CHAPTER THREE #3
Yes, master, of course… but Dorian… please, I would still like the honor of killing him… now more than ever. For my son.
And so you shall, but locating the Feyreisa is your first priority. And it is to that aim that you will devote all your efforts. Once you have provided me the information I require and put that stone in place, your reward will be the honor of killing Celieria’s king.
After a thorough pat down, the lieutenant led Sebourne through the door and down the connecting hallway.
They passed five doors, three on the left, two on the right, before the hallway made a thirty-degree turn to the right.
Two more of the King’s Guard stood at attention beside the fourth door on the right.
The door led to a small, windowless interior sitting room, fairly bare by court standards, though the two couches and chairs that occupied the room were of obvious quality.
There was a closed second door at the back of the room, flanked by more guards.
“Make yourself comfortable, my lord. I will let His Majesty know you are here.” The lieutenant bowed deeply a final time, went to rap softly on the back door, then slipped inside.
Dervas cooled his heels in the small sitting room for the better part of a bell.
Though several people came and went through that guarded back door, no one came to summon him.
No one came to look after his needs or offer him refreshment.
No doubt the waiting and the deliberate lack of polite comforts were more small punishments.
And now, my umagi, I am going to erase all memory of this conversation until it is time for you to fulfill your task. This is for your sake as well as ours. With your memories gone, even a shei’dalin as powerful as the Tairen Soul’s mate could Truthspeak you but still learn nothing of value.
At last, after what seemed like an eternity, the door opened again. King Dorian’s valet, Marten, stepped into the sitting room. “Great Lord Sebourne? His Majesty will see you now.”
“That dimskull Dorian has reinstated Sebourne.”
Ellysetta looked up at Rain in shock as he shed his golden war steel and prepared for bed. “What?”
“Aiyah. Told me so himself half a bell ago.” Rain dragged a hand through his hair in a distracted gesture and sighed.
“I suppose I shouldn’t call Dorian a dimskull.
We’re desperate for troops. I can understand why he did it.
” He met her gaze. “But I have a bad feeling about this, Ellysetta. I don’t trust Sebourne. ”
“You think he will betray us?”
Rain shrugged. “I don’t know. I told Dorian he should at least let Gaelen check Sebourne and his men for Marks, but he wouldn’t hear of it.
Sebourne is still a powerful, well-connected Great Lord with many supporters.
He fears that alienating Sebourne—especially after what happened with Colum—would spark a civil war. ”
“He may be right.”
“I know.” Rain slid under the covers and pulled Ellysetta into his arms. “But I still have a bad feeling about this.”
Rain’s bad feeling left Ellysetta just as unsettled as he was.
It took her a while to get to sleep, and when she finally did, she dreamed.
Images flickered across her mind. Charred and broken stone, shattered glass, the ruins of a building.
A dark hole ripped into a wall. Stairs leading down into a windowless room.
A sconce lit, revealing a very large, dark oval mirror perched on a column of stone.
As Ellysetta watched, the dark oval of the mirror began to glow with silvery-blue light, just like the phosphorescent mirror pool at the heart of Grandfather Sentinel in Elvia.
The surface seemed to ripple, and a face rose from the glowing depths.
A Fey face, strong and stern, with pale wwwwwwblond hair and eyes like deep green wells.
A strange tug of recognition pulled at her.
The Fey in the mirror was a stranger… but something about him struck a deep chord, as if she should know him—or once had.
She reached out a hand, but before her fingers could brush the mirror’s surface, the mirror dissolved. The dreamview became a white blur.
When it focused again, she was walking in a grim, denuded landscape.
The glare of a harsh white sun blazed down on a world leached of all color, alien and yet somehow still familiar.
A river flowed in the distance, its surface still and black—the Heras.
The tumbled ruins of a stone fortress lay scattered before it.
From the shape of the hills and the destroyed fortress, she recognized the ruins as Kreppes.
The ground beneath her feet was covered in a thick layer of what she first thought were broken shards of sun-bleached shells. She stumbled on a rounded bulge hidden beneath the shards, and pain darted up her leg as her ankle twisted beneath her weight.
Ellysetta nearly fell to her knees, but she managed to catch her balance. She turned to see what had tripped her, and her stomach clenched with a sudden surge of nausea.
