Chapter Ten
Jet
I’d been half-hard since I’d lifted her up the rock formation and felt her body melting into mine, and saw the heavy-lidded softness of desire in her eyes.
It didn’t help that once she was able to settle down and ignore the sounds of the idiotic redcaps still trying—and failing—to scale the rock formation, and had me rip off a piece of bread for her to try that a low, throaty moan escaped her.
That was not a sound I needed to know.
But now I could think of little else.
Even as the rot-scented redcaps followed us all the way back to the castle a few hours later, I saw Vishen returning to the castle with several flasks in his arm.
Hope fizzled out and died, though, when Serin tried each and gave him a sad shake of her head.
It was nearly nightfall, and Serin was stubbornly refusing even another drop from her flask, even as the aches and shivers slowly started to return.
I figured if Nira didn’t return soon with the cure, I could wait until Serin was in that delirious, barely-conscious state and force some into her mouth.
But as I was stacking wood in the fireplace, the door burst open, and there was a pink-cheeked Nira with not only several flasks, but one large gallon jug of water.
“He failed, didn’t he?” she asked with a little smile, like she enjoyed besting Vishen. If she, in fact, had the right lake water at all.
“Nothing worked, no. And she won’t use any more of the flask water.”
“I’m going to jump right to this one,” Nira declared, grabbing the gallon jug and pouring some of the contents into a glass to hand to Serin.
“She’s too weak to hold it,” I said, getting to my feet and striding over to take it.
Now, did I strictly need to sit behind Serin, her body propped up to mine, to give her the drink? No, no I did not. And I went ahead and didn’t consider why I felt the need to do it at all.
The second the water poured into her mouth, all thoughts I’d been trying not to ponder flew out of my head anyway. Because Serin came alive. I swear I could practically feel the wave of vitality coursing through her.
“I’m good,” Nira said, smirking as she set down the jug on the dresser. “Well, mission complete. I’m going to go retire to my room. If you need anything… call Vishen.”
Serin let out a small laugh as the other woman left the room.
“It seems like your voice is coming back,” I said, pulling away from her, reminding myself that she was practically a prisoner in the castle and this marriage, that I needed to stop getting close to her.
She had a wide-eyed look for a second before she tamped it down, making the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.
“Are you able to speak?” I asked, keeping my tone calm. Even if I felt my father’s anger—a part of me, no matter how hard I tried to fight it—rearing up. I saw the guilt slice across her gorgeous face, making me take a deep breath. “Why would you lie about that?”
Her face went tense. “Just today,” she rasped, her voice rusty.
“All day?”
“Since… the flask water.”
A muscle ticked in my jaw. “So you were able to speak the whole time we were touring the castle and hanging out on the cliff?”
“Yes.” Her voice was small.
“Why?”
She swallowed hard.
“Serin.” I didn’t mean to snarl her name. It didn’t even sound all that menacing to my own ears. But Serin jerked and slid up the bed, curling her knees to her chest, her lower lip trembling.
Fuck.
Right.
She was a Daughter of the Lake. Before Grimwood, her exposure to anything other than lake creatures had likely been limited. Harsh emotions had to be as foreign to her as the brutality of kidnapping.
I took a deep breath, then another, waiting until my jaw slackened to speak again, hoping my voice would soften around the edges. “Why didn’t you want to speak to me?”
“I don’t know you.”
“I understand that. But I have done nothing but try to take care of you. Why would that suddenly change just because you could speak?”
“I don’t know. Everything is new to me here,” she admitted, anxiously smoothing the blanket at her side. “I don’t know how much I can trust you.”
“I thought I made it clear that we are, for the time being, in this together. My fate is tied with yours.”
“Doesn’t that mean you could use me in whatever way you wish to get your desired outcome?”
“Given what you’ve heard about my asshole father since you’ve been here, I get your concern. But I’m not him.”
“But you follow his orders. Like marrying me.”
“He is the king. And until that crown is on my head, I need to at least appear to be playing into his hand.”
“But you’re not?”
“I am doing everything in my power to keep this court together while he devolves into madness. And to keep it out of the greedy hands of his so-called friends.”
“Like Grimwood.”
“Precisely. The more I think about it, the more I think this move of putting you in his daughter’s place was less about saving her from me and more about keeping her for his own future plans. Perhaps a political marriage to another of the power families.”
“But he had to know I’d speak eventually.”
“Not if he thinks whoever he has on the inside of the palace is still drugging you. I doubt his plan is for this to go on forever. He likely has a scheme that takes place within the next few weeks. A poisoning or an outright attack to take the palace by force.”
“Wouldn’t he need more than one person on the inside to do that?”
She wasn’t wrong.
