Chapter Twenty-Five
Derran reached his palace with his mind still half in motion from the parting in the burrow.
He did not go first to his bedchamber or even to the throne room.
Duty came before comfort in him when enough pressure was applied, though he preferred no one made a habit of discovering that.
He went first to the sky court armory, gathering pages and squires and outfitting each of them quickly with additional weaponry.
They followed the prince in silence, only a few worried glances passing between the young fairies.
Then Derran called for his warriors, loyal and powerful fairies that had fought at his side in battles past.
They too outfitted themselves while he paced, none interrupting him with speech, knowing well enough that he would explain in due time.
Alongside them, he gathered the servants and courtiers still within the palace, called them into one of the broad inner galleries, and told them plainly what danger stood loose in the kingdom.
A mirage fairy. Powerful. Deceptive. Able to alter appearances. Able to control shapeless creatures. Able to turn one trusted face into another.
That last part was what truly caught them. He saw it in the way the room quieted. Fairies who had listened with politeness before now grew still in a more useful fashion. Even his warriors exchanged looks, less of concern and more of preparation.
“Spread the warning,” he told them. “Through the sky court, through the light channels, through every household that owes us an ear, up here or down below. I don’t care if it reaches the furthest nest before supper or after midnight, so long as it reaches them.
No one trusts a face without a second look. No one goes alone where they needn’t. And if anything seems wrong, you bring it to me at once.”
They bowed, and many left immediately to obey.
A few of the more vital members of the sky court remained behind, moving back to their regular posts.
The palace still required hands to run it after all, even with danger in the air.
Lamps did not light themselves, linens did not fold themselves, and the sky court’s ruling entity, for all its airy elegance, would descend into nonsense within a day if its servants vanished entirely into righteous warning.
Derran stopped a maid, one he’d known since childhood, before she went. “Please send someone to my chambers with a change of clothes.”
She nodded and hurried off. He did not notice the other maid nearby, the one with black hair braided in a ring about her bowed head, listening without seeming to do so.
Derran went to his rooms.
He intended nothing more than a fast bath, fresh clothes, and perhaps the luxury of standing still long enough to gather himself before the next hour’s demands arrived. The events of the last day had begun to pile on one another too quickly even for him, and he wanted just a moment of respite.
The bath did what baths did. Warmed him. Softened the edges of too many thoughts. Not bringing peace, exactly. Only a brief loosening. He was just stepping out, still naked and toweling water from his hair and shoulders, when he heard a voice from his bedchamber.
“Your Highness? I’ve brought your clothes.”
The maid’s voice was lovely. Soft and musical and soothing in some way he could not have explained. He was annoyed, distantly, that she had come in without waiting for his permission, but the annoyance did not fully take hold. It slid off the sound of that voice.
“Just a moment,” he called.
The maid did not wait. She came around the corner of the bathing room passage as he was drying himself, and for the space of a blink he thought he saw black hair and violet eyes.
Then his vision shifted, as if it had gone out of focus and returned.
Ina stood there.
In maid’s clothes, of all things, which made no sense and yet seemed in the moment curiously unimportant beside the fact of her face.
“…Ina?” he wondered aloud, confused.
“My darling,” she answered, and her voice was low and sweet and wrong in some small place he could not have named if pressed.
She came to him with her eyes narrowed in a smile, reached out, and took the towel from his hands.
That should have woken him fully. It did not.
His eyes widened, and something in him tried to struggle toward alarm.
There was a scream somewhere in the back of his mind insisting that the whole shape of this moment was off, that something about it had been twisted.
Yet his body had already begun to answer the sight of her and the touch of her and the sudden heat of being wanted by the woman he loved.
He tried to hold on to the wrongness.
It slipped.
She touched him. Caressed him. Sank to her knees before him. Opened her mouth to him.
He breathed out her name again, his head tipping back under pleasure so immediate it washed through the rest of his thought. Even then, even with his pulse thudding and his body giving itself over traitorously to what it believed it wanted, something in him still fought. A dim battered instinct.
Wrong, it whispered. Wrong.
But he could not hold on to why.
