21. Battles Take All Sorts of Shapes
21. BATTLES TAKE ALL SORTS OF SHAPES
~ RUSH ~
My brittle smile faltered as I stared up at the queen. How could someone so hideous on the inside be so objectively beautiful on the outside? Serpents should slither from between her perfect red lips to suggest her true nature.
“Your Majesty?” I asked, hiding the unease that washed down my torso.
Though I stood only a few steps away from my brothers, the distance was too great when I suddenly feared she’d strike any one of them to punish me.
While she stared at me with eyes that burned like the coldest ice, I scrambled to anticipate the best explanation for our being in the dungeons. We went down there to identify the source of the shaking—to protect her and her reign, of course.
We should have left the burnt-orange dragon restrained. But then we would have been as heartless as she was.
My attention flicked once more to the guard, who wouldn’t meet my eyes this time. Or could this be about releasing the four children she’d condemned to execution?
Or it might be something else—or a combination of so many situations. I’d never once been on her side, and she was too cunning to fool entirely.
“Whatever it is I’ve done to betray my queen to whom I’ve sworn allegiance,” I uttered, “I beg Her Majesty’s forgiveness and plead for the opportunity to make things right.”
There was a time when diminishing myself in such ways would have stuck in my craw, but not anymore. Not with Elowyn out there to protect. Not now that we were so close to success. I’d do whatever it took now to see our plan through so I could get back to Elowyn.
Anything.
Including the very last thing I’d ever want to do.
“Perhaps Her Majesty will invite me to visit her in her private chambers? To show her how much I appreciate her understanding?”
I heard someone’s breath hitch behind me, but couldn’t decide whose it was.
I tilted my gaze downward, proving my subservience. There, not two feet from where I stood, beneath chunks of cracked stone, rested clumps of dust, a reddish gray from where they’d mixed with Idra’s or Yorgen’s blood. Matted strands of Idra’s hair, once a straw blond, snaked across a chunk of marble pillar, now the muddy oxidized brown of dried blood.
The warrior in me itched with the urge to protect my neck from the dangerous predator.
“No, Rush,” she said.
My gaze jerked up at the eerie resignation in her tone.
“You’ve betrayed me one time too many. And after I granted you leniency with that”—her lips curled—“ girl you claim to care about.” She shook her head. Her crown was pristine and perfectly straight despite the chaos that engulfed the throne room. “I never would have guessed you’d be so stupid as to throw away every opportunity I’ve offered you—and for that ridiculous girl. For all that I do see, I didn’t see that.”
“Your Majesty,” I started. “Please. Nothing is lost. We can still?—”
“ We will do nothing.” She snarled, then sighed as if contemplating a strain as heavy as the pillar that had crushed Conroy. “I’ll have to start all over again. Prolong my reign even further as I search for a new suitable heir.” Her eyes glimmered, belying the insincerity of her feigned regret.
She shifted to view my brothers behind me, and every muscle in my body tensed, my jaw clenching so hard my ear drums popped.
“I suppose one of them might do, but they’d have a long way to go to prove they’re more loyal to me than to you.”
My teeth ground together; I had to force my jaw to relax before I cracked teeth. I’d burn her alive—damn the consequences—before I let her lay a finger on any one of them.
“What do I have to do to earn the chance to prove myself to Her Majesty?” I asked, the question deeper than I’d intended it. I cleared my throat. “I killed the woman I love— loved —for you. How does that not prove my allegiance to you? I couldn’t have done more.”
“Watch yourself, Vega,” Ivar hissed from behind her right shoulder, his sharp eyes pinched. “I’ll kill you myself if you keep disrespecting my queen.”
The queen actually chuckled. “Ivar ... see?” she asked me. “What I require—nay, what I demand— of you is the level of loyalty Ivar and Braque show me.”
“I can do that.”
Braque tilted his chin farther up just so he could better look down upon me. “No, you can’t.” His upper lip curled. With his puffy, round cheeks, he reminded me of a fish, hooked at the lip.
On his stubby legs, he scooted closer to her. “My queen, they’re just the words of a desperate man trying to keep his head. The drake’s never shown Her Majesty the adoration she deserves.” He patted his ever-present potions satchel as if hoping to get to kill me himself.
I ignored her pair of suck-up shadows. Reminding myself I was a warrior tasked with defending all the fae of our entire realm, and that battles took all sorts of shapes, I held Elowyn’s face in my mind, her smile brilliant, and played the ring of her laughter through my memory. For her, I could do this.
