41. Because I Know Your Heart
41. BECAUSE I KNOW YOUR HEART
RUSH
I couldn’t resist a smile when Elowyn lifted her skirts just enough to see beneath their hem. She wiggled her bare toes, digging them into dirt. Sensing my attention, she glanced up, returning my smile with an endearing pink blush.
“Promise me when we’re king and queen we won’t let it change us,” she said softly enough that only I would hear, and not the crowd that had gathered around us in the largest clearing we could find in the forest beyond Embermere’s outskirts.
We could no longer delay our crowning—the fae needed the stability in the aftermath of our coup—but neither El nor I had wanted to do it at the palace. While few visual reminders of its previous monarchs remained, as intent as all of us had been to scour the grounds free of them, there were still too many. Better to begin our reign wholly separate from the previous, and connected to the land whose magic we sought to honor.
I took a step closer, also enjoying the coolness of the earth against the soles of my feet. I dipped my head toward hers. “You must know it’ll change us.”
Her immediate protest was so vehement that her hair slid from along her back to hang over her shoulders in silken sheets of a black so dark it shone with blue highlights. Her eyes flared with a faint glow, its violet now a constant expression of the vast power that brewed continuously inside her.
“No, Rush, no. We can’t let it.”
“I’m sorry, El, but ruling will change us.”
Her mouth opened again, but I swept her hair behind her shoulder. “It doesn’t mean we’ll become anything like them.”
Several weeks had passed since the deaths of the former despots of Embermere. Their names were rarely mentioned, and whenever they were, it was in a nervous hush and equally nervous glances to ensure they weren’t a curse capable of conjuring their bearers.
I brushed her hair back from the other shoulder too. Despite the fact that she was about to be crowned queen of an entire realm, she’d opted for a lovely yet simple, gauzy dress of a deep pine green that accentuated her natural perfection. Her face was fresh and bright, berry juice tinting her lush lips a beautiful forest red. Unlike Talisa or her court ladies, El didn’t hide what they considered flaws. The scars along an upper arm, her chest, and neck, where dragonlings had raked their claws when her advanced healing powers had still been bound were faint but there, a reminder of her life in Nightguard, before she’d suspected she had a destiny as grand as this one.
Countless stares trailed my movements as I pressed a kiss to her lips, tasting the sweetness of fruit. “You and I will never be anything like them.”
“How can you be so sure?” Her gaze looked beyond me to the rows and rows of fae crowded around trees and bushes, occupying every free space.
We’d issued an open invitation to anyone who wished to see their new monarchs crowned. Fae from every segment of society—and from many of the uncivilized parts beyond it, too—had arrived: from the drakes and drakesses of the other seven clans to pygmy ogres—that one had surprised us—from the elusive river nymphs to the even more elusive wind sprites, to the changelings to the arbosauruses, who blended in among the other trees save for the way they shook suddenly, shocking anyone inattentive enough to lean against them.
I kissed El again. Her eyelids fluttered closed.
“I’m sure because I know you,” I said. “I know your heart. You want only the best for all the fae.”
“I really do,” she admitted, kissing me another time before opening her eyes.
“And you know I do as well,” I said.
“I do.”
“Besides, the land has chosen you. ”
Her palm pressed to my tunic, over my heart. “It’s chosen us .”
“See?” I beamed at her. “We’ll be fine. The fae will be fine. Our world will heal.”
Her lips pulled back from mine to frown. “The land chose her too though.”
My spine stiffened some. “It did. But she wasn’t always the way she was at the end, or the land wouldn’t have.”
“Mmmmmmm.” Her stare scanned our audience. “The land will be sending someone to crown us, right? It’s how it’s always been done?”
We’d already been waiting too long. “Aye, of course, my love, since the creation of the Mirror World when the land crowned Prince Borromeo before he’d even found his queen. Whenever the land’s representative arrives, we’ll start. Everyone else is ready.”
It had also been El’s idea to issue special invitations to every kind of fae so that they might choose to send a representative of their own to the coronation. It was to be a symbolic gesture, but an important one, conveying that she and I would rule with the well-being of all as our priority.
