Chapter 30
Chapter
Thirty
Iland on the terrace with the moons arcing above me and Chase’s hoodie still wrapped around me—which is a little weird, since I’m wearing it over the silky gown the realm has decided is appropriate for its queen.
Apparently, the realm has a sense of humor.
I unzip the thing, breathing in Chase’s scent for courage. Since I was aiming for Adric when I crossed into the realm, I know he must be close, and sure enough, he’s at the far end of it, one hand resting against the long jaw of a familiar black dragon—Leth.
I smile, remembering the last time I rode her—those enormous wings, the silver eyes that are now taking me in like she remembers me, too.
Adric stands beside her, but as I watch, he turns slowly, as if he’s sensed that I’ve arrived. And the moment he sees me, I melt a bit under the glow of pure happiness that lights his face.
“Beloved,” he says, his eyes roaming over me. Then his brow furrows, and he cocks his head. “My love, what troubles you?”
“I need to talk to you. But not in the castle. Somewhere no one can overhear.”
As he goes still, Leth swings her head toward me, and I wonder if she can understand our words.
“How bad?”
“Um, hello? Bad enough we’re not talking about it here.”
He doesn’t ask another question. He motions to Leth, and a moment later, he’s swinging up onto her back, then reaching down to pull me up behind him.
Five minutes later, we’re above the castle, and Chase’s voice in my head is an unpleasant soundtrack to this incredible sensation.
Does he care about the rest of it, or only you?
For a moment, I wonder if I even care myself. Because it’s hard to hold onto anything dark when the whole world drops away beneath a dragon’s wings.
I gasp as Leth climbs, and the castle shrinks to the size of a toy, and the air goes cold and clean.
Adric’s body is solid between my arms, the leather of his coat warm where I’m pressed against his back, and for a few seconds, I forget the soldiers and the Threnir and the questions.
In this moment, there’s just this—him, and the height, and how huge and strange and beautiful his realm is from up here.
Then I remember why I’m here, and I hold on tighter, as if that can make this last longer so that I never actually have to do the hard thing.
It can’t, of course, and soon enough we land on a high outcropping, far enough from the castle that the lights are a smudge on the horizon. Adric helps me down, and Leth settles onto the ground a few yards away, her body curled, her head tucked under her wing.
Some insect chirps, but other than that, all is silence.
“Tell me,” Adric says.
“Whistler’s doing well. Solenne really helped him.”
“I’m so glad to hear that, Beloved.”
“Well, there’s more,” I say grimly. “You’re not going to like it.”
His eyes narrow, but he says nothing, just waits for me to continue. I clear my throat and wish there were an easier way to do this. Because as much as I enjoy ratting Kali out, I also know it’s going to hurt him. He trusts her, after all. Stupid, maybe. But he does.
“It was Kali,” I blurt, because otherwise I’d sit here forever trying to figure out how to say it.
“What are you talking about?”
“Kali had Whistler. She kept him in a cage. And do you know where that cage was?” I ask, then answer before he has the chance. “Her secret camp. Where she’s training her own little army. An army that Whistler saw firsthand.”
I watch his throat move as he swallows, then his chin rises ever so slightly as he slowly shakes his head.
“He says she has hundreds of soldiers,” I go on. “Maybe more. And her camp is somewhere in the desolate stretch south of the range. The site’s cloaked. And she has dragons, too. He thinks she’s been training them in secret for a long time.”
A dangerous kind of stillness settles into his body.
“South of the range,” he says, in a voice that could be discussing a dessert pastry.
“Whistler’s sure. But we’re not certain whether he actually escaped, or if she let him go to see whether he’d reach Chase. Or you.”
“Baiting an attack,” he says. “Which would mean she has left men loyal to her among the castle forces.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” I admit. “But it makes sense.” I shrug, then grimace. “It’s possible Whistler really did escape.”
“That changes nothing. She is still conspiring against me. And that, I cannot abide.”
