28. Puck
“Your hands,” Lysandra gasps, pulling the hand that was brushing her lips away from her face into the firelight. The skin is angry and red, and I don’t have the heart to tell her the one beneath her—the one I used to check her pulse—looks worse.
“They’ll be fine until I can see a healer,” I say, burying my nose in her hair. Goddess, I love the way she smells. The faint scent of her arousal lingers in her post-orgasm haze, and it’s almost enough to make me hard again. Everything about this female makes me hard.
“I’ll warm it up.” She places my hand underneath her boob.
“Thank you for your service,” I murmur with a nip to her earlobe that makes her nipples pebble.
It’s such an odd, almost domestic moment; it makes it easy to imagine future mornings where we wake wrapped around each other. Mornings filled with lazy kisses and slow, unhurried sex. It’s a nice vision.
“Can I ask you something?” she asks. I hum, nuzzling into her and basking in the feel of her soft curves pressed against me. “Do I look like her?”
Its like she hit me with a mallet. Knocked from my lungs. Shattered the fragile peace we found.
Titania is the centaur in the room we’ve firmly ignored until now. Even when we were at each other’s throats, we didn’t bring her up. I assumed it was an unspoken agreement to leave her dead and in the ground. I wouldn’t blame Lysandra for the terrible things she did, and she wouldn’t remind me she was her daughter.
I swallow around the lump that’s formed in my throat. Memories assault me. Four hundred years of verbal abuse, of being beaten down and made to feel like I was completely alone in the world.
I want to roll away, to run out of this cave and never look back. The only thing keeping me rooted to the spot is knowing Lysandra would follow me into the storm, and I can’t erase the thought of her half-dead body buried in the snow.
“It’s just,” she continues. “Sometimes we’ll be talking and everything seems…okay. Like maybe we could be friends. But then, you’ll retreat.”
“Like when you told me I didn’t belong anywhere?” I ask, my voice sounding cold even to my ears. She flinches.
“I never apologized for that, did I?” she whispers. No, she didn’t. And I was thinking with my dick, so I didn’t even care. “I’m sorry. I’ve never felt as awful as I did that day. It was wrong of me to lash out because you’d gotten under my skin. And, for what it’s worth, I’m sorry for the way she treated you.”
I can’t answer. I know her apology is genuine—vulnerable, even. But I can barely hear it as a shrill voice from the past slithers through my mind like a poisonous snake.
You’ve ruined all my plans, Puck. Apologize.
You can’t do anything.
I don’t know why I bother. I should wash my hands of you once and for all, but where would you go?
No one cares about you. No one has sought you out. I’m all you have.
You should be grateful I’ve put up with you for all these years.
My stomach roils. I can’t shut down the memories of being trapped in my mind, an unwilling passenger forced to do Titania’s bidding. The blood of Oberon and every Fae she made me deal with coats my skin. But the worst part, worse than every seedy deal, every death at my hands, and every piece of information passed, was the loneliness. I spent years without anyone realizing I wasn’t me anymore, feeling so lost that the only person I had was the Fae keeping me captive. Even now, a gaping hole remains in the center of my chest, a yawning maw waiting to swallow me whole.
How could I forget that? It’s the whole reason I call Lysandra princess—to remind myself who I’m dealing with. Am I so desperate for affection that I would turn to someone who not only hates me but wants to take the one thing I have left?
What the hell am I doing?
Lysandra sighs when she realizes I’m not going to answer and lays her head back down, this time keeping it on her hands rather than my arm. When her breathing evens out, I shift so I can see her face. In many ways, she looks nothing like her mother. Sure, there are hints of similar expressions, but Lysandra is soft. Warm. Even when she’s calculating, she doesn’t have the same ruthless gleam in her eye Titania did.
But now…
The only time I ever saw Titania’s mask slip was when she was asleep. The few times she made me sit in her room and keep watch, I would marvel at the fact that the peaceful creature in bed was the same who terrorized me day in and day out.
It’s the same way Lysandra looks now.
I need to get out of here.
I stay where I am, completely nude and pressed against my enemy’s daughter until morning light starts to trickle in through the mouth of the cave. It hasn’t been very long; it took me most of the night to find Lysandra in the wastelands, and then we…well.
I gingerly extract myself from her, tucking the blanket as tight as I can so she doesn’t notice the lack of my warmth. I avoid looking at her face while I dress in fresh clothes from my pack and put all my winter gear back on. As an afterthought, I put more arrows on the fire. Even though I need to get as far away from Lysandra as possible, I don’t want her to die in this cave.
The sunlight is weak in the Winter Court, obstructed by clouds. Luckily, the blizzard isn’t as terrible as it was last night, and I don’t hear a peep from the wolves as I exit the cave and head toward the sea.
The scent of salt and seaweed reaches me before I catch sight of the rocky shoreline. I’ve always hated how colorless this court is. Even the beach, which one would associate with sunshine and blue water, is like a painting done in grayscale. The water is such a dark blue it appears black, only broken by the white spray that splashes over gray stones.
I pick my way down a precarious, icy path, keeping one hand braced on the slate rock wall as I descend the cliff. The stones at the shoreline are smooth but shift under my feet, and I keep my eyes down to keep from rolling my ankle. Wouldn’t that be something? To survive the entire trial only to be taken out by a rock.
Perched on larger rocks are the sirens in their half-humanoid forms, sunning themselves in the barely-there sunlight. Their multicolored hair, skin, and tails are a stark contrast to the gloom of their surroundings. Every inch of the sirens sparkle, their magic captivating even when it’s not focused on luring victims to their death.
