Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Soldiers unlocked the cell, the door creaking on protesting hinges, and jostled me to my feet hard enough to clack my teeth together. They jerked me forward, laughing when I stumbled.
“Get moving, filth,” the one at my elbow grunted.
“What the hell are you doing?” Poppy called sharply. “Can’t you see she’s sick?”
My head spun and I wretched.
The guard to the left pointed at her in warning. “Watch your mouth, witch. We’re coming for you next.”
Poppy’s craggy features swam into distinction in the glow of the Fae light, all harsh angles and greasy hair. “I’ll watch my mouth when you watch your face, troll. Although I suppose you couldn’t help being born ugly.”
Good one. I’d appreciate her wit, and the way she rose to my defense, if I weren’t in the process of throwing up. Bile scorched up my esophagus but when I hunched against the sensation, nothing happened.
I was empty.
Armor clanking and gazes averted, two soldiers maneuvered me between them. Come on, bear, give me something. I stretched into the depths for my shifter form, but between the cuffs and the curse, I found no response.
“Halfling abomination.” The murmur was loud enough to be intentional.
The guards bounced me between them with a laugh as more of their ilk grabbed Poppy from her cell.
If the soldiers had treated me poorly before, now that they knew what I was they were ruthless. I needed their help to stand, to move.
I’m not the only halfling shifter here, asshole.
The Claw & Fang was an underground organization for a reason. Any halflings like me living in Faerie weren’t safe. I’d been on the run for too long to remember what it felt like to breathe without struggle.
Fae lights cast a warm glow leading out of the dungeon.
“Be careful, Tavi. It’s all going to be okay,” Poppy called.
She lied.
I struggled to look over my shoulder at her, and my lungs hitched.
This version of Poppy sounded like the witch I knew, with the same long silvery hair.
Filth coated her skin, and more wrinkles fanned from her eyes, but she was most certainly Poppy and not Barbara.
She kept her identity in the glint of her eyes, the set of her shoulders. Age hadn’t caught up to her.
Was it because she hadn’t had to live as a human? Barbara had been withered. Or had she said her magic use had taken the youth from her features? I couldn’t remember.
Another jostle and my attention splintered further, our escort taking us through the winding halls between cells and up the canted stone staircase to the land of the living.
A few more paces and I’d be in the throne room, the same place I’d once celebrated the Solstice Ball with Mike. Those days were long behind us. I barely remembered the dress I’d worn.
The world went complicated and snarled, footsteps a peal of thunder as they forced us into a room off the main ribcage of the king’s castle.
The air thickened and my lungs went tight. No, wait, I did recognize this room. I’d met the premier here, and the Elder Council. They were assembled now in the same manner. Cosmo Foxfall stood to the right side of King Tywin, who was perched at the head of the long polished table.
So many changes to the past…and I still ended up in the same place.
The Elder Council, the lower half of their faces still hidden by masks, said nothing—watchful, silent, grave. They merely marked the proceedings.
Cosmo huffed out a laugh at our approach, still wearing the jacket with black-beetle buttons down the breast, his lapels straight as a knife. Same wide-set eyes, still eliciting the same eerie bristling of the fine hairs on my neck.
Then I saw Mike sitting at his father’s left, and fear erupted in a gut reaction. Something was wrong. My overworked brain catalogued the pieces, knew them for the awkward picture they presented but made no sense of them.
Something isn’t right.
Mike sat there glassy-eyed and pale and did not react at the sight of me. Not happiness nor revulsion nor pleasure. Nothing.
You are seconds away from losing your free will.
I found my voice and turned to Tywin. “What did you do to him?”
But he ignored me. Tywin snapped his fingers and the soldiers settled into their formation as the door swung shut, ominous, terminal. A loud snick of a thrown lock settled the matter and a silencing bubble cut us off from the rest of the castle.
My nerves screamed. I blinked against blurry vision and the impossible reek of the king’s magic as it churned in my gut. Everything inside me fell to ash.
I didn’t want it touching me. I didn’t want to be in the same castle as him, let alone the same room.
“Now that we’re all gathered here, the tribunal can commence,” Tywin began.
“Tribunal?” Poppy repeated the word. “What the hell do you mean?”
Tywin’s lips thinned and I delighted in his unmistakable flash of irritation. “The gathered have come to discuss your future in this realm.”
It had taken me way too long to realize there were more people in the room. The Elder Council sat at the main table, but rows of chairs fanned out beyond, each one filled, each person given a front row seat to our misery.
Tywin wanted an audience?
Certain faces in the crowd stood out from their neighbors’, features recognizable. These weren’t faces the king would know intimately, not the way I did. Why were they all here? Who brought them?
My breath caught in my throat and I tipped backward, caught off balance. The soldier on my right growled and jostled me forward into place.
“The tribunal is for your benefit,” Cosmo Foxfall put in, those smarmy words seeping like oil through the space.
They barely penetrated the fog in my head, but I hated the way those syllables made me feel. Especially when I saw Nora Kwan sitting in the second row, the third chair in from the window.
