as the king pointed out another pytherion advancing from the sky, I wondered if Garran and my father were aware of just how advanced this military had become.
Even if the wards upon this realm didn’t fall for centuries, these beasts would outlive the magic that had made them. If I couldn’t break the curse, another loophole would be found long before then.
The pytherions would only multiply.
With an army of them, vengeance wouldn’t just be had. Defeat, bloody and brutal, was guaranteed. Their might could allow the Unseelie to conquer and control this entire continent.
The pytherion drew closer. Sunlight brightened dark green scales. I wasn’t sure I breathed as it twirled into a spiral toward the ravine floor.
Then its wings spread, and warriors hollered as the beast soared back up the mountainside.
Straight toward us.
I shouldn’t have cared about kingdoms who saw me as nothing but a coin for payment and insurance. Yet as the pytherion darkened the bridge—as rock crumbled from its grip on a stone ledge right above us—fear unlike any I’d encountered before turned every inch of me stiff with the desire to flee.
As if sensing it, Vane squeezed my hand. “Surella won’t hurt you.”
“Surella?” I rasped, though it was evidently the pytherion’s name.
More rock crumbled. I squeezed his hand hard when a spiked tail swung against the mountainside.
He merely pointed up.
A head angled down at us from a long and curled neck. My stomach roiled, the mixture of monster and serpent utterly horrifying. Slit pupils spread within giant bronze eyes. A forked tongue flicked toward me.
“She’s scenting you. Keep still.”
The soft information wasn’t necessary. Even so, I was grateful for the sound of his voice as day turned to absolute night. Rock dust sprayed toward the ravine below, the beast shifting over the cliffside to better see us. That long and thick tail blocked all sunlight, gold spikes glinting. A foot braced upon the railing before us, claws curling, bowing the steel.
The king stopped me from surrendering to the instinct to move back. To retreat and hide. “Stand still and tall and look only at her.”
I didn’t need to ask why. I knew better than anyone not to present as prey, but by the twin goddesses…
This wasn’t a beast.
It was a nightmare with a maw the size of a cave.
Half of the pytherion’s head now in view, I marveled at the scales. Armor but also weapons—the sharp sides flared as the serpentine dragon continued to assess me with flicks of her black tongue. Her tucked wing appeared scaled atop and leathery beneath, lined in the same silvery-gray feathers behind her scaled cheek.
Finally, her eyes left me.
As soon as they met the king, he stepped forward. Mercifully, he released my hand so I wasn’t forced to join him as he bowed to Surella and extended his fist. I would have thought him merely showing off and reckless, but then I remembered.
The bond between beast and the king of beasts.
The pytherion closed her maw. She released an eerie clicking sound and exhaled through slit nostrils.
The heat of it misted my skin in sweat.
I refrained from moving and found I didn’t want to as the creature finally touched her long snout to the king’s fist.
Submission, however reluctant she was to give it.
That she had didn’t comfort as she then flung herself from the mountainside. Stones and dust rained, and Surella disappeared into the shaded portions of the ravine.
A chilling roar ridded the damp from my skin.
Vane tugged me along more bridges, talking about numbers and eggs and pointing at a nest upon a ledge above an indoor training room, but I couldn’t say much.
I couldn’t shake the cold kiss of dread.
Even when we’d vanished back to the castle, it coiled tighter and tighter around my bones. “That was…” I failed to find words and ceased trying.
Vane took his time releasing me from the bulk of his arms. As he did, he smirked. “I never grow tired of visiting them.”
A burning sensation constricted my throat. I shook my head, unable to voice just how much the visit to the mountains had troubled me. Unable to understand exactly why it did. Trying to express it likely wouldn’t be wise. Vane had taken me to Skull Mountains for a reason, and not just because I’d asked.
He watched me too closely. “You look pale.”
I stared down at the colored tiles in the foyer. Tried to remind myself that all those warriors and pytherions couldn’t seek this king’s vengeance right now.
“Did you show them to me as a gesture of trust?” Trust that would be broken in a very dangerous way when he realized that even if I fell in love with him, the wards wouldn’t break.
I was no longer sure how to navigate this—how to survive something so beyond my control. Something so much bigger than me.
When I peered up at the king, I found him studying me with unreadable features. He then scrubbed his bristled chin and sighed. “Mostly, yes, but also because I’m beyond proud of what we’ve accomplished. We’ve lost many in our mission to breed such a rare species. I wanted to show you that it’s been worth it,” he said, gruffer now. “How incredible they are.”
I should have kept my mouth shut. But I’d already told him before, and he hadn’t listened. So it wasn’t as if I’d been keeping it from him. “Trust requires honesty. So believe me when I say you are breeding an army of monsters for no reason, Vane.”
The use of his name earned me a curious tilt of his head. He seemed to see my attempt to ensure my safety once again. He dragged his thumb beneath his lower lip, scraping the coarse hair. “Your heart races.”
I didn’t let his more playful tone deter me. “I do not have Atakan’s heart. It’s true what they say…” I swallowed thickly. “He is heartless.”
Which made me utterly useless to this Unseelie king.
For endless yet suspended moments, my heartbeat went wild though I didn’t breathe. He stared down at me, and I pondered what he might do. Yet, no matter what horror I imagined, I failed to believe he’d harm me.
Then he grinned. “Fear not, Princess.” His fingers bumped beneath my chin. “My sources have told a very different story.”
My heart ceased racing.
It stopped beating entirely before pounding at my sternum. “I don’t believe you.”
I couldn’t believe him. Not only did it seem impossible for Atakan Ethermore to love anything, but it would mean what I’d just seen might be unleashed upon the continent of Elaysia all too soon.
