The Wicked Queen (A Feud So Dark and Lovely #3)

Chapter 1

Iwas a bomb packed with dynamite and my fuse grew shorter each day. How long until I exploded and killed everyone around me? How long until Cleodora, queen of the Greenheart Court, made me hurt my husband, my home city, my people?

Not fucking long, I reckoned, swallowing a lump as I watched Ryvan, my ever-smirking best friend, lay a periwinkle blue flower on the stone column carved with Zaugustus’s name.

Not that Ryvan was smirking now; he looked like a stranger, grief and pain carved into his tanned face, his black hair less rakishly coiffed than neglected mess.

Mine wasn’t much better. I’d dragged my red hair into an untidy braid and ignored the dark circles around my eyes.

Being the puppet of a psychotic queen plays havoc on your appearance.

So does losing a man who started to feel like a father.

I rubbed my eyes as they stung, leaning into Kier, who stood beside me, his arm practically glued to my back.

It had been three weeks since I returned to Lazankh, since the Greenheart queen compelled the human army to attack our home and then retreated without warning.

Since she infected me with sly, quiet magic to control me.

Exactly like she controlled the humans who killed Zaugustus.

I was no better than them now. I’d do anything she ordered.

Kier tucked me closer as Jakoda, the reluctant new leader of the Troupe of Disaster, began an unlikely eulogy.

“Hey, Zaugustus, remember when we just barely escaped Cyana after you called the king a pompous coward on stage, and I said—and I quote—one of these days that reckless rebellious streak will get you killed. Well,” she said, her voice breaking, “I told you so.”

I snorted, not that much amusement touched the empty void in my chest. I knew Kier could feel it through the mate bond because he squeezed me tighter to his side.

Guilt and hatred coiled through my gut the way they always did, the former at myself for pretending everything was fine and not telling him about the voice that slithered through my mind, dropping commands; the latter at the villainous bitch who commanded me not to tell him.

She’d tested her commands three times over the last few weeks, her voice like the insidious creep of madflower.

Her first command was to find out where the westernmost military base was.

The second to ferret information out about the defences on the castle in the capital, where the king and queen—Kier’s parents—lived.

The third made me want to kill her. I fought the compulsion so hard I tasted blood.

Tell me how you control the Haar. I’ve seen it done, and I know you know how to wield it. Tell me.

Go fuck yourself.

Tell me, or I’ll make myself present the next time that husband of yours fucks you. He’s a thorn in my side, but he does have such broad shoulders, and that jawline, that growling voice…

So I told her. I didn’t control the Haar, but he listened to me. He’d let me pass through the fog if I asked, because we had a connection, a bond.

I slumped on the bathroom floor for an hour as vomit burned my throat and my stomach cramped.

What would she ask next?

I pressed closer to Kier, needing his touch and comfort even if I was terrified she’d use me to hurt him. What if she commanded me to kill him, and I couldn’t resist?

He wrapped both arms around me, his scent filling my senses with pine and sandalwood, and maybe it was because he could feel my grief through the bond, but he never once asked why I needed so much reassurance lately, so much physical touch.

Maybe he couldn’t feel the way my soul ripped itself apart.

I wanted him to look at me, to see me. It was the only way I’d ever be free of Cleodora’s command. Not that I could tell anyone what she’d done to me, but Kier knew me. He’d know something was wrong if he looked beyond my grief, right?

I choked back the lump in my throat and scrubbed the tears from my face as Jakoda wrapped up her speech, recounting a time Zaugustus and she were arrested in their youth. They’d been friends for thirty years, and I hadn’t even known.

“I need a fucking drink,” I muttered.

“Me, too,” Aerona, the youngest of our troupe and a smaller, younger, blue version of me, readily agreed.

“Not a chance,” Hames, our regular grump and overprotective warrior, immediately shot down. “You can drink when you’re older.”

Aerona bared sharp goblin teeth and gave him the middle finger.

“That’s really not ‘funeral appropriate’,” Cherish sighed, standing a few paces away from Hames with her arms crossed over her chest, her long teal dress complimenting the flawless lapis of her skin and her long black hair.

When I first met her, I thought she was stunning and stuck-up, with a chip on her shoulder and a rod shoved up her ass.

