CHAPTER THREE #4
Ellysetta’s hand flew to her throat. “Aliya was Lord Hawks-heart’s sister? Tajik, are you saying Galad Hawksheart sent his own sister to her death? “
Tajik nodded. “I could have saved her, but he made sure I didn’t.
Had she lived, it would have changed a Verse in a minor Song, but he said that one change might have rippled to a greater, more important Song, and put its outcome in danger.
He wasn’t willing to take that risk. Her death ensured that change wouldn’t happen. ”
“Oh, Tajik.” No wonder he harbored such enmity towards the Elf king.
If Galad Hawksheart had intentionally sent Rain to his death, no power on earth, the Seven Hells, or the Haven of Light would have spared him from her wrath.
She laid a hand upon her uncle’s arm. “Kem’san avi i ver’baloth. ” My heart weeps for your sorrow.
“Beylah vo, kem’jitanessa.” He covered her hand.
“Now perhaps you will understand that when I say you be wary of Elf-gifts, it is no idle warning. I know just how far Hawks-heart will go to protect his precious Dance. If he thought tormenting your dreams with those Sentinel blooms would benefit the Dance, he would give them to you without a qualm and never tell you their true purpose.”
Was it possible? Could the Elf king have gifted her with the Sentinel wreath not to protect her from the Mage’s dream-attacks, as he had claimed, but rather to open her mind to prophetic Elvish dreams?
Your Elvish blood awakens.
The memory of Hawksheart’s words echoed in her mind.
Since the moment she’d drunk the Elves’ liquid sunlight and placed her hand on the Elf king’s Mirror, her dreams had not stopped or grown less frightening.
Instead, they hummed with a sense of veracity she could not shake, no matter how much she wished to.
The dream she’d just had, and several others before it, were no Mage-spawned nightmares sent to torment her.
They were potential verses of her Song, brutal, vivid visions of the dread future that awaited her if she did not find a way to complete her truemate bond with Rain and defeat the High Mages’ evil plans for her.
Ellysetta pressed the heel of her palm to her heart. The walls felt like they were closing in, as if the weight of the world were pressing down upon her, oppressive and suffocating.
“I need some air,” she said, and bolted for the door.
Except for the guards standing at their posts and the occasional footstep of a watchman going about his night duties, all of Kreppes lay silent and still beneath the starry, moonlit winter sky.
After rushing from her suite in the west wing, Ellysetta climbed the stairs to the ramparts, where the cool air and open sky made her feel less closed in.
She walked along the northern battlement in the company of her quintet and looked out over the river into Eld.
She didn’t know what she was expecting to see.
Some sign of malevolence, perhaps, or approaching evil, but all she saw was the unbroken darkness of Eld’s great forests, stretching across the horizon, and the silvery shine of moonlight reflecting on the swirling confluence of the mighty Heras and the Elden river Azar.
“Doesn’t look like such a threat, does it?”
She turned to see King Dorian step from the shadows of the wizard’s wall, the raised walkway spiked with high, open-roofed towers set back from the main battlements.
“Your Majesty.” She inclined her head. “Forgive me. I didn’t see you there. I did not mean to intrude.”
“Your presence could never be an intrusion, Feyreisa.”
The compliment flowed off his tongue with both courtly ease and surprising sincerity.
How strange it seemed. She’d grown up all her life seeing this man’s image on the coins that passed from one Celierian hand to another in commerce, and now, here he was, standing beside her on a silent night on the eve of war, offering the pretty charm of a courtly Grace.
Master Fellows, the Queen’s Master of Graces who had taught a woodcarver’s daughter the ways of Celieria’s royal court, would have beamed with pride.
“It is strange, how peaceful it looks.” The king continued, nodding towards the vast, shadowy forest to the north.
“I have fought in three wars before this. Always, I could see my enemy approaching. I never realized what a comfort that was.” Hands braced on the flat surface of the stone crenel, he scanned the dark horizon.
“I keep looking for the campfires, the ships, the troops that experience tells me must be there, yet, my reports say this enemy can simply appear, with no warning, and in great strength. This… nothingness… is very unsettling.”
