19. The Wretchedness of Inevitability
19. THE WRETCHEDNESS OF INEVITABILITY
RUSH
The queen had stretched the days of the Nuptialis Probatio into a second week, and I found myself yet again in the Great Salon of Delicacies waiting for another of her events to begin. Not even the last. The third of four. All her fancy parties and gatherings—attendance mandatory of course—had become a special kind of torture.
If it wasn’t her attention on me, then it was that of the many ladies who continued to hope they’d become the next crown princess. The mere thought of any one of them as my wife felt insidiously wrong in the same manner the queen herself did: a depravity of the natural order of things.
Now I better understood why. It wasn’t just that these females were simpering and foolish, vacuous and trite, conniving, cruel, and catty. It was that they weren’t Elowyn—the one woman with whom I’d been destined to share my life from before either of our essences incarnated into these bodies.
A female other than Elowyn was the only possible result of the Fae Heir Trials at this point. The queen had ordered the dark doorways of the first event dismantled even though Elowyn hadn’t come back. Perhaps especially because she’d stepped through the threshold never to return.
Though I asked, the queen refused to tell me where that middle doorway led. She brushed off the specifics, claiming only that all the other contestants had been able to complete the challenge. It wasn’t her fault Elowyn was incompetent.
With a contented smile that made my insides churn, the queen had declared Elowyn disqualified from the trials for leaving the premises—a freedom not even the queen of Embermere had, she’d said. According to the queen, Elowyn had violated the terms of the Fae Heir Trials—and so she could never become my bride. It didn’t matter that Elowyn hadn’t chosen to abandon the trials.
With Azariah off hunting for her, and he the only one with a connection to the trials’ magic that might supersede the queen’s, there was no one left to contradict her. Even if the pegicorn had remained behind, it was possible he wouldn’t have argued against the point anyway. Azariah was smart enough to recognize a losing battle.
My brothers and I had been fighting a losing war against her for too many years. Many of us fae had— without a single substantial sign of progress for our many, many losses.
The late afternoon sunlight filtered through the wall of windows, casting the room in a pretty golden glow. How ill-fitting that I’d grown to detest this great salon practically more than any other space in the palace. The entire wing set aside for this stage of the trials, actually. I was so over the contrived artifice of the competition that I’d begun to wonder if the fae dungeon might be a better place—until the memory of a gaunt, haunted Gadiel rapidly dispelled the notion.
The queen sat ahead of me in a smaller version of her usual throne, positioned directly across from a stage that had been erected in the middle of the ample room—this time not sectioned into parts. Layers of flowing light-gray, lilac-tinted gossamer were drawn around the large platform. Braque stood obediently at the queen’s side, slightly behind her.
The contestants were divided into two rows of high-backed, ornately carved chairs behind mine. Their stares were warm along my face and body, but I refused to glance their way, not even at the less threatening ones among them such as Octavia Lily Rose. Merely studying them—or the queen, always the queen—made me burn with the wish to abandon my body, leave it for some other poor sod to occupy.
Counting Elowyn, the competitors had winnowed from the initial twenty-two to fourteen. Even Natania, Coretta, and Malina, the most arrogant and obnoxious of the bunch, were nervous in a way they hadn’t been at the start of the Nuptialis Probatio. Then, they’d seemed eager. Excited even.
They’d obviously been delusional.
They could harbor no great delusions now. The queen didn’t bother pretending she minded when any of them died—or disappeared into magical doorways. Neither did she bother to pretend she’d stop any of them from killing off their competition. She stopped short of highlighting the glaring possibility that she might herself be behind the murders.
Seated in anticipation of the queen’s arrival, the ladies had grown silent when she entered and claimed her throne without comment. Sigmund had recovered from the thrashing he’d received, courtesy of the queen attempting to keep Elowyn from the trials, and had announced the queen’s entrance. I’d expected him to tell us more, but the tall, thin man had only stood off to one side, his stare fixed on a point far away.
