Chapter Twelve
Twelve
Atree branch raking against my back as I fall jolts me out of my haze of shock.
I quickly turn myself into a ball, bringing my knees up and shielding my face with my forearms. I want to make myself as small as possible.
I know I am going to hit all manner of branches and tree limbs on the way down, but the smaller I am, the fewer I’ll hit.
My strategy works, for the most part. At least until I hit one unlucky limb with my side.
All the wind is knocked from me. I wheeze and roll off the branch, narrowly missing another one on my way down.
I allow myself to hit one final branch. Prepared this time, I’m able to brace myself and catch it with both hands.
My fingernails rip across the bark, torn up in an instant. But it slows my descent.
Though it doesn’t stop me from hitting the ground awkwardly. Luckily, the thick blanket of moss cushions my fall. I’m wheezing and aching all over. My body is covered in bruises and scratches. This is why Joyce forbade me to climb anything after the roof. Nothing ever goes right when I’m high up.
A heavy thud next to me steals my attention. I get up and rush over to where Davien has landed. He’s so very still. It isn’t until I’m on my knees at his side that I can see his chest moving.
“Thank the gods,” I whisper. I may not know fully where I stand with this man, and he might have betrayed my trust in some murky ways. But I know that he is the best chance I have of surviving this world and getting home.
The man who launched the spear descends gracefully through the canopy. He moves from branch to branch on his tiptoes, nothing more than a whisper of smoke between. With a pop, he materializes on the ground not far from me.
“You’re alive.” He tsks. “How utterly disappointing. I expected this to be far simpler. To think I couldn’t kill a fae with stunted magic and a human. I’m losing my touch.”
“Stay away,” I manage to say. “Don’t come any closer.”
“Or what?” He adjusts the shadowy scarf that swoops across his shoulders and upper chest. I was right—it is just like the one worn by the woman from the woods who attacked me weeks ago. “I don’t know why he dragged you here, human, but let me assure you that you are far out of your depth.”
Like I don’t know that. He continues approaching. I hold up a hand and repeat, “Don’t come any closer.”
“I’m waiting to see how you’ll stop me.” He shakes his head with a sinister smile.
I turn back to Davien. He’s my best hope. But the moss around the shoulder the spear tore through is already stained a deep red. I shake his good shoulder lightly and plead, “Get up.”
“He’s not going to get up. He’s the last loose end that should have been tied years ago,” the man snarls. His white hair shines in the moonlight as he holds his spear aloft. He takes a step forward and adjusts his weight to throw.
“No, you don’t—” Shaye shouts from a distance. I can see her and the others trying to reach us. But they won’t be fast enough.
I have to stall. I have to do something. “I said don’t come any closer!” I scream a final time. My fear and rage grow within me, a swell that can’t be contained. Emotions and wants burn so hot they’ve become something tangible.
The power bursts forth from my palm, turning into a wall of light. It rushes toward our attacker with deadly force. In an instant, he’s enveloped. Silence fills the air as the man is changed into a reverse silhouette—a solid figure in white that’s too blinding to look at. Then he explodes.
The force of the magic knocks me onto my back at Davien’s side. The shock wave rushes through the woods, violently shaking limbs from the trees and shearing the moss from the soil and bedrock underneath. My ears are ringing as the forest goes suddenly dark and eerily silent following the blast.
I sit up, realizing the pains in my body are gone as surely as our attacker is. I blink at the epicenter of the blast, where he was standing just a moment ago. There’s nothing but a singed bit of hard rock. I stare at my hand.
I…I did that? How? A thousand questions swirl in my mind, immediately coming to a stop the second I hear a soft groan next to me.
“Davien?”
His eyes crack open. “What just happened?” he murmurs.
“I think I killed a man.” I return to staring at my hand, waiting for the realization that I just ended a life to sink in.
“He was a shit stain on this earth. Good riddance.” Davien sits up, rolls his injured shoulder. He pauses and looks at the wound. He pokes his finger through the torn and bloody hole of his shirt, runs it along unbroken skin, and sighs. “It seems you healed me too.”
“You…don’t seem happy about that.”
“I’d be happier if I were the one to heal and protect myself.” He stands with a scowl and stalks over to the center of the singed earth. Davien digs the toe of his boot into the only remnants of the man and spits.