Sounding more earnest than I would have believed myself capable, I stood ramrod straight and met the queen’s frigid blue eyes. “Not only am I capable of that kind of loyalty, I’m burning with the desire to prove it. I’ll do whatever it takes to become heir to Her Majesty’s throne and thus secure her reign.”
At least most of what I said was true—thank you, ambiguity.
She stared into my eyes for so long that I felt my tattoos flare, a tell that she was getting to me I wished I could hide.
Finally she said, “I believe you.”
An exhale whooshed from my body as I belatedly attempted to silence it.
“My queen,” Ivar protested, but she held up a hand to quiet him.
“I believe you’ll do whatever it takes to secure your own goals.”
I held completely still.
“You’ve earned your death sentence as many times as you’ve earned your place as my heir. I see and hear everything. I know everything that happens in my kingdom.” She allowed that fact to hang in the air like a noose, suggesting she was unwilling to mention our visit to the dungeons to prevent the guards from hearing. “I asked you to do something as simple as to kill those who’d murdered my son , and your crown prince—some would even say your friend. And yet you let the descendants go free to continue that traitorous bloodline.”
She leaned forward in the direction of the severed heads, lumps only partially concealed by the debris, and spat.
Behind her, the guard who’d outed me flinched before schooling his features into trained impassivity.
All of us at court, save perhaps Ivar and Braque, had to be the best of actors.
She waved her hand and a goblin materialized from the wall behind her, a silver goblet already perched upon a tray above his head, the accentuated points of his upper ears peeking from between the scraggly strands of his hair marking him as a male.
His large feet deftly avoiding the mess, he knelt in front of her throne. We all waited in silence while she drank a liquid that left her already red lips stained a deeper hue of it.
When she gestured the goblin away, I said, “Your Highness, may I prove that at the bottom of all my actions is an enduring loyalty to your crown? To you ?” Now I was flat-out lying. “I’ll find Azariah for you and return him to court so the Fae Heir Trials may finally continue and your reign may be assured.”
Languorously, she blinked, then threw her head back in a cawing laugh that made even my bones clench in apprehension.
A moment later, Braque joined in. Ivar only scowled all the harder at me.
When she jerked her stare back to me, I stopped breathing. Her eyes blazed like a fire from the Igneuslands. “You think I don’t know where Azariah is? That I can’t snap my fingers”—she demonstrated, and the guard, who was clearly on edge after whatever interaction he’d had with her, quailed—“and get him here as fast as his legs or wings will carry him?”
Again, she laughed. Again, my breath froze.
“There’s nothing you can offer me that I want,” she insisted.
I gulped, inhaled, exhaled, then, before I could regret it, “You’ve never had me as your lover.” This time, a couple of my friends’ breaths hitched. “I’m certain Her Majesty has heard the gossip since she always knows everything going on at her court. I’m a superb lover. Very attentive.”
The bitter tang of vomit burned my throat. I could hardly believe the words were coming out of my mouth. But I held on to the feeling of Elowyn’s lips against mine, her skin soft beneath my fingers, her body yielding and incredible against mine. I’d imagine the beauty and ferocity of her face instead of the queen’s, and somehow, some way I couldn’t currently fathom, I’d find the strength to withstand the queen’s touch.
I’d find the way to survive, to honor my duties as drake and mate.
The queen’s chuckle this time was part seductive purr, part husky smoke that arced out to entwine around my throat and choke me.
“Yes, I have heard.” Another chortle. “Of course I have. Which makes it all the greater shame to have to kill you.”
I opened my mouth?—
“Save your breath, Rush. I made my decision before you walked into this room. I need someone I can trust with complete obedience.” She looked around me at the friends I dared not glance at. “Which means they won’t serve me either.”
She leaned back in her throne, flicked her hand in the air, and drank from the silver goblet when the goblin once again appeared. “It’s unfortunate. I wasted so much time grooming you. And taking care of that sister of yours too. Now she’ll die.”
She sighed, licked a droplet of deep crimson from her lower lip while my own blood chilled to ice. “But alas, I have time to find another heir.”
“Yes, you do, my queen,” Braque added with a sweet lilt that made me want to kick him in his big, ugly head. “Plenty of time to find someone worthy.” He sneered at me. “Grateful.”