The rounded bulge was a skull… a man’s skull.
White teeth grinned in a macabre smile beneath the gray-white shadows of empty eye sockets.
She took a stumbling step backward, away from the skull, and the shells beneath her feet crunched and snapped. Only then did she realize these were not stones, nor shells. They were bones. Shattered as if by some god’s terrible hammer. Bleached white and brittle by the sun.
The remnants of what had once been living, breathing people.
Thousands of people.
And in the center of that barren landscape, upon that graven sea of the dead, Ellysetta stood alone. Garbed in scarlet from head to toe like a splash of blood on the snow-white field.
And she knew, with a certainty she could not explain, that every person whose shattered skeleton lay beneath her feet had died because of her.
Ellysetta’s eyes opened. The brittle white boneyard of her dream became the night-dark ceiling of the room she and Rain shared at Kreppes. She could hear the low voices of her quintet just outside the bedroom door.
She sat up, and out of habit turned to check the Sentinel blooms beneath her pillow. The flowering sprigs were still in place, as they had been every night since leaving Elvia. Not a Mage-sent dream then.
Beside her, Rain stirred. His hand flexed against the bed-sheets, seeking her. Shei’tani. The sleepy call drifted from his mind. Not Spirit, merely an unchecked thought.
She brushed back the silky spill of hair that feathered across his brow. “Las, kem’san. Ruliath.” Peace, my love. Go back to sleep. A push of encouraging Spirit accompanied the words, a gentle weave that she laid upon him without guilt.
He was so weary. The fact that her dream had woken her but not him was proof of his utter exhaustion.
He had been so strong for so long, but his vast power was beginning to flag.
Madness—both from the trauma of war and from their uncompleted truemate bond—was chipping away at the powerful barriers that held back the torment of his overburdened soul.
Yesterday, his thoughts had been so loud her quintet had heard them on several occasions.
Since the moment she’d called him from the sky, he had taken care of her, looked after her, put her safety before his own.
Now it was her turn to give him back a fraction of that devotion.
She loved him so. No longer because he was the hero of her dreams but because he was the Fey, flawed and yet so fine, who had won her heart.
He was a king, a great and noble leader of the immortal Fey, but he was also just Rain, her beloved, hers to protect.
And she would protect him… just as fiercely as the tairen defended the pride.
When she was certain he was well and deeply asleep, she rose from the bed and dressed quietly, drawing a thick, furlined velvet cloak over her gown.
There would be no more sleep for her tonight.
The strange, disturbing dream hadn’t terrified her, as her dreams often did, but it had left her tense and unsettled all the same.
She needed to get out of this room and go for a walk to clear her thoughts.
In the antechamber outside the bedroom, she was surprised to see the five warriors of primary quintet instead of her secondary.
“What are you doing here?” she whispered, closing the door behind her. “Shouldn’t you all be asleep?”
“Shouldn’t you?” Gaelen countered.
She arched a brow, then had to smile. “Mei sorro.” The phrase, which meant well struck, was one Fey warriors used in training when their sparring partners hit a good blow.
It was a phrase she’d become quite familiar with since Gaelen and her quintet had begun training her in the use of Fey weapons.
She was getting better at hitting precisely where she aimed but still had work to do to improve her own defenses.
“More dreams?” Bel asked softly. He watched her closely, his gaze filled with a mix of certainty and concern.
“Aiyah.” She grimaced, then confessed, “I’m beginning to question the real reason Lord Galad gave me those Sentinel blooms. They seem to make me dream more, not less.”
“You’re starting to learn the true nature of Elf gifts,” her uncle Tajik muttered sourly. “When an Elf gives you a rose, always look for the thorn.”
She turned to the red-haired Fire master with a puzzled frown. “Why do you hate the Elves so?” Her uncle never had a kind word to say about his woodland kinsmen.
“I don’t hate all Elves,” he clarified. “Just their king.”
“What has Lord Galad done to earn your wrath?”
“You mean besides sentencing my sister and her mate to a thousand years of torment? “
“You were bitter before you learned that.” She pinned him with a level gaze.
Tajik looked away. “I loved once. An elf maid named Aliya. With her brother’s consent, we would have bound ourselves to one another in e’tanitsa.” He shrugged. “Instead, he sent her to her doom.”