Chapter 37 Rae
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
RAE
Extricating myself from his arms, I make my escape as fast as I can, leaving him on his knees on the floor. I should be worried; I should make sure he goes back to bed. His back is a mess and he has lost a lot of blood but… I can’t.
I’m still dizzy and weak, but I need to get my bearings. I need a moment alone.
What now? I need to speak to the queen of the sea, but she never even gave any sign of hearing me every time I begged her to remove the spell from me. Why would she answer me now?
It doesn’t matter. I’ll try again. Send a message through Alys.
Time is slipping through my fingers. Today I’m expected to be at the king’s side, the thought sending sweat rolling down my back. Tomorrow already we have the second ball, and after that, the third trial.
I still haven’t managed to find out everything I need to know. I still haven’t killed the king… Meanwhile, Phaethon is occupying Jai’s body and mind, not letting me talk to him and acting as if he cares for me.
Mars. Marsyas.
During his verbal sparring with the king, I had the impression Phaethon was as confused by the king’s insinuations as I am.
Marsyas was the king in the story of Persephona and the Underworld the telchin told me. He had fought in the dragon war. He’d been… a dragon? A dragonking.
Maybe I can find the book with the original story. Somewhere. The king has a library.
And you think he will help you find the book you’re looking for? Ha.
But I can’t trust the stories the king tells me. Who says they haven’t been doctored to suit his needs and affect me in specific ways?
And what about this? “Remember that he caused your family’s demise. Your parents. Your little brother. Your people.”
No, Jai wouldn’t do this to me. Never.
Stumbling through the palace, down endless corridors, the passages swimming in my eyes, I miraculously find my way to my room. If I had taken another wrong fork in the maze, I’d have broken down and cried, I’m sure.
With trembling hands, I turn the knob and push the door open, stepping into my precarious, temporary sanctuary, a space of quiet and privacy, where I can sit down and put the pieces of this puzzle together before—
I stop in my tracks, barely one step into the room.
I’m not alone.
Someone is sitting on my bed. A woman, I realize after a few blinks to clear the haze from my vision. A familiar woman.
“Mera?” I gasp.
“Come in,” she says with a grin. “Make yourself at home. Oh, don’t look at me like that. I’m not here to kill you.”
Cautiously, eyeing her for weapons, I step all the way inside the room and close the door behind me. “Are you sure about that?”
She hums and smooths her hand over my coverlet. “Yes. Relax.” She’s dressed in a long, dark green dress and with her dark hair bound back, she looks quite pretty. “Today I’m taking it easy. A day off, if you like.”
“Funny,” I mutter.
“I’m not that bad, am I?” She leans back on her hands and lifts a brow.
“Well, forgive me for not keeping up with your change of moods,” I say, annoyed at how unnerved I am at finding her here. But of course I have no key for the lock and the idea that anyone could come in here, even when I’m asleep at night, is frankly terrifying.
“Ooh, angry, are we?”
“Just tired,” I confess.
“It’s hard to know who to trust.” She says it as if we’re agreeing on something. As if we’ve become bosom friends. Confidants.
Maybe we are in agreement. I don’t know. I can’t deny she’s right.
“I figured, us humans should stick together,” she says now.
“I thought you hated my guts.”
“Psht. So dramatic.”
I walk over to the window, reluctant to sit down. I don’t trust her smile and words, and no, it’s not a thing of beauty. It’s a thing of lessons learned.
“Is that why you’re here? To tell me this?”
“Or because I distrust the others?” She gives a little laugh. “Well, not many of us left, are there? Even if you’re in league with the finnfolk and the fae and, well… if you’re human. I mean, you did command a drak. How did you do that if you aren’t fae?”
“Am I your last resort, then?” I ask to avoid replying to her questions, to which I don’t even have all the answers. “What about Amaryll? She isn’t in league with the finnfolk and the fae. A better bet, surely.”
“Don’t push your luck.”
“My luck?” I snort, turning around. “Yes, I’ve been so lucky.”
“Those of us who made it through the trials have a lucky star.” She observes me from under her lashes, enigmatic like a cat.
It’s a sobering thought. “A guardian Eosphor?”
“Something like that. My mother always said…” She trails off, toying with a thread in her bodice. “She said we all have a guardian spirit somewhere.”
“Maybe not in this world,” I say softly.
She glances up. “You don’t believe it?”
