Chapter 25 #2
“It means faithful.” She smiled as if I were invited into the joke. “It has not been true for anyone yet. He always betrays the people who love him. But surely it will be different for you.”
There was a long pause between us. Long enough and quiet enough for me to realize that in the quiet of the room, I could hear the buzz of my blood through my ears, the slightly erratic flutter of my breath. I’d gone still as prey.
“Do you know why it will be different?” she prompted me gently, in a tone generally rendered to the very old or the very small.
Answering her felt like a trap, like opening the door to betraying Fear. I waited her out, hoping I did not look as much like prey as I felt when watched by those ancient golden eyes.
She was terribly patient. I thought she wouldn’t speak at all until I caved.
But finally, she said, “Tell me the name of your dragon, Cara.”
“I don’t know it.” I kept my voice level.
Truths, thin ones, but it felt dangerous to give her anything at all.
“There is a reason no shifter marries before they are claimed by a dragon. Do you know what it means for two dragons to be mated?” Her face seemed sorrowful for my ignorance, though I knew better than to trust that soft gaze and sympathetic frown. “What it means for their shifters?”
“No.”
“No. And he did not tell you.” Her expression was that of a woman about to give a gift she knows will not be received as one. “You will never love another, Cara.”
I stared at her, perplexed. The words did not quite resolve into anything that made sense, though they were all familiar enough. I would never love another?
The performed sorrow dipped, apparently exhausted by my stupidity. But she managed to stay the course. “Fear married you, prior to your claiming, so whatever dragon claimed you would be bound to him and to Shadowbane through him.”
The sense of being trapped closed around my chest again like a vise. My breath was shallow.
Lightbringer had known that either she would come to me, or another dragon would be with her mate, or I would die.
Fear’s plan forced Lightbringer into the world. Against her will. And so she was trapped, and she would not speak.
Fear had been frustrated by Lightbringer’s stubborn refusal, but I felt a sudden well of loss opening in my soul.
“The mate bond runs through you as well. Dragon to dragon, husband to wife.”
“I am aware.” My voice came out dry and steady.
“Are you?” Her brows arched. “Are you aware you will never be able to experience a love that you chose of your own volition?”
Those words slowly wormed their way through my fear and slowly began to knit together in my racing mind.
Shadowbane and Lightbringer were mated—forever.
Across centuries. Lightbringer had claimed me, either to save my life or to keep someone else from being bonded to her mate.
Her claiming might not have been a mercy at all.
It might have been ancient jealousy.
For the first time, it occurred to me that the dragon—the voice in my head, the one Fear saw as an ever-faithful friend—might despise me. Might despise me always.
And though Fear and I did not have centuries…
Our bond was just as unbreakable.
If the queen was not lying.
Her voice was even, unhurried. “There will be only Fieran. For the rest of your life. As long as he lives.”
She might be lying.
If so, she needed something from me. Something soon. Something she wagered she could trick me into giving. I would give her nothing.
But I was not entirely sure she was lying.
Marry me. Fear had grinned, with my knife to his throat.
Marry me. He had asked, in the Night Market, hand-in-hand.
Marry me, I had begged him. To protect Tay. And only then—when he had begun perhaps to truly care for me—had he hesitated. It takes so little in the midst of all this Fae trickery to find yourself bound.
I had chosen him.
I had been angry at myself for caring about him, had fought it, had argued with my own instincts, and eventually had accepted the whole of what he was: the charming deceits, the endless calculation, the ruthlessness and the caring intermingled.
I’d chosen him anyway. He was a deceitful trickster rogue, but he was mine.
If the queen was telling the truth, I had been tricked, and I was being tricked, and I would be tricked again in the future. I could not trust my foolish heart to him.
“He let you believe you could leave him, didn’t he?
” the queen said. She had not raised her voice.
She was watching me with the keen judgment of a woman who knew how to manipulate even better than he did, and it reminded me not to trust a word she said.
“You are that rare mortal who values your freedom.”
“I believe we all do.” I was not special. The idea that I was not special underlay my entire life philosophy.
“I do not believe so. The mortals rally at the gates to be raised to Fae and bound to my service,” she told me.
She held a hand to cup her ear delicately; whether she could truly hear their distant cheers or not, a satisfied smile ghosted over her perfect lips.
“But you are different. You do not wish to be raised; you do not want to sit on my throne as a Fae queen.”
“I’m mortal.”
“You cannot be forever now, can you?” she said gently. “At any rate, you believed that you could leave Fear, if you chose. He has known all along that this was not true. He lied to force you into a bond you can never escape.”
Fear had known, the entire time, that the choice I was so carefully making was a door with no room beyond it. I pressed my lips together. My fingernails were biting into my palm, and I forced myself to release them.
“What do you want?”
“I want you to go home.” She sat back with the ease of someone who has arrived at the part of the conversation she has been building toward. “Back to Stonehaven. Take your family and leave my son to his little wicked plots and plans.”
For a long time, that had been all that I wanted. Tay well, and both of us going home to Stonehaven.
She watched my face. “If you remain—if you continue to disrupt what I have spent decades building—you will not be the only one to eventually leave behind mortal fragility. Your brother is as eager as any at my gates to join my Fae court.”
My legs softened beneath me. I stared at her, the words not quite making sense.
“I cannot harm your brother,” she said before I could speak. “I know that. But I can gift him. And you cannot stop me from giving gifts.” She tilted her head. “How can you deny him what he would choose for himself?”
Her eyes were ancient and golden and entirely without mercy.
“You chose him thinking you knew who he was and who you were to him.” Something moved in her expression, not sympathy, but its cold cousin. “And now you find the choosing was never yours. That must be a particular kind of pain.”
I did not answer. The world had gone dark around the edges, and all I saw was her beautiful face, and all I felt was the desire to plunge a dagger into her side. If only that would matter.
“Go home, Cara. Or stay, and lose your family.” She rose to her feet. “Unless I see clear evidence you are packing your bags for Stonehaven, you will soon find yourself alone in the world. Except for Fear.”
We both knew what she meant: packing my bags, severing the bond, murdering my husband. But she could not ask me to do such a thing.
She rose to her feet and opened a small chest on her desk.
Inside glittered a knife on a bed of silk. My heart stopped. The unmaking knife?
But that made no sense, and then I saw that it was different: a new, bejeweled dagger.
Intended to be plunged into my husband’s side.
“Tonight you will fight the Last Hunt in pairs and destroy the greatest monsters,” she said. “Tonight, to celebrate, I will raise three mortals, not just one.”
She moved toward the door, inhumanly graceful as always, as she left it behind. She had not given me the knife. The choice whether to steal it was mine. That must mean she was not violating the magic.
Then she stopped and looked back. “He hurt you, didn’t he? Poor little mortal girl. You were never going to outwit him.”
She left me standing alone, and I did not answer.
I’d woken choking on despair all those nights, feeling as if I were burning alive. I’d found solace in Fear’s arms, slept well with my head against his chest, and felt—though I had not wished to admit it to myself—as if he were my savior.
The thought tasted like bile on my tongue. Perhaps I had simply slept in his arms because the coin was in my room and I was in his bed. If he had decided that was protection, in its own way, what else might he do to me?
I needed to talk to Fear, or…no. Fear would lie to me if it helped his cause. I needed someone else. Ander maybe, or Anayla. Either of them would know about the bond between dragons.
When the door opened, I expected the Nightwalkers.
“Cara!” Lidi cried.
My little sister flew into my arms.