After a long wait and no sign that this third event was to start anytime soon, the buzz of light chatter began behind me. After more waiting, its volume rose.
Until the queen turned in her throne. Not to censure any of them. Not to feign interest or friendship, to play at being “one of the ladies”—a ruse only an idiot would believe.
But to smile at me.
The conversation behind me ceased abruptly.
My blood chilled by several degrees.
It was the queen’s I caught you being bad smile, and it spread as she pointed it solely at me .
“Rush,” she said in that smooth voice that disturbed me for its outward pleasantness. “Come. Join me. Keep me entertained while we wait.”
Wait for what? I wondered warily even as I couldn’t help but notice her emphasis on the one word and what it might mean.
Since I’d denied her several nights ago, nothing had happened. I’d braced myself for the worst, even my death. But she’d done nothing to punish me for denying her my performance or company.
Nor had she mentioned that someone released the parvnits that were the subject of her exhibit in the Silver Salon of Rarities and Curiosities.
After a brief moment to steel myself, I stood and walked toward her with an overwhelming sense that I approached my doom. The queen never forgot to punish any transgression, no matter how insignificant.
Though I was mere steps from her, and covered the distance quickly, it was sufficient time for a lifetime of regret to wash over me.
What had I been thinking by refusing her? So many fae depended on me to redirect the tides and spare the Mirror World from her darkness. Those I cared for most would be the prime targets of her vengeance. How many of them would I let down this day because I hadn’t been able to stomach her intentions for me?
West had lost Ramana to our cause. Years later, when he thought I wasn’t paying attention, the death of his mate still etched sorrow deep into his face and dimmed the light in his eyes. To save my sister, West would have lathered his naked body in oil, pranced around a chicken coop rolling himself in feathers, and then danced his fucking heart out for the queen and anyone else she invited to the show. He would have hated every moment of his indignity, but he would have done it fucking gladly to save his mate, to share one more day with her.
By dragon’s veins, he’d do it to spend one more minute with her.
Had I condemned my own mate before I even got the chance to know her? To remember how she felt wrapped in my arms?
Already half decided to swallow my own dignity and try to smooth things over with the queen, I bowed to her. My lips were parted for whatever supplication would slip past them. I didn’t want to think about what I’d say in advance. Saying it at all would be awful enough.
With my head tipped down, I absently studied her full skirts: a silver, gauzy material that draped across a small dais.
As if I’d already loosed the words, I anticipated the judgment of others:
Rush Vega, the drake who was so strong and determined that he’d returned hope to an entire clan— nay, to an entire kingdom—prostrating himself before the queen so as to become her willing whore. And he showed such promise, too…
The condemnation rankled, squeezing my lungs.
I rose. “Your Majesty, I?— ”
“Rush,” she interrupted. “Sit.”
I glanced around. There was no seat near her beyond the one I’d vacated, and no servant hurried to fetch it.
“Of course, Your Majesty. Where would you like me to sit?”
Her smile was there again. Now serpentine, it reminded me of a snake sunning itself as it digested recently devoured prey.
“At my feet,” she said.
Like your whore? I thought bitterly, now pressing my lips shut.
With another bow of my head, I dipped to sit at the edge of her dais, as far away as I could get on the ledge that only extended a few feet to either side of her throne. My fingers clenched with the instinctive desire to reach for the throwing blades I’d concealed along the inside of my waistband. The knives were short—yet long enough to slice her throat and carve through her chest until I could scoop out her heart and crush it to mush in my bare hands.
For the umpteenth time, I lamented that the queen couldn’t die by ordinary means. Not by my hand nor blade. Also not for the first time, I questioned the land’s magic, that it would empower her to continue suppressing her subjects. Didn’t the hereditary royal magic sense her wickedness? She was nothing like the elven rulers of Faerie. History painted them as strong and fierce while also being honorable and respectful of all life in their realm .