“Any chance I can convince one of you to retrieve the last clue for me?” I ask, turning on the charm. The one closest to me has Aegean-blue skin, very pale teal hair, and eyes that match. She flicks her tail at me in a gesture I interpret as come closer.
“Darling, I’m having a morning,” I say, dropping my pack, shedding my outer layers, and kicking off my boots. If she denies me, I’ll need to go straight into the water, and I’m not going in with all this weighing me down. “Name your price.”
“You survived a queen’s blizzard. Is a bit of cold water so bad in comparison?” she purrs, flipping her hair over her shoulder and leaning closer.
I pick my way over until I’m standing in the water in front of her rock. “You’ve never been wrapped in iron and sent to the bottom of the ocean.” When it’s clear she won’t help me cheat, I lace my fingers in her hair and tug her down to my lips. She inhales, sucking the breath from my lungs, then gives me a gentle push.
The water behind me is surprisingly deep and I fall, hands and feet outstretched toward the surface, as I go down and down and down. Thanks to the siren’s kiss, I can breathe amidst the freezing water, and once the initial shock of cold has faded, I flip over and begin to swim.
It’s so dark, and unlike last night, I don’t have any kind of light illuminating my way. The water presses in on me, the memory of its crushing presence threatening to consume me, but I keep breathing deep, painfully large breaths.
I wonder if Lysandra has woken and found me missing. We didn’t have any kind of agreement to wait for each other on this last leg of the trip, but leaving makes me feel slimy. I should have left a note. Not that it would help; being left in the middle of the night isn’t easily explained away by a note.
As I swim through the darkness, I continue to tell myself I’m doing the right thing. We know nothing about Lysandra. She could be as ruthless of a ruler as her mother, which is why I need to win this trial. There’s no reason I should feel guilty about leaving while she was asleep. If we were safe and warm in the Day Court Inn, I wouldn’t feel this bad. This is a competition; it’s not personal.
Except she came on my fingers last night, and I left her naked and alone in a freezing cave. That makes it personal.
Round and round I go, cycling from feeling guilt to justified so often I can’t tell which way is up and which is down. All the while, I swim.
I’m about to return to shore and ask the siren what the hell I’m supposed to be looking for when I see something glowing up ahead. It blinks, a bioluminescent green light shining in the darkness. I kick my legs harder, propelling myself forward until I float above a glowing shell with two scrolls attached to it with twine. I make quick work of the knots, releasing my clue, and then swim back the way I came.
The same siren is waiting in the water. She’s in her monstrous form, her blue skin leathery and wrinkled, gills poking out the side of her neck. She crooks a webbed, barbed finger toward me, and I shudder as I float over. She sucks the ocean water from my lungs and pushes me up to the surface.
Drenched and freezing once again, I stumble onto the shoreline, shaking off like a dog since I didn’t bring a towel. Without care for modesty, I strip out of my wet clothes and put on a light tunic and pants before donning my winter gear. The sirens watch with amusement as I shoulder my pack, give them a wave, and head back up the cliffside toward the portal without even reading the clue. I know I’m headed to Spring Court, so I might as well start walking.
The wind is so loud in the wastelands that it hides the sound of footsteps, but I still take the long way around rather than pass by the cave. I’m not sure what would be worse—finding Lysandra is gone and on my tail, or seeing her there and sleeping. Like a coward, I avoid the situation entirely.
As soon as I’m in the shelter of the ramshackle building that’s home to the portal, I open the final riddle.
Return to the start and answer this:
More precious than gold,
More powerful than magic
Its presence can make you a hero
Its absence a villain
If you’re to rule, you’ll need this in spades
The location is easy; I need to go back to the palace gates. The riddle, on the other hand…
I repeat the lines over and over in my head, trying to make sense of them as I hurtle down the ley line.
The portal exit closest to the palace is in a tavern in my mother’s village. When I stumble out of the tap room, the entire town is waiting along the dirt path, cheering wildly. My mother pushes them aside to reach me. She brushes stray snowflakes from my hair, and the others help rearrange my pack so I can take off the heaviest layers now that the weather is balmy once again.
“You’re the first one back,” she whispers excitedly. I know this, of course, but I smile anyway. “Did you figure out the final clue?”
“Mostly. I’m between two answers.”
She scrunches her nose, clearly wanting me to tell her so she can help. I don’t. If I can’t figure out the correct answer on my own, then I deserve to lose.
She orders the Fae to let me through as I trek the short distance from the village to the palace gates. Unlike our send-off, a crowd surrounds the entryway to await our return. Goddess, that feels like it was ages ago. How has it only been a day since the start of this trial? So much has happened since.
The crowd claps as I draw nearer, and I stop before the judges, slinging my pack off my sore shoulders.
“Welcome back,” Devorah says, her long chestnut hair in a sleek sheet down her back. “I believe you had a final riddle to solve.” I extend the scroll to them; Raul snatches it and confirms it’s real.
“Tell us,” Celesta says. “What’s more precious than gold and more powerful than magic? What’s presence can make you a hero, but absence will make you a villain?”
“If you are to rule,” Devorah finishes. “What will you need to have in spades?”
I glance at my hands and swallow thickly. “The answer is honor.”
Everyone holds their breath. Then, as one, the three judges say, “The winner of the second trial is Puck!”
The crowd erupts. They clap me on the back, they hug me, and they shake my hand. I go through the motions, smiling and doing whatever I have to do to get them to move on.
Honor.The winning clue was honor.
Ironic, since I apparently have none.