9. Delphine
Whatever Icarus had planned,the castle was alive with the energy of it. Something about this court, the Eastern Court of Luxia, reminded me of the human king’s castle in Alderia. We’d only been guests there for a short time, but I’d visited many of Avarath’s courts before the glamour had returned, and this was different from other faerie courts. I sensed this court’s glamour, but there was something off about it. It was too distant, too dense. If I didn’t know better, I’d think that most of the fae of the Eastern Court didn’t have glamour at all.
Perhaps, I was just comparing it to that strange, twisted glamour that Icarus possessed. Perhaps whatever glamour ran through the veins of this court was so dull in comparison that it quelled my ability to sense it.
Either way, the glamour that flowed through Avarath was not present here in the same way. I could reach for my glamour, still, but the court was not possessed by it. Not like Armene and Tethys’ courts after Mordrigal was once again awakened. I’d felt it flowing there like a lifeblood. Here, here it was different. Here, if I hadn’t known that we walked the halls of a faerie court, I’d have thought this place belonged to just another human king. Just another human court.
From the way the fae of this court stared at us, it might as well have been.
It could have served us well to explore this place, to see for ourselves the kind of fae that walked these halls. At first glance, these were not the kind of fae I feared, the kind I thought I’d meet in battle and shake when I saw them. But the fae that I’d be sending to Icarus, if I agreed to do as he asked—if I agreed to his deal—those were the kind of fae that would have even Caldamir making peace with fate before facing.
I’d not just one choice to make now, not one choice that would seal the future fate of Avarath and these ever more intertwined human realms, but two. Neither promised a straight path ahead. Both promised to embolden another already dangerous power. But now, at least, the first choice I had to make actually felt like a choice.
By the time we were given privacy to discuss our own plans, my mind was reeling.
I wasn’t so sure that it was better now, to have this choice now, too. It was complicated. Too complicated. It was the kind of decision that needed to be made carefully, dealings with a fae like Icarus must be weighed with intention.
But intention took time, and time was the one thing we didn’t have.
We’d been left in some kind of long-forgotten strategy room. Maps were laid out on a long table, but they were foreign enough that they meant nothing to me. Armene wandered over to the table, his fingers tracing along the penned line of what I assumed was the Luxian coast. Somewhere there, along it, we’d appeared. Dripping with salt water and half-cocked hopes, we’d appeared.
Now, I was beginning to wonder if it would’ve been better if we hadn’t.
Armene wasn’t the only one looking at the maps, but he was the first to lean in closely, a grimace drawing his eyebrows close together. “What kind of kingdom is this?”
Caldamir let out a sound like a growl from the back of his throat in agreement. “Certainly not the type we’re used to.”
“Like its magic,” Nyx’s voice carried over, wistful, from the back of the room. He’d already wandered over to a nook tucked away into the back wall, a small alcove where a strange sort of device moved on an axis, plates shifting over and around one another in a complicated helix as he nudged them along.
I’d seen him handle similar devices to disastrous consequences, so without even thinking about it, I found myself rushing over to save the contraption before I even knew what it was I was doing—or what it was I rushed to save.
“Can’t you go five minutes without—”
The simmering rage that had so quickly flooded through my veins cooled the moment I saw what it was Nyx had nearly destroyed. He stood frozen to the spot, his shaking fingers stiff when I brushed them aside—and then nudged the rest of him over too, to get a better look at it.
“Come.”
I didn’t have to so much as beckon the rest of them over to my side. They were there in an instant, their forms leaning over my shoulder to look at the strange instrument that had so captured my attention. Nyx was nudged so far to the side that his shoulder was pinned against the wall, but the moment he started to squirm in frustration, one sharp look from Caldamir was all it took to have him still once more. It didn’t stop him from glowing a bit, however, when the momentary fear that I’d seen on his face turned to pride when he saw me looking on at his discovery with interest, and not anger.
“See? I’m hardly so useless as you all seem to think. Look what I found.”
“And what do you think it is you’ve found?” Caldamir asked, to which Nyx blanched and stuttered out a few incoherent words before the Mountain Prince turned his shoulder to him again and then back to me. “What is it, high king?”
Something about how Caldamir said it made me blush. Heat flooded my skin as he caught my eye, the mere meeting of our gaze making something awaken once again deep within me. I found my own words stolen from me momentarily, and had to break the prince’s gaze and turn back to the complicated metal web of flat discs before me.
“It’s a map,” I said, after a second, once my tongue was willing to cooperate with me. “Of the realms.”
“Oh, it’s so much more than that.”
Directly behind my left shoulder, I felt the brush of Seren’s long silver hair as he bent over me, his breath warming my skin as he leaned in for a closer look. My own breath caught again. The hair on the back of my neck began to stand up, the warmth that Caldamir flooded me with rekindling twofold. I was suddenly all too aware of how close all four of the princes stood behind Seren, behind me. It was more than feeling their magic, more than sensing that glamour, it was them. All of them, here, together, with me. It had happened only once before, in Elysia, but we’d hardly stood united. Four of them had been prisoners, my enemies.
