Chapter 34
Thirty-Four
Finally relinquished by the guards at the gates to the academy, Fieran strode inside as if he hadn’t been returned home like a naughty boy found stealing candy from a shop. I felt more embarrassed to follow him inside, but Fieran was unstoppably cocky.
He moved close to me, his voice low to keep it from carrying in the cavernous entryway. “Tell me everything you said to her.”
“Don’t you want to know what she said to me?”
He caught me in his arms, drawing me against his chest. I tried to push away from him, but his arms were unyielding. His wings unfurled from his sides, shimmering above me. A single beat of them, and we lifted skyward.
I clasped my arm around his neck, and he gripped my thigh, pulling my legs around him so I was anchored to his body. I gritted my teeth at the contact, at the friction of his hard torso between my thighs. I was trying to keep from plummeting to my death; that was all.
He landed us lightly on the top landing. He lowered me to the floor, but my body was still pressed against him, his leg parting my thighs. His warm palms lingered on my skin, waiting for me to get my balance.
I pushed away from him and strode into the common room. Rees rose to greet me, nosing my palm in greeting—or, more likely, searching for snacks. He licked my palm, drawn perhaps to the remnants of honey cake and human misery.
Fieran slung his belt over the back of a chair and drew his tunic off, wincing at the movement. I dared a look, dreading how his body affected me.
But black-and-blue marks spread across his torso, and the stab wound bled at his side. I’d assumed he’d been healed; he was the queen’s son, after all, even if she might kill him one day, but they’d let him bleed all the way through the city. “Gods! That looks terrible!”
“I’m touched—and frankly surprised—that you care.” He opened a cabinet and pulled out a bundle of medical supplies.
I was torn between wanting to catalog his wounds in case he needed more care and being annoyed by my own tendency to linger, staring at the hard planes of his body.
Anyway, he was right. I shouldn’t care. I should just let him bleed out.
“I need you to tell me every bit of your conversation with the queen,” he told me. “Don’t worry about offending me. I already know you’re not loyal to me.”
I stared at him skeptically.
“I’m serious. Your only loyalty is to your brother and your sister.
You’re scheming for the life you think you deserve.
Working that awful little farm until your brother marries and your little sister grows up, and your dreams wither.
But the fields will bloom, and so will they, and that’s all that matters, right? ”
The image he’d just rattled off so easily—as if it were a foregone conclusion—stung. “You’re an asshole.”
“You’re calling me names, sweet little traitor? For the most part, I admire your loyalty—though I wish I had a share of it. I’m not angry.”
He sounded awfully magnanimous for a man who had stolen my sister’s magic, used my brother’s suffering, and successfully trapped me at his side in what was likely to be my doom.
“How generous of you,” I said coolly.
“Hold this,” he told me, handing me something while he held a bandage strip between his teeth. The words came out garbled. “I’m going to need both hands for the stitches.”
I might as well be blunt. He’d figure out the truth anyway, and the queen would know too. “What does the queen want? She has to know we’d be having this conversation. Or are you a mystery to her?”
I sometimes felt like a stranger to my own mother, even though we’d shared the same house.
“She has plots upon plots.”
“Why do I have a feeling that’s hereditary?”
“Perhaps.” He sounded remarkably unaffected by the accusation he had much in common with the evil queen. “But we have plots for different purposes.”
“You don’t trust me. Fine. But tell me what it is that you want, at least in broad strokes, Fieran. You’re trying to free the shifters from this hell the queen has created for them?”
“I do want to see shifters freed from the Trials.” He gritted his teeth as he poured a cleansing potion over his wound. “And you want to be free from the Trials, so you should work at my side as my ally.”
“As your ally, or as your wife?” I asked, still stuck on that bizarre proposition of his.
“Ideally, your wife is your ally. It’s awkward when you’re enemies.”
“The queen wants me to report back. She knew you’d feed me information to report to her.” I didn’t try to hide the irritation in my voice. “What lies have you already told me?”
“I did learn from the best.” He sat gingerly, holding the edges of his wound together so he could begin to stitch it. He couldn’t hide the way he winced, the way the muscles in his lean side spasmed.
“Why don’t you go to the healer?”
“I might as well stay in practice. It’s not as if being stabbed is an uncommon experience for me.” He flashed me a smile, though it was a shaky one. “Isn’t that a thought that cheers you up?”