The queen flicked a hand and a goblin materialized with the now familiar silver goblet on a platter held high above his head. As she sipped, the already blood-red of her lips darkened.
The hand nearest me beckoned in a come-hither crook. “Come closer, Rush.” Her voice slithered like that same snake savoring its meal.
I swallowed thickly, hating myself for it when her gaze tracked the bob of my throat. I slid next to the perimeter of her vast skirt.
Her fingers wrapped around my hair at my nape and dragged me toward her, until my ass pressed against her feet beneath her dress.
She yanked on my hair and held it so that my head leaned against her thighs. “There. That’s better.” My eyes pointed up at her face.
Unflinching, I stared back at her.
Fuck her . All the fae counting on me would just have to find the way to forgive me—or not.
Because fuck her .
I pressed my lips shut so tightly I felt the tendons in my neck protruding.
“Oooooh,” she cooed sickeningly. “If looks could kill, I do say yours would do the job.”
She laughed, a delicate roll that would have been pleasantly feminine if not for its source. My blood grew colder.
“But you can’t kill me, can you?” she said. Our audience was loud in its rapt silence.
She released my hair to stroke her fingers along my forehead. This time the tendons in my neck bulged with the effort it took not to flinch and yank my head off her lap and gouge out her eyeballs.
Lightly, she began scratching her fingernails across the crown of my head. When they caught on any of my many small braids, she didn’t tug but merely gently moved to another spot. The action was almost … tender.
She looked away from me, toward the females. My stare had no choice but to remain on her face.
“Very few dare say no to me,” she said in a conversational tone that was more dangerous than yelling. “Even less so, anyone still living.” She chuckled forebodingly. “The reasons, I presume, are obvious. My kingdom responds only to strength. And so I can’t be weak.”
She glanced down at me. “Can I, Rush?”
Her scratches began to dig into my scalp. “No, I cannot,” she continued without my reply. “Therefore, I am not weak, nor will I ever be.”
Braque leaned forward. “Of course my queen will never be weak. She’s the strongest ruler Embermere has ever had.”
Her fingers stilled for a moment as she seemed to consider how to react to Braque’s obsequiousness. Eventually she resumed her scratching. Gone was the misplaced tenderness. Now her fingers felt like claws grinding into my scalp so deeply I suspected she’d draw blood.
“Thank you, Braque,” she finally offered. “ At least some of you haven’t forgotten what it means to be the monarch of Embermere. Ruler of all the Mirror World. Come to the right, the honor, the duty by blood. I am the descendant of Prince Borromeo. Of King Spiro the second. Of the royal bloodline of the elves of Faerie.”
Her fingers wound around my hair. She pulled them so tight to my scalp that I wondered if she meant to rip out the strands.
The sky-blue of her eyes bore into mine. “You, Rush Vega, are not. You do not have the right to behave as a future king of Embermere unless I grant you that right. Which means that you do not have the right to deny me a single fucking thing.”
My breath hitched. She tightened her hold.
Since my arrival at court I’d heard the woman say a number of awful, hideous things, so foul I did my best to forget them the moment they passed her lips. But not once could I recall an instance when she’d used the “coarse language of the commoner,” as I’d heard her refer to the word fuck . I remembered the incident well for its blatant irony: she allowed her dancers to finger-fuck her upon her dais, in open view of any reveler at her parties sober enough to pay attention.
That the queen would use the commoner’s language now could mean nothing good.
If this was to be the appointed moment of my death, then I’d go out tearing her to pieces as best I could—protections from the land’s magic be damned. I might not be able to kill her, but I’d bet I could make her hurt .
She twisted her grip and my eyes watered on their own, when I’d never approve of such a display of vulnerability.
“You ruined my plans,” she hissed. “And you destroyed the exhibit I went to quite a bit of effort to arrange. The parvnits aren’t easy to pin down.”
With a sudden amused arch of her brow, she chuckled, as if her unintentional pun were a delightful surprise.
