20. The Sooner We Get to It, the Sooner We’re Done
20. THE SOONER WE GET TO IT, THE SOONER WE’RE DONE
~ RUSH ~
With a smug and haughty hmmph that made my simmering blood heat to an instant boil, Millicent turned in a whoosh of skirts and began walking away with those annoyingly short, simpering steps of hers—presumably off to find the queen. I lunged for her before I’d decided what to do with her beyond killing her. That instinct was immediate.
Gripping her arm, I spun her around to face me while my friends stepped up to flank me—not because I’d need the assist, obviously not. Despite how despicable this girl was, with her desire to play trivial games when lives were at stake—when the fate of the entire realm hung in the balance—there was nothing she could do to hurt me beyond further entangling me with the queen. No, my brothers grew nearer because I had no doubt they too were warring with their desire to strangle her right then and there and be done with it.
“Let me go right this second,” she hissed.
“I will not,” I snarled, attempting to control my anger. With what I’d just witnessed in the dungeons, it wasn’t that easy. “You threatened us.”
“That was a stupid thing to do,” Ryder added, moving closer.
As reckless as this girl had been in alone cornering four of the most formidable warriors in the mirror world, she wasn’t entirely idiotic. Though I held her by both arms, she was careful to look everywhere but at my eyes.
Millicent snapped her stare to Ryder’s. “It was not stupid. I’m a servant of the queen, just as you are. It’s our duty to look out for her at all times.”
West harrumphed, his disbelief thick. “Give us a break. Like it’s really necessary that the queen know the ins and outs of our sex lives. That information doesn’t affect her in the least.”
Millicent looked to him, that bold greed to get to be the one to offer up a dark secret on a platter to the queen again dancing across her face, plain but for the ambition that curled her mouth and eyes.
“Oh, it’ll affect her all right.”
My hold on her arms automatically tightened before I made myself lighten my touch as I worked to control my ire.
She winced but didn’t comment, instead saying, “You should be grateful she desires you. Rush, especially. It’s the greatest of honors.”
West snorted. “Yeah, it’s an honor, all right.” But beyond his sarcasm, he didn’t offer more of his true thoughts.
If the queen wasn’t already listening, assuming we let Millicent live, the girl would report everything.
“The queen will reward me?—”
I cut her off. “Our business is not your business. Do you understand me?”
She stared fixedly at my chest. “I’m a feethle. Her Majesty’s favorite feethle, no less. You can’t manhandle me like this.” She tried to yank her arms free but couldn’t. “Let. Me. Go. Or you’ll regret it.”
“What we’ll regret is not killing you—right here, right now—for being such a horrible pest,” Hiroshi snapped, with a chill that morphed his voice into something I scarcely recognized, and I’d known the man much of my life. “Rush is a better man, a better fae , than you could ever hope to be. And I take personal offense to you threatening him. You’re playing games you don’t grasp. I should turn you into a slug and leave you that way.”
Her head whipped toward him so fast that I sensed her feethle close to the surface. I didn’t think she could transform into her creature with me holding her, but neither was I certain. I had to hurry.
She bared her teeth at Hiroshi. “You wouldn’t dare. My queen would have your head for that. She wouldn’t even hesitate. Then she’d put it on a pike, and we’d all get to watch your pretty face get devoured.”
“ Your queen,” West said, his voice coming from directly behind my ear, likely trying to help lure her stare to mine, “banished you to the stables. You’ve only just been allowed back at court. She won’t even notice you’re gone.”
My attention pinned on her eyes, waiting to snag them, I caught the flash of truth that registered there.
Baring her teeth again, she hissed. Without warning, I ducked and captured her stare. She gasped, but I was already in, and she wouldn’t be able to look away until I finished.
Releasing my hold on her, I pushed into her mind and erased all recent images of my brothers and me, therefore deleting her concocted theory of our sexual liaison. Before pulling away, I performed a quick search of her mind, and nearly throttled her all over again when I discovered she’d been spying on Elowyn and reporting back to the queen. It was how Millicent had gained her favor, the ruler bestowing the sniveling girl with changeling magic as her reward. No doubt it was only because she’d better serve the queen with the increased agility and ability to sneak around. I also saw the queen feeding her “favorite feethle” bowls of warm blood, moaning in pleasure as she watched Millicent’s creature lap it up with so much hunger.
I’d obviously known the queen was depraved, but this level was new. How could she become aroused from that? Was it the knowledge of whose blood it was? That was sick.