“But Your Majesty,” I protested, doing my best not to be disgusted with my wheedling. It was humiliating—but a necessary last-ditch attempt to secure a future that would spare so many thousands from the darkness currently consuming the mirror world.
“The magic of the Fae Heir Trials won’t allow it. I’m still the male champion, ready to match up with my bride. You can’t kill me.”
She rocketed to standing. Every single one of her personal guards that stood in a semi-circle behind her throne winced this time, not just the one who’d betrayed me.
“You dare to tell me what I can and cannot do?” she bellowed so loudly I wondered if the volume might have rattled the glass in the large wall of windows had any of it survived the dragons’ fury.
She marched toward me with heavy, angry steps that shook the dais until she stood so close she could touch me—or I could slice off her head, a desire that blazed through me as hotly as her sudden ire.
Craning her neck down so her breath whisked across my forehead, she seethed. “Embermere bends to my will. The entire mirror world and its magic does as I want. I rule the magic. I command it. No one else. Just me.”
And that was the very moment when, despite all appearances, I knew in my heart that somehow, some way I couldn’t yet see, everything would be all right.
No one commanded the magic of Faerie, so no one commanded the magic of its mirror. The power that ran through it was contained to the land. No one person could possess it, only wield it with the land’s permission.
The situation morphed from a harbinger of my doom to a forecast of her own.
Maybe not by my hand, and perhaps not today, tomorrow, or even this century, but someday the queen would meet her demise. And the land would claim back all she’d stolen from it and its creatures.
As powerful as this queen was, with her awful bloodlust and the creeping darkness she’d inherited from her father, the power of Faerie that ran through the mirror world, that coated its very skeleton, was stronger.
It forever would be.
“The magic of the Fae Heir Trials yields to me,” she continued in a yell I only blinked against.
Incongruously, the anxiety and pressure released from my body, replaced by a pure faith I’d perhaps never before experienced in my life. If I ever had, I hadn’t since I was a child, so many decades ago, when I was still ignorant of the horror that swept our realm like a worming, infectious disease.
“If I say the trials are over,” the queen went on, “then they are. If Azariah dies because of it, so be it.”
“It will be his honor, my queen,” Braque said.
She stared hard at me. “Exactly. Nothing happens in this realm without my say-so. Once you and your friends are dead, I’ll allow an appropriate time for your subjects to mourn you”—she swept a lazy hand through the air as her features drooped in pretended grief—“and then I’ll begin a new set of trials, one that will yield an actual worthy heir.”
“Yessss, Your Majesty,” Ivar said, his glare on me. “Yes!”
She turned and, after an unconcerned glance at the remains of the king’s throne, sat on her own. Her lips parted to reveal usually white teeth stained with pink. “May your memories die with you, and may your essences burn forever in the Igneuslands.”
She spat again, this time aiming for my boots. Her aim was true.
But I remained in this odd space only faith could explain, partially detached from my body and the circumstances seconds away from threatening it.
When she raised both arms, I sought out her eyes and caught them right away. But when I attempted to push my thoughts into hers, she only cackled as I slammed against a mental wall as impenetrable as stone.
Her grin spread. “See you in the Igneuslands.”
Well, at least she had no illusions of where she’d end up. The Etherlands would probably burn to a crisp should she ever step foot in them.
She flicked the fingers of both hands toward me and my brothers.
I drew my sword and heard three similar shwiiiing s behind me.
Then the stone beneath our feet, already cracked and upended, rattled and vibrated with a loud moan, pushing up entire slabs of marble. I bent into a crouch and rode the wave as the heads of Idra and Yorgen toppled and tumbled out of the way, smaller rubble rolling with them.
Unwilling to wait to discover the queen’s chosen method of death, now that the ruse was definitively up, I leapt onto the dais and swung my sword at her neck.
Moving faster than was possible, faster than she should have been able to, she appeared behind her throne next to the tunnels, her laughter drawing my eye to her.
“You didn’t actually think I didn’t have secrets, did you, Rush?” She tsked and shook her head, her crown not daring to move. “Such a waste. You’re so damn beautiful.” Then she waved three fingers at me.
“Enjoy your meal.”
It took me a beat to realize she wasn’t speaking to me, and by then she was gone, again moving faster than was reasonable for any fae of any kind, the open door to the tunnels the only sign of where she’d gone.
Ivar and Braque were following behind her at a normal jog when a roar I’d heard before shook my insides.
I turned in time to witness a dragon’s snout rising through the floor.