Chapter 33
Thirty-Three
Icould barely fathom this most recent secret of Fieran’s. “Were you going to mention the Fae Queen was your mother?”
How had I been so stupid? Fear had seemed to see himself as a king, so I thought Ander called him a prince to mock his arrogance. I wanted to slap myself almost as much as I wanted to slap him.
We were alone in an enormous room. The queen’s castle, like the rest of the city, felt as if it were an organic thing, but everything here felt wrong somehow.
We were surrounded by towering rose quartz walls, veined with gold, and I could’ve sworn the walls pulsed.
I only caught their shivers out of the corner of my eye, but it made me want to run.
Fieran’s hands were bound, though he looked relaxed and at ease even now, as if he was merely going along with the pretense that he could be held. “I heavily implied it. I told you I could protect you from anyone but her.”
He was so full of bullshit. I wasn’t sure if he was worse when he was lying or when he was feeding me those endless half-truths. “That’s not a very comforting thought, given where we are now. What does she want with you?”
He gave me a look that said I knew the answer.
“Fuck, Fieran,” I said as the truth set in. “What does she want from me?”
“She wants to know what I want from you.”
“But I don’t know anything!”
“You’re welcome. I’ve been keeping you in the dark for your own benefit.”
“I cannot tell you how much I want to take my chance to punch you now while your hands are bound.”
“You’re welcome to try,” he assured me. “I’m happy to take any opportunity to train you for the arena.”
I turned away in exasperation. “How do we get out of this?”
He shrugged one shoulder. “Something will come to me. She thinks I’m scheming for her throne.”
“But you aren’t?”
“No.” He shook his head. “I don’t want a throne. I want freedom for shifters, Fae, and mortals alike. She should know that by now.”
He raised his voice on the last sentence, looking around meaningfully.
When I looked up, the queen was on her throne. My stomach dropped.
Neither the queen nor throne had been there a heartbeat before, and the entire image was terrifying. Beautiful though she was, she sat in a throne woven of gold-dipped bones.
Enormous bones.
Dragon bones.
She’d heard all of our conversation, hadn’t she? Playing it back now, I was sure Fieran had been manipulating it to make sure I confessed my ignorance.
He was trying to make her believe I knew nothing.
“Little mortal girl,” she said with a purr.
The way she looked at me reminded me of the Fae who had stripped my magic, and once-cold fear, dormant for almost twenty years, rippled through me. I found myself frozen, the same as I had been when I was a child screaming for help that never arrived.
“Don’t make any deals with her,” Fieran told me, calmly but swiftly. “If you make her promises—even if you think your language is carefully crafted, if you think you’re clever—you will be outwitted—”
She raised a hand, fluttering a few fingers.
Fieran flew across the room and a cage grew around him. I could see him from here, but nothing he said; his words were being drowned by some enchantment.
“Neither of us can trust him,” the queen said, which was a strong opening move, saying the one thing I would be hard-pressed to argue. “Are you really ignorant of his plot?”
She raised her hand to summon me closer. Since I didn’t think I would survive being flown around the room as well as Fieran, I rapidly headed up the stairs to the dais where her throne sat.
“Close enough,” she said, holding her palm out toward me, her nose wrinkling faintly as if there was something offensive about my mortal form.
I stopped, gripping my hands tightly in front of me, my posture stiff. “I don’t know what Fieran wants with me. He won’t tell me.”
She studied my face. “But you are mortal and yet…dragon-marked?”
I nodded.
“Dreadful. Who are your parents?”
Why did I feel she was asking questions knowing my answers?
“My mother is no one,” I said. “Just a mortal. Not special. I don’t know who my father is.”
“Your mother must be special to have caught the eye of a shifter.” She was watching me carefully. “Do you look like her?”
The question was so unexpected that I stumbled. “A little.”
Truth be told, I didn’t like how much of my mother I saw when I looked into the mirror.
“Did your mother ever tell you how she met this shifter?”
I shook my head.
“Do you know anything about her life before you?” At my slow response, she clucked her tongue. “Children are so ungratefully uncurious about their parents’ lives. As if your existence is the only part of ours that matters.”
I wasn’t going to argue with the Fae Queen, who I was beginning to suspect might be slightly mad as well as terrifying, ancient, and powerful.
Though to be fair, I wasn’t surprised that anyone who spent much time around Fieran might be driven mad.
“She never wanted to talk about my father.”
“She didn’t tell you much, but you’re a clever little thing. Fieran wouldn’t like you otherwise. What assumptions did you draw?”
I stared at her, reluctant to answer.
“Speak,” she said, and I found myself eager to speak.
I knew I was enchanted, but I couldn’t stop myself; the dreadful truth I couldn’t control myself was a worm that writhed under my thoughts as the words spilled out. “I’m afraid he might have forced my mother. Or at least been cruel to her. She’s afraid I’ll find him.”
“Well.” She leaned forward, studying my face again. She had a disquieting way of looking as if she were seeing directly into one’s soul. Fieran had inherited that from her. “I can tell you a few shifters you should visit to see if you make them nervous with your existence.”