Nora was my friend from the human realm and another academy student like I’d been. She hadn’t been given a key to Faerie or elevated to the Elite Academy. She’d have had to wait for graduation to do so.
We weren’t close to graduation.
I was even further behind than she at this point.
Professor Marsh sat at the end of the rear row, her fiery red hair pinned to the top of her head and her black cat-eye makeup pointy enough to stab someone.
Beside her, Melia had blunted her sharp chin and softened her cheekbones to make herself nearly unrecognizable, her features camouflaged by magic.
My heart lurched in my chest. There was no way in hell Marsh and Melia would be allowed in the room. Their opinions wouldn’t matter to the king or to Cosmo.
Nurse Julie sat at the end of the final row of chairs. Her skin was softened to a pretty shade of violet rather than her normal stark blue, and her features resembled the nobles I’d seen around the palace. She was Seelie through and through to anyone watching her now.
And directly across from her was the most shocking friendly face of the bunch.
Doug Wilson had made it out of the scuffle at the Fae Academy. There was no way to disguise his thuggish appearance, his black hair and his defined masculinity. A neat beard decorated the lower half of his face and his eyes were dark and half shifted, lit from within by an inhuman glow.
I blinked and the image changed to an academic in glasses, another Seelie researcher.
I was losing my mind.
There was no way that there was a full-blooded werewolf shifter in Faerie right now. How had he gotten in?
Doug and I stared hard at each other, my mouth going dry as the guards maneuvered me into place. They marched me to the end of the table and knocked me against the wood hard enough to bruise my hip bones.
Something was happening with my friends. They spread across the room in a bizarre pattern. Only Marsh and Melia sat together. Otherwise, they were spread out evenly among the watching crowd.
Were they here to help me?
Did they have a plan?
The premier began to blather about the impartiality of this proceeding and how it was important to the monarch to give us a fair shot to defend ourselves. The final judgment rested in the hands of the king, of course, but—
Blah, blah.
“This tribunal is called to order,” Cosmo intoned. “Tavi Alderidge, you stand here before us today as the accused.”
The king led the witch hunt. “You have defied your king and the laws you swore to uphold,” Tywin announced. “The charge is treason.”
I blinked at him as the word rattled around in my head without landing. Treason? What did this have to do with me being a shifter?
“You used your own body to portal between the realms. The law states that only the Elder Council members and those Fae who are issued keys by the monarchy of Faerie may travel between the realms.” Tywin pushed to his feet and rested both palms against the table.
“By portaling using your body, you have broken the law and the word of the king.”
A harried laugh squeaked through my lips. “You’re not serious.”
“By order of the Elder Council, in accordance with the law of Faerie—”
“You’re doing this because I’m a shifter!”
“—the punishment is death.”
I froze in place and turned unerringly to Mike. He didn’t respond, didn’t move. He might as well be a statue. Even the crowd stayed silent, a pall falling over the space.
“You showed your true heritage as a shifter,” Tywin agreed, a muscle twitching near his eye. “I am absolutely disgusted to have opened the castle, my home, to you with your tainted blood. You preyed on my generosity and have sought to undermine my reign from the beginning.”
“A disgusting traitor,” Cosmo added unnecessarily.
Tywin scowled. “You infected my home with your lies and duplicity, and worse, you forged a friendship with my son. You jeopardized the future of my heir.”
“Shifters are the scourge of the world and deserve to be wiped from it!”
A rattle of agreement spread through the crowd at Cosmo’s statement.
“We deserve to live like anyone else,” I argued. “We’re people. We’re members of the community. We live and breathe and protect the ones we care about the same as anyone else.”
I kept waiting for my friends to make a move but nothing happened. Help me. Do something!
“King Tywin, please. You can’t damn an entire group of people for—”
His fingers curled above the table. “You’re telling me what I can and can’t do?”
I was trying to survive, to stand on my feet without sagging to the floor and sinking through it. I was a puddle of pain, melting into oblivion, and hyperaware of the eyes on me. Everyone turned in my direction, with the Elder Council a silent sentinel witnessing the fallout.
I whipped around to Poppy only to see she wasn’t in the room with us anymore. Heat burned my face. Had she ever been?
“To prove the fairness of this enclave,” Tywin continued through grinding teeth, “I will put it to the vote. The council will decide by majority rule what to do with you.”
He’d already decided. I knew it without him having to speak it out loud.
This was a masquerade.
He’d put together this semblance of a trial for me but the council and Foxfall would do whatever Tywin wanted. We all knew it.
“All those in favor of releasing the prisoner?” Tywin voiced the question and waited three heartbeats for those gathered to raise their hands.
No one stirred.
“All those in favor of sentencing this halfling shifter to death?”
My lungs seized as one by one the Elder Council lifted their hands. It was unanimous.
“Well, then.” Tywin sounded utterly pleased with himself, as if he hadn’t just damned me. “Someone get me the warrant.”
“My pleasure, sir,” Cosmo replied with sickening satisfaction.
The king was about to sign my death warrant. There was no way out of it this time.