Chapter 14 #2
I didn’t need him. I didn’t need him. The brand on my chest burned. I didn’t need him. I focused on it, sensing him through it, and fought to calm myself. I didn’t need him. I could handle this. All of this. Lorien. Surviving. Missing him. I could handle it all. I didn’t need him.
“Saphira.” Meiryn lifted my glass, a concerned crinkle to her brow as she offered the wine to me. “Sip this. It might help.”
Everyone was staring at me.
“I… I, ah… a very interesting fact about wolves.” I grimaced as I blurted, “We mature at one hundred and our animal sides can get very unruly around this time, especially if we feel threatened.”
I shot Lorien a black look, pinning the blame squarely on his shoulders rather than the two females I really wanted to rip to shreds with my fangs.
“Oh, well. That sounds awful. No wonder you were a little out of sorts, but look… you are recovered now and perfectly fine.” Meiryn beamed at me, and I silently thanked her for backing me, for going along with my ridiculous and somewhat embarrassing excuse for looking as if I was having a major panic attack at the dining table.
The nobles all murmured in agreement.
Lorien just looked as if he was plotting murder and I had just handed him a weapon he could use against me.
I wasn’t sure how he could use the throes of my maturing process against me, but I’m sure he could find a way.
“Perhaps we should move to the adjoining room for dessert and drinks?” Sylvan regally gestured to the arch behind me, where there was a large drawing room.
I had been dreading this moment from the second my fae handmaiden had informed me of the schedule for this evening’s celebration.
It was time to set my plan in motion.
I stood, pushing my chair back, and plastered a bright smile on my face. “Thank you, everyone, for a wonderful meal.”
I led the way into the drawing room with as much grace as I could muster as my ribs blazed.
Towers of sweet things filled the side tables that stood between the tall arched windows on the right of the room, and between the double glass doors that led onto a terrace there was another table with a huge punchbowl and decanters, and small crystal glasses.
I made a beeline for the punch.
I had almost reached it when the first highborn crowded me, a couple who delighted in telling me all about their business in the district where the warehouses were located, and how they had not one but two trading halls, and several shops selling their preserves and wines.
I nodded and smiled, and made comments whenever they had to pause to breathe, showing them that I was listening.
Building trust between us.
I needed their backing.
Showing mercy to Lorien had set the groundwork for this moment and now my plan unfurled into something beautiful as everyone wanted to speak with me, and I made sure to listen and speak with them all, discussing their businesses and showing concern, or delight, or praising them.
Doing whatever I needed to do in order to gain their backing.
Gaining power with it.
I had learned from Kaeleron in more ways than just how to fight.
I had learned how to be strategic and how to survive.
I needed powerful allies, because I wasn’t strong enough to hold my position alone, not with Lorien still gunning for me and not when I had no clue about this court or how to run it.
I courted the favour of every lord and lady, and singled out the ones who felt the most powerful to me, but for every sliver of approval and promise of support I received, they wanted their share of something in return.
Whether it was power, wealth, a better position in the trading halls or endorsement of their products, they all wanted something.
I lost track of who wanted what by the time I was speaking with the fourteenth lord, so I just kept smiling and agreeing, and hoping I wasn’t promising more than one person the same thing.
The sense that everyone was playing some game or another, and that they were all three moves ahead of me, grew as I forced myself to be polite and find their attention flattering.
No matter how many times they told me, no matter what they said about me, I wasn’t like them.
I was a wolf. Still a wolf. Cunning, yes, but not like these people.
I felt there were veiled meanings in each thing they said, each offer they made, or request. Every word felt like a deception.
Or maybe I just wasn’t used to people paying so much attention to me, courting my favour and flattering me to get it, and I was letting Kael’s opinion of the seelie colour my own.
I decided I wasn’t when the two females who had whispered about him came to me.
“Are the rumours spreading through the court true?” The tallest one—the female who had listened to me and Meiryn talking—crowded me, and reached for her friend, gripping her arm as if she needed to support herself as she continued, “I have heard that the dreadful Wrathful King held you captive in his dungeon, and treated you as his slave.”
The friend piled in before I could answer. “I heard that you were more than just his slave. I heard the wretched monster did awful things to you, forcing you in that brutal way of the unseelie to do abominable things.”
My claws came out and I curled my fingers into fists, letting them bite into my palms to conceal them.
It was hard not to slash them across their throats as three more females scurried over to us, their eyes gleaming with interest, so bright with their cruel curiosity.
“Did he force himself upon you?” A third looked as if she might reach for my arm so I shot it a black look, halting her.
It didn’t stop her from casting me a horrified look that didn’t conceal her glee and her hunger for gossip as she added, “My brother said that unseelie do horrific things to captive female seelie… that they tie them up so they cannot fight and then they use their bodies as they want, and they are not gentle when they do it.”
The other four females looked delighted to learn such a thing.
“Someone said he has done it before. That he came to this court decades ago and stole females, taking them back to his castle to keep them in a harem. Does he have a harem of seelie females? Did you see it?”
I didn’t even deign that one with a look in her direction as the urge to make her shut her filthy mouth roared through me.
“Did he keep you in his bedroom? My neighbour, he is rather dim, but he said that the Wrathful King would have kept such a pretty prize as you are chained to his bed, there for him to slake his lusts whenever he should wish it.”
My temper snapped. “I am sorry to disappoint you, but he did no such thing.”
None of them looked as if they believed me.
They murmured among themselves, moving away from discussions about what Kaeleron had done to me to ‘shocking’ tales of what unseelie males had done to seelie females they had caught, and how they treated females of their own breed.
They either really believed that the unseelie were brutal and unfeeling monsters, or the masks they wore were very convincing.
“Sister.” Meiryn’s bright voice silenced the group of twittering females as they turned back to me. She smiled tightly at them. “If you would excuse us. I need to introduce my sister to someone.”
She led me away before the females could say a word.
I followed her, a strange sort of numbness filling all of me as their vicious lies of debauched unseelie rang in my ears.
They didn’t know the unseelie. I reminded myself of that.
They didn’t know anything about the people they spoke about as if they were monsters, beyond what they had been told.
They didn’t know the unseelie like I did.
Were some of them assholes? Absolutely. I mentally looked at Kalyn when I thought that.
Most of the ones I had met were nice though. No worse than an average seelie. Probably better, in fact. I wanted to scream at them that they didn’t know the first thing about the unseelie, that they didn’t know Kaeleron, and that he had been so kind to me.
That I loved him.
But that would probably get me tossed in the dungeon.
So I swiped a glass of punch on my way past and drained it in one go, steeling myself for whoever this person Meiryn wanted me to meet was. Gods, I hoped it wasn’t another gossip-hungry female.
Meiryn led me out onto the terrace.
The very empty terrace.
“You lied again,” I said as I looked at her.
She shrugged. “You looked as if you needed someone to save you.”
Twice. She had saved me twice now.
“Thanks.” I leaned my backside against the stone railing that ran at hip height around the terrace, uncaring of the drop to the courtyard beyond it, and tilted my head back as I rested my elbows on it. No stars. No night. Just that eternally blue sky. “I miss the moon.”
Meiryn chuckled. “I’ve never seen it.”