Creatures and people had arrived in hordes over the previous week, filling the forest to bursting and beginning the long road to healing the prejudices among our kind that the former royals had fostered. We’d had to post guards throughout the woods to break up early brawls, but as the days had ticked by, the tensions had ebbed, until currently those who were small mixed with the large, and those who were brutish hovered protectively over the dainty.
The palace’s staff— staff , not servants anymore, and certainly not slaves—every member of the staff had been given the choice to stay or go—had been working tirelessly to prepare a feast capable of accommodating all of them, and cask after cask of golden wine and sunrise spirits also waited the festivities that would follow.
“Can’t say I’m not glad the umbracs didn’t show,” El said, again only for my ears. “If I never hear a single thing chitter again in my life, it’ll be too soon.” She shuddered at the memory of her time in the Sorumbra.
I chuffed, rubbing a hand along my short hair, still unused to the new length. “There are far worse fae out there than the umbracs that we can both be glad didn’t see fit to make the trek.”
“Oh.” She worried at her bottom lip. “Like what?”
I kissed her, trying to erase the worry. “No need to learn everything at once. We have long lifetimes together for that now.”
“Right.” She laughed, a low, soft trill. “I keep forgetting that part. We have centuries together now that…”
Though she didn’t say it, I could still guess at the rest of her thought: Now that we don’t have a raging, murderous bitch trying to kill us at every turn .
And with what relentless madness had the raging, murderous bitch tried to kill us. While we’d been busy repairing the kingdom since her death, we’d made a number of alarming—though not entirely surprising—discoveries. Talisa had many more pieces lined up along the edges of her gameboard, ready to put into play. Thank the Ethers, she hadn’t had the chance to implement all parts of her strategy, or the results of our coup might have been quite different. There were starkly few members of the court she hadn’t wielded leverage over. Even the scaless Octavia Lily Rose, who was in line to inherit the title of visdrakess, and who’d grown close to El during the Nuptialis Probatio, would have had a difficult choice to make had Talisa forced her hand. Her twin Octavio Linden Oak had been one of the fae we’d recovered from the fae dungeon, where he’d been waiting for his sister to prove her loyalty to Talisa by betraying Elowyn—and if not that, then for his death and likely his sister’s as well. Story after story along those lines had surfaced, and it had been largely Talisa’s underestimation of the threat we posed that had spared us. It had taken us days to march to the palace, but despite all that time for her to prepare, Talisa had assumed she’d have another chance to defend herself.
More shocking was the discovery of journals and annals her predecessors had kept, dating back from the beginning of the Mirror World, detailing the progression of the study of power, magic, and essence, until it had devolved into the appropriation of others’ magic and life force to expand that of the royals.
Talisa’s magic had allowed her to manipulate the life force of others, a trait passed down through her family, who’d grown increasingly greedy and desirous of more than the land would provide them.
They’d begun taking the life force of one creature to stuff it into that of another, altering the other’s makeup in a way that they then passed down through their own breeding over the generations. Eventually a royal decided the dragons possessed the most potent of all magic, and their attention focused on them in earnest, to the exclusion of all others.
When Erasmus eradicated the dragons, he took their power into himself as they died, something his ancestors had never done. The king absorbed so much power that it eventually overloaded his system and killed him. That was a surprise: Talisa actually hadn’t ended her father. She had, however, taken his essence into herself when he’d died so as not to “waste it,” an admission we’d found scrawled in her own hand. That had been her first taste of another’s power, and it had been far from her last. She’d been torturing dragons for years to determine if their power would be greater if they gave it to her of their own will instead of her taking it by force. She never got what she wanted from them, not even when she began stealing the magic of hatchlings still in their eggs, presuming that the moment before birth was when power would be the purest and thus the strongest.
Studying her journal entries and logged experiments, a few in Braque’s hand, her descent into darkness—and its attendant madness—was plain. She began drinking blood to more directly consume life force. And when she imbibed the blood of the dragons, she forged a connection with them that allowed her to override their will.
