Chapter 48
Forty-Eight
The next morning, I managed to slip up the stairs to Bismyth while everyone else was going down.
I stopped at the doorway; the door stood open, but it was still closed to me.
Rees, however, had no such compunctions and darted inside. I grabbed for him, but he streaked off, and I winced, knowing I’d be face-to-face with Fieran soon. As much as I wanted that, I also dreaded it.
Asrael appeared a moment later, Rees wrapping around his legs like a looming shadow that also happened to be desperate for love. “What are you doing here?”
He sounded so cold that it scraped at my nerves. I hadn’t thought Asrael and I were friends, but I hadn’t suspected that his tolerance of me was solely for Fieran’s sake, either.
“I need to speak to Fear.” My voice faltered, mortal-weak in the face of the shifter’s anger. The sound of it irritated me, so I lifted my chin and snapped, “Fieran already has one dog at his heels to snap at anyone who tries to enter his territory. Surely he doesn’t need you too.”
Asrael favored me with a long, unreadable look. “How is Ander?”
“He’s fine.”
His eyes narrowed knowingly, as if he’d heard more than I meant to reveal. “Your presence is missed.”
My head snapped up. I studied him, confused. He’d sounded irritated by my presence a moment ago. Perhaps this was just Asrael, unreadable and cold.
“Stay,” he ordered. I wasn’t sure if he was addressing me, or Rees, or both of us equally.
He turned and disappeared into the back. I offered Reese the back of my hand to sniff, but he lunged happily past my fingers and butted his head into my thigh. I knelt and began to pet him.
Fear strode out of the back. He was bare to the waist, wearing fitted pants; he’d obviously come from training, since he glistened with sweat.
Unappealing. It was deeply unappealing, the way his skin shone over those chiseled muscles, the power of his arms across his chest, the ridges of his abs…and worst of all, the bright golden eyes in the cruelly handsome face.
That swell of joy seeing him was a traitor.
Fuck.
Despite everything…
I pushed the thought away.
“Come on in. The door’s always open to you.” Fieran held the door to the hall beyond the common room open, and as if he could decipher my unraveling thoughts about his cool reaction to my betrayal, he added, “Little traitor.”
“We’ve talked before about your terrible choice in nicknames.”
“You’re still my Never,” he promised me as I followed his broad, tattooed shoulders into his room.
Warmth lit in my chest, and fuck that. “I don’t have time to banter with you. I have to get downstairs for training.”
“Of course. Sit and tell me what you need.” Fear settled himself into the window seat and gave me a distinctly devilish look.
“I’m worried about Tay.”
He looked pointedly. I sighed and joined him, sitting on the edge nearest the room. The breeze coming in through the window teased my hair, lifting it wildly around my face. The thought of falling into that wind, feeling my wings spread, and being buoyed up was both heady and terrifying.
Fieran leaned back against the other arched side of the window, looking comfortable, as if he owned the skies. I supposed he did. “What’s wrong with Tay?”
“I think he’s enchanted by the queen.”
He nodded. “She seeks to control you through him. It doesn’t surprise me that she has her hooks in him, in case you try to send him away.”
“We should have gotten him out of here the moment that she healed him—”
“Do you think there was a moment when she had healed him but not yet enchanted him?” he asked.
I tucked my hair behind my ears, chewing my lower lip.
“Not every turn of fortune or fate is somehow your fault.” He sounded weary, and I wasn’t sure if he meant the words for himself just as much as me. “You’ve done the best you could. You saved his life. That was your wish.”
The memory of the wishflower flared to mind. Save my brother’s life and my sister’s magic. “Is his life truly saved if he’s in the queen’s clutches?”
“We are all in the queen’s clutches,” he reminded me. “You saved him. You saved yourself, surviving the Trials—”
“We’ll see if I’m claimed.”
“I have no doubt a dragon will be drawn to your bright flame. Mortal though you might be.”
I scoffed at the flattery. “I’ve been through the book of Clan Amber dragons. There are all these stories of bravery and fighting from the First Wars through now. But I’ve seen no reference to a mortal.”
I leapt up and crossed to his bookshelves. He rested his wrist on one curled knee, watching me with an utterly relaxed expression.
“There is no compendium that will mention a mortal,” he told me. “If it ever happened, it would have been stricken from history.”