Not so much anymore.
They were, instead, more than allies, more than friends, more even than lovers. Not long ago they were less than nothing to me, now they were everything.
Seren leaned in closer, his chest brushing up against my back, and even though the mere touch was enough to get my heart racing, it returned me to the present.
“This is a device for measuring the passing of time between the realms,” he said. “See here, when you move the map of Avarath to this point, how it overlaps for a moment with Alderia? This is a Midsummer conjunction, one much like the day the princes brought you to the faerie realm, Delphine.”
I watched as the flat disks moved into place until the faces of them overlapped. There were other discs, some of them the same size, some much smaller. They moved in a strange, mathematical orbit around and under one another along the wire tracks, shifting one way or the other based on the direction any one plane was shifted.
Even nudging one of the tiniest planes, discs no larger than a coin, caused all the rest of the parts to move as well.
It was on one of these smaller discs that I focused.
“So, these …”
“Realms, all of them,” Seren said. The way he said it made me pause. There was a strangeness to it, an uncertainty that I wasn’t used to hearing in his voice. He, who always knew what to do. Always knew the answer. Always knew the way forward. Hearing that in his voice made something inside me shift too, not too unlike the shift of the device still slowly revolving before us, the planes it represented shifting along in their ever more complicated dance.
I knew time moved more quickly in Alderia than Avarath or Elysia, that days or weeks would pass here before a single one passed in the others. Seeing it for myself made it seem somehow more and less real at the same time. I’d seen the way Sol grew too quickly before my eyes, even now I depended on this shift between the realms to buy me the time I needed to prepare to face Mordrigal and Deimos. I’d barely batted an eye when Icarus told me he could get us to a new realm, one where each day that passed here was sixty there. A realm where we would have not only time to strategize, but for me to unlock my power in a way that might allow me to hold a candle to the one high king that matched it. After all, Mordrigal was powerful, but his main power was currently held at bay. Caldamir and his court remained on our side. The power of that wasn’t lost on me.
The power I would lose if Caldamir was once again drawn into Mordrigal’s fold wasn’t lost on me, either.
“Why do we even need Icarus, then?” I asked, gesturing to the device. “Can’t we just pick one and find our own way to it?”
I glanced then, almost without thinking, at Tethys. I knew there were ways between the realms, but he was the one who brought us here. He was the one that used the magic of the old gods to carry us to this new kingdom, to Luxia. I’d be a fool to think he did it of his own volition. He was sworn to those beings, to the god of the sea he so loved, the sea his court drew its magic from. If we were here, it was because that god wished it. I knew that.
Maybe that god wished us to make our own way to one of these realms without having to make a deal with another fae I dared not trust.
Tethys said nothing, but Armene stepped up in his place. The two of them shared a look, briefly, that told me everything I needed to know—everything I already knew. The two had always shared a bond. Watching them look at each other, at the briefest flicker of emotion between the gaze that the two bonded brothers shared, was like looking in on something private. I felt embarrassed to have watched, more embarrassed still to hope that Tethys might be willing—or even able—to defy his own orders to help us.
More than he maybe already had.
He might be acting on the sea god’s wishes, but he’d helped us still. We wouldn’t be here without him. No, we’d instead be scrambling around the Sand Court trying to prepare for a fight so heavily weighted against us, all we could do was lose.
Now, at least, we had some kind of choice.
Maybe even some kind of chance.
“If we had more time in this realm, then maybe, sure, we could find our way to another. To one like Icarus promised us,” Armene said. He nodded down at the web of realms, one finger reaching out to gently nudge Elysia. I looked on as Elysia made a slow, steady track around its axis while the progressively smaller realms became almost a blur of motion. Some of them didn’t move in straight tracks, either. Some of them moved in ellipses, their paths moving slower than others at times. Some of them seemed to move on no path at all, moving along at a speed that only they seemed able to determine. Still more seemed to blink in and out of existence, moving in such a way that it was hard to tell if it was simply a trick of the light, or if they truly had disappeared for a moment. Some things needed explaining. This was one that did not.
Armene’s message was clear. Even if we found a path, it would be too dangerous. We could find ourselves in a realm that behaved badly, in a realm where one hour could have us coming back to Avarath long after not just this war, but many more to come, had been fought, and many more courts been lost. Or, worse still, we could, like some of these realms before me, go to a realm where we all simply ceased to exist.
“Icarus is an evil, of that much I am certain,” Seren continued, something about his aura darkening as he did. It only made what he said next surprise me even more than it already would have. “But he is a necessary one.”
I turned back to look up at him, seeing all eyes on the once-high-king along with mine.