When she’d believed herself to have become immortal, her writing had grown shaky. Of course, there’d been no entry proving this hypothesis of hers false after Elowyn’s power collided with her own.
“What if no one shows up for the land soon?” Elowyn asked, drawing me sharply from my thoughts. Her brow was furrowed. “We can’t just keep all these fae waiting.”
With effort, I focused on the present. No matter what Talisa did, we’d have the opportunity to fix it, even if it took us our entire lifetimes. “I don’t think they mind waiting.”
“How can they not? It’s been at least an hour of everyone just standing around.”
“And they’ll wait many hours more to witness such a significant event in our shared history.”
“He’s right,” West chimed in. “This is a really big deal.”
I spun toward where he stood with Ramana’s hand tightly clasped in his. Since he’d brought her back to court, I hadn’t seen my sister farther than a foot from his side.
I scowled at him, though the gesture was halfhearted. “You’re supposed to be pretending El and I have some privacy here.”
Ramana laughed. The boisterous roll, which I’d believed I’d never hear again, was a balm that soothed the ragged edges of my essence.
“Only you would expect privacy as the new king of Embermere,” Ramana said with a twinkle in her eyes, back to being the brilliant, deep blue of her youth. “You’re gonna have to get used to not having it, big bro. Everyone’s gonna need something from you.”
In earnest this time, I scowled at my sister. “That’s not helping.” I flicked a glance at El, and sure enough, her brows were pinched. “Maybe you should go stand with everyone else.”
“Un-uh. You’re stuck with me right where I am. Besides, you said you wanted your friends close.”
“I did…” And now my sisters, whom I adored of course, and my brothers, whom I loved, and Bolt, who was my best friend if on four legs, and Azariah, who was seemingly glued to Bertram, and Xeno, who was apparently glued to my mate, and Saffron and Pru and her granddoody and Horst, the goblin who’d attended me at court, and Einar and a deep-blue she-dragon … and on and on the list went … they crowded around Elowyn and me from the opposite side as the crowd.
Ryder grinned and laughed from among them. “You’re well and truly stuck with us, bro.”
My stare flicked from him to Hiroshi. I suspected it would be a long time before I looked at either of them without experiencing a rush of relief.
There’d been steep losses—awful, horrible losses—but despite it all most of us had survived. Everyone I loved most in the world was here at my side—crowding the crap out of me.
“ Waaawaaaa ,” croaked the ranucu.
“What is it, Bertram?” Azariah asked of him right away, turning to face him with an attentive flutter of his wings and a whoosh of his fluffy tail.
“ Waawaa , waawaa .”
“Where?” the pegicorn asked urgently.
“ Wawaaa .”
Azariah’s head turned to search the groups of fae across from us, his horn jerking perilously to either side. Bolt bobbed his head out of its path.
“What is it?” I had to ask.
“Bertram says the land is here,” Azariah offered.
“Who? Where?” I asked.
But when I turned back around, the where was obvious. And when Xeno gasped, much like he’d seen the dead walking , so too was the who .
“That ain’t possible,” Roan rasped.
The dwarf’s eyes were shining a startling green. He’d shaved his face of his bushy beard and mustache to match his short hair, and it was still like I was looking at a different person every time I saw him.
“Finn’s … dead,” Roan finished.
But Finn clearly wasn’t—not all the way, anyhow. He had to have given the land permission to take him over as the land never took what wasn’t freely given.
The fae healer who’d attended Elowyn’s father before he’d agreed to leave for the Sorumbra with her at my request strode along a path that had parted open for him. He didn’t say a word that I could hear, but our suddenly worshipful audience seemed to sense him regardless—or rather, not him per se, but the immeasurable, ancient power that animated his body.
In tacit agreement, our friends stepped back, leaving El and me to stand in the middle of the clearing on our own when Finn reached us. His tunic and breeches were in tatters, stained with what appeared to be black, dried, umbrac poison. His skin, however, glowed, and his eyes were a brilliant caramel color that shone like a faceted gemstone catching the light.
He didn’t speak when the faint luminescence of Elowyn’s body surged to a strong glow, and her eyes glittered like matching violet crystals.