“Hurry,” Ryder cautioned in an urgent whisper, reminding me that anyone could pass through this hallway.
So I planted beliefs into Millicent’s mind. Rush, Ryder, West, and Hiroshi are loyal servants to the queen. Whatever they do, it’s always to help the queen. Even if I don’t understand their actions, I trust their reasoning is out of allegiance to the queen.
About to retreat, I added a final suggestion. Elowyn isn’t a threat to the queen. I have no desire to ever speak of Elowyn. Wherever she is and whatever she does, it’s none of my business. I have only good things to say about her to the queen or anybody else. I never have reason to be suspicious of her, Rush, Hiroshi, West, Ryder, or Roan. They are innately trustworthy.
“Rush,” Ryder pressed.
I withdrew from Millicent’s mind, and she slumped against the wall behind her, blinking groggily.
Without a further word to her, I jerked my head at my friends. “Come on, let’s go. We need to make a quick stop before we go see if Her Majesty needs our help in the throne room.”
Then I changed directions and prowled rapidly toward Saturn’s quarters, the only place I knew we could speak openly within the palace walls. Now that the crown prince was dead, she’d have even less reason to station her spies there.
Nobody spoke until the four of us were inside Saturn’s rooms with the door firmly shut and locked behind us. Like so many others, that measure of safety was an illusion, but it still eased a fraction of the tension galloping through my body.
I spun on the others. “I don’t think I can do it anymore. I have to get the hell out of here, right the fuck now, and I have to get to Elowyn. She’s our only hope of freeing those dragons.”
And she’s the only hope for me .
As the weeks without her dragged by, it became more and more difficult to accept that I’d never see her again. It remained true that she might never forgive me for what I’d done, but I was no longer certain I could live with myself if I didn’t try to get her to understand.
Hiroshi gathered his hair behind him and tugged harshly on the lavender ends. “I’m with Rush. I don’t think I can do it anymore either.”
As one, Ryder, West, and I turned toward him. Hiro was our group’s voice of reason.
“I’m burning, burning , with the need to kill her.” Even within the relative safety of Saturn’s bedchamber, we still didn’t name her more often than necessary. The queen was like a tormentor from the Igneuslands, forever shadowing us, searching for our greatest weaknesses to then pounce. “And I want it to hurt,” he added with an emptiness I’d never heard from him before. “I want the pain to go on and on for her.”
Ryder and West exchanged loaded looks. As drakes with the responsibility of our clans upon us, we didn’t have the luxury of avoiding violence. But that didn’t mean we liked it.
“Maybe we could get the dragons to roast her alive, then force Ivar and Braque to heal her, then do it all over again, as many times as we can,” Hiro said.
“You know what?” West blurted. “I was all ready to talk you two out of it. I owe it to Ramana to see our plan through. And we’re so close, so close to Rush winning the trials and being named crown prince. But you know what? Fuck it . Ramana’d be just fine with us watching the cunt burn and then watching the entire place burn down with her.”
Of course, it wasn’t that easy, or we would have killed the queen ages ago. So long as her power was connected to the land’s, she wouldn’t die.
That didn’t diminish the appeal of Hiro’s scenario though.
Ryder stalked back toward us from where he’d been peeking out between the closed window curtains. “Look, you guys know I’d be fighting for the right to be the one to light ‘er up, but we don’t have time to dream right now.”
The door to the bathing chamber hung ajar, and for several seconds I was there once more, with Elowyn on my lap, her naked and slick body mine for the feasting.
“I’m not dreaming,” I insisted though I registered the longing in my voice. I turned toward them. “I can’t keep faking it with her. She’s going to know, and then she’s going to kill me anyway.”
“Yeah,” Ryder said, “but if you run off into the Sorumbra after El right now, she’s going to hunt you down and have your head, and then she’s going to figure out the only plausible reason for why you’d tear out of here after being her puppet all these years.”
“He’s right,” West said on a sigh of resignation. “She’ll find out Elowyn’s alive. You know she will.”
My right thigh muscle twitched with an actual need to chase after my beloved. I didn’t care how difficult it would be to find her in the Sorumbra, I’d manage it. I’d always find her, no matter where she was. My heart would guide me to her as surely as a compass.
Ryder shifted closer, his pale eyes heavy with the weight we’d been forced to carry since before puberty. “I for one still haven’t gotten over how swiftly she chopped Idra’s and Yorgen’s heads off.”
