Chapter 12
Chapter
Twelve
The Lithenmere wakes me with light. A slow brightening in the walls that builds until lying still feels like resistance.
Maximus is already up. Standing at the window the mountain carved for him, arms crossed, watching the basin glow. He’s been awake longer than I have. I can tell by the set of his shoulders. He’s been thinking.
“Tell me,” I say from the bed.
He turns. “From what Lanthar told me, the alliance is straightforward,” he says. “Military support from the Court of Stone against Konstantin’s witch forces. The Fae counter witch magic in ways we can’t. The cost is presenting the case to all four courts under their protocols.”
“With all that Konstantin is doing, I don’t think we’ll have a problem presenting our case.”
“On another note, we need to feed.” Quieter. “It’s been days.”
He’s right. I’ve been ignoring the pull, attributing it to the ambient magic, the nausea, the general strangeness of living inside a mountain.
A Fae attendant appears in the doorway. They do that here. Materialize like the stone exhaled them.
“The Rite of Return is this evening,” she says. “A celebration held when the kin of the High King returns to the realm. Arrangements have been made for honored guests. Blood will be provided to you there.”
She looks at me.
“Attendants will arrive to prepare you at the sixth bell.”
She’s gone before I can ask anything.
The sixth bell sounds like the mountain singing a single low note that vibrates in my sternum.
Two Fae attendants enter our chamber. One gestures for Maximus to follow. The other turns to me.
“Wait,” I say. “Where is he going?”
“Separate preparations,” the attendant says. “You will see him at the rite.”
Maximus catches my eye across the room. The corner of his mouth lifts. Then he follows the attendant out, and the stone seals behind him.
The remaining attendant is already moving.
She opens a section of wall I didn’t know existed, and behind it is a bathing chamber three times the size of the one I’ve been using.
Steam rises from a pool carved directly into the mountain’s heart, the water glowing faintly amber from the mineral veins beneath it.
I bathe. The water does something to my skin that mortal water doesn’t. Softens and brightens at the same time, as if the minerals are polishing me from the outside in.
When I step out, wind spirals up around me.
It starts at my feet. Cold and fast, skimming water off in sheets, and I can hear it, a low rush that fills my ears and cuts out everything else.
It moves up my calves, my stomach, my arms. Pulls at the roots of my hair.
Presses flat against my collarbone. The friction of it raises the hair on my arms.
It spins around me for about thirty seconds. Then it stops.
My skin and hair are dry.
Will wonders never cease?
The attendant approaches me, holding fabric.
I’ve seen Fae clothing on the court members. I assumed it was silk. I reach out and touch it. It’s not.
“What is this fabric?” I ask.
“It’s something the Lithenmere produces, spun from fibers that grow in the deep gardens,” she says.
The material moves like liquid and catches light from angles that shouldn’t be possible.
The color is deep crimson. Almost black in the folds, burning red where the light hits.
“For the bondmate of Lord Maximus,” the attendant says. “The mountain chose the color.”
The mountain chose my dress color. I’m going to need a minute with that.
She helps me into it. The fabric knows where to go.
It settles against my body like it was measured for me.
The neckline sits low across my collarbones.
The back is open to the base of my spine.
The skirt falls straight and then flares at the knee, and when I move, the crimson shifts through shades I don’t have names for.
I look down at myself, and I don’t recognize my own body.
“Sit,” the attendant says.
She does my hair. Her fingers move through it with speed and precision. She pulls it up, twists it, pins it with something gold. Sections of hair fall around my face in a way that looks accidental but absolutely isn’t.
When she steps back, I stand and face the mirror.
The woman looking back at me has brown eyes that catch the gold in the chamber walls.
The crimson fabric makes my skin glow. The hair frames everything the dress reveals, and the overall effect is someone who belongs in a Fae court.
Someone who looks like she was built for this. Someone who looks like royalty.
I was built for a cage. For a ring with chain-link walls and concrete under my feet and a crowd that wanted blood.
I’ve never looked like this.
“High Princess Seraphina and High Princess Mira are in the corridor,” the attendant says.
I walk out.
Seraphina is unrecognizable. She’s spent the entire trip in practical clothes, her hair tied back.
