20. Here Was My Queen
20. HERE WAS MY QUEEN
RUSH
Whatever happened when the map surged and then faded from Elowyn’s body left her eyes glassy and her face slack. I didn’t fucking like it. I asked for details but she wasn’t ready to share. Uncommonly quiet, she went with me to examine the captive fae, all awake now except for the one male for whom Elowyn’s intervention had arrived too late. We’d moved his body off to one side of the clearing to later honor his passage to the Etherlands.
Though blessedly awake now, the fae were too weak to do much but lie where they’d been. Ramana was the strongest of them all, thanks to her bond to West, we guessed, and even she remained slumped across his lap and chest. It was just as well. I doubted West was willing to let her go even for a moment. My friend’s face was all amazed shock and stark relief. He barely glanced away from her, as if afraid he’d discover it was all a dream and she wasn’t there at all .
It was much how I felt toward Elowyn. Since reuniting with her, I wanted nothing more than to sequester myself somewhere with her and never let her go, to prove to myself that what we shared was real and I’d been blessed by the Ethers with the greatest gift of my life. I needed to touch her all over, to be inside her so deep that I could go no deeper, to reclaim the connection between us, body and essence, her heartbeat pressed to mine, her breath commingling with my own, her heat enveloping me and making us one.
With the dragonling clinging to her back, Elowyn knelt beside a pair of females, who blinked sluggishly up at her. Pru and Larissa sat to either side of them, the females’ heads in their laps. Reed had discovered old meals in sacks inside the cabin, and my sister and the goblin attempted to feed the former captives some gruel. Without any notion of how long it might have been since they’d last eaten, they offered them only a few bites, just enough to help them begin recuperating their strength.
Thank the Ethers, Larissa had shed the tablecloths and now wore a simple frock. Perhaps she’d found it inside the cabin, or maybe Pru had produced it for her as she’d dressed Xeno, who also thank fuck was back to being clothed. Larissa’s skin, however, was wan and pasty. Would this existence be cruel enough to return one sister to me only to snatch away another? Larissa needed Braque’s treatments once a month or she grew very ill. The reason she’d come to the palace in the first place was for her monthly ministration. How long did she have before the sickness overcame her? How long before there would be no stopping the disease from ravaging her body?
“Do we know who they are?” Elowyn was asking Larissa and Pru.
While Pru answered, Larissa gazed up at me. I heard Pru say, “No, Mis—Elowyn. I don’t recognize them, and neither does Lady Larissa.” But all I could think was that my little sister’s smile was sad, as if she too realized how limited her time was. How my decision to refuse the queen—and therefore Braque’s treatments—had condemned her to a slow, agonizing death.
“No, Rush,” she whispered, drawing Elowyn’s attention, which immediately grew sharper. “It’s not your fault. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s just … what is. I’ve made peace with it. Please don’t blame yourself.”
I took in her somber stare and tried to memorize every aspect of it in case our days together were numbered.
“You had to say no,” Larissa added, referring to when I’d told the queen neither my sister nor I would entertain her, sealing Larissa’s fate.
Elowyn looked back and forth between us. “What’s going on?”
Larissa held my stare as she answered. “Nothing for you to worry about. You have enough to think about since it looks like it’s on you to save the world.” The sorrow of her eyes extended to her smile. “Is that about right?”
Elowyn breathed slowly. “Yep. Looks like it. ”
“Then how do we help you get it done?”
Steadying Saffron with a hand, Elowyn stood. “Best I can figure, first we see if there’s any way to save anyone else the queen’s been draining before she kills them all. See if my map is really gone or if there’s a chance we can get it back. Maybe Ivar will be more forthcoming now that the queen essentially left him to die at our hands. And then after all that, we build a fucking army.” Her eyes flared violet as they blazed into mine. “We murder the queen. Free the dragons and everyone else who’s been under her tyrannical rule. Then you and I become king and queen of Embermere, true stewards of the Mirror World.”
To hear her speak with such determination, as if our victory were a given fact, stirred power in my veins. Here is my queen .
“When I touched the land…” Our companions stopped whatever they were doing to listen. “Well, the land and I connected. It … they, maybe?—I dunno, but they spoke to me.”
Several of the others drew in sharp breaths. My heart pounded.
“Do ya mean ya actually heard the voice of our sacred land, lass?” Roan asked, his usual gruffness subdued.
“I do, and I did.”
More gasps.
“Never heard o’ such a thing,” Roan added.
