Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
In her quarters, Rhiannon reclined in a high-backed wicker armchair, wrapped in a long gray fox-fur robe and nothing else.
Her room was dressed in the earthen colors I’d come to associate with this place: light-green drapes hung over her four-poster bed, spread with a bark-colored animal skin; burnt-orange curtains over doorways to other rooms; a wall tapestry of forest and sky.
Her bare feet were hardly visible through the sumptuous brown fur of the bearskin covering the floor.
Purple-blossomed vines seemed to grow over every surface, draping over the bed and all four walls and the chair she sat in. This space had the expansiveness of what I imagined were royal chambers—it even smelled richer here, as though the air were regularly sprayed with a floral mist.
It would be lulling if I weren’t in the presence of a queen.
The biggest difference between her room and the one I’d slept in was the presence of the outdoors. Rhiannon had a wide balcony, and since we were so high up in the citadel’s spire I imagined she could see over the canopy to whatever lay beyond.
I wanted desperately to look out over that balcony. Wanted it like I’d always itched to climb my kingdom’s wall at night.
Rhiannon’s burgundy hair hung in a fat braid over one shoulder, her slender fingers toying with the end of it as she observed me. The swell of one of her large breasts, nearly visible beneath the robe, drew my eyes. When she noticed, a smile touched her lips.
She gestured. The young woman at her side, black-haired and slender, dropped to her knees before her.
The queen uncovered her own breast—pert, the nipple pink and small—and at her nod, the woman leaned in, set her fingers delicately on the arm of Rhiannon’s chair, and began to lave her tongue over Rhiannon’s nipple.
She licked, sucked, swirled, all with her eyes pressed tight shut.
Rhiannon sighed, eyes on me.
“The spiritstag spoke to you,” she said. “A human girl.” One of her eyebrows rose, and her gaze shifted to Dorian. Something unspoken passed between them.
Since we’d entered, he had been near silent, practically monosyllabic, his eyes unfocused, shoulders tense, and I didn’t know what that meant. Clearly he hadn’t wanted me here. But he hadn’t received the spiritstag’s decision—I had.
Perhaps Rhiannon would tell me what Dorian would not. “What are these trials?”
Surprise flitted across her gaze. “Dorian has not told you?”
“He told me we’re dead. He told me they’re tests of strength.”
Beside me, Dorian shifted but did not speak.
Rhiannon’s lips twitched. Her fingers smoothed up and down her braid as the young woman at her breast went on licking and sucking. “What do you know of Feyreign, child?”
I forced my eyes away from Rhiannon’s chest and onto her own. “It’s the realm we stand in. The one I was brought to after my kingdom was attacked, my people were killed, my mother’s house was destroyed with her in it.”
Her blue eyes gleamed with something like approval or amusement. Not sorrow, not regret. “So you face truth. And do you know which court you’ve been kidnapped to?”
Not a modicum of guilt. No shame.
Maybe she hid it well. More likely, she didn’t give a fuck. Perhaps she was even pleased.
I pushed down the rising anger. “Sylvanwild,” I said without feeling. I recognized her tone, the look in her eyes—she saw me as a child, a simple creature. What she perhaps could not have expected was that I’d been treated this way by humans, too, all my life.
Around absolute power, I felt most comfortable being underestimated; it was safer. At least until I knew where I stood.
“Well done.” Rhiannon sat forward, and her fingers touched the bramble diadem set upon her head. The licking abruptly stopped; Rhiannon’s breast glistened, the nipple peaked and dark pink. “Perhaps, then, you’ve deduced who I am.”
“The queen.”
She gave that impish half-smile I had begun to realize was common to her. “I lead of this court, yes. But each court has a monarch, she who has shown the traits most valued by her people.”
She. Her.
No mention of a king.
What traits did she speak of—and how could a woman possibly be the one in greatest possession of them? In my kingdom a man had always sat the throne, and a queen wasn’t even a feather-on-the-wind possibility.
“You’re surprised,” Rhiannon said. “I seem to you less capable, perhaps. Less powerful than the males you’ve seen around me.”
I said nothing. There seemed to be no good answer.
“Wise,” Rhiannon said of my silence. “Well, soon you’ll know all of what we value. Your training for the trials begins on the morrow.”
Beside me, Dorian exhaled hard through his nostrils.
My eyes snapped to hers. “Training?”
Her fingers tapped in rhythm on the wicker, pinky to index finger. “How else do you suppose you’ll survive to become my court champions?”
Her champions. That meant—
Queens and diadems and whose boot rests on whose neck.
