Chapter 6
Gerard had spent the last fifteen years of his life dominating brutal battlefields. He knew one now when he stood atop it, no matter how many magical, festive fae adornments swirled around it. By the time Lorelei finally turned to face him, she wore a smile full of confident, dazzling mischief …
But he’d been studying her for years, too.
“Precisely how much danger are we in?” He had to lean tantalizingly close to ask the question under his breath.
The assorted members of the crowd were giving the two of them space at the moment, but he wasn’t fool enough to underestimate fae hearing—or the hatred on that ruling fae lord’s face.
“I take it you had not factored Lord Oberon into any of your clever plans?”
For once, he managed to provoke a visible reaction; Gerard savored the brief, telltale twist of her lush lips and the flash of frustration in her impossibly blue eyes.
But of course this woman would never allow him an easy victory.
Instead, she tipped her head back and batted her eyelashes up at him with saccharine pity.
“My, my, General de Moireul. Are you actually afraid of a little physical challenge? All those stories in the newspapers made you sound so fit and agile—but then, ever since you took up command years ago, you’ve never had to risk your own skin, have you? ”
Jovar save him, how did she find every gap in his armor with such pinpoint precision?
Gerard would never be one of those smug, careless generals who hid behind their medals or risked their men unnecessarily!
His jaw tightened at the accusation, but he forced himself onward.
“What is your true relationship with Lord Oberon?”
“Isn’t that patently obvious?” She rolled her eyes. “Deep contempt, of course. Have you seen the pattern on his robes? I could never approve of anyone so lacking in good taste.”
The Queen of Balravia herself was notorious across the continent for showering rainbow-colored sparkles everywhere she went without the slightest regard for good taste, decorum, or royal dignity … but Gerard chose not to follow his tormentor down that temptingly laid path of distraction, either.
“What makes him consider you his sister, then?”
Her eyelashes flicked mocking glitter at him. “Oh, trust me, darling. No matter what dearest Oberon may say now, neither of us has ever thought of it as a fraternal connection.” Her voice was poisonously sweet, but he caught a note of real tension underneath.
Ah. One of her many former lovers, then. Gerard’s muscles tightened instinctively as he lifted his gaze once more to look across the rapidly clearing battlefield.
The man who sat atop a gilded throne on the open grass was, of course, a perfect specimen of aristocratic fae beauty, from his shining locks of long, bark-brown hair to his tall, spare figure, which looked as lean and tensile as an arrow string.
No doubt he and Lorelei had made a striking pair for whatever length of time she’d indulged him in her bed.
No wonder he was so bitter now, witnessing what he had lost.
Gerard took in the hungry gaze still fixed on Lorelei—and felt a sudden, almost overpowering instinct to shift between them and turn his own bigger body into a wall to protect his nemesis’s small, curvaceous figure from the other man’s view.
Utter madness. Lorelei was Gerard’s captor; his enemy. She would never need or want any help from him. He certainly shouldn’t want to give it.
Still, it took all the willpower he had to lock himself in place and keep his voice low and uninflected. “Will you at least tell me the rules of this tournament you’ve chosen to enter us into? It seems unnecessarily complex as a method for disposing of your prisoners.”
“Oh, but you’re not my prisoner while we’re here, remember?” Her glittering eyelashes fluttered low, hiding her eyes.
Gerard raised a single, pointed eyebrow. “Then I may turn and go home now?”
“And abandon me to fight alone?” She gave a dramatic pout. “That would hardly be noble or gentlemanly behavior from the famous Golden Beacon.”
A wave of exasperation rolled through Gerard’s body as he gazed down at her.
Was she really so certain of her control that she didn’t even feel a need to leverage her most obvious and effective threat?
They both knew he could never find his way back to the mortal world without a fae guide …
and judging by her earlier conversation with Lord Oberon, she was clearly bound by some ancient fae rule of etiquette not to back down from this ridiculous venture.
“Enough.” He infused iron into his voice. “Just tell me: Have we any chance of actually winning this tournament?”
