Chapter 25
Chapter Twenty-Five
Melia was in Dorian Jade’s hands.
Our strict time frame contracted around us, shrinking with each passing second. We had to move and we had to do it now.
Melia was the brains of our rebellion. As far as Jade was concerned, she was too valuable to kill. However, it also made her vulnerable.
She had information he’d use against us if he were able to draw it out of her.
Which gave us roughly forty-eight hours for preparation before launching a full-scale assault.
The camp was full of movement and energy. It filled and swelled with the arrival of each new person responding to the call of the intelligence team, many more than I’d anticipated in our short time frame.
If Melia trusted them to be discreet, then I did too. She would have personally vetted each one of her agents. What they did, they did well.
They accomplished more than any of the rest of us on our own.
We strengthened our wards and borders rather than risk the chance of another attack while moving our camp. But with the influx of new arrivals, from both the river and the forest, we were at max capacity.
Weapons were gathered and armor sized. We opened several new tents committed to blacksmithing as people poured in from the four corners of the kingdom to fight on behalf of the rebellion.
I’d never been so terrified.
Each new body joining the ranks, from both courts, became my responsibility. Elfwaite assured me it wasn’t, but no matter how many times I heard it or from whom, it made no difference.
Even Doug Wilson and Allen worked overtime to bring in shifters and halflings from the mortal realm. We had an influx of students who’d been pulled out of the Fae Academy for Halflings when the first mess with the Grimaldi pack took place.
Another influx of Fevar brought with them supplies and caravans.
I wasn’t sure where we found the space for them but Mike worked miracles. In the absence of Queen Laina, he took on her role, the delegate. The backbone, content to work with Elfhame and the others on these logistical and tactical nightmares.
Having the queen here would have been a blessing, but we had no idea where she was. Last I’d seen her, she was at the Fae hospital in Eahsea.
Was she still there? Had the king pulled her out?
I shook my head to clear it and marched through the day.
Movement and energy.
There was no way to get used to it but the distraction helped. If I didn’t have to sit still, then I didn’t have to feel anything outside the fear and resolve.
Terror only grew the closer we got to taking the battle to Dorian Jade.
If I slowed down, it was to introduce myself to the new people here, so many people who wanted to see change in their realm. I tried to greet each one of them myself, to see to their needs. The more who came prepared, the easier it got for everybody.
I was actually kinda good at this role, the one I hadn’t wanted to begin with. But my smiles felt like a betrayal. I shouldn’t smile when we were one day closer to launching our attack. One day closer to death for so many of these unsuspecting souls.
Smiles were for people who had nothing to lose.
Solemnity. Struggle. Those were the bones keeping us stable, the pillars to lean on. Smiles had no place in war.
Once Julie got my leg stabilized and the poison of the spell dissolved, my magic took the reins. I healed without a scar and was back to normal.
The night before we were set to march out, Bronwen, Coral, and Elfwaite gathered us together for a sendoff for Livvy and Noren in a small private ceremony I’d fought against. We’d already burned them along with the rest of the bodies and sent them to the Summerlands and the waiting embrace of Faerie.
We would only waste more time by holding a private ceremony. To accomplish what? To make the tears flow freely again? To weigh down our hearts with memories of people we’d never see again?
But Bronwen insisted, and when she dug her heels in, there was no force in this world to resist her. Add my cousin to the mix? And the pixies? Those two were worse than any natural disaster I’d faced.
Even Poppy stuck her nose into the fray.
“Livvy helped me through the worst fallout from using my powers to stop those obstacles," I muttered to Poppy. “What the hell am I going to do now?”
“Now, you are going to find another way to handle them yourself.” Poppy nodded once, decisive, assured. “You’re worrying about the wrong things, girl.”
I worried about finding a way to help the Aether and fix that problem, too. How the hell was I supposed to go on like this?
I got my mother back but lost her again, almost all at once. The emotional whiplash left me breathless and aching in places that had never ached before.
I’d been forced to push aside my grief at losing Uncle Will, the man who raised me, out of necessity.
Now I’d have to do the same thing all over again but on a bigger scale.
Poppy clapped her hands for attention and when she lifted them, a circle of flames spouted between us, the area we’d cleared for the pyres now utilized for a different purpose.
Bronwen, Coral, Nexa. Mike, Julie. Poppy. Elfwaite and Elfhame. Me.
The people who’d seen the best of Livvy and loved her.
We’d get Melia home. She wouldn’t have to survive Dorian for much longer.
We’re coming, I assured her in my heart.
“We’ve gathered here tonight to celebrate one hell of a Fae woman, and, I admit, a scruffy bastard of a direwolf I actually miss.
” Poppy was dry-eyed, her blond hair done in two long french braids on either side of her head.
She’d left her weapons behind for this. “We lost them too soon, but their sacrifice led us to this point. We’ll make them proud, as they’ve made their loved ones proud.
We’ll miss them every day, but we know their spirits are safe in the Summerlands, treasured, never forgotten. ”
Not the way Faerie had been forgotten.
I pushed my hands against my heart and the erratic thrumming, too fast for me to be anything but lightheaded.
“We send you to the Beyond with love and light and magic, as is your due.” Poppy lifted her arms to the sky and the flames grew, changing color as they twined together.
Their rich orange glow deepened in a blush of rust and purple, looping and knotting and sending a shower of sparks like fireflies into the air.
I wanted to feel the magic of the moment but there wasn’t any room for it. Instead I marked the tracks of the sparks until they guttered out of existence.