“She’s the one to save us all,” Edsel put in. “I knew it. Didn’t I tell ye, Elowyn? ”
She chortled darkly. “You did. Shortly after you tried to kill me for daring to consider Pru a friend, if you recall.”
“You did what ?” I snarled at Edsel, discovering Ivar’s cutlass suddenly in my grip.
“It’s a long story, Rush,” she said. “And everything’s fine now.”
“Tell me,” I growled at the goblin. How dare he threaten my mate?
I felt her hand on my shoulder before I registered that she’d moved. “There are too many stories and too many updates to share now. After this is all over, we’ll have all the time we want to catch each other up.”
“Is that a promise?” The question came out with a serrated edge, as if I barely dared contemplate a lifetime with her for fear that it would be snatched away from me. How easily your faith comes, Rush. How easily it goes.
To Edsel, El said, “Maybe to make up for holding a blade to my throat”—she squeezed my arm so I wouldn’t leap over the bodies between us to throttle the traitorous goblin—“especially when I was so close to dying”—a vicious growl ripped from my throat, but I stayed for my mate—“you’ll do me the favor of checking on Larissa.”
“What’s wrong with ‘er?” Edsel asked, peering at her from a couple of patients over. “Mmmm. She ain’t quite right, I can see that now. What ails ye, girly?”
Larissa sighed and set down the bowl of gruel. Absently, she trailed gentle fingers along the forehead of the fae in her lap. So gentle and kind, my sister, so magical. The world would be such a darker place without her in it.
“I’ve been sick for a long time,” Larissa eventually said, her voice as soft as a whisper, as if she didn’t want to admit to the burden she’d carried so stoically and for so long. “It would have killed me a long time ago, except for what Rush has done.” Unshed tears glistened in her eyes as she gazed at me. I didn’t deserve them.
“He’s sacrificed everything for me,” she continued. “Thanks to him, Braque’s been giving me one of his powerful healing potions once a month all this time. It’s the only thing that’s kept me alive.”
“How long, exactly , since the last one?” I asked around a tight throat.
She shrugged. “I was overdue when she put me on that stage.”
“Dammit!”
Edsel frowned. “And what is it exactly that ails ye, girly?”
Larissa looked everywhere but at me or him and shrugged again. “No one knows. It’s so rare an ailment that it doesn’t even have a name. If not for Braque’s genius with alchemy … well, I wouldn’t be here. And if not for all that Rush’s done, the queen wouldn’t have agreed for Braque to help me.”
“See?” Ivar piped up from where he still sat out of our way, bound to the chair. Xeno continued to guard him, but the changeling no longer bothered with questioning. Ivar’s face was distorted with swollen, discolored bumps, covered in cuts, smeared with blood. The male was prepared to die for his precious queen. The snakes slumbered atop his lap in a perturbing scene that Hiroshi would probably erase soon. There was no point to torturing the advisor if he wouldn’t help us subdue the queen no matter what we did to him.
“Her Majesty does have good in her,” Ivar said. “Everything she does is for the good of the kingdom. Anything that’s good for Her Majesty is good for Embermere. It’s thanks to her that the Mirror World thrives.”
Reed laughed darkly, which I doubted he often did. “Are those her thoughts or yours? You think the Mirror World thrives ? What hole have you been living in?”
“A very opulent, luxurious one at the palace,” Ryder supplied with a scowl. “Ivar doesn’t live in the same world the rest of us do. He sees only what she wants him to see.”
“That’s not true,” Ivar insisted.
The snakes began to rouse. Hiro’s eyes narrowed in focus on them.
“I accompany her on every trip she makes beyond the palace grounds. I see what’s out there just as much as Her Highness does.”
“Do you, really?” Ryder asked, a vein throbbing in his neck. “When’s the last time you saw the outskirts of Embermere?”
In spite of his restraints and a nest of freaking vipers living inside his body cavity, the male stiffened haughtily. “I’ll have you know I escorted Her Highness to the outskirts just four seasons ago. Everything was beautiful, lush and verdant, very evidently healthy and fertile. We are all fortunate to live in the Mirror World under her protection, and you are all ungrateful scum.” He stretched his neck to spit beside his chair. “You should be thanking her, not vilifying her.”
Ryder, Hiro, West, Roan, and I were exchanging loaded looks. Eventually Ryder said, “An illusion, it’s got to be.”
“What’s an illusion?” Ivar snapped.
Hiro positioned himself in front of Ivar. “What you saw,” my friend said with some of his familiar gentleness. “That’s not at all what the outskirts of Embermere are like. The area is downtrodden and miserable. The land is dying, its fae barely surviving. The earth is parched, dry, and brittle. The fae are frightened and suspicious. They live in constant lack. There is too little life there.”