Her lips twitched as her eyes flashed open with what looked like sudden, real amusement. “Of course you want to win, even now. I should have known the Serafin Empire’s most famous general wouldn’t limit his competitive urges to the mortal realm! You just can’t bear to lose at anything, can you?”
If Gerard had ever in his life met a more competitive creature than the woman who stood before him now, he might have allowed that insight to discompose him. As it was, he pressed onward. “What sort of challenges are we about to face? And which weapons are we allowed, if any?”
Sighing, Lorelei finally deigned to answer one of his questions. “There should be an assortment of challenges across the next few days, ranging from—”
“Days?” How many days could Gerard’s men hold their camp in that remote mountain pass without alerting the Emperor to his predicament?
He didn’t doubt the loyalty of his officers; if that note Lorelei had left in his handwriting was even half as convincing as she’d claimed, they would all fight to keep his “secret quest” safe from even the most official of inquiries.
But he also knew his emperor’s impatient nature.
Back in Fiora, Otto would be seething with bitter fury and humiliation after the anticlimax of his armies’ long-awaited march to the Kitvarian border.
There, Gerard had officially agreed to a peace rather than an invasion as Otto had commanded, to seize a new territory and officially expand the Empire for the first time in decades.
Under the unexpected circumstances that had arisen at that border, Gerard couldn’t have done otherwise without flouting Imperial law—but when it came to Otto’s increasingly bellicose ambitions and recent purge of the more peaceable and thoughtful advisors from his side …
May Jovar light me a way back soon!
“Oh, do stop fussing so much!” Lorelei wafted a handful of rainbow sparkles through the air as she waved away all of his serious concerns with a careless flick of one hand.
“After all your studies, you must understand that time passes very differently here. Why, for all you know, we might return to Balravia less than a minute after our departure!”
“And for all you know…?” he prompted tightly.
“Darling, just relax your pretty head and let me worry about all of that. I have everything under control, remember?”
Would she ever stop trying to push him into madness? Gerard’s teeth ground together, his own control close to the breaking point …
And she returned seamlessly to her earlier explanation. “… Ranging from general challenges of wit and magic to paired duels against a variety of opponents. We’re allowed to use any weapons we bring with us.”
This time, Gerard didn’t even bother with a response. He only looked down at her with weary patience.
“Oh, very well, if you will be so humorless about it!” Reaching behind her neck, Lorelei pulled out—apparently from nowhere—the sheathed sword that had lain beside his bed when she’d abducted him. “You may have it back for now, if you’d like.”
“How very generous, Your Majesty.” He gritted the words through his teeth as he reached for his stolen weapon, the air between them almost palpably vibrating with tension.
She offered it to him by the hilt—and as he took it, his larger hand closed around her fingers. It was the first time he had touched his maddening, infuriating, mischievous captor in all their seven years of circling.
It felt like a flint being struck.
Lightning sparked against his skin where it touched hers, and then it spread like a fire that had to be smothered immediately, before it could devastate everything.
Gerard braced his muscles against the sparking heat and light and dug his booted heels against the grass, fighting to keep his face under control as he drew his hand away.
He could not let her see or guess how powerfully she’d affected him …
And then he saw that her own eyes had flared wide, and she was breathing quickly.
Seven years ago, she’d taken his arm in hers and pressed her lush figure shamelessly against his side, but she’d done it with cool control as part of a calculated seduction, and she’d been a stranger to him. Her touch hadn’t affected him in the slightest.
This time, his hand had closed around her fingers only for a moment—but her responsive swallow was a visible flex against her soft throat, as if his impossible, incorrigible nemesis was fighting exactly the same battle as him, after all.
… As if he wasn’t the only one who’d been burning up from the inside out from the moment he’d seen her this morning … and across so many years of private, intimate battles.
The tip of Lorelei’s tongue swept out to moisten her upper lip, her dilating gaze clinging to his—and for the first time he could remember, Gerard acted without a thought, shifting forward into her space by pure instinct.