“After the Nuptialis Probatio ended, I was going to open up the exhibit for the rest of my court. It would have been the talk of the moon cycle.”
She held out her goblet for a goblin to retrieve as she ran her tongue along her teeth. Coated in pink, they appeared unreasonably sharp from my vantage point.
“You denied me that too,” she said.
“They would’ve been dead by then,” I countered.
If she was pissed, then she likely would kill me and restart the Fae Heir Trials, selecting a more pliable candidate to become the next crowned prince. No reason to hold my tongue anymore.
The freedom to reveal my true thoughts bubbled inside me, its flavor unfamiliar after nearly four years trapped in the palace, unable to leave unless she said so.
“No one would’ve wanted to see tortured, dead parvnits,” I added.
Her fingers gentled, again a disconcerting caress along my battered scalp. I could feel her smearing the blood around .
“That’s where you’re wrong again,” she said, sounding as if her thoughts had traveled somewhere faraway. “Death can be very beautiful.”
“That’s only ‘cause you aren’t talking about your own.”
Her stare whipped back to mine. “Of course I’m not.”
My heart stuttered as instinct warned me of a deeper meaning to her statement.
“Everything and everyone dies,” I insisted, needing to be certain about this.
Her responding grin was both simultaneously striking and hideously ugly. A juxtaposition of contrasts I’d never be able to reconcile.
“Not everyone,” she said.
My heart thudded. “What?” I croaked, swallowing around the awkward bend of my neck over her lap.
She beamed. “I can no longer die, my darling. In a way, I have you to thank for my newfound immortality.”
What? How? Why? The questions tore through me in a burst of anguish I didn’t voice. She can’t not die. By a dragon’s doom, she simply must be able to die someway .
“I’ve given you everything you could ever need,” she said, looking up in a daze as if she were telling a story, not condemning an entire world to a slow downward spiral of death and decay, sentencing us forever to her darkness.
“You’re the perfect specimen in every way,” she droned on. “A magnificent manifestation of form and function. You couldn’t be more beautiful.” She trailed off for a few moments before resuming her languid rubbing of my head. “You’re a formidable warrior. A superb leader and drake by all accounts. The perfect choice to be my successor.
“When your parents asked me to accept your life in service to me in exchange for the care of your sister, I didn’t hesitate. It was an opportunity I seized. I could see how much you loved the girl. You’d do anything I said.”
I wondered if she remembered we had an audience. The room beyond us was so silent I would have thought us alone. I couldn’t even make out Braque’s winded breathing, the evidence of his fondness for overindulgence.
“But you betrayed me. I offered you chance after chance to prove that selecting you as my heir was the correct path. Repeatedly, you proved that the only person I could trust to rule this kingdom is myself.”
No mention of the king. It was possible she had entirely forgotten the pretense of their joint rule.
Scratch, scratch, scratch , her fingers rubbed along my head while I sought for something, anything, I could say to sway her. Nothing came to mind.
Her voice was intoned with the wretchedness of inevitability.
“So I found the way to live forever,” she concluded peppily.
Someone in our audience sucked in a soft gasp. The queen’s head snapped in her direction to zero in on the poor female, whoever she was.
After the queen glared for several terrifying seconds, she gazed down at me again. “So you see, Rush. I have you to thank. The kingdom will thank you too. Now it will only ever know my rule.”
This was an outcome worse than death. This was a result I’d never even considered in my worst nightmares.
An undying queen who brought only suffering to the fae. This was the nightmare?—
She shoved me forward with a jerk. My brow slammed into the armrest of her throne, a carved dragon claw ripping open the flesh. Blood trickled down the side of my face, seeping into my hair from the earlier scrapes.
The queen’s nostrils flared—at the scent of it, I thought with a plummeting certainty.
“Go,” she commanded. “Take your seat again. I don’t want you to miss the show.”
I stood rapidly so as to remove my unprotected back from her reach but then hesitated, studying her, searching for signs that she was telling the truth, that she really couldn’t be killed by any means now, not even magic. Not even the continual transference of power that had governed the Mirror World for thousands of years.
