Chapter 6 #2
I stuck him in the neck with my dagger, his voice turning to a strained gargle, bubbles of blood rising to his lips and his eyes widening in delayed surprise.
It was funny how close death could come to people before they realised it had snared them.
Beautiful, foolish denial had kept Fae like Caelan merrily ignorant of his demise until his very last breath.
“Pity you won’t make it to the celebrations, Caelan.
” I tugged the dagger free, ready to stab him some more to ensure he couldn’t heal from that wound.
But as he slumped to the ground, a tangle of vines crept over him, dragging him into a twisted mass of roots.
He thrashed against them but they tightened their hold, wrapping around his throat and winding over his chest, stealing him away into a mass of bracken.
It seemed the forest was happy to finish the job.
And there he would stay I supposed. No grave to mark him, no one able to visit to leave so much as a flower.
‘Poor Caelan’ some insufferable wench would utter to the sky, but his soul wouldn’t be there among the stars.
It would lay here rotting forevermore. Because of me.
And that suited me rather well. This day was already more interesting than the last, though to say my interest was piqued was still a stretch.
Nothing roused me as much as the rush of killing.
I wiped my dagger on the moss by my boots and treaded on, my gaze skipping between the large leaves above, seeking movement among the branches. Nothing. All was still now, my beastie gone to ground. No matter. There were plenty more to find.
I walked a while among the whispering trees, certain they were speaking riddles to me.
Sometimes I caught a word or two, a song to lure me east or west but I never wavered from my path south.
Not that I knew what awaited me there, but I wouldn’t risk following the call of the forest only to find myself in a trap.
At last, I reached a clearing, parting a fan of low-hanging branches to reveal a valley beyond.
In it sat a trickling stream which coiled around an old castle of cream and brown stone.
It must have been taken by the forest several hundred years prior.
Its turrets were boxier than the modern palaces with their piercing spires but not as decorative, though their pale blue colour was striking in its own right.
I strode toward the stocky building, finding it bigger than it had appeared from up on the hill.
Vines were crawling across its walls and curling around its windowsills like clawing fingers, but the building remained mostly intact, despite the forest’s touch.
The arched wooden door stood open, beckoning me inside, promising sanctuary. Or death. One of the two. And as no whispers summoned me closer, I risked the latter and walked inside.
The cold was apparent, but a fire would heat a room or two in no time.
It was fine enough for a fallen prince – as Caelan had called me.
He had loved the royals during his years of servitude, always gushing and following them dutifully.
I’d never been fond of an ass tonguer, but Prince Koval in particular had adored the flattery.
He was, quite unfortunately, my uncle. A male who had looked down on my father’s choice to marry my mother – a Fae who had not checked the boxes the royals rather preferred for their wedded brides and grooms. The older the Fae, the better.
The more connected they were among the inner circle of the Coterie, the more likely they were to find themselves a royal partner.
Father had been a rebel. I had to thank him for that.
Royal I may have been, but my relation to King Arthrun who had sat on the throne during my time in the Fae realm of Rivenspire had been distant.
I was a prince by blood, but there were plenty of others who had awaited a chance at the throne.
The king himself had never borne children, but his sisters had, and some of those children had had their own and so on until there had been a large pool of heirs with royal blood, all awaiting the moment the spirit of Providence would show up and select a new king or queen.
But it never had. Usually, a monarch didn’t reign longer than a couple of centuries – or if they were particularly poor at ruling, the spirit would crown another Fae promptly.
One king had only lasted two years before being replaced, and he had lived in shame on the edges of society since.
But Arthrun, he had ruled for over five hundred years, and there had been no whisper of the spirit stirring.
And so the pool of princes and princesses had grown and grown, all hoping Providence might appear and select them.
At least until The Last King was finally revealed and the crown finally found its place upon the head of the one destined to rule until the end of this age and beyond.
Though I, like many of my kind, doubted that fated monarch would ever come.
Among my rather large family, my uncle Koval was one of the more insufferable of my relatives who had hoped Providence would select him for the crown.
He always had been a prissy little tart, so I doubted he’d decided to step into the forest this time.
Would he or any of my estranged family be joining me here in the Great Hunt?
Perhaps my aunt, Princess Drava, might have had enough gall to test her mettle.
The others? I highly doubted it. They held nothing of the ferocity my line of the family had possessed.
Maybe my mother’s rogue blood mixed with Father’s rebel tendencies had been the reason for that.
The truth was, I hailed from two of the strongest Fae warriors of the realm, and I’d always found my extended family withering company.
I expected I’d feel a touch more murderous if a reunion was on the cards.
Funny thing about being branded as a psychotic outcast; you tended to live up to the reputation.
An old chair with a back so tall it was akin to a throne had been drawn up to a fireplace in a stone chamber away from the entrance hall and there I sat, plotting my next move.
Blood speckled my fingertips, and I examined the red tarnish to the deep golden hue of my skin. Silly things, weren’t we? Immortal, so long as we didn’t accidentally fall down a well or jab ourselves with something a little too pointy.
Death was inevitable, so she was good company to keep.
I’d rather make a friend of her than face her whimpering like a newborn pup. It was why I wore her fingers as a necklace. Two bony hands wrapped around my throat, tattooed there to declare her ownership of me.
I felt her creeping closer now, always brushing past, never quite catching hold of me, as if her grip was not yet strong enough to claim me.
“Yes, yes, you’ll have me in the end, darling. But there’s work to be done right now, and you’ll want to see what’s coming next. I’ll put on a fine show for you. A bloody one. You know the type. Our favourite.”
Stories told of Death’s visage, the head of a falcon on the body of a woman. She was the spirit who would take the hand of all those passing into the afterworld and lead them to their fate.
She left me, as she always did, off to seek easier prey. But she’d be back. She couldn’t resist the draw of me. Her little project.
The night was deepening beyond the stained-glass windows, the forest alive with groans and wicked wails.
Someone was dying out there, screaming for mercy.
They clearly hadn’t made it to shelter in time.
A human, most likely. The fleshy kind with bones so brittle, they’d snap like twigs.
Why their kind came here, I didn’t know.
Proving nothing as ever. Trying to be remembered.
What fools. But let them die for all I cared.
Let them be hailed back home, only for those celebrants to die too one day, and on and on the cycle went.
Stupid, fleshy humans. If I were so breakable, with a lifespan akin to a mouse, I wouldn’t go squandering my death for glory.
Spirits be, why didn’t they die for something interesting?
Perhaps, I envied them a little though. Brittle as they were, they had something right.
A beginning and an end. Clear cut and quick enough to give them one hell of a fire in their bellies.
They lived truer and more keenly than the fair folk.
We were the ones to squander life, lavishing in our palaces and draining the earth of all it had to give.
Now look; the forest was fighting back. It despised us, and so it should. I despised us too.
Rivenspire had deserved the scourge of the Hollows that had made the Fae hide, scurrying into their shining towers to wait out the storm.
But it had never ceased, the dead still walked the land, roaming, devouring and ripping through lands that belonged to their lush realm – but that was before they’d built the wall.
Their numbers increased with every passing day.
Enough to climb that very wall perhaps. Or to crack clean through it.
I laughed. Dark and rumbling was the sound.
Yes, that would amuse me greatly to see the Fae’s palaces fall, to see them climb on each other’s backs, brother on sister fighting to escape the purge.
But there would be no escaping that end.
The Hollows were death on legs, ever moving. An unstoppable tide.
If there was something worth living long enough to see, it was that. Oh how the Fae feared the Necromancer who had created them. How they whispered of the king of the wastelands who was sending his dead to finish them all. And oh how I would fucking laugh when their high castles came tumbling down.