Over the faint luminescence of my own skin, my tattoos surged with light like that of the moon. The vines spread quickly, visible across the backs of my hands. Where they were often barbed in blood-drawing thorns, plump, crisp blossoms bloomed instead, like spring coming to life after a long, harsh winter.
Elowyn’s hand was already in mine, and still in silence, Finn grasped our free hands, clutching them together.
You have kept your promise to us.
I startled as a voice that wasn’t Finn’s filled my mind. Elowyn didn’t—after all, she spoke to dragons like this all the time now.
We will keep ours to you.
The voice was neither masculine nor feminine, neither rough nor smooth. It was somehow … everything in nature all at once. Every element woven together, every bird’s song and every waterfall’s melody, every roar, bark, and yip. It was the sound of the wind and the rain all at once, with the warmth of the sun balanced by the coolness of the moon, and the earth that absorbed both.
My skin erupted in bumps beneath my tattoos. I’d never imagined magic could have a voice, a sound, even. Yet here I was, hearing it.
The immensity of the moment blurred my vision. Awe sank into my bones. A sense of eternity fluttered through my breaths.
Do you vow to continue shining your light despite the opposition of darkness? To return the natural balance between the light and the dark, day and night, the sun and the moon, heat and cold, life and death, between the essence and the physical manifestation of it?
I do, Elowyn’s voice said into my mind.
Shaking off my shock, I hastened to add my own affirmative.
Do you vow to only inflict harm in the defense of yourselves and the fae who depend on you for their protection?
I do, Elowyn and I replied in unison.
Do you vow to balance their needs with your own?
I do.
We will be the very best stewards of this magical land as we are capable of being, Elowyn added. At all times, we’ll endeavor to defend the fae and the Mirror World so that the darkness will never again rule here. Only that dark which serves to balance the light will endure.
With eyes that might have contained all of existence, Finnian studied us for several moments, during which none of us blinked.
Finally, Elowyn said, Ah, if you are ready to, uh, crown us stewards of the land, then we brought the crowns of our predecessors. She began to turn to signal that they should be delivered.
No, Finnian said. Return those to me. You shall have new.
Elowyn signaled to Pru to hand the crowns to Finnian. When she did, he indicated she should lower them to the ground, which swallowed them up in seconds.
Our spectators were a great many, whom no one had called to attention or silence in any official capacity. Regardless, not a single sound interrupted the sanctity of the coronation as Finnian released our hands and extended his toward the ground.
It shuddered and rocked—and still, our audience didn’t mutter a peep to interrupt—until matching crowns of polished ore burst through the dirt.
When El tipped her head toward Finn, so did I. First he placed a crown on her head, then mine. It settled into place with a weight too light for the burden I’d long fretted over carrying.
Thank you, Elowyn said. For your trust, your support, your magic, and for all the life you give to the fae of this world.
Aye, you have our deepest gratitude, I added.
Finnian didn’t even nod in recognition, and did nothing to signal the ceremony was at an end. As he turned to leave, El flared out her skirts, so when she dropped to her knees, it was her skin that touched the earth.
As Finn-who-wasn’t-Finn walked back through the wide-eyed and wide-mouthed throng, Elowyn dipped her forehead to the earth. Her crown didn’t so much as slide.
I lowered myself to her side to do the same, and with our fingers intertwined, we dug them into the dirt. It hummed beneath my touch, a tune I now recognized as the very same that sang through my own blood.
Being king wasn’t about flaunting influence and power in a court, artificial and removed from the natural world that supported it. Being a true king meant always remembering that a real balance required all elements, and all creatures and people of the fae. It required a constant connection to the foundation that held everything else up.
The foundation of all that truly mattered.
From behind us, Hiroshi called out, “Forever as one in the light! Forever divided in the darkness!”
The call was echoed over and over and over again .
Until I arched up to add a new verse to the familiar rallying call of the fae.
“Forever united in the balance of both!”
When the call was resumed, the third component of it was repeated too.
The healing of the Mirror World had truly begun.