Our circle wasn’t complete anymore no matter how many kind words Poppy used to open the ceremony.
Nexa pushed her hair behind her pointed ears, seconds away from collapsing against her daughter on their approach to the fire. She murmured low to Coral, an insistence on her strength, before stepping free and standing on her own.
Square-shouldered, with delicate features, Nexa had shrugged off the mantle of wealthy, elite courtesan. She was a female lost to grief like the rest of us.
I stood beneath the shelter of Mike’s arms, both of us wrapped in a blanket.
“My sister Dae was always a troublemaker. She came out of the womb screaming, if you believed our mother. And she never stopped taking risks no matter where life led her,” Nexa began.
This wasn’t the place to smile either. This was the place to let the others show their grief the same way I’d been careless in showing mine. A safe place.
Yet Nexa told her stories with a flash of mirth lightening her face. Her skin, usually pale, still maintained a vibrancy I lacked whenever I looked in the mirror. Her eyes weren’t dull. She had hope.
I had stubborn perseverance.
“Dae never listened. I remember when she first met Baronne and she declared she felt a spark with him. Oh boy, did I try to warn her out of sleeping with a werewolf, but she insisted it was the right thing to do. She was the fiercest woman I ever met. So fierce she once tried to wrestle a hellcat from the Dasha Plains herself! She thought for sure she’d be able to tame it.
Faerie knows, she eventually did. Kept the hellcat as a pet for a good thirty years before it… ” Nexa sighed. “I miss her.”
Mother and daughter stood touching shoulders through this trip to the past.
The stories had us laughing by the time we finished the ceremony. Tears rolled down my cheeks for a different reason now.
Life went on.
Livvy would have hated to see us crying over her, Nexa was right about that. And if her own sister wasn’t broken and bent from loss, then maybe my aunt wouldn’t mind me borrowing some of her strength.
Mike and I walked back to our tent after the ceremony, his shoulder bumping against mine. Comfortable and easy, exactly the way I needed without any of his stifling concern.
“When this is over,” he promised, “I’ll give you the most beautiful wedding. Anything you want, Tavi, and we’ll do it. If you say you want to go deep sea diving for pearls, I’d get over my claustrophobia."
I perched at the foot of our bed and shucked off my Converse. “I’m really not the kind of woman who’s dreamed of anything extravagant, Mike. You and me and our peeps, and I’ll be happy. I don’t have a whole Pinterest board crammed with ideas.”
I never had. My old friend Dawn used to pull her hair out because I never wanted to play those games. Who would I marry, who did I want to kiss, what kind of dress did I like…
None of it had ever appealed to me.
Mike stood watching me systematically undress. “You don’t want a big wedding?”
“I don’t think it’s necessary. Then again, I haven’t spent much time considering it. Maybe I would like something over the top. I definitely want a sixteen-layer cake, though.”
“We could have Chef make it. Or maybe Raelynn would like to try her hand at it.”
I shivered. “Chef would make the cake garlic-flavored even if I asked for red velvet. And Raelynn would probably want me to make half of the layers myself.”
Then I wished I hadn’t said red velvet. A cake the color of blood? At our wedding? The idea didn’t sit well with me.
Mike knelt between my knees, his palms branding my thighs with heat. “Whatever you want, garlic or not, we’ll have a beautiful wedding, and then we can move someplace like Mirwen or Bluelar. We’ll be country folks and have a slow, easy life. You want chickens? I’ll get you chickens.”
I stopped and breathed him in. An image of a stone cottage flashed in my head, the sides covered with vines and flowers and a steeple roof with those old-fashioned slate shingles.
Gardens everywhere—although I had a black thumb.
Chickens, maybe ducks, a couple of direwolf puppies tumbling through tall meadow grass…
My chin dipped. “I can’t picture you as country folk. Seriously, it’s laughable. You’re Crown Prince Michael Thornwood.”
His gaze straightened, somber. “I’d try if it meant the two of us could rest.”
Rest.
Despite the circumstances, he looked as delicious as ever, lanky and lean. His skin held a healthy outdoor tan and his blonde hair had been lightened and brushed by the sun.
His face held an air of sharp intelligence honed over the years.
The set of his jaw, the lines gathered on his forehead, and the green hue of his eyes erased any distance we might have once put between us. Mike wasn’t the kind of man to accept the world as it appeared to other people, which made us good together.
Butterflies exploded in my stomach. The cottage held appeal.
It’s still a shock that someone like him wants to marry me. I wouldn’t even consider it for anyone else.
“Someone is going to have to rule Faerie,” I reminded him. “You’re next in line if we can pry your father free of his throne.”
King Tywin probably had a permanent dent in the seat from how often he sat there.
Mike’s brows drew together. “Quite honestly, I don’t want it. Not even a little bit.”
He’s never wanted it.
Back when we first met, he’d mentioned it cryptically on multiple occasions. I thought he was joking then, a way for a royal of his status to blow off a little steam or find a common connection point. But now?
“You don’t? Really?”
He shook his head. “It’s not my path, no matter how many people want to convince me it is. I’d rather go diving for pearls.”
He rose, lifting my hands with him to brush kisses across my knuckles, his lips dancing over my flesh. The scent of fire clung to our skin as we climbed into bed together and he fell into perfect place behind me.
Mike didn’t want to be king. He had no interest in claiming the throne. If we accomplished our goal and overturned Jade and Tywin, someone had to helm the ship. Laina wasn’t royal by blood. Only by marriage.
If not Mike…then who?