He bit his lip as the needle dipped under his skin, and came up again.
“Why not use your healing magic?”
“It costs my dragon. Bleeding him to make the potion.” His voice was short, along with his breath, from the pain. “I’d rather suffer a little so I can take less of it. She said she’d grant your brother peace?”
“Yes. I found the choice of wording troubling.”
“As well you should. She might mean she’d cure him, or she might mean she’d kill him. Which leads to two possible conclusions.”
“Which are?” The thought that my brother was in danger set my heart to a feverish beat.
Fieran looked undisturbed. “Perhaps she doesn’t need you, she plans to kill you, and that entire conversation was misdirection. Or she doesn’t know if she can cure him, so she’s keeping her options. The magic won’t let her lie, but that’s never limited her.”
“Why would she want to kill me?” The answer was clear as soon as I said the words, and before Fieran could beat me to it, I added, “Because you’ve decided I’m useful. You’re the reason Tay and I are in danger.”
“You were already in danger. Your brother was dying of a curse no simple Fae could have cured, and you were going to die once the shifter’s curse reached your door.”
The queen must be right that I was immune to the curse as a mortal, given that I was a year older than he thought I was and still alive. The nightmares of burning troubled me, but it made sense my mind would try to come to terms with my likely fate when I was unclaimed by a dragon.
Maybe the curse was just a myth to force shifters into the Trials. If the queen was using the Trials to control the shifter population, she might have created the curse to terrorize every shifter into compliance.
“And the…second possibility?” I didn’t want to say it out loud.
“The queen herself cannot absolve the curse on your brother.” He scrubbed his hand over his face, already moving on in his thoughts to something more interesting than my brother’s life. “Though she has had no access to him to gain that knowledge.”
“You couldn’t keep her out of your house, could you?”
“I can’t keep out her spies. I’ve brought in many healers trying to unravel the curse on your brother. It’s been a helpful thing, having him hostage in my house.” He gave me a meaningful look.
“Tell me what you’ve tried.”
“You won’t like hearing it.”
“Just tell me.”
He sat on the edge of the table—a bit heavily, as if the wound taxed him more than he would admit. “I brought in the best Fae healers for healing runes. Those disappeared overnight. I even paid a blood Fae to siphon the sickness out, but she ran away.”
He gave me a faint, unamused smile. “It turns out your brother is difficult like you.”
“He’s not difficult. He’s far better and kinder than me.”
“Kinder, perhaps. I doubt anyone could be better. At any rate, it’s a powerful curse.”
He’d delivered that compliment so casually and then moved on. I shook my head, finding myself always a bit unmoored by him. “Why would anyone curse Tay?”
“I think the queen was right in telling you that you need to figure out who your father is. Perhaps Tay was targeted because of him.”
He meant that Tay was targeted because of me. Tay wasn’t the mysterious shifter’s child.
“This is one situation where we should take her advice. But warily, always. Her advice always serves her purposes first, and of course she wants to prevent more mortal shifters as much as I want to help.”
“I’ll do it to help Tay, but…I don’t want to find my father.”
He clicked his tongue. “Look at you. Still loyal to your mother, after everything. Loyalty might just be your defining trait.”
“Were you listening?” Emotions I didn’t want to feel throbbed in my chest. “As I said goodbye to my family?”
“You looked as if you might run.”
“You are an absolute asshole.”
“I know.”
As I turned the situation over in my mind, I had to admit that finding my father suddenly wasn’t selfish. I was driven by a lifelong sense of curiosity that I didn’t trust, but now I needed him. “If I find my father…do you think he could hurt my mother?”
For a second, I was sure he was going to lie to me with pat, easy words.
“I don’t know what happened between your father and your mother. I don’t see why he would return to your village if he learns of your existence. But I can’t make any promises.” When he sounded sincere and concerned, it made me more furious than his usual flippant, cocky tone.
Those were the moments I wanted to trust him too much. The moments I felt my vulnerability.
“If we find the truth and don’t like it, we can always lie about it,” he offered, and that sounded more like the Fieran I knew and despised.
“How would we even go about finding my father? The queen suggested some shifters I might visit to see how they react.”
“On your own?” He sounded as if he were fishing for me to request his help.