Chapter Twenty-Four #2
“I—Aodhan will rule. He will have a Seelie sit alongside him. You all know no—” His tongue trips over the word and Grant wraps his fingers around one of the bars. He’s already won.
“Three. Two suns, one moon. Two fae. One… something else. I bet she’s not entirely fae, not really. It’s about balance.”
I huff a laugh. “That’s the other thing, isn’t it? The Unseelie and Seelie thing.”
Grant nods like what I said makes perfect sense. “It’s arbitrary,” he says. “Not in how you’ve been treated, obviously, but in what you can do.” His magic flares and he tips his head to one side. “But you already know that.”
The fae freezes in place. The bluster returns, but it feels more forced than before. “You have no idea what you’re talking about, you—”
“You can shift. Transform. Whatever. They’d call you Unseelie, but you’ve been with the Seelie all your life.”
I sit frozen. Ophelia is just as still as I am, her eyes wide. Slowly, the fae nods. “My parents were Seelie,” he says, “and they told me to never—No one knows. No one.”
Lark is Seelie. I should have realised it when he told me the difference, and both his parents were Unseelie, except maybe one wasn’t and they kept that quiet, too.
There’s no version of this where the king and queen weren’t involved.
The witch isn’t fully fae. They were fated to rule together, but for whatever reason, the witch didn’t take a throne with them.
“If you want us to fix this, you need to help us out of here.”
The fae scowls, but as the seconds tick by, the expression on his face softens. “Even if I could—I do not have the key. Aodhan took it.”
“Took it?” Ophelia asks.
“He left. An hour ago. He is going to the castle.”
My heart races. “What is he… What does he plan to do?”
The fae doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to. Aodhan is either going after Lark or Oisin, and I know who he’ll consider easiest to control. Then one of us will get to leave—I know Aodhan won’t risk losing the upper hand—and the other will be stuck here. Forever.
“I don’t need you to let us out of the cell,” Grant says slowly, and his magic flares again. The door swings open and he gives the fae a mischievous grin. “But I do need you to help us out of the house. And to the castle.”
The fae studies all three of us. I can’t tell what he’s thinking.
All we’ve given him are, honestly, wild theories, even if some of the evidence seems to be there.
If it turns out Iagan has done all of this, then we’re completely off base.
But it fits with everything that’s been nagging at me since we arrived.
I just didn’t notice any of it, too caught up in Lark and what was going to happen to him.
Too caught up in trying to get Ophelia back.
The fae nods once and vanishes up the stairs. Ophelia looks at us both, eyebrows raised. “I hope he’s going to help.”
“I think so,” Grant says. He wanders over to the now-open door. “If it is the witch behind all this, we have a bigger problem. She’s never going to let us find the way out again.”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Ophelia says. She might not entirely agree with all we’ve just said, but she’s never one to fail to get on board when it comes to it.
I get to my feet too. My head spins and I sag back against the wall, breathing hard.
“Dante?” Ophelia puts her hands on my shoulders, her magic probing at me. “Oh, fuck. That’s not good.”
“What is it?” Grant asks.
“You’re—” All I can see are her eyes, wide as they are. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
“About what?”
“Your magic. It’s gone.”
“Gone?” I can feel a wisp of it, still. “I’m just tired.”
“No, you’re not. You two have your theories or whatever, but I have this. It’s being drained out of you. What the fuck?”
Grant appears at her shoulder. “What does that—What does that mean?”
Her mouth presses into a thin line. It’s not good then. Fuck. I shake my head. “Let’s get this done first. If we don’t get back to the castle, there’s no getting home.”
Ophelia doesn’t like that, clearly, but she sighs and nods. She keeps close to me as we exit the cell. I pause there and look back.
“Grant. The iron…”
“What about it?”
“Do you think you can… I don’t know. Melt it down? Make it into something we can use?”
He looks at the bars, then puts his hand on one again. “Yeah, okay, let me see.”
Footsteps sound on the stairs. The fae reappears, breathing hard. “We do not have long. Aodhan took the wagon, but I found another. I can pull it.”
Grant grins at him. “Yeah, you can.”
The fae faintly colours at the words, then his eyes go wide when Grant’s power lashes out and the bar he’s touching turns to a pile of iron filings. He scoops them into his hands, then gives some to me and to Ophelia.
“Will that work?”
I pull the bag the witch gave me out of my pocket and tip the filings I have inside. Ophelia gives me hers, too, and Grant grimaces when he realises she doesn’t have any pockets.
“That’ll work,” I say. If the witch has any magic in the bag she gave me, at least the iron should dull it.
“Right, come on then,” Grant says, heading past the fae and for the stairs. “We’ve got a couple of kings to save.”