He sighs and looks past me into the dark, and I can almost see it—his mind moving back through a thousand years of faces and rooms, turning over which of the people in his court were never what he thought.
“It explains the rebellion,” he says, mostly to himself.
“What rebellion?”
“The men I executed in the courtyard. Drakkar and the rest.” He meets my eyes. “I told myself they were a clean handful. Opportunists who had miscalculated. I cut them down because the threat was small and I wanted it gone before it grew.”
“But it had already grown.”
He nods. “Now I think they were one of her cells. Or a sacrifice—a piece she could spend, to see what I would do if I caught a thread.” He exhales slowly.
“I did exactly what she wanted. I cut the thread and threw the cloth away, and while I admired my own swift hand, she finished the larger work somewhere I wasn’t looking.
” He closes his eyes. “My love,” he murmurs. “How did I miss this?”
I want to put my arms around him and tell him it isn’t his fault. That she played him, because she knew he would see who he wanted to see. Not who was really standing in front of him.
I get that. I do.
And that’s the problem, isn’t it? Because I wonder if that’s what Adric is to me. A man I want to be good and kind and just, who might be darker than I let myself believe.
I start to shove the thought away—I know better, after all, but Chase’s question is still sitting in my chest like a stone, and I can’t put it down—Does Adric care about the Real?
Does it matter to him at all that my world is under attack?
And will he stand back and watch it fall, knowing it would mean the death of people I love and the place I still call home?
I sigh. Maybe now’s the time to find out.
I sit in the sand and draw a lazy pattern with one finger. “It gets worse,” I tell him.
“Go on.”
“The cameras at the Widow Maker caught six crossings in two nights. Little things, at first, but tonight there was a Threnir.”
Everything about him goes quiet. “Are you sure?”
I nod. “Chase said it’s from Retribution.”
“It is. Was there just the one?”
“I think so. Why?”
“Because Threnir hunt in packs.” His voice goes quiet. “And a pack can be bought. If one is loose in the Real, Beloved, it did not wander there alone, and it did not wander there for free.”
“Kali,” I say.
“Considering everything you have told me tonight, she is my first best guess.”
I shudder, then make myself look at him. “Then I have to ask you something. And I need the real answer, not the king’s one.”
“Of course, Beloved.”
“The army. Yours, not hers. What’s it for?”
“For the Real,” he says. “It has always been for the Real.”
“How?” My voice comes out sharper than I mean it to. “Because from where I’m sitting, you’ve got an army and a plan to bring the barriers down, and those two things together don’t exactly add up to protect the freshmen.”
“The barriers are failing fast now. My brother knows this,” he says without flinching.
“When they fall, the things that have been pressing against them for an age will come through all at once. My army is the wall I intend to put between your people and that flood. A guard. Nothing more, and nothing less.”
“You make it sound noble.” I hear how cold I’ve gone.
“But Chase told me the truth a long time ago. You’re the one forcing the cracks.
The barriers aren’t just wearing out on their own—you’ve been pushing them down faster.
So don’t stand there like some rescuer. You’re the reason this is happening at all. ”
I expect him to deny it.
“Yes,” he says, surprising me. “I have hastened it. I have forced cracks, and I will not pretend otherwise to make you think better of me. I believe the barriers must come down, Cora. I have believed it for longer than your world has had a name.” He holds my eyes.
“But abandoning your world to what comes after the barriers are down is not the same act. I have never intended either.”
“So what are you saying?”
“Simply that I will not use my resources to shore up the barriers. It is time for them to fall. All the realms can co-exist. Even the Real, so long as my army exists to protect it.”
“That’s insane.” My voice is practically a squeak.
We’re way too vulnerable. The people in the Real have no way to fight the creatures from your realm or Retribution or even the Others.
Hell, even the Unseen would dominate the Real in a heartbeat.
We’re not prepared, and your army couldn’t even protect one percent of the population. ”
“There will be casualties, yes.”
His words land like a slap, and I blink back tears. “You could at least pretend that’s hard to say.”