“You think we should take Icarus up on his offer?”
“It’s absurd, this game of bargains,” Caldamir said with a snort, his shoulder now digging into Nyx enough to make the Woodland Prince squirm again. He didn’t dare try to unpin himself, however, didn’t dare so much as whine, which in and of itself was surprisingly good judgment on his part. He was a fae far too out of place outside of his court. He was still the same otherworldly beautiful creature that I’d met that day, the one that had stolen my breath away with droplets of honey dripping from his palm, but he was out of place here. Away from his court, from the forest and the trees, from the fae that revered him totally, away from his magic still trapped by the bracelet returned to his remaining arm, he was a shadow of himself. These other princes were warriors, they were fighters, they were strong-willed and decisive.
Nyx was no warrior. His talents lay in the persuasion of his beauty, of the charm he’d once possessed before the last weeks and months had leached it out of him, turning him into the simpering creature now pinned behind Caldamir’s shoulder.
I pitied him for that.
He’d betrayed me, yes, but he’d done it for the right reasons—his right reasons, and for that, I had a hard time entirely faulting him. He’d stolen my brother, as good as killed him himself, just to save me. Just because he loved me. He’d betrayed me because he’d thought it was the right thing to do. And now he’d done it again, without even knowing it. Two wrongs didn’t make a right, but Nyx’s sacrifice didn’t go unnoticed…especially when I saw how far the creature he was now was from the one that had first bewitched me. I saw him for who he truly was, beneath the glamour.
And I loved him for it, as much as I hated him for all that he’d done.
“To be fae is to bargain,” Armene said in response to Caldamir. “We can either take power, or we can make a deal for it. All realms have their rules, their exchanges. We’re blessed to have the glamour to bind us to ours. If we make a deal, we must follow it through—but so do those we seek to gain power from.”
It was a fair enough statement, but somehow, I was the only one who thought so. Caldamir, Seren, and even Nyx began all at once to argue with Armene. Caldamir held his stance firmly that there was no choice here at all, no bargain to be struck, no deal to be made—not with Deimos, not with Mordrigal, and certainly not with this new dark fae that held so much power without the title yet to make him a true threat. Yet.
Seren seemed set that the only deal to be struck was with Icarus. His confidence surprised me even more than the first time he’d suggested it.
Nyx, meanwhile, had finally seen the opportunity to try to get into someone’s good graces. He’d gone off on a sort of soliloquy, rambling on about the intention of the deal over the outcome of the deal, and how one should be weighted more heavily than the other. He seemed unaware that no one was listening to him, or perhaps he was. Perhaps he simply needed the growing echo of the party’s bickering in order for him to order his own thoughts, to come to peace—or at least to terms—with where his own deals had brought him.
Tethys was the only one among them who hadn’t spoken.
He stood at the back, a few paces behind Armene, watching. There was a strange look on his face, not quite serene, not quite disinterested, but something similar. He looked on as an abject observer, with a quiet confidence that bolstered my own.
He was not here to influence us. He’d already either done his part, or he was waiting for whatever role he’d been deemed to play next. The fact that he remained with us still was enough of a fact to assure me that—whatever it was that lay ahead—fate was still on my side. There was no other way to explain it, to explain this.
Any of this.
From the moment Caldamir had laid eyes on me in Alderia, in the human realm, things in all the realms had been set into motion in a way that only fate could explain. It was the timing of it—the final Midsommar before the worlds parted and there was no longer enough glamour to bring them together again. Meeting Seren in the pool. Arriving at the mountain court at just the right moment, a time when the realms of Elysia and Avarath were fated to pass over one another, allowing me to find haven in the realm of my forefathers.
It all came down to fate’s time.
Time that we wasted now, arguing like petty schoolchildren over a decision that only one of us was ultimately going to make.
Me.
That blank look on Tethys’ face shifted slightly the moment before I broke my own silence. His eyes met mine, and in that moment, he knew what I was going to do, and that tiniest shift, the slightest glint in his glowing golden eyes, it was all it took to carry forth the words that had been building at the back of my throat.
“Enough.”
For the first time in my life, human or fae, I knew what it was to speak with the authority of a king. A high king.
I’d witnessed Seren carry it, seen how even the princes had little choice but to ultimately bow to his will. Now, I saw it for myself. I did not force them to bow to me, didn’t bend them to my will. I simply spoke, and something within me wrapped around the words, the glamour that had given me the power now truly imbuing me with it.
“We didn’t come here, to the human realm, to Luxia, didn’t willingly waltz into a foreign fae territory, just to fill up our remaining hours arguing over whether or not to take a deal. We could have done that in Avarath, in Armene’s court. We could have saved ourselves the time, trouble, and danger of making this crossing, of alerting the rest of faerie and the human realms to our movements. This is not an argument. This is not your decision. This is mine.”