And though I’d asked for none of this insanity, it would still be my fault. I would live with that forevermore, and that was if I lived.
But only if I fell for this king of monsters.
Vane stepped so close, the tips of his boots kissed the pointed tips of my own. Gently, he clasped my chin and tilted it to search my eyes. “Then I’ll just have to prove it to you.”
My foolish heart kicked when his head lowered, and his lips descended toward mine.
Hurried steps clapped down the marble stairs. “Vane.”
We separated to find Cerwin three strides from us. His expression gave away nothing, but an odd look—almost pitiful—was cast at me before he said, “Word has arrived.”
Vane didn’t look at me. He trailed his right hand from the foyer into the far hall. Unsure why, I decided to wait rather than return to the king’s chambers.
Hushed murmurs were all I could hear beyond the quiet screech of my pulse in my ears.
Meadow rumbled a purred greeting, paws padding whisper-soft over the stairs. She leaped down the last row into the foyer and rubbed against my legs.
I scratched behind her tufted ear when she rose onto her hind legs to tap my hip, lost to thoughts of pytherions, the king’s mouth, and a prince in a faraway land.
Vane returned before I could uncloud my mind and unglue my feet. “We’ve just received the report.” The grim set of his harsh features should have been a warning.
But nothing could have prepared me for the words that left his mouth. “I’m sorry, Mildred.” He exhaled roughly and took my hand, thumb brushing. “Your father and stepmother have been murdered.”
No one knew specifics, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to know them.
I’d been forced into realizing that grief had yet to touch me before now. Forced to learn the difference between sorrow and hurt.
My father had never been a good man. He’d also never been a bad man. I didn’t know if who he’d been nor what he’d done mattered. Not when staring at what would never be.
What once was had become an endless never.
Never would I see his eyes crinkle when he laughed. Never would I catch him looking at me with that soft smile before he looked away. Never would I get to ask him all of the many questions I’d been too stubborn and angry to ask about my mother.
Never would I get to lie to him by telling him that I forgave him for selling me to a doomed fate.
And Agatha…
Love wasn’t needed to feel saddened by someone’s passing.
The report claimed that my father and stepmother had been traveling to meet with King Garran about my disappearance. They and their companions were found in a bloody heap in the middle of the road just an hour shy of their destination.
A sword bearing Ethermore’s royal crest had been embedded in the roof of my father’s carriage. A message, Vane had said, in the bleary hours that had followed our visit to Skull Mountains.
More details weren’t necessary when that sword said everything.
For three days, the pytherions, Atakan, and the Unseelie king’s motive to make me love him disappeared beneath a numbness that wouldn’t abate.
I half hoped I’d cry so I could feel something else. Something more than the shocking permanence of death.
As the sun crested the trees once again, Daylia made her presence known in the corner of the bedchamber by setting the breakfast tray on the table. She then stood there, watching me although I didn’t remove my gaze from the sunrise.
She’d brought me every meal, as per usual, save for dinner. The king had taken to delivering that himself. But he hadn’t said anything more since delivering me a blow that might not heal.
He’d sit quietly in an armchair at the table or half reclined over the bed, reading while I stared through the same window or soaked too long in the bathing pool.
Though I could hardly taste anything, I ate bits and pieces. Just enough to keep from being ordered to. I feared that if anything were demanded of me right now, all of my carefully secured furies might explode into uncatchable fragments.
“You look so tired, Mildred.”
I feathered my fingers over the scars adorning my inner ankle and said nothing.
The steward lingered. Her peering eyes pressed upon me while she fussed with dishes.
A shadow flitted from behind the divan.
Vane entered, the scent of blood worsening the empty ache in my chest. “Day,” he said, the greeting gruff.
A look passed between them. One I didn’t see but could feel in the silence.
Daylia sighed. “How is it looking?”
“Good,” the king said, and the bathing room door closed.
Daylia finally left the king’s chambers.
I drifted into sleep, the gentle fingers glossing my cheek startling. My forehead peeled from the cool glass of the window, and I blinked up at Vane.
He’d left last evening after he’d delivered my dinner, muttering something about returning shortly. I’d wished I’d wanted to ask why and where and if I could write to my sister.
But I did the same thing now that I had then. Nothing.
It seemed he wasn’t going to let me get away with that for much longer. After eating breakfast, he turned in the chair and crossed one leg over the other.
He wore linen pants and no shirt, and I tried to will some semblance of feeling into my body at the sight of all that bare skin and muscle.
I failed.
As I was about to return my head to the window, he spoke. “I need to visit Lord Stone this evening.” He paused, perhaps awaiting interest. “Would you like to accompany me?”
That earned him a rasped, “No, thank you.”
He finished chewing a piece of fruit, then rose from the chair and walked barefoot to the divan.
I stared at his large feet with eyes so dry, I wanted nothing more than to close them again. The divan creaked as he sat by my own bare feet. His clean scent enveloped, luring my weary gaze to his.
His mouth quirked, a tremulous tilt, as those blue eyes clouded with something that might have been concern. His hand slowly rose to rest upon my knee. My silk robe slid over my skin when he curled his fingers. “Cerwin and Daylia will be attending. I cannot leave you alone in this state, Mildred.”
“You can.”
“I won’t be able to focus on anything.” Strands of damp red hair escaped from behind his pointed ear. “Nothing but you.”
A twinge in my chest made warmth drop into that emptiness with a splash. But although his words were sweet, I still said, “What difference does it make if I’m miserable there or here?”
His response was instant. “You won’t be alone. You’ll be right where I can see you.”
Another twinge became a violent pinch when he leaned closer to brush my tangled hair from my cheek. “Come with me, Princess. Return to life,” he whispered. The plea brightened his eyes. “Just for a few hours.”