West huffed. “That’s only ’cause she was trying to cover up how she’s the one who killed...” He trailed off to gesture toward our surroundings and the ghost of the man who’d once been our friend.
“Just because she’s always favored our man,” Ryder said, referring to me as my thigh twitched again, “doesn’t mean she won’t do the same to him just as fast. She’s not stupid.”
No, she wasn’t. She was a brilliant and ruthless strategist, and that fact had long made our jobs so much harder.
I looked at Hiro, and in his stare I saw the same burden I was currently carrying.
“Nothing I don’t know,” he said. “I’m still not sure I can keep doing it, especially when she’s trying to get her filthy hands on Rush all the time.”
I gulped at the fresh reminder, when I usually did my best to pretend I didn’t notice how close she’d come to forcing me into her bed.
“We have to do it though,” Ryder persisted, his brows and lips tugging downward in a resignation that probably broke him as much as it did me. “We have to get the trials back on track, get Rush crowned prince, and only then can we maybe let up a bit. Once Rush is prince, she can’t take that shit back. One step at a time, guys. We do this first, then we figure out if there’s a way to end it all sooner.”
He met the agony in my gaze with his own. “Then we find Elowyn, free the dragons, and Gadiel and everyone else too. But we can’t do anything so long as she holds all the power.”
“I understand it, of course I do,” Hiroshi said, before whispering, “I still don’t know if I can stare her in the face and hide my disgust.”
I inhaled then exhaled slowly. You and me both, buddy .
“Besides,” he went on, “not sure what we can do at this point to stop her from finding out it was us down in the dungeons. Maybe the roasted pygmy ogres get played off as a natural accident, and she believes they unchained the dragon first. Maybe she doesn’t even think anything of the dead feethles. But the ones that got away?” He shook his head. “They’ll go straight to her, if they haven’t already. Our only chance is that the palace will be in chaos right now and the nobility’s probably in hiding.”
Before I could talk myself out of it, I barreled forward. “So we hurry. We go to the throne room now, convince her we’ll be of more help finding Azariah and getting the trials back on track ‘to secure her reign’ than sticking around. We find the feethles who got past us and I get in their heads. We try to muddy the waters of what we did down in the dungeons. And then we hunt the pegicorn down, get him back here, and get me crowned.”
Acidity burned the back of my throat. Without bothering to hide my distaste, I swallowed it down, pointing at my three brothers in turn. “But the very instant that crown hits my head, I’m finding her.”
“We’ll help you do it,” Ryder said. “We’re all back on track, then?” He looked at each of us.
Scowling, I nodded. West and Hiroshi did the same, Hiro adding, “We just leave the dragons down there to be tortured until then?”
Ryder squared his shoulders as if he had to carry the burden of that horror on his own. “For now … yes.”
He should know better. When the four of us were together, we never shouldered anything alone.
Seconds ticked by, each of us lost in our own thoughts, steeling ourselves once more for what our lot in life would require of us.
When I was no closer to accepting that I couldn’t gallop off into the Sorumbra to find Elowyn, I grunted, “The sooner we get to it, the sooner we’re done.”
And with silent assent, we trekked back across the palace to the throne room, where the queen once more sat on her throne. It alone was untouched. Pillars had crumpled, shattered glass and crushed stone littered the floor along with piles of other debris. The king’s throne was decimated far beyond that level. A heap of dust, it made me wonder if that had been the queen’s work, not that of dragons many stories below.
The moment we entered the room, though many feet still separated us, her stare met mine and trailed every one of my steps until I was bowing before her. Ivar and Braque stood at either of her sides, looking down upon us.
In a voice too light for the circumstances, she said, “You may rise.”
Instinct raced toward my heart like a stake as I tilted my eyes up to meet hers up upon the dais.
Her wicked smile was spreading when movement in the back corner near the wall drew my eye.
It was the guard who’d witnessed me releasing Idra’s and Yorgen’s four children.
Apology scrawled across his grave face, he gave a single sharp shake of his head.
So she knew.
I’d never had to work so hard to force a believable smile to my own face.
For Elowyn, I could do this. For my sisters and for the fae who’d suffered so much at her hands.
She crooked her finger at me, and when I managed to get my feet to obey, her smile dropped.
Her blood-red lips curled into something akin to pleasure, and she hissed, “Rush, you betrayed me.”