I glanced at Dorian. His eyes remained unfocused, elsewhere. But I basically had the gist of it.
“We’re in competition,” I said, low and slow, “with whoever else enters the Sylvanwild trials.”
Rhiannon inclined her head, eyebrows lifting.
“Those who fail, die,” I said, low and slow. “Those who succeed become your champions in something greater.”
Her blue eyes flashed, and now I understood why Dorian would not look at me, why she carried such amusement on her lips.
Why we were fucked.
I was human—deadweight. I had no chance of passing these trials, whatever they might entail. Dorian had said it himself: he was three times as strong and twice as fast as me. No doubt that was true of every other fae.
This was some kind of cosmic joke. On me, on Dorian. In partnering us, the spiritstag had condemned us to death.
A purgatory after all.
“When do these trials begin?” I asked.
“When the spiritstag wills it. Perhaps tomorrow, perhaps a week from now.” Rhiannon’s eyebrows arched, and one hand rose to smooth her braid. Maybe she sensed how my stomach had fallen out of my body and onto her bearskin. “Do you desire to be my champion, girl?”
My eyes lifted to meet hers. Best speak truth, now that I was a dead woman. “What choice do I have?”
Her head tilted a degree. Yes, that was a flicker of surprise across her face. “Truth again. But do you desire it?” Her tone, her crisp blue eyes, demanded something from me—some affirmation.
I could only say what I felt. “I would rather this than be forced to run like a rabbit.”
“Is that what you promised her, Dorian?” Rhiannon nodded toward me. “To be hunted?”
Dorian stirred, finally seemed to return to the room. His face lifted even as her brow lowered. “I promised her only what we promise every human brought to Sylvanwild.”
Every human. I was not the first, or perhaps the only in that battle. But I had been the only one in that wagon, and I didn’t know why.
I couldn’t hold back. I had to know.
“Tell me why you attacked my kingdom.” I hated the plea in my voice. “Tell me why you took me.”
Rhiannon’s attention shifted off of Dorian and she no longer smoothed her braid.
Her hands lowered to both bramble arms of her chair and her spine straightened.
As she grew, I felt smaller. “Demands are the realm of monarchs and children. If you want me to consider you a woman, then you will speak to me as a queen.”
Fresh anger curled in my chest. This time, I spoke into it. “Tell me why you attacked my kingdom, Queen Rhiannon.”
Her lip curled. We gazed at each other, unblinking. “I don’t think I will.”
The anger ignited, blazing into my neck and cheeks. “Then why should I desire to be the champion of a court of murderers and thieves?”
She didn’t move at first. Her face remained passive. Then her legs uncrossed, and I saw it: a jagged, gleaming blade held by leather twine to her waist. It was as long as my thigh. Her fingers slid along the bramble arm toward her waist.
I wondered if she was twice as fast and three times as strong. Better to die at the hands of the queen and perhaps nick an artery than go down hunted or serving her. My hand moved toward my own knife.
“She desires it,” Dorian said, stepping forward. “She wants to be your champion, my queen.”
Rhiannon’s eyes narrowed, and her hand paused.
“The spiritstag has decided,” Dorian said, sounding out of breath. “The human accepted its decision back in the grove.”
Rhiannon’s gaze slid past Dorian and found mine. “Is that so?”
My attention shifted between Dorian, chest rising fast, and the predator of a queen still sitting almost-naked on her wood chair. He was trying to keep me alive—why? Why should he care?
The logic came immediately:
As his partner, my death would mean his death. It was all that made sense. He was saving his own hide.
Silence overtook the room. I didn’t answer.
Dorian turned toward me. His brow was drawn, eyes both intense and pleading. Say it, he mouthed. Tell her.
There was something in his expression—a thing I had not seen before. Need? Sincerity? Well, even a murderer and a thief could be sincere when it was their life in question.
Yet my gut twisted; a wrench of sympathy I didn’t expect or want to feel crept in. He was my captor. I hated him. This morning I had tried to stick a half-blunt knife in his neck. And yet…
What the spiritstag had shown me in the grove had felt unlike anything I’d ever known. Anything I’d ever thought. It had offered something to me—a thing I had longed for from the time I’d looked up at the sky and felt my own smallness.
And, it had shown me Dorian’s face.
Partners. It had wanted us together. I had felt its surety.
That surety had leaked away since, sifting out of me like sand, but it wasn’t fully gone. A grain of it still sat in my gut, and that was what wrenched it now.
“Yes,” I said, quietly. “I desire it.”