I shrug. “I don’t know the will of the divine. The Gods have been asleep for too long. We don’t speak their language anymore.”
“Yet you keep fighting. You don’t give up. That means you believe in something.”
I shrug. I believe in revenge, and now… now Mars is back, I believe that fate has a twisted sense of humor. I may be ready to hope, to put my faith in fate again, but I’m scared.
Scared it’s all a lie. That everything will come crashing back down.
“Remember that he caused your family’s demise.”
Can’t forget that. I should be delirious with joy to find him again, to find he has feelings for me, but my mind won’t let go of this little detail.
The general of the fae king’s armies. Killing people for a hundred years. Suppressing any revolt. Carrying sacrificial victims here to die. And my family.
Not such a little detail, after all.
“I’ve seen Lynn around the palace,” I murmur. “Have you talked to her? The king said she was given to a fae lord. Is she okay?”
“Lynn? She’s dead,” Mera says dismissively, turning away from me to look out of the window.
I recoil, the shock almost physical, a blow to my stomach. “Dead? She’s not. I tell you, I saw her! The king said—”
“Dear Gods, girl, you aren’t all there in the head, are you?”
“Not all there in…?” I shake said head. “She can’t be dead. She can’t. I took her place so she could survive. How would you know anyway?”
“I saw her dead body, that’s how. Right after the first trial. A guard was dragging her by her necklace out of a room. Pearls rolling everywhere. She was gone.”
Pearls rolling everywhere…
“But I saw her,” I say stubbornly. “I saw her more than once. I…”
“Gods below, a ghost? You see ghosts now?”
“Only those who have lost someone can see them,” the page boy had said.
“Girl.” I jerk when I find Mera standing right in front of me, snapping her fingers in my face. She glares down from the one foot extra height she has on me. “I was right, wasn’t I? You’re as crazy as Athdara.”
“What?”
“I mean, you’d have to be, to work with the seafolk. They eat most of the people they bargain with.”
I step back. “Not true.”
“Oh? Got any insider information you’d like to share?”
“No. Stop inferring things you know nothing about.”
“Ouch. Look at you, all haughty. You probably think that now you have the royal mark on you, the king will marry you. But… I wouldn’t bet on it. After all, it’s not up to him. So get off your high horse, lady.”
I shake my head, bewildered, hope adding to my dizziness. “Not up to him?”
“Didn’t you know? He has to marry the winner of the games, if there is one, man or woman.”
“But… what if there are many survivors?”
She laughs. “Want to know how many won so far? How many survived? Not a single one.”
My mind won’t let this tidbit sink in. “He has to marry any survivor?”
“Yes. Like I said, don’t get your hopes up because of the mark. After all, it’s not complete.”
“I know that,” I snap, becoming irritated with her smugness. “What about Lady Selene? Isn’t she engaged to him?”
“A fae marriage is distinct from a human marriage,” she says, as if that makes sense. When I say nothing, she rolls her eyes. “Where have you been living, under a rock? The laws say that the king may take a human wife, aside from his fae queen, to mark his dominance over the human world.”
“A plaything,” I whisper, bitterness coating my tongue.
“Why, did you expect anything else? That perhaps he fell in love with you as you dragged your filthy feet over his marble floors?”
“He lied to me,” I whisper, furious at myself for falling for the deception, for not recognizing the real Mars right away. “And I believed him. I let him put that mark on me.”
“A mark only takes if you accept it.” She frowns. “And you did.”
My blood is sluggish in my veins. I feel like I’ve been plunged underwater, to the dark depths of the ocean where everything slows down, even time. “Like a mate bond… but we made no promise. Didn’t exchange blood.”
“An incomplete bond still has power. Has he used your connection?”
He can compel me to do things. I don’t say it, though. And I don’t say that it’s his insurance against Jai hurting him, both of which facts would give her more ammunition against me, making me seem a pawn of the fae.
The exact thing she has been accusing me of all along.
Even a tentative, temporary truce is better than having to fight all the time, although I shouldn’t stop looking over my shoulder.
“You should be careful,” she says. “Not everyone is who they seem.”
“Don’t worry,” I mutter. “I didn’t buy your friendship speech, either.”
She bares her teeth in a sharp grin. “Good. And be wary of Amaryll.” She turns away from the window and me, heading to the door. “Don’t trust her.”
“Why not?”
“Because, girl, she has her eye on the prize. She wants that marriage. And now you have the king’s mark on you, you’re her target.”