As he claimed the inches between them, his fingers tightened around the familiar leather grip of his sword.
A crack in the leather scraped against his palm, finally breaking through his mindless haze.
Jovar save me. How could he have forgotten?
Gerard hadn’t felt so much as a hint of his sword’s presence earlier, even when he’d stood nearly close enough to touch Lorelei’s back. The leather grip’s familiar, comfortable solidity in his hand was a staggering reminder of the fae queen’s powers of illusion.
No matter how desperately his body might try to pull him towards her; no matter how open and unguarded she might appear, with her blue eyes so helplessly wide before him now …
He would never be able to trust anything she showed him. It could never be anything but deception. Worse yet, trust would signal betrayal of every oath of loyalty he had sworn to the Serafin Empire.
It would make him no better than his parents.
That realization was more effective than any blow.
Breathing hard, he yanked his gaze free and took a long step backwards, rebuilding his self-control stone by stone until he was as hard and emotionless as any of the cold, grey statues that had lined the galleries of his grandmother’s villa in Fiora.
When he finally met Queen Lorelei’s gaze again, he felt nothing: no reckless warmth, no dangerous yearning, and not the slightest trace of shameful temptation. His vision was focused and clear, as always, and she was only one more challenge to defeat as he had so many others.
“Regardless of what you may be scheming, I can be pushed only so far,” he said evenly.
“I will agree to fight by your side in every trial in this tournament that I am called to—but only if you agree that you will return me to the mortal realm immediately after our final challenge. Otherwise, I will lay down my arms now and refuse to move another step.”
Her glittering lashes swept down to cover her eyes for a long, silent moment. Then they flicked open, and she gave him a smile of pure, undiluted condescension, with no hints of openness or vulnerability anywhere to be seen. “Very well,” she murmured. “I accept your bargain.”
At her words, a hot shock of magic suddenly charged the air between them, like a fire catching light. It burned against his skin for a single, scalding instant and then vanished … but its message lingered in his still-tingling skin and twisted gut.
Bargains were far more than mere words of commitment in the fae realm, apparently—and on this magical battlefield, for the first time in years, Gerard was well out of his depth.
Hundreds of miles away and in the mortal realm, another battle was about to erupt in a snowy mountainside camp.
Ten feet away from a massive boulder coated in transparent ice, ten armed soldiers stood guard before their commander’s tent, facing off against five others, who flanked an official Imperial messenger.
Raised voices rousted even more soldiers from their tents, while white-and-gold-cloaked Gilded Wizards clustered in a separate group nearby, watching and whispering worriedly to each other.
The Imperial messenger’s irate voice carried the accent of the highest court and lashed his gathered audience like a whip.
“Your precious Golden Beacon may have given you his orders, but His Imperial Majesty will not be denied! He requires the attendance of your general now, by swiftest course to the capital, with no more cowardly lagging along the way. General de Moireul will be on the train that leaves Kolnir station tonight, or he will be declared guilty of disobeying Imperial orders … again!”
Angry muttering sounded through the crowd of watching soldiers as they edged closer.
The five soldiers who stood behind the messenger dropped their hands to the hilts of their swords in rolling unison, like a wave of impending violence.
Unseen and undetected by any of them, the distant observer who watched it all through the boulder’s thin coating of ice winced in pained anticipation …
And then one of the cloaked Gilded Wizards stepped forward, pushing back her hood as she interrupted the standoff.
“Wait!” Turning from the Imperial messenger to the officers who led the human shield before the general’s tent, she said loudly, “We think you should all know. One of my colleagues walked past the Golden Beacon’s tent yesterday morning …
and he’s certain he sensed the remnants of fae magic coming from inside it. ”
The crowd erupted into a new kind of chaos at that news …
And, seated far away in her efficient royal office in her cold, northern capital city, Queen Ailana of Nornne let out a low groan, closing her eyes for a brief moment of respite from the scenario playing across the sheet of ice on the silver tray set on the desk before her.
“Oh, Lorelei,” she murmured wearily. “What have you done now?”