Now I just thought she was beautiful and sad.

And deadly. We’d trained with magic this morning and I had several bruises to prove it.

“Is this ‘funeral appropriate’?” Aerona asked her, holding up both middle fingers now.

“I can practically see Zaugustus’s moustache twitching beyond the grave,” Ryvan said with a flat attempt at humour. “Like a disapproving walrus. A kind, accepting, loyal, irreplaceable walrus.”

When Ryvan’s voice hitched, I pulled away from Kier’s side and threw myself at my friend, squeezing him into a bruising hug.

“Ugh,” he groaned, his voice thick with unshed tears. “Bony arms.”

“Hey, you want the hug, you deal with my bony arms.”

He dropped his head onto my shoulder with a ragged breath. “It feels like being stabbed by two very blunt but insistent knives.”

I made sure to dig one of those very blunt but insistent knives into him, and he snarled and tore away, lifting his hand threateningly.

His pointer finger lit up turquoise blue.

He’d avoided all attempts to talk about his mixed Bluescale-Greenheart heritage, but he wasn’t hiding it like before.

Not around us, at least. I’d make sure to nag him into opening up about it, just as soon as I got rid of Cleodora’s compulsion.

“You should probably let go,” Ryvan said with a last squeeze to my middle, his finger no longer glowing. “Your mate’s planning my grisly death.”

“It wouldn’t be grisly,” Kier disagreed from much closer than I expected. “I wouldn’t do that to Zaba’s friend. I’d make it quick.”

“Or you could keep me alive…” Ryvan suggested, batting his eyelashes at my husband.

“Sure,” Kier agreed too easily, his voice a delicious rumble of jealousy and possessiveness that brushed my soul like a kiss. “If you let go of her instantly.”

Ryvan dropped his arms and pushed me back. “Begone, wench.”

I whipped out the dagger I won when I was stabbed by a rebel back in Greenscale, and Ryvan backed up a solid three steps. “Begone, best friend whom I love very much.”

“Hmph.”

I put the knife away, smiling for a moment until everything crashed down on me again.

Zaugustus was dead.

Our enemies had two armies under their control.

The Haar had wreathed most of the court in fog, absconding most of our people to a place he’d refused to tell us. Even Kier didn’t know.

Cleodora could sink her claws into me at any moment, and I’d have no choice but to do what she ordered.

My smile fell. I tucked myself back into Kier’s arms as Hames and Cherish approached the stone monolith that marked Zaugustus’s life and death.

We didn’t have his body because it perished in the fire at the theatre, but this stone showed he was important, loved, and missed.

The lump in my throat swelled as I recalled his gruff affection and the easy way he’d absorbed me into their family.

This compulsion changed nothing; I’d find a way to round up every human rebel in goblin lands and either kick them back where they came from, with the compulsion ripped from them, or I’d end them. They killed my friend; they deserved it.

But doesn’t that mean you deserve it, too?

I ignored the voice of my conscience, ignored the cramp in my stomach.

“Zaba?” Kier murmured, turning me to face him, gentle fingers brushing messy red strands of hair from my face. “What do you need?”

He stopped asking me if I was okay weeks ago, because I very clearly wasn’t.

I opened my mouth to tell him I wanted to go home, back to Lazankh’s castle where I felt most safe, but movement in the trees around the small hilltop cemetery caught my eye. I froze, confusion overpowering my grief for a moment.

Celandrine? My old superior, the army recruiter who trained me to be a figurehead for the Lucrecian army in Seagrave, before I even met Kier.

I reached up, moulding my hand to the back of Kier’s neck to bring him down for a brief kiss. “I just need a moment alone, to clear my head. I’ll be right back.”

Sapphire eyes flashed. He didn’t like me being away from him, after he exiled me and then spent three months trying—and failing—to find me. And pining. And obsessing. And falling deeper in love with me. Weird, I had absolutely no idea how that felt. At all.

“Ten minutes,” he murmured, pressing another kiss to my lips.

“Fifteen,” I haggled.

“Thirteen, and no longer,” he said firmly, tucking stray hairs back into my braid.

“Thirteen,” I agreed, and set off into the trees where Celandrine disappeared.

What the hell was she doing in Lazankh?