“Half the kingdom believes you can make mortals into dragon shifters.” I might believe it too. There were so many stories about why Fear had brought me into the Trials.
“People believe what they wish. For instance, you believe you can unravel my secrets without wearing my ring. But that would be dangerous for us both.”
I shoved his books back into the bookcase. Sometimes I was tempted to marry the bastard. “I’ve read enough fairy tales to know marrying a Fae is always a trick.”
“I cannot tell you what I’m plotting, Cara.” His voice, for once, sounded genuine, and when I turned to face him, he looked serious. “But I promise you that my manipulations serve your desires.”
I was sure by some complicated logic, he believed that was true.
“Tell me something else, then.” I challenged him, moving back to the window seat. “Tell me what happened between you and Ander.”
I had Ander’s version of the story. I was curious what Fieran would admit.
“Talking about Ander? How dull.” He gave me a long, surly look. I gave him one right back until he nodded once. “All right.”
I sat opposite him, pulling my feet up onto the window seat to mirror his posture—though I kept a death grip on the edge of the seat. The wind seemed to tug at me, as if it were determined to rip me out of his room, but then it died down. His tousled dark hair fell back into place.
For a few long beats, there was silence between us. A muscle in his cheek jumped.
Fieran had never before looked wary to me. As if he were afraid of being hurt.
“My mother has never told me who my father is.” He spoke the words suddenly, swiftly.
A decision made and executed with his usual casual violence.
“She knows how much that matters to me, and that would be reason enough to keep her secrets, but perhaps there are other reasons.
Perhaps she killed him after breeding, as do some monsters.
“At any rate, I wonder how it is that she came to be pregnant by a shifter, because my mark came as a surprise to her. She fantasized about drowning me, but the magic protects heirs and their royal parents from violence against each other.”
“How did you know that she wanted you dead?” I pictured some horrible servant telling the tiny prince that he was never wanted.
“She told me.” His words were calm, his face carved from stone.
There was a roil of emotion beneath that facade.
I was sure of it. “Since she could not kill me, she raised me in neglect. A prince in name only, unable to read, dressed in filth and ignorance. She did not send me to the academy. She did not allow me tutors or training.”
He glanced out the window, as if looking toward the academy just down the sharp line of the coast. “I stole or lied or charmed the servants for what I needed, so in that way, she allowed me my most necessary education. And then, one day, she brought home Ander.”
His voice twisted. “She killed his parents. I’m sure of it. But he adored her then. Not enough, though, to obey her. He used to be strong and fierce and determined to do what was right.”
“You were friends.”
“We were brothers. There is no one I have loved more until—” He interrupted himself.
“I would like to pretend otherwise, but I was a child. I was desperate for connection. Ander had spent his life being cared for by his parents, by his fathers’ shifters.
He was well trained and full of honorable ideals.
My mother tried to convince him I was an evil, depraved little thing. ”
His face was shadowed, lost in the past. “But Ander pitied me. He shared everything good the queen gave him, and he shared my punishments by throwing himself onto my side. He trained me. Everything I am today, I owe to Ander.”
I searched his face, looking for the glib words that would undercut that truth. But he didn’t say anything. “What went wrong between you?”
His lips twisted. “I tried to take the throne. He was at my side, as always, until he betrayed me.”
The words slid into my gut like a blade. Then, slowly, skepticism won over. “Would he tell me the same version?”
“He would tell you I failed him,” he told me. “The queen rooted out everyone who served my plot and murdered them. The remnants of his family. The knights who had trained him. The woman he loved.”
He raked his hand through his hair. For a second, I thought he wasn’t going to speak, and then he confessed, “I had been so unloved, and he let me into his family as if we really were brothers—as if they had been mine all along and we were both coming home. I needed them, and so they fought with me. For me.”
I flinched at the pain in his voice. I wanted to reach out and touch him, and I didn’t dare, and then after a second, I did. I laid my hand on his knee, and he looked up at me with a grim smile touching his lips to acknowledge the touch.
“He tried to save them. It was too late. He has been the queen’s lapdog ever since.”
There had to be someone else he was still trying to save, or…
“Why wouldn’t he seek vengeance?”
“To keep the queen from gutting everyone he has left.”
“Clan Amber.”
He nodded.
“You wouldn’t sacrifice Clan Bismyth to end the queen’s reign.” The words came out as a question.
His gaze met mine evenly. “You think I’m a monster.”