“My mother told me to stay away from him.”
“But your mother, as you said, is just an ordinary mortal. And I’m giving you a different set of advice.” There was a distinct hiss in her voice with the word advice, and the stone walls seemed to pulse closer, as if they were narrowing.
She leaned back, and I had the sense of my tongue being my own again, thick and clumsy. “I would like information from you, Cara. About your father. About Fieran’s plans. And then I would like to send you home, where you can’t possibly be useful to my traitor son.”
“I would like to go home.” My voice was fervent. The desire to run was alive in my every tense muscle.
"But Fieran has you under his control in some way?"
I nodded.
“He usually does,” she muttered. “What is it you desire, Cara?”
Was it greedy if I tried to get both Tay’s life and Lidi’s magic?
“My brother, Tay, is suffering from a curse. Fieran has him in the healing sleep in his home.”
“He has your brother hostage. And he’s been pretending to find a cure for you, yes?”
I stumbled on that word, pretending. My stomach dropped as if I were falling, but I couldn’t believe a word she spoke. I trusted her even less than her son.
“Do you really think that my son—the second highest figure in our kingdom—couldn’t get a curse healed for your brother if he wished?”
She’d already forgotten the name of my brother, I was sure of it. But that didn’t mean she wouldn’t help him so I’d be loyal to her and not to Fieran. “Will you help my brother?”
“If you do as I ask, I will free him from his curse. He will know peace again, and so will you—as long as I know peace, for I fear my son’s most recent antics.”
“I have another request.” I hadn’t made any promises yet, and after Fieran’s warnings, I would do my best not to.
“Yes, mortal?” There was a dangerous note in her voice, as if I were testing her patience.
“Fieran took my sister’s magic.” She might be more inclined to help me if it would undermine Fieran. “I’d like her magic restored.”
Her brows arched, the silence between us hanging like a cage.
She made a flippant but elegant gesture with one long hand. “She’d have to come here. I don’t travel for mortals. And to restore her magic, there are steps that must be taken. You would have to do the work.”
“Thank you.” I felt a rush of hope, though it was mixed with a sharp sense of misgiving. Like a breath of air filling my lungs, with a dagger still pointed at my throat. “I would do anything to help her.”
She smiled faintly, as if she knew that were true, and something disquieting wormed through my stomach. Make no promises.
“You want me to spy for you. But Fieran will guess our conversation.”
“He will know,” she admitted. “He’ll tell you what he wants you to pass to me. But I’ve had years of practice sorting Fieran’s lies.”
Why hadn’t she just killed Fieran if the two were involved in some struggle for the throne?
She drummed her fingertips on the arms of that throne. “You’ll tell me the lies he’s spinning for you. He might even ask you to lie to me; tell me what those lies are and what you come to understand from being in his circle.”
Her lips pursed with amusement, as if she had thought of a joke. “I don’t trust that rotted boy of mine, but I do trust his judgment of you. Hopefully he’s right, and you are more clever than you appear.”
“It’s difficult for me to leave the grounds. How will I get that information to you?”
Ander’s face rose to my mind. He and Fieran were at odds. Was he a servant of the queen? Did she have other spies amid the shifters?
“Clever girl,” she said, though her tone suggested I was clever for a mortal. “Don’t be afraid. I’ll find a way to bring you back to me when I wish.”
Those words definitely did make me afraid. “I want to go home. I’ll do whatever it will take to put my family back together.”
She tilted her head, studying me. “You’ve been so careful to neither lie nor to promise, Cara.”
Something in her words chilled me.
“But you’re lying now. Do you even realize it?” She seemed amused. “Mortals lie to themselves so often. That’s why they are so vulnerable to the Fae’s deceits.”
I couldn’t think of an answer.
“I want you to miss the Recruits’ Trials,” she said. “If you are claimed by a dragon, you cannot ever go home. You understand that, don’t you?”
I nodded.
“Find an excuse to escape it. Fieran might not trust you afterward, but he won’t easily relinquish you to me, either. He’ll want to forgive your sins.”
“What happens after I miss the Trials? Will I burn? With the curse?”
“You’re mortal,” she said, as if I had forgotten. “The curse won’t trouble you.”
Either she was lying about that—happy to see me burn rather than help Fieran—or he was.
“And afterward, Fieran…”
“Fieran will either keep you with him—and we’ll be a step closer to unraveling his plans—or he will send you home, as you wish.”
“But my brother—”
She interrupted. “If you destroy my son’s dreams, I will give you back your own.”
She seemed bored, dismissive. I nodded, taking a step backward, feeling a rise of warning.
I had to get out of here. “May I go? And take Fieran with me?”
“Gods, yes. I’ve no use for him.”
The next thing I knew, I was surrounded by Fae guards. Soon after that, Fieran and I were being marched out of the castle and down city streets. Their boots clattered around us, disrupting the still and the magic of the night.
I caught glimpses of Fieran’s shadowed face in the torchlight, but the guards were between us. He seemed dark and regal, rising above them even when they had him in chains.
The queen had spared us for now, but whatever mercy this was, it wasn’t meant to last.