“Take your seat now,” she repeated.
Without any idea what to say or do to ameliorate the clusterfuck, I did as she asked. I sank onto the seat I’d only vacated a few minutes before as if I were now a thousand times weightier.
She didn’t watch my retreat to see how I obeyed. Instead she kept her attention straight ahead.
Without deigning to so much as look at the princess-hopefuls, she announced to the empty stage: “The Fae Heir Trials are now concluded.”
Unintentionally, I locked eyes with Sigmund, who stood beyond her line of sight. His long face, always stoic and dispassionate no matter the circumstances, was slack-jawed. His eyes were wide with what I guessed was the same sort of terror I was experiencing.
My attention seemed to jar him from his shock, and he quickly looked away.
“Thus, when Azariah returns with my prize”—
Elowyn. She means Elowyn , I thought with renewed horror.
“He’ll announce the magic binding all of us dissolved. And the rule of Embermere will continue as it was always intended.”
No mention of her precious deceased Prince Heir Saturn, I couldn’t help but notice.
My poor friend. He hadn’t stood a chance against his mother. He’d lived on borrowed time since the moment he first drew breath outside her putrid womb.
“You’ll all be free to return to your usual lives. Here at court,” the queen added, in case any of us dared believe we’d be truly free .
“None of you have proven you deserve it. But some of you at least have not betrayed me. So, to mark the end of the trials, I’ve arranged for one final bit of entertainment.”
“So generous of my queen,” Braque said.
She didn’t so much as glance at him. He pouted before composing himself and patting his potions satchel as if to reassure himself that he, too, was powerful.
The queen swiveled in her throne to single me out with another of her creepy grins. “Actually, I’ll rephrase. The entertainment I’ve arranged is exactly what you deserve.”
Mutely, I stared back at her until she again faced forward. Then my heart resumed its beating, pounding too fast.
By a dragon’s spilled blood, what had I done?
In a furious flash, the faces of my loved ones flitted by, too fast for me to hold on to:
West, Hiroshi, Ryder.
Larissa.
Elowyn.
Perhaps my parents.
Ramana, already gone.
Or someone like Gadiel.
Elowyn. By the Ethers, it would be Elowyn.
Ivar had found her. The queen would try to kill her in front of me. I’d try to kill the queen, and then Elowyn and I would both be dead.
My mate would be gone before?—
The sunlight beyond the wall of windows suddenly dimmed—the queen’s power, I realized. She’d never before been powerful enough to affect the weather without extreme displays of emotion.
Then again, she’d never been fucking immortal before.
Lumoons surged to life in bobbing lines around the stage.
The lilac-gray gossamer fell from where it had floated, sliding into silent heaps on the floor.
And there, at the center of the wooden platform, where no one had been minutes before … stood my sister.
The one I hadn’t yet let down.
Naked and trembling, she stood with bloodstained rings pierced through swollen, red nipples. Feathers of the trufy bird—perhaps even the identical ones the queen had sent me—hung from the rings to cup Larissa’s small breasts.
Not even a single feather, however, concealed the rose hair that marked the apex of her thighs. The queen hadn’t afforded my sweet, gentle sister even that modesty.
No, I corrected. The queen hadn’t afforded me that modesty. What she’d done to my ethereal-like sister was because of me .
Larissa was paying the price for my fruitless rebellion.
I didn’t think. I stood and stalked toward the stage.
“No,” the queen commanded.
But I didn’t stop.
“Return to your seat. ”
I didn’t.
I climbed onto that stage and took my shaking sister into my arms. Larissa pressed her face to my shoulder and sobbed.
“Fine,” the queen snapped. “Have it your way. I think I’ll enjoy this turn of events quite a lot better, actually.
“Settle in, ladies. This’ll be a show to remember.”
I hugged Larissa to me even harder. But already I knew I’d failed to protect her in the way that mattered most.