“It is hard to say. But I will not lie to make it easier to hear.”
“You’re not even trying to understand, dammit. You’ve never lived there. It’s not your place, your home. You don’t care because it’s not your world. But it is mine. Dammit, Adric. It’s my home.”
He crouches in the sand in front of me. “Do you truly think I don’t understand that?
Do you truly think I believe that my realm will come through unscathed?
It won’t. But war is the price every world pays to become part of a larger one.
Yours is the youngest at the table, and the least armored.
I know that, of course. But I have always meant to put my soldiers between your people and the things that would hunt them, and to hold that line until the Real learns to stand on its own.
Not because I am soft. Because a world burned to the bone is no world at all, and I have no use for a unification that leaves yours a graveyard. ”
“You son of a bitch.” My voice shakes. “You’re sitting here telling me you’ve done the math. That the death of some huge chunk of the people in the Real is an acceptable loss to you.”
“I am telling you that I have done everything in my power to keep that number as low as a king can keep it. That is not the same as not caring what it is.”
“It’s never been real to you. Not the way it’s real to me.”
Something moves across his face—grief, maybe?
“It is true that I do not love your world the way you love it. I cannot. I have watched too many civilizations rise and fall to grieve each one as if it were the first.” He reaches out and takes my hands.
I yank them back, and he sighs. “But I have never—not once—built toward ending yours. That is the line, Beloved. And it is the one thing about my reign I have ever been certain of.”
And here’s the awful part—I believe him. I even understand him, at least a little. Of course, a creature who has watched civilizations collapse into dust would look at the Real differently than I do. I just have to figure out how to get through his damn thick skull.
And what to do about his right-hand gal.
With a sigh, I hug my knees to my chest. “What’s Kali doing with an army?”
“Treason, apparently.” He meets my eyes. “My army is a guard. A wall between your people and what’s coming. But hers is a bomb, and I can only assume that when the barriers fall, she means it to drop it on your world—to conquer it, not shelter it.”
I swallow, letting the horror of it all sink in. “So the difference between you and her,” I say slowly, “is that you only want some of us dead.”
It’s cruel, and I mean it to be, and I watch it land.
“Want? No. But if that is how you need to hold it tonight, then yes.” He doesn’t look away.
“But do not pretend the two are the same, Beloved. I have spent an age trying to make the price as small as I can. She has spent it trying to make the price everything you are. You can hate us both. But do not confuse us.”
And the awful thing is, he’s right. I do hate it. And it isn’t the same. And I don’t have anywhere to put either of those facts, so I just sit there holding them with no clue where to go next.
“I made a mistake of trust,” he says, gentler now. “Not a mistake of plan. I should have seen her. That is what I owe my brother, and Whistler, and the men I cut down in the courtyard, who may have been her pawns or her sacrifices or both. I will carry it.”
His grip tightens. “But I am not going to pretend I have changed my mind about the barriers. I have not. I have, however, greatly changed my mind about my lieutenant. And I find that addressing her treachery is something I am very eager to tackle.”
“Tonight?”
“No. If I move tonight, she’ll know I’ve seen her true face. I’ll wait and let her think she still has time.”
“What do I tell Chase?”
“Everything I have told you. Every word. And tell him that the soldiers who answer to me—and not to her—will stand for the Real when the time comes, and that when there is work that needs us both, he need only send for me.”
“Okay.”
“And Beloved.” His thumb moves once over the back of my hand.
“Would that you could stay with me, but I fear it is not safe.” A small smile touches his lips.
“More, I know you would refuse. So promise me this—in the days coming, trust nothing that doesn’t reach you from Chase or me directly.
Not my court. Not anyone who claims to carry word from me, however familiar they seem. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
Leth shifts, restless. The sky has begun to thin at one edge—the gray that passes for dawn in this realm.
“Go now,” he says. “There is no time.”
Then he cups my face in both hands and presses his forehead to mine before releasing me to take that long step forward back to the Realm of the Real.