8. Let’s just blame it on the cold #3
“So, where exactly are you taking me?” I asked to give my mind something tangible to focus on. “If you planned on giving me a tour, this has been mediocre at best.”
Maksym cast me an unimpressed glance, but it only lasted for a second before his amber gaze flickered up to the rafters, and his attention narrowed.
Good goddess, maybe I wasn’t losing my mind. “You hear it too?”
“I certainly do,” he rumbled before he growled, “Eilir. I swear to Mina, if you don’t come out right this second…”
Mina.
The mother of the lower pantheon, and not a name I heard often outside of lectures as a child.
But I had little time to consider the clear weight of her importance to the dark fae, because that damned buzzing went through a cycle of starting and stopping again, emanating from above us.
Maksym planted a hand on his hip as he scrubbed his fingers over his brow.
“No, Eilir, she doesn’t bite—” His attention flickered to me. “I don’t think she bites. Just come out already.”
My jaw slackened. “Of course I don’t bite. Why would I—”
Something drifted into my periphery.
No, not just something—a plant with wings.
A fucking sapling with butterfly-shaped, translucent wings.
I backed up an uneasy step and was flat on my ass before I knew it, staring up at a goddess-damned sprite with my jaw nearly on the floor. A tree sprite, if its bark for skin and tufts of leaves sticking out the top of its head were to be trusted.
“Hello, Princess Enora,” it said with its squeak as it clasped its little woody hands and drifted down in front of me, its wings throwing off glimmers of rainbow light. “It is so very nice to meet you properly.”
“Hello,” I rasped.
Black, beady eyes appraised me before a smile bloomed on the sprite’s face, revealing a set of jagged white teeth.
“This animated gnat is Eilir.” Maksym crouched into my periphery and flicked a leaf atop the sprite’s head. “Their Radiance is the principal emissary of the denizens of the Lastlight Woods, and one of the sprites who discovered your camp and saved your life.”
My attention bounced between Maksym and Eilir, who was still grinning at me, unblinking.
“Oh,” I breathed as a sliver of reason threaded its way back into me. “Wow.”
I knew then why the buzzing of the sprite’s wings had sounded so familiar, yet I hadn’t been able to place it. Chances were, I wasn’t in a condition I’d like to remember when they found me, but the pieces were there, shrouded somewhere in my mind.
“A lady of few words,” Eilir chuckled as they flew a path around Maksym, much like a gnat would in the height of summer, evading the king’s swat.
“A lady of an incredibly unpredictable number of words.” Maksym rose and started back down our original path, deeper into the second level. “Come now, Miss Wynn. I don’t have all day.”
The sprite tutted, its leaves rustling as it shook its head. “Always missing his manners, that one. Here, I’ll help you up.”
Eilir extended one of its tiny hands towards me, branchy fingers splayed out to a size that was barely the area of my palm. I set my hand over top and expected to do most of the work, but the fucking sentient twig hauled me off the floor.
One buzz of its wings, and I was staggering to my feet in an awkward sweep, almost toppling straight over as I gawked at the wisp of a creature.
I wasn’t large by any stretch of the imagination, but I wasn’t exactly small either. You couldn’t be a waif and be an active service member.
“There you go,” Eilir said before gesturing ahead to where Maksym was already dozens of paces ahead. “After you, Princess Enora.”
“Thank you,” I sputtered.
A soft, wind-like chuckle trailed after me as I hurried after the king, and it took everything in me to suppress a bout of panic-induced laughter.
Not only was I in Grimmoria, following behind its king and mulling over my execution or marriage, but I was now a point of humor for a fucking sprite.
They were sworn up and down to be extinct in all our texts in Odessa, a race from a bygone era who’d seen their numbers decimated through centuries of war and the drain of life that eventually ravaged the Wastes.
But Maksym had said Eilir was one of the sprites who saved me.
Meaning more of them existed. I just couldn’t fathom it.
“Miss Wynn?”
I tensed and found the king was no longer striding ahead of me.