“No,” Ivar denied instantly. “That’s not right.”
“No, it isn’t right,” Hiro said. “On that we finally agree.”
Ivar was shaking his head. He caught sight of the snakes, now undulating back and forth, and quickly averted his eyes. “Everything Her Highness does is for the ultimate good of her kingdom. Her subjects are supposed to support her. It’s how it goes. They fuel her so she can look out for them.”
I stalked over to him and waved his cutlass in the direction of the fae who appeared half dead as they clung to their lives. “Is this what you call ‘looking out for them’? By the Ethers, Ivar, are you out of your fucking mind?”
Ivar’s face hardened like stone. “No respect for her sacrifices,” he muttered as if to himself.
“What sacrifices do you think she’s made for her dear, darling subjects?” I pressed.
Evidently offended on her behalf, Ivar tipped up his head in regal fashion. “My queen has no need to explain herself to any of you, and I won’t do so on her behalf either.”
I felt my beloved’s approach before I saw her round me to lean behind Ivar. Fury hardening her features, she pressed a blade to his throat.
He stilled completely. The snakes did as well—Hiro giving her space.
Elowyn lowered her mouth to his ear and hissed, “You stood by while your cunt of a queen”—he bristled at the crude insult—“violated my mate.”
With Saffron’s head bobbing over her shoulder, she drew the blade across his throat in one swift slice. I believed that was it for him until the line of crimson that welled revealed itself to be shallow. She shoved the knife back to his neck.
Though surely Ivar was intelligent enough to view her cut for the warning it was, he sneered. “He was there of his own free will. He chose to come to her bed.” He stared up at Elowyn. “My queen is the most beautiful female in all the realm. Just because you’re jealous and don’t like that he made love to her, doesn’t mean it wasn’t so.”
Many things occurred at once, converging from many directions.
“What a spiteful, disgusting thing to say,” Elowyn exclaimed, her dagger digging into the slim cut she’d already made. “She made him forget me!”
“He didn’t want to be there,” West snarled at him, shocking me that he’d left Ramana to rise to my defense. “Fuck, of course he didn’t, you spineless piece of shit.”
Ryder, Hiroshi, and Roan were there too. Even Xeno’s face was flushed with what may have been anger on my behalf—or perhaps it was on Elowyn’s. So many of his reactions seemed to be about his best friend Wyn .
To avoid the snakes, Ryder bent over Ivar from the side. “Just ‘cause Rush puts his duty above all else—a duty that involves saving this entire damned place, by the way, which means he’s also trying to save your sorry ass—doesn’t mean he likes what he’s got to do. That’s what a real male does, Ivar, ‘cause obviously you don’t know what real courage and strength look like. He takes the hits on the chin and keeps going because that’s how he protects those of us he loves.”
I gaped at all of them, my own protests dissolving.
Larissa appeared at my side, her smaller hand sliding around mine. I gripped it with ferocity as I struggled to quell a tsunami of emotion that arrived with memories of what it had been like to feel those females touching me as if I were their possession.
Laughing darkly, Ivar only tsked and pulled his head back to avoid the bite of El’s blade. “A male cannot make love unless he’s aroused. Rush was aroused to satisfy my queen.”
“That was ‘cause of me ,” Elowyn rasped. “He drugged himself to avoid feeling, you awful, horrible, little…” She trailed off, shook her head, tucked away the blade, and stepped back. Her chest heaved as she glanced at the others but not me. “He’s not worth it. There’s no insult great enough. I just…” She breathed in, out, and finally looked at me. Tears welled in those beautifully loving eyes, magnifying the violet so that it was crystalline in its clarity. The color, I suspected, was her magic coming alive. Her eyes had been a light gray when we first met. My mate was transforming into something even more magnificent.
After several calming inhales, she announced, “Let’s focus on saving whom we can while there’s maybe still a chance. Ivar”—she winced as if his name itself were foul—“surely you must realize it’s not okay for the queen to murder her subjects to supposedly keep me from draining their power—as if I’d ever do that.”
“You’ve had it out for Her Majesty since you first darkened the palace gates.”
“No, I haven’t. She’s been the one who’s had it out for me. All I’ve been doing is trying to get the fuck away from her and … never mind. You don’t believe me, an d you wouldn’t care even if you did. Do you know where else she’s keeping fae to drain them of their power?”
“The queen shares everything with me. But even if you flay me alive then set me on fire, I won’t tell you a thing that will injure my queen.”