“Perhaps the waiting is actually the first part of the attack.” A chill breeze blew through the fortress’s night shields.
She drew her velvet robes tighter and plumped the fur collar higher about her neck.
“To constantly be on your guard, knowing your enemy is stalking you, but not knowing how or when the next blow will come… such torments are one of this Mage’s favorite weapons. ”
“No doubt because it is so scorching effective.” Dorian pushed back from the wall and turned to face her. “Is that what it’s like to be Mage-Marked? To feel as if you’re constantly waiting for an attack? “
The question took Ellysetta by surprise. No one had ever asked her what it was like, to be Mage-Marked, and though Dorian had always treated her with impeccable courtesy, he’d never invited personal confidences.
“I suppose it is, in a way,” she answered. “The pressure is always there, but it doesn’t just come from without. It also comes from within.”
“How so?”
“Well, he doesn’t just attack you. He also tries to trick you into betraying yourself.
Sometimes, the tricks are very persuasive.
” All her life, she’d battled the Mage and the nightmares he sent to torment her.
Since coming into her power, that torment had only grown worse.
“I doubt I could have lasted this long if not for Rain. He is my strength.”
Dorian looked away. “You are very lucky to have a love so selfless and steadfast.”
His glum tones made her empathy flare. The sense of loss—even despair—that had surrounded him these last days, spurring his temper, fanning his anger, suddenly made sense.
“I know how blessed I am to have Rain,” she agreed.
“All my life, I dreamed of a Fey-tale love. My mother always tried to discourage me. I was an unattractive child.” She smiled a little, remembering.
“She no doubt meant to spare me the pain of lost hopes, but I didn’t realize that at the time.
So when she’d tell me to set aside my dreams of Fey-tale love, that such great loves weren’t meant for mortals, I’d remind her that she had found such a love with my papa—” She hesitated, then admitted softly, “—and that you had found such a love with the queen.”
When he said nothing, she added, “I’m sure that whatever difficulties may lie between you now, they will not last. I have seen the great love you bear her.”
He glanced at her with sudden suspicion. “Are you reading my thoughts, Feyreisa?”
“Nei, King Dorian. I and every Fey in Kreppes have done all we can these last days to shield ourselves from mortal thoughts and emotions. But not all thoughts require magic to detect.”
He grimaced. “I suppose not. Especially when one isn’t being particularly subtle.”
“If you need to talk, I would be glad to listen. About anything.” She started to reach for his hands, but drew back before she touched him. The moment her skin touched his, her promise to leave him the privacy of his thoughts and emotions would be broken.
“You have never much cared for the queen.”
“I—” His statement caught her off guard and left her scrambling for an appropriate response. She wanted to deny his remark, for his sake, but Fey did not lie.
“No.” He smiled. “You haven’t. It’s all right. Most people don’t. She is not an easy woman to like…” He looked back towards Eld, “… or to love.”
“But you do. Love her, I mean.”
“More than life.” He rubbed his face, weariness apparent in every line of his body. “So much that the break between us weighs on me more heavily than this war.”
Ellysetta had to fight to keep herself from touching him, from weaving peace upon him. His emotions had opened up so much she could not hope to block them. The ragged, aching hole, the emptiness, as if part of his soul was missing. The fear that his wife’s love might be lost forever.
“Your Majesty… Dorian…”
“Some people believe I don’t see her flaws,” he continued as if he hadn’t heard her, “but I do. I simply love her in spite of them. Or perhaps because of them. She is a princess of Cappellas. There’s not a more deceitful, conniving, heartless land in all the mortal world.
Intrigue, betrayal, murder: They’re a way of life there.
No one trusts anyone—not even their own family.
And she grew up in that. Can you imagine?
A child, a beautiful, innocent little girl, raised in that… that darrokken pit of a Hells hole. Ah, gods.”
He leaned back and shook himself, as if trying to shake off the overwhelming emotion. “She didn’t let it break her, though. She was too strong. So strong she could live through all of that and still allow herself to be vulnerable enough to love me.”
The words kept tumbling out, as if he needed to say them, to hear them. As if he needed to remind himself.