Selediel #3
This had all of us laughing, some of us more freely than others, but we laughed. Even Gayle.
“Well, I’m in to suss out a spy,” Gayle said. “It’ll take my mind off things.”
“Mac is such a total ass,” Aleece mumbled to her plate before shoving more egged toast smothered in syrup in her mouth.
“Aleksei’s determined to get him to back off,” Laura shared.
“I’ve ordered a spell,” Gayle announced.
And again, that got all our attention.
“You’ve what?” Laura asked.
“It cost a fortune,” Gayle said. “But…this has to stop. The way I feel. I can’t concentrate on work.
And now, I’m away again. I might lose my job.
I mean, they’re being cool. It doesn’t happen often that an employee is fated to the prince and future king of an entire realm.
And two of my bosses are already mated, so they get it.
But there’s only so many times I can disappear to another realm. ”
“So you’ve…ordered a spell?” Aleece forced out.
As she would.
There were ritualistic spells that witches conjured, but they’d been doing those for centuries, so ordering those up was commonplace, and it was very rare any of them went awry.
There were other spells that were downright illegal.
For instance, love and revenge spells. But for the right price, and if you were able to access the wrong witch, you could still get them.
However, if it was found you did something like that, the penalties were pretty severe—for the witch and the customer.
Then there were other spells that could be iffy, if the witch wasn’t well-trained and experienced.
Like, if you wished to lose weight, a witch could spell you to lose interest in food.
Or if you had a test to study for, a witch could give you a spell so you’d stay awake and alert.
There were also environmental spells, like you lived in a noisy area of the city and wanted to block out the noise so you could sleep.
Or, apparently, if you wanted to dampen the link you had to your fated mate.
As such, it wasn’t verboten to go to a witch, and if they spellcast for a living, they had to be accredited, and the accreditation process, to my understanding, was thorough.
It was still widely considered reckless, unless the spell was lowkey.
“I’m sorry,” Gayle said, perhaps misreading Aleece’s reaction. “That was insensitive, since you’ve been living under one unknowingly for forever.”
Oh yes.
Then there was that.
It was illegal to cast a spell on someone without their permission.
Unless you were prince and future king of a whole realm, it seemed.
“It’s not insensitive,” Aleece replied. “I understand why you’d do it. But unless the witch is accredited, spells can be risky.”
“That’s why it was so expensive,” Gayle explained. “Because I went to the best of the best. It took a long time for it to ferment. But that’s where I was yesterday when Cormac tried to grab me again. I was picking it up.”
“And what does it do?” I asked, but I had a feeling I knew.
“What Bainon’s is doing to Aleece,” Gayle told me what I knew. “It eradicates the connection I feel with my mate.”
“Well, although you taking a spell doesn’t fill me with glee,” Laura started, “it’d serve that male right for him to have a mate on his hands who doesn’t give a fuck if he’s around or on the Trivesta Space Station.”
“I might take that potion when Bainon unbinds me just to make that same point,” Aleece grumbled.
I thought this was an excellent idea.
However…
“How long does it last?” I asked Gayle.
“She said a month,” she answered. “If Cormac doesn’t back off by then, I’ll have to take it again.”
“How much did it cost?” Laura inquired.
“Five thousand marks.”
We all gasped.
“Yeah, so much for my vacation fund,” Gayle said.
“It, and a hefty bit of my savings will be wiped out if I have to take a second dose. Not that work will let me take a vacation since I keep disappearing. I am really not looking forward to calling in tomorrow and saying, ‘Guess what! I’m in Abyssinia for the foreseeable future. So warm up the holo decks!’”
“Honestly,” Laura snapped. “If he doesn’t promise to back off during dinner tonight, I’m taking you to Trivesta myself.”
“And how will that help me keep my job?” Gayle asked.
But she didn’t wait for an answer. “I love you. That’s so sweet.
All of you are being so sweet. But”—she twirled her fork in the air to indicate the queen’s breakfast room—“he’s made it clear I won’t be moved permanently into his fabulous fortress to be princess of the manor, and as such wouldn’t need a job.
I have a mortgage to pay. And not only do I like the job I have, if I lost it, job hunting sucks. ”
It really did.
“One way or another, we’ll sort this tonight,” I vowed, only to have Zyra cast an odd glance at me when I did.
“Okay, so today…interact with staff on duty and get a feel for them,” Aleece said.
“The rest of the time, lick our wounds and spend loads of it complaining how males can be high-handed, arrogant assholes. And dress straight past the nines all the way to the elevens for dinner tonight so they can eat their hearts out at what they’re missing.
Or, the two who are missing something will eat their hearts out. The other three will just get laid.”
Zyra laughed softly at that.
“And we need to conference comm Mon, so she’ll know where we are and what’s happening,” Gayle added.
“This sounds like a plan,” Laura agreed.
It sure did.
And I knew exactly what I was going to wear to dinner.
Tanyn left me hot and bothered with a smirk.
We’d see about that.
His kind of payback was mega.
Mine was going to be a bitch.
(And then…mega.)
We were leaving the breakfast room to reconvene in Aleece’s chamber seeing as the palace had sent a case of her things, and she wanted to make sure she had something stunning to wear to dinner, because if she didn’t have it, we had to get on-pane shopping so she could order something with urgent delivery.
Though Gayle didn’t have anything, she already shared she knew exactly what she wanted and had ordered it on her Palm while sitting at the breakfast table for same-day delivery from an exclusive department store in Abyssinia.
But it was on our way out when Zyra caught me.
“Can we talk a second?” she murmured.
I was glad she asked, because I was feeling weird about how she’d been kind of weird at breakfast.
“Be right there,” I called to the other gals.
We got “okays” and nods before they disappeared in Aleece’s room.
Zyra took me to her and Manny’s room.
Their bedchamber was decorated in glimmer and deep purples—heavy on the glimmer. It was a favorite of mine because the juxtaposition was divine.
She went to her nightstand, nabbed her tablet and came back to me.
“I need to show you something,” she said.
“Okay,” I replied, not liking her affect.
She’d stopped hiding it and seemed outright tweaked.
“Remember when I was taking pictures of the furniture and art that were in the unused rooms at the citadel?” she asked.
I couldn’t forget. Even though it seemed like ages ago, it wasn’t that long at all.
“Yes.”
She pulled up something on her tablet I couldn’t see and looked at me.
“And remember you asked me to cease sending you pics of the paintings?”
I nodded.
“Well…” She huffed out a breath. “This is one of the pics I didn’t send. Though, when I didn’t, I hadn’t yet met your friends.”
She turned her tablet around.
At first, I needed to narrow my eyes to focus on what I was seeing. There was a lot of damage. Some peeling.
Then my stomach dropped when it came clear.
“That’s Selediel,” she whispered.
“Who’s Selediel?” I forced out, not even close to recovered from what was accosting my eyes.
“The beautiful fae who was sequestered at Sigil. And who the king starved to death there.”
A brisk chill stole acutely over every inch of my skin.
I forced my eyes to hers.
I was about to say something, but she got there before me.
“And I can’t know for sure, but I would assume Prince Cormac has seen a portrait of her. Selediel is an ugly piece of history for all the realms, but mostly Land’s End, which she had to escape, and Sky’s Edge, which proved the death of her. Her story was buried. But it wasn’t erased.”
“What do you think this means?” I whispered.
“I don’t know, luv. But it has to mean something.”
It did.
It had to mean something.
Because Selediel, the celebrated beauty who was chased from Land’s End to Sky’s Edge centuries ago, looked exactly like my fae.
My gal.
My bestie.
The fated mate of the future king of Land’s End.
Gayliliel.