In fact, I was about ten paces away from plowing right into a half-wall that framed a set of stairs. I hadn’t noticed the king or the sprite turning down an offshoot hallway.
They waited at the opening, an unmistakably impatient look on Maksym’s face.
“Sorry,” I mumbled as I hurried over.
The king had the audacity to roll his eyes as he turned and kept on down the significantly more compact hallway.
This one was decorated with various tapestries that depicted dark fae warriors in a concerning variety of brutal acts. Beheadings. Dismemberments. Even the middle of someone being drawn and quartered by beasts with the appearance of horses touched by death.
The victims in all depictions looked remarkably like high fae, with their shades of golden hair and verdant eyes.
I knew, of course, that the dark and high fae had spent most of their history in and out of wars with each other, but my imagination supplied the brutality.
Not that we didn’t have our own tapestries in Odessa that were grotesque in their own ways, but they tended to be locked away with our most historical artifacts.
“Are these your ancestors?” I asked.
Between the unease still simmering beneath the surface of all this and the way the humming of Eilir’s wings echoed as they trailed a path close to the ceiling, I felt the need to fill a bit of the air with my voice.
Maksym glanced back briefly but did not slow his pace. “Yes.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. Goddess help me.
“The Blackspire clan has led Grimmoria since The Divide,” Eilir said as they zipped down beside me. Talk about a prayer answered quickly. “Except for one little hiccup span of a few hundred years, give or take, Max comes from a long, long line of rather noble Blackspire men.”
“Max?” I chuckled. That was awfully endearing.
“Don’t,” he shot back without even a glance over his shoulder.
I let that slide in favor of a more pressing question I had.
“Wait…” I swallowed. “Didn’t you say you killed your father?”
“He did,” Eilir answered in a chirp for the now silent king. “As they all have, truthfully. Max’s father, Callum, killed his father to take his throne. Callum’s father had killed his own father to do the same, and so on and so forth. They can be rather vicious in their search for—”
“Enough, Eilir,” Maksym ground out. “You’ll have plenty of other time to regale Miss Wynn with history I know too well when I’m not around.”
A sore spot for the king, clearly, and one I noted in the recesses of my mind.
He’d seemed incredibly proud of his patricide when he was set on intimidation back in my cell, showing me the blade that severed his father’s head like it was a prized possession.
Eilir, though, let out a tiny squeal as soon as Maksym stopped speaking, their hands clasped in front of their wooden body.
Their attention bounced between the king and me as they squeaked out, “She’s staying? You’re staying?”
I opened my mouth, but Maksym interjected.
“Miss Wynn has not decided yet,” he stated with a shrug. “She may very well be leaving us in one way or another in three days’ time. I wouldn’t get too attached.”
Despite being made of a substance as usually unmoving as wood, Eilir’s entire tiny face fell into a frown.
“Oh,” they breathed. “That was presumptuous of me. And I can hardly blame you either, princess. I can’t say for certain if I’d rather be sent to my certain death or be stuck married to Max. He can be quite—”
“EILIR.”
The sprite squeaked a startled noise as Maksym’s hand swung back and nearly knocked them out of the air. They zipped up high above us and shot farther ahead.
I finally let out a laugh of disbelief. “So, sprites aren’t extinct, you’re a temperamental asshole, and, what, let me guess—your horses breathe fire here? Or is there anything else I should know to help me make my decision?”
The king shot me a withering glare as we stopped at a set of modestly carved doors in the eerily quiet hall.
“This is, and will continue to be, your accommodations should you choose to stay.” He pushed open one side and motioned me ahead. “And I swear on that, so don’t bother asking.”
The suite must have been the size of my apartment in the fortress, if not larger, and far more lush.
It had all the hallmark traits of the rest of the Keep—dark stone walls, wooden rafters, and a vaulted ceiling swallowed up into darkness—but there were deep, jewel-toned velvets and plush, dark furs everywhere in sight.
A spacious four-poster bed, too, set back between two arched windows, and topped by a circular piece with red stained-glass flowers.
Everything spoke of luxury and comfort, of thoughtful finishes, of status.