Tonight she’s wearing silver. Her hair is loose.
It falls past her shoulders, and the silver in it catches the Lithenmere’s glow, and she looks like what she actually is, which is the daughter of a king.
Mira is beside her in deep green. The dress is sleeveless, and the burn scar on her left wrist is visible.
She chose that. Her golden hair is braided with gold thread, and her jaw is set the same way it was in the garden with Lanthar.
She looks like a woman walking into a room that owes her something.
Seraphina’s eyes move over me. Both eyebrows rise.
“Well,” she says.
“Don’t.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything.”
“Your face is saying plenty.”
Mira’s mouth curves. “You look dangerous, Celeste.”
“Good.”
We walk.
The Lithenmere opens a passage I haven’t seen. Wider than the corridors, the gold veins in the walls brightening as we approach, the stone smoothing itself ahead of our steps.
The mountain is showing off.
The passage curves and opens and the sound reaches us before the sight does.
Music. Strings and something deeper, a low harmonic that resonates in the stone itself, as if the instruments and the mountain are playing together.
The rite is held in a natural cavern that the Lithenmere has lit from within.
Columns of living rock rise from the floor and branch at the ceiling like stone trees.
Between them, the gold veins have been coaxed to the surface and they pulse in slow patterns that follow the music.
Light falls from crevices in the ceiling where crystal formations catch and scatter it into shards of amber and white.
The four courts are here. Stone to the left, gathered near the walls. Ember across the far side, the air around them shimmering. Tides near a flowing water feature, mist pooling at their feet. Gales elevated on a natural ledge, Ithara perched at its edge.
Hundreds of Fae. All of them in formal dress. The cavern smells like crushed minerals and night-blooming flowers.
At the center of the cavern, a cleared floor of smooth stone.
Lanthar stands at its edge. Silver formal robes. The High King in full authority, but tonight it looks different. Tonight he’s not adjudicating. He’s welcoming.
His eyes find Seraphina.
Something passes between them that I’m not part of and don’t try to read.
Then Mira steps forward.
The cavern goes quiet. The music dims. Every court turns.
Mira walks across the cleared floor. The green dress moves with her. The gold thread in her hair catches the light. The burn scar on her wrist is visible to every being in the room.
She stops before Lanthar. The same ten feet she held in the garden. Her distance.
Lanthar inclines his head.
“Blood of my blood,” he says. His voice carries through the cavern without effort. “Returned to the realm that has waited for you.”
Mira inclines her head in return. Once. Precise. She doesn’t speak.
She doesn’t need to. The cavern responds. The gold veins in every wall brighten simultaneously. The crystal formations in the ceiling flare. The mountain recognizing what Lanthar just declared.
Gasps sound from around the room, and for a moment, there is total silence.
King Lanthar gives a nod.
The music resumes. The rite has begun.
Two attendants emerge from the edge of the cleared floor. Each carrying a goblet which appears to be carved from stone with gold veins running through it. The liquid inside catches the light with a depth that stops me from looking away.
One stops before me and inclines his head. "Fae blood," he says, quietly.
The scent reaches me the moment the vessel is in my hands. It's nothing like human blood. It smells like the forest outside the Lithenmere and the mineral springs beneath it and something electric, something that makes the back of my throat ache.
I look up for Maximus and my brain stops working.
He's in black. Fae-cut, close-fitting, the fabric the same liquid material as mine.
The collar sits high, and the lines run clean down his frame, and his shoulders fill the structure the way they fill everything he wears.
His hair is pushed back from his face, and the gold light from the walls is doing something to his jaw and his eyes that should be illegal.
He's holding a vessel of Fae blood and looking at me across a cavern full of ancient beings. The expression on his face makes me wish we were alone.
The room could be empty.
He crosses over to me.
"You look..." he starts.
"I know."
"You don't. Because I can't find the word."
I raise my vessel to him, and he raises his. Our eyes hold over the rims.
"Together?" I say.
He nods.
We drink.
The first sip is light and cool and tastes like nothing I have a word for. Not sweet. Not salt. It takes like what I imagine ambrosia to taste like, with a mineral edge that coats the back of my throat. I feel it land. A small loosening, like a muscle I didn't know I was holding finally lets go.