“Well, you’re welcome.” I stand and go to draw my robe around me; my hands hit something wet. Davien might be healed, but his blood is still all over me. I cringe at the filth covering me.
“I shouldn’t need to thank you,” he murmurs without looking at me.
“Excuse me? I saved your life, and because of that I now have to live with the fact that I killed a man. So maybe a ‘thanks’ would ease that process a bit?” My hands are shaking. There’s the slimy, sick feeling I expected that comes from knowing I ended a life.
“I shouldn’t need to thank you because I should have been able to do that myself!
” Anger overflows from him, an unbridled, unyielding rage that is far greater than anything I could’ve created.
“You stole the power of our kings—and took it for yourself. Just like your kind took our lands and our songs and stories. You took what should have been mine.” His hair falls in front of his face. His breathing is ragged.
I can only stare in shock at his misplaced rage. I didn’t ask for any of this. I certainly don’t want it. But the anger is radiating off him as waves of power that still my tongue.
“Davien, that’s enough.” Oren breaks the silence. The rest of the group has arrived. “We should keep going. The king’s Butchers are on our trail.”
“We walk through the night,” Davien declares after taking a moment to breathe and collect himself. “We don’t stop until we cross the Crystal River and are in Acolyte land.” He looks back at me. “I’ll carry you myself if I have to.”
“I’ll be fine.” I fold my arms and watch as Oren leads Davien away with a hand on his back. Stern words are exchanged between them, mostly from Oren. Giles and Hol are close behind. Shaye lingers.
“Are you coming?” she asks.
“It’s not like I have any other choice,” I mutter and drag my feet forward.
She grabs my arm. I try to yank it away, but she holds fast. This close to her for the first time, I notice faint golden tattoos that swirl up the side of her face. They almost blend in with the brown of her skin.
“Walk with your head held high, human.”
“I have a name.”
“Walk with your head held high, Katria.” Her obliging me by using my name gives me pause. “For you have the power of kings within you. Do us all the courtesy of not shaming it.”
“What does that even mean?” I don’t know why I ask; she’s not going to give me an answer.
But she defies my every expectation and does. “The ritual we performed in the wood last night was to draw out the ancient power of the lost royal family of Aviness from the last living heir.”
“Lost?”
“Assassinated would be more apt,” she clarifies, voice and expression turning dark.
“They ruled for centuries, until Boltov the First killed King Aviness the Sixth. After that…the fae land was torn apart from the inside, Boltov usually ending up on top. But the only way they managed to keep control and rule the fae was by systematically killing every last one of the Aviness bloodline—anyone who could possibly reclaim the mighty power of the first kings to truly rule the fae.”
Shaye points to Davien. “He is the closest thing our people have to that lost ruler and the power they carried in their veins. That ritual was to restore his power to him as the sole remaining heir of Aviness, the last limb of the family tree that Boltov hasn’t severed.”
“His birthright,” I whisper.
“Yes. And you stole it by stepping into the fire when he was supposed to. So until we find a way to wring it from your fragile human bones, give our history a modicum of respect and at least act like you walk with the power of ancient royalty.” She finally releases me.
I rub my arm and grudgingly nod. She rolls her eyes and begins trudging along. I follow close behind.
“May I ask you something?”
She turns and glances at me. “Go on.”
It’s strange. Shaye has been the farthest thing from friendly toward me, but she doesn’t strike me as cruel. I’ve spent years around those who are genuinely cruel. There’s a certain manner to a person when they’re looking for every possible way to tear you down.
Shaye doesn’t seem like she’s hunting for ways to be mean for the sake of it. Naturally abrasive? Somewhat, perhaps. Cautious might be more apt. But however that nature of hers manifests, she doesn’t appear to delight in my misery.
“How did the last living fae heir end up in my world?”
“Because that was the only place he could go that he would be safe.” Shaye sighs. “A little more than twenty years ago, Boltov and his Butchers—”
“Butchers? Like the man who attacked us tonight?”
“Yes. They’re either murderous fae who swear to defend the Blood Court Boltov made or poor souls who are born into the Butchers and are never given a choice.
Butchers relish bloodshed and engage in it as sport.
” She cringes, as do I. “The Boltov Butchers have made it their life’s work to eradicate any who would threaten Boltov’s claim. ”
“Can women be Butchers?”