It was something I had mentioned to Vishen briefly—the possibility of the entire staff at the palace being turned against my father and by extension, me. He saw my staff concern and raised me the military.
“If worse came to worst, the soldiers will go with who makes them the biggest promises. Whether or not they have any intention of making good on them.”
And as talented as Vishen was—and, if he approved of her, Nira was—they stood no chance against an entire army.
“Are we in danger?” Serin asked, likely reading the play of emotions across my face.
“Probably.” Then, not wanting her so scared that she fled and fucked things up before I could work them out, I added, “That is why it is important we found your lake, and that you continue to drink from it to keep your strength up. If at any point we need to flee, I need to know you can keep up.”
“Okay. But what is your plan?”
“It’s still in the beginning stages. Now that your situation is figured out, I can dedicate more time to working on the possible coup.”
“Can I do anything?”
“Not that I can think of right now. But I might need you and Nira at some point. I’m a little short on allies right now.”
I was hoping to change that soon, though.
I already had a way in with a lot of the common fae, since I’d been letting out prisoners and forgiving astronomical debts my father had placed on others.
But I needed better allies. Ones with coin and power. I was hoping to work on that over the next few weeks—if I had that long. There were several royal events coming up: a royal feast, a tournament, and a ball.
Everyone important would be showing up.
Which made it extra dangerous for me if there were enemies all around, but it was also my only chance to reach out to others and curry favor. There was no other way for me to get away from the castle with my father’s redcap spies tracking me down.
“What can we do? As allies?”
“Nira will protect you for me.”
“While I just stand there like a target?”
“Do Daughters of the Lake have any skills?”
“I have… water skills.”
“What does that mean?”
“I can sense things through water.”
“Sense what? Who has visited the water?”
“Well, yes, but also, I can sort of read the emotions of others through their water.”
“Their… water?”
“Tears or sweat.”
“Hm.” That might be useful. If she could possibly sense someone’s feelings toward me just by their sweat, that might be something valuable. “Anything else?”
“Well, there was this one time…” Her gaze went far away like she was lost in a memory.
“What happened?”
“A man came to my lake, and I’d… I hadn’t been dressed. He wasn’t someone who took ‘no’ for an answer…”
A growl crawled its way up my throat, making me need to cough to cover it. It was ridiculous to feel pissed off and possessive of a past version of Serin—before she was even mine.
For fuck’s sake.
She wasn’t mine now.
“And?”
“And I don’t even remember asking it to or anything like that, but the water rushed up and crashed down on him over and over. I think it might have drowned him if I hadn’t called out to beg it to stop.”
Now that, that could be very useful. But only if we were close to her lake, I suppose.
“Have you ever tried to command water other than your own?”
“Why would I?”
“Would you be willing to try?”
“But why would it respond to me?”
“Isn’t all water, essentially, the same water? It gets lifted up from all water sources and dropped back down onto the earth, refilling the ocean, streams, lakes…”
“Oh. I never thought of it that way. I suppose I could try.”
“Then try. Tomorrow. When you’re back to your full strength.
I will send Nira out to the lake first thing in the morning before you wake.
Then I will send Vishen when she gets back.
You will have more than enough to hold you over.
And we have all these other water sources,” I said, waving to all the flasks and jugs, “to test your skills on.”
“I can do that. In here?” she asked, glancing around.
I hadn’t considered how unusual it was for her, being in a palace, behind thick walls that kept out the nature that had been her home for so long.
“For the time being, it is the safest place for you. At least when you only have Nira for protection. As I know more, I will feel more comfortable with you moving around more freely. Besides, I’m pretty sure if you left here alone, the redcaps would follow you.”
A full-body shiver coursed through her.
“Why do they smell like that?”
“It’s the blood.”
“Blood?”
“That’s what smells. The blood on the tops of their heads.
They just keep adding to it, and the smell intensifies.
” Serin turned a certain shade of green, her eyes going round and panicked—like she might get sick.
“The reality of the Unseelie court is not always pleasant,” I admitted.
“The redcaps are a tool of my father’s to control me.
When I am in charge, they will be gone.”
“At least they’re relatively easy to outsmart.”
“I’m not entirely convinced they have a brain. Or if they do, they somehow share it between the twenty of them.”
“Your quarters are spacious, but what if I’m craving fresh air?”
“I can take you outside if you need it.”
What?
No, I couldn’t.
I had shit to do.
Alliances to make.
Rats to find and figure out what to do with them.
I didn’t have five minutes to spend on anything frivolous, let alone an hour to take my wife outside for fresh air.
“Really? That would be great.”
Fuck.
Like it was possible to change my mind when she was looking at me like that?
And what the hell was wrong with me that some stranger was starting to have any kind of sway over me?