“That can be arranged,” Xeno said evenly. “Though I’m digging Hiro’s snakes. I’m thinking they should feast first.”
Ivar didn’t react.
“You’re truly willing to let innocents die,” Hiro said, “when you have the information to help us save them?”
“As I’ve said,” Ivar answered, “we’re her subjects . It’s part of our role to make sacrifices for her. We strengthen her so she has the power to defend us.”
“Defend us from what ?” West asked, sounding exhausted, his hands slapping against his thighs, setting his weapons to rattling in their sheaths. “Since as long as I can remember, the only threat to the Mirror World has ever been her .”
“Our queen is the greatest tactical mind we’ve seen in thousands of years. There are threats from the outside you don’t even know about.” He hesitated before adding, “We’ve been wrongfully denied access to Faerie. It’s our true heritage, where the magic is strongest. If not for what King Spiro did, my queen wouldn’t weaken. None of us would.”
“If not for King Spiro, the Mirror World wouldn’t exist at all,” Roan pointed out .
“Exactly,” Ivar said triumphantly, as if he’d made some grand point.
Pru padded over to wedge herself between Elowyn and me. She tugged on the hem of El’s leathers. Saffron scuttled up my mate’s back to avoid going with the goblin, making my beloved wince. She believed she hid it well, but El couldn’t conceal the many grimaces from me with how closely I watched her. My mate was still injured. She should be healing somewhere peaceful instead of dealing with crazy, foolish bastards like Ivar.
“What is it, Pru?” Elowyn asked with a calm that was presently out of my reach.
“One of the sleepers. She’s been trying to talk, Mi—Elowyn. Her voice is hard to understand, but Pru thinks she knows what she’s saying.”
“And what’s that?”
“She keeps saying his name.” The goblin scowled at Ivar with admirable ferocity. “And now she’s started saying something that Pru thinks sounds like turtle .”
“Turtle?” Elowyn repeated, mystified.
I watched Ivar as he heard that one word. The highly annoying sense of superiority he always wore wrapped around his person like a cloak slid from his face. He gawked, eyes wide and empty—no, not empty, churning with … something.
With the dragonling practically sitting on her shoulders, El bent at the waist to better meet the goblin’s stare. “That sounds like she’s still unwell. Keep me updated if she says something new, but for now, just keep doing whatever you can to help. Thanks, Pru. ”
“Turtle,” Ivar croaked. “Are you sure she’s saying ‘turtle,’ goblin?”
Pru scowled at him some more, meeting his frantic stare with slim, yet very straight shoulders. “Pru doesn’t make mistakes.” The goblin brazenly stared him down as if she hadn’t just finished admitting she only thought that’s what the female had said. With Ivar seated, she nearly reached his head, but not quite.
For several moments, Ivar stared blankly into the distance, lost to something none of the rest of us could see. Then he barked, “Take me to her!”
Xeno snorted and rolled his broad shoulders. “That’s not how this works, asshole. You’re our prisoner. If you wanna get to do something, you gotta give us something we need. Like information on where the queen’s stashed anyone else she’s sucking the life out of.”
His face reddening, Ivar gulped. “If that is who I think it might be, then I’ll tell you whatever the blazes you want. Just take me to her. Now .”
Xeno looked at Elowyn, then me.
“But he stays in the chair,” I told him.
The changeling, who was obviously even stronger than he looked, crouched and picked up Ivar in the chair on his own. “Show me where, Pru,” he said, and the goblin pattered alongside him, pointing.
When Xeno set him down, Ivar’s mouth dropped open. It was a look I’d never so much as imagined on him, let alone witnessed before.
“Take away the snakes, Hiro,” I told my friend softly. “They could scare the others.” In fact, several of the rescued captives were already struggling to drag themselves away from the vipers.
A wave of lavender light rolled along Ivar’s body and the snakes vanished. His tunic, and the flesh it concealed, were unmarred.
The woman tried to roll to sit up, but her body was too weakened; she collapsed on herself. Pru scuttled over to help. From where she lay flat on the ground, with a rough squawk that was clear enough, the female said: “Turtle.”
“It’s not possible,” Ivar uttered.
Elowyn sidled next to me, so close that the heat of her body mixed with mine. I wrapped an arm around her waist beneath the ever-present little dragon and pulled her close to my side with a possessive grumble.
“It’s not possible,” Ivar repeated, making it clear that whatever wasn’t possible was precisely that. “You … how … you were supposed to be dead,” he finally said in a strangled whisper.