“Why couldn’t they be?” Her answer is guarded, her expression unreadable.
“There was a fae who attacked me in the woods, but she seemed like she was really after Davien. She wore the same shadowy cowl as the man tonight.”
“Your assessment is right; she was a Butcher.” Shaye scrambles up a shallow ridge and then, to my surprise, offers a hand to me. “We tried to patrol those woods as often as we could—on both sides of the Fade—but some of Boltov’s men and women slipped through from time to time.”
I take Shaye’s hand and she hoists me up with ease. Her biceps are wider than the limb I struck on my fall. The woman could likely break me in two if she tried, and after years of manual labor, I am not frail.
“So he was hiding in my world to get away from Boltov and his Butchers?”
“Oh, right, I never finished.” Shaye sighs and shakes her head. “I hate this story.”
“You don’t have to tell me.” Though I do desperately want to know now. Kings, evil knights, runaway royalty—it has all the makings of the storybooks Joyce read to Helen and Laura. The ones I would hear by pressing my ear to their doors at night before I crept back to my bed and tucked myself in.
“You want to know, so I’m going to tell you.
” Shaye takes a breath and continues the tale.
“King Aviness the Sixth’s death sparked a seemingly endless cycle of people vying for power.
There are three things that give a king control over the fae: the glass crown, the hill on which the first king was crowned—which is also where the glass crown resides—and the magic of the ancient kings.
If a man controls all three, he controls the fae. ”
“I see. So just one of them isn’t enough?”
“No, though any of those three things holds immense power.
So any person even distantly related to Aviness tried to lay claim to the glass crown and its powers as the true rulers of the fae, but Boltov always got to them before any could get anywhere near the crown, much less the hill of the first king on which the High Court sits.
“Most retreated into these woods for protection, some abandoning their heritage altogether—not that it made any difference. Boltov saw that the trees were watered with their blood, systematically hunting down any of the Aviness lineage who could lay claim to the dormant, old magic of kings. Davien was only tangentially related to the bloodline, but it didn’t spare him from the hunt. ”
“Tangentially related? What does that mean?”
“His mother was a widow with a little baby. She remarried, but the…poor thing didn’t know that her new husband was the last, distant survivor of the Aviness family.”
“How could she not know?”
“He was related only through a number of marriages and cousins removed, a rogue twig on the family’s branches.”
“It sounds like the man Davien’s mother married hardly had the blood at all,” I say.
“Indeed. The last true Aviness by any significant measure was put to death nearly thirty years ago.”
“And if Davien was born before his mother married, he has no blood relation to the Aviness family at all, merely marriage.”
“Yes, but that’s enough of a link to make Boltov nervous.”
Davien’s story is eerily similar to my own in some ways. I can’t help but think of Joyce, widowed and with a child, marrying with the hopes of security and secret ambition. “Does he have any siblings?”
“No.”
At least no one suffered like I did. “So I take it the Butchers killed his father?”
“And mother, even though she had nothing to do with the family other than a marriage band and vows.” Shaye pauses as we pass through another town of ruins.
The sun is beginning to creep over the horizon, and the morning’s first light paints the stones in a ghostly hue.
“Oren, Davien’s butler, has watched over him from birth.
He took Davien and retreated back to an old Aviness stronghold on the other side of the Fade.
One that still had some of the old wards.
It was the best chance for Davien to get away from Boltov and grow to adulthood—when he would be strong enough to return and fight for us all. ”
That explains why it looks like a castle. “Why would a fae stronghold be on the human side of the Fade?”
“Because the elves find perverse delight in taking our land, and when the world was cut up, some of what was ours went to you humans.” She wears a look of disgust. But in a positive display of her character, she doesn’t seem to direct it toward me.
More at the circumstances…and those long-ago elves.
“So Davien was raised in the human world?”
“Yes. Cut off from our people and the magic of Midscape…he’s lived a lonely life of struggle.
The only thing that’s kept him going is the obligation to free us from Boltov’s tyranny.
Because his grip becomes tighter on these lands by the day.
And if Davien dies—if the last with a claim to the power of Aviness perishes—then nothing will stand in the way of Boltov finally unlocking the full power of the glass crown.
The power of kings will no longer be tied to the Aviness bloodline and will be free for the taking. ”