Chapter Thirty-Six
Gerard
Ger woke with a shrill gasp that sent his attacker skittering back against the opposite wall. He blinked the blur from his eyes and found Mareda staring back at him, her chest heaving beneath her own clutching palm.
“Goddess, you scared me,” she hissed.
He stared up at her from where he sat against the door, panting and incredulous.
“You kicked me!”
“I barely nudged you.”
Ger scoffed. For all her prim and proper ways, Mareda did make it rather clear sometimes that she was Adeline’s blood through and through.
She had a point, though; as kicks to the shins went, this one had been rather delicate, but he’d been on high alert all night.
He hadn’t meant to fall asleep—wasn’t sure when he had even drifted off.
But the door remained closed behind his back, and anyone coming in or out would have tripped right over him.
Mareda caught his glance over his shoulder and nodded at the door.
“Is he alright?” she asked quietly.
Ger thought of all he’d heard from the other side of the wall, the raw and broken sounds of unfettered grief. He shook his head. No, he did not believe the Merrow King was anything close to alright. Then again, who was?
Mareda’s blue gaze hung on the door a moment longer, and the depth of regret when she turned that gaze on him resonated so hard it shocked him.
All at once, Ger thought he might understand Ade’s sister in a way unheard of between them to this point.
But, he supposed, up until this point, they’d had very little in common.
Now there was too much common ground. Too much shared pain. Too much understanding.
“He’s going to have to be alright,” she said, wincing at the unintended cruelty.
Ger scrambled to his feet.
“She’s coming?”
Mareda shook her head. “She’s summoning. Him. Us. Everyone, now.”
“Shit.”
Mareda’s lips folded inward, a flat line of agreement. “Yes. Shit.”
???
Kai could not even pretend as he sat at the queen’s side, eyes heavy and swollen, expression slack, shoulders sloping, and his clothes rumpled and askew from his fitful sleep.
Adeline couldn’t pretend either—she stood with her hand in Ger’s and her gaze fixed on her Merrow King, unwavering.
Ger was worried she’d draw blood if she bit her lip any harder.
And, selfishly, a little worried that she’d fracture his fingers in her grip.
Her hair and clothes were in just as much disarray as the King’s, her expression so tortured it would take only a glance at either of them to see that something was amiss.
And there were glances; Ger felt the eyes of several courtiers, the most brazen among them the Empress Vanjir, who watched her niece with her hands wrung out before her.
It mattered little, though.
Avette was preoccupied.
She perched on the edge of her throne like a child on New Winter’s Day, eyes alight and her hands curled around the armrests as though physically restraining herself from reaching for Imogen as she cut a path down the centre aisle of the throne room.
As though in protest, the ice figures watched her every step with their wide, frightened eyes, frozen in eternal horror.
He felt that horror viscerally, but it was surprisingly easy to sit with, all things considered. It might have been the warm, slightly pinchy feel of Adeline’s hand in his, though it certainly didn’t hurt that Mareda had told him what to expect.
It’s going to look bad, she’d said. But you need to trust Imogen, alright?
Adeline agreed at once. Kai had just stared blankly.
And Ger was … reserving judgement. She was, after all, incredibly convincing.
Her hands held up in offering, a blue silk cushion beneath a shimmering white pearl.
That serene smile on her face as she glided toward the queen, the beam of it so bright it nearly washed out the new rings of exhaustion beneath her dark eyes.
“Her hands,” Ade whispered.
Ger hadn’t noticed that either—the way they shook beneath the silk. Avette would take it for excitement, if she took it at all.
“Your Majesty,” said Imogen, her voice a reverent hush.
She swept a low curtsey, head bent and arms raised.
Avette’s pendant flashed, blue light gleaming from the black pits of her eyes for just a moment before she reached out.
And plucked the Pearl from Imogen’s hands.
The rise of the winds was so abrupt that half the watching courtiers cringed, their gasps a chorus to Aera’s vicious howl.
Avette rose from her throne, standing—floating.
Her pale feet, bare as ever, pointed like a dancer’s as she rose from the ground.
Her white skirts billowed around her, her hair fanning out in a black halo, and her face alight with the Pearl’s white glow and a terrible awe all of her own.
She was a perversion of the Goddess; beautiful, otherworldly, and intrinsically wrong.
Ger knew they all felt it as she hung suspended in her unfathomable new power, the wrongness of it all.