After a time she rose and took his hand, guiding him back toward the bedroom. At the foot of the bed she began to undress. He followed her there, still dazed under the glamour of her presence, and reached to help with the fastening at the back of the dress.
His fingers undid the buttons. The cloth loosened, and he pulled it carefully from her shoulder. She moved her copper hair aside. He bent to kiss the curve of her neck.
Then he saw it, just a flicker.
A mark on the shoulder.
A queen of the night flower.
Not decoration. Not dye. A branded mark, scarred white now. The same one he had seen scorched into the shoulders of the canopy court attendants only a few short weeks ago, in the council chamber.
A sign of someone the fairy courts had judged and imprisoned.
Not a mark Ina should bear.
He blinked.
Again.
The scream in his mind, which had never wholly stopped, became much louder.
Something is wrong!
Between the hanging copper strands at her neck he thought he saw black hairs now. One. Then two. Then none again.
He did not move too quickly. Not yet.
That, perhaps, saved him.
He closed his eyes and reached out instead, letting his hands rest on the body before him in what must have seemed to her a continuation of the same desire. He touched her gently. Slowly. Up the line of her arm. Down her side. Across her back.
But now he was not touching for pleasure.
He was touching for truth.
He knew Ina’s body. Almost better than his own.
He had held her often enough naked in his bed and in his bath and in every half-sacred corner of his chambers.
He knew the precise fall of her shoulders, the slightness of her waist, the dimple at the base of her back, the way her hips fit under his hands.
This body was close. Close enough to trap a fool.
Not close enough for him.
The shoulders were a little broader. The hips curved differently. And when his hand moved down the spine, the dimple was not there.
He knew then.
Not Ina.
He took one steadying breath and opened his eyes. Her back was still to him.
He did not give the mirage time to recover.
He shoved her hard onto the bed.
The shock of the movement cracked the illusion like struck glass. Copper hair broke apart into black. The maid’s dress and Ina’s shape failed together. Zuri screeched and twisted back toward him, her beauty now all malice and thwarted appetite.
But Derran had already changed.
He was swallow before her first gasp finished leaving her. Large, swift, and wholly out of her grasp. He shot upward, burst through the balcony doors, and flung himself out into open air.
Behind him came only her scream, sharp with fury, and flung bolts of magic that missed his beating wings.
He did not look back. He flew hard into the evening sky, heart still hammering with lust and revulsion and relief all knotted together, and knew with sick certainty that Zuri had grown bolder than any of them had yet accounted for.
---
Karai and Ina were already in the library when Derran arrived.
He came through an open upper window, still swallow, fast enough that the lamp flames bent sideways in his wake.
Then he changed too quickly and too high up, landing in his own form with all the grace of a prince dropped from a shelf.
He hit the floor barefoot, one knee and one hand taking the worst of it.
He was, Ina realized in the same instant, very plainly naked.
Karai looked him over once from head to toe and raised an eyebrow. “Did you forget your clothes?”
Derran did not answer.
He got to his feet, nearly tripping over himself in haste, and crossed the room in three strides. Before Ina could do more than take a half-step back, he had his hands on her shoulders and was turning her, not quite roughly, but firmly enough that she stumbled against the edge of the table.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she demanded.
Karai moved at once, coming around the table with all the speed of a man who had already been agonized enough with his former lover nearly killing him hours earlier and did not intend to watch the queen being manhandled for sport.
Yet Derran cut him off with one look, deadly enough to stop him in his tracks.
Then Derran pulled up the back of Ina’s shirt and looked.
He exhaled so hard it was nearly a collapse.
There was no flower mark on her shoulder.
And the dimple at the base of her back was there, just as he knew it to be.
He let the shirt fall back into place, stepped away, and dropped to the floor in a sprawl, as though the last of his strength had gone out through his heels.
“Get me a robe or something. Please,” he muttered, closing his eyes.
Ina turned on him, indignant and red-faced. “What was that all about?”
Karai, with a look that suggested he was too tired to be scandalized properly but not too tired to be annoyed, snatched a white blanket from the back of one chair and threw it at Derran. “An explanation would be good.”