The ancient, primal sense clawing up their spines at the sight.
The very essence of their world, twisted and broken and bent.
It made his head spin, his stomach roil.
He was almost certain he heard Adeline retch at his side.
It might have been only a moment before she drifted slowly to the ground.
And as the winds died, and the glow of the Pearl absorbed into her skin, Avette’s face came alive. She beamed. She laughed. She clapped her hands around the Pearl and outright shrieked, more animated than Ger could ever remember seeing her.
“Where two fairytales meet,” she said, delicately dabbing away a single tear of sheer joy from beneath her long lashes. She stared down at the Pearl pinched between her long fingers and smiled a soft smile, a mother watching over her precious babe. “What a happy ending indeed.”
And it struck him, in that moment, that Mareda had been right.
This looked very fucking bad indeed.
???
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Adeline shrieked the moment Ger shut the door to her quarters.
She snatched up a cushion, dented with Ger’s own backside, and lobbed it at the wall, then slumped into the empty armchair. Ger shot a glance at the door.
“I thought you trusted Imogen,” he hissed. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” she moaned. “I don’t know. But she has the Pearl, and she fulfilled the fucking prophecy—”
Oh, Daughters, no, please, he was so tired of this.
“What bloody prophecy?”
Adeline sighed.
“The storm will seek out peace and calm, beneath a magic-bearing palm, all power resting in her icy hand.”
“But we knew that. We knew whoever had the Pearl had the power.”
“We did,” she said. “But now it’s done, there’s only one way to undo it.”
She paused, and Ger rolled his hand at her impatiently. Honest to fucking Goddess with the dramatic pauses.
Adeline bit her lip.
“Now only traitor's truth can see,” she went on, still in that intone that suggested a recital, “the one who sets the rivers free; and all within Her ancient, bless'd plan.”
“So someone has to betray her?”
“Someone has to unveil some devastating truth. And we have no way of knowing who or what that is.”
Ger stared at her. Paced to the fire and turned back on his heel to pace back to the armchair.
“Why does it have to be in verse?!”
Adeline flapped a hand up, an exasperated half-shrug. She scooted forward in her seat, urgency tensing her shoulders.
“Ger, we need to talk to the others. Imogen, and Marry, and Kai. We’re not going to get anywhere like this, passing scraps of information back and forth with each of us missing half the context.”
Ger reached for the back of his neck like he could rub away the foreboding prickling at his nape. But he nodded all the same.
“We need to get everyone in one place, alone. Maybe tomorrow night, to give us some time to—”
“Ade,” Ger cut in, then winced. She stared blankly at him, so he dropped to his haunches and laid his hand over hers. “Tomorrow is Kai’s wedding night. He won’t be out of Avette’s sight.”
She blanched. Not a single expression passed over her face, but when she spoke, her voice was hoarse.
“Tonight then. Find a way to tell the others.” She swallowed, and Ger could hear the harshness of it; the pain. “We meet tonight.”
It was after midday by the time Ger managed to slip a message to Mareda—Lady Imogen had been sleeping, oddly enough, but the princess had promised to pass the word on, and whatever reservations he’d had about this whole thing, he did believe that.
Reaching the Merrow King was harder; he’d gotten away with it last night only for all the chaos following their return from the cavern.
Jack was probably his best bet, but the porter wasn’t in the kitchens when Ger headed down for lunch.
It was strange, the way his hunger evaporated with a quick glance around the room.
How easy it was to decide he’d eat later, after he’d changed out of the rumpled clothes he’d slept in and into his armour.
He’d come back then, and maybe Jack would be there.
Not that it mattered.
Except, he reminded himself, it did, because he needed him to deliver Adeline’s message.
Goddess, he wasn’t even good at lying to himself.
For the whole walk to the Queen’s Gard’s quarters, Ger was so preoccupied with his internal bickering and thoughts of Jack—who may or may not be in the kitchens later—that it took him a full thirty seconds to absorb the sight of him standing in the long hall of bedrooms. Right in front of his door.
Jack wasn’t in the kitchens because he was here. Now.
“Jack?”
The porter turned, soft brows arched in surprise—that quickly gave way to a smile.
“Hello, Pup.”
Ger’s stomach gave a weird flip.
“Mouse.”
It was an effort not to stumble over his own feet as he approached. Someone had taken all his nerve endings in one fist and tugged him forward like a puppet on a string.
“What are you doing here?”