Chapter 28
Maddox
My vision returns, and I find myself standing in a suspended meadow in the treetops.
Lichen and epiphytes grow on flowering shrubs and smaller trees arranged in a fairy ring around the little clearing.
Bundles of glowing blossoms illuminate the area, but unlike the deep purple of nightshade buds, these are a warm goldenrod yellow.
Moss and thin branches have woven tightly together to form spongy ground sturdy enough to walk across with bare feet.
Plopping down, I pull off each of the leather boots I’d been wearing beneath my scarlet gown. The constant song in my head stops and the tiredness returns to my bones. Like I’ve just been drenched in tree sap, everything feels weighted down and heavy.
Slowly, awareness creeps in.
“Isn’t it lovely here?” Lorelai says in my ear. “Almost as lovely as you.” She pulls my hair tie free and runs slender fingers through my loose strands, breathing in as every muscle in my body stiffens.
“Most mortals scream when I stop singing in their little heads. But you are a different sort of mortal, aren’t you? You can see, can’t you?”
I turn my head to look at her, but she moves to my other side. I almost ask what she plans to do with me, but I’m not sure I want to know the answer. “What are we doing here?”
“Why? Don’t you like it?” Lorelai crawls on hands and knees until she’s kneeling in front of me, flashing a sharp-toothed grin.
Pupils swallow her aquamarine eyes so they’re nothing but dark voids boring into me.
Ropes of gray spiderweb hang like a makeshift dress from her wiry frame.
Tiny black spiders crawl inside the woven silk.
“I mean…” My head aches as I search for a way out of this. Any way. My weapons are still on my belt, but the siren will most definitely bite my head off with her razor-blade teeth if I make any quick movements. “Obviously it is lovely here,” I tell her. “Just curious, is all.”
Glancing over my shoulder, I spot a break in the foliage, but beyond that is nothing but inky darkness. What time is it? My heart speeds. I have to get back to Magesté. I have to get back to—
Poisoning Castor.
Lorelai’s wide smile fractures, eyes narrowing as she leans in toward me, ocher smoke spilling from her mouth like saliva. “I don’t believe you.”
Song spreads once again through my skull, filling me up, intoxicating every inch of me.
My eyes flutter closed, and I forget what I was so worried about just a moment ago. I wish she would just keep singing and never stop. Her hands stroke along my jaw, sliding down to remove Castor’s black cloak from my shoulders. I let her, shrugging out of the heavy material.
“What do we have here?” Her head tilts as she pats the leather belt strung low across my hips.
Dreamily, I answer, “Weapons.”
“What do you need weapons for?”
“To kill the Redwood King.”
Lorelai pulls back now, looking me over with renewed interest. “Kill the Redwood King?”
“Yes,” I say placidly. “I’ve made a pact with the Myrtle Queen.”
Lorelai’s smile spreads wider than ever, her song increasing in tempo. “Have you? And what has the Myrtle lovely promised you in exchange for the king’s death?”
I giggle—which I don’t ever do, but now I’m not sure why. Giggling is great. “Lots of things. Money, a place to live, a cure.”
“A cure from what?”
“My mortal disease.”
Her giggle dances with mine. “How very thoughtful of the Myrtle Queensy.”
The song in my head intensifies, pumping through my veins like a heavy bass drop.
My back arches slightly as I ride the wave of music, Cheshire cat grin stretching my lips.
Lorelai leans forward, pressing a palm to my thigh as her other hand slides along my other leg and plucks the golden dagger from its holster.
She flashes her dazzlingly sharp teeth at me. “This looks like fun. Shall we play with it?”
Her song recedes to a delicate melody, and I nod eagerly, watching as she runs the glinting blade down my arm, dried remnants of the blood nymph still clinging to the metal.
A sharp sting draws my eye to a line of red running like a vertical constellation connecting my freckles.
I press my finger to the line, and it comes away wet.
“I’m bleeding.”
Lorelai takes my hand in hers and brings my blood-covered fingertip to her lips.
A forked tongue flicks out of her mouth, wrapping around my finger and sliding up until the blood is gone.
“Mmm. Sweet blood. You’re positively delectable.
” She moves forward until she’s straddling me, pressing the tip of the blade to my cheek.
Another sharp pain. Another trail of blood dripping down my face. Another giggle.
The dagger traces a canyon across my cheek and carves a line along my collarbone. Lorelai’s black tongue laps up the spilled blood like a hummingbird seeking sweet liquid in a honeysuckle. It tickles a little. My gaze casts down to see my chest bathed in red, ivory blouse now crimson.
“Could this kill me?”
She places the tip of the knife to my neck, pressing slightly, and her sweet breath pools in my ear. “Absolutely.”
Does dying feel like this? This simultaneously weightless and heavy feeling of being drunk on song and bathed in blood? It isn’t so bad, really. I don’t know what I was so afraid of. At least I won’t have to hurt anyone.
A distant sound meets my ears, but I’m not really listening—not until Lorelai is wrenched from my lap and the music disappears, replaced by sharp, throbbing pain down my arm, across my collarbone, and along my cheek.
The dizzying drunkenness dissipates and my focus zeros in on Lorelai waltzing around…
“Durian?”
In a handful of seconds, I register the hole in the foliage behind him, the discarded samara, his golden hair, his sandstone horns, and the bleeding cut on his cheek. Though, judging by the steady stream coming from my own, I’d say I probably look worse off.
But also. What the actual fuck is the cursed prince doing here?
“Who allowed you into this kingdom?” he growls at the siren. “Your kind is banished from here.”
“I’m not scared of you, dryad kingsy,” Lorelai snarls back. “Your laws mean nothing to me or mine.”
The magnitude of her monstrous appearance hits me all at once—her fathomless beetle eyes, claw-tipped hands, and shark’s teeth peeking out of a pool of charcoal smoke spilling to the ground.
Without looking at me, the cursed prince says, “Maddox, take the samara and go back to Magesté.”
“Maddox wants to stay with me,” the siren purrs, sending a soft lullaby into my skull. Don’t you, my love?
“I—”
Vines burst out of the branches beneath the bed of moss on which we stand, and the song turns to wisps of smoke. The siren laughs, dancing out of their reach. The way Durian’s hands are pressed out before him tells me Castor isn’t the only brother with a deadly skill.
Tell the king you want to stay with me, she sings in my head. Then out loud, “Or are you in a hurry to complete your little mission?”
The siren is speaking in riddles again. I wish my head would stop swimming long enough for me to focus on her words. Did she call Durian the king?
Durian’s furious gaze travels briefly from Lorelai to me and back, the vines halting their dance with the siren. “What mission?”
“Have you not told him about your mortal ailment?” Lorelai asks me with a mad cackle. “Does he not know?”
I swear I can feel my blood sugar rising from the adrenaline.
What did I say to her before? What did I say?
I sink to my knees, chest heaving as I try to keep up with the oxygen my body clearly needs to calm my racing heart. “I—um—”
A cackle erupts from the siren’s throat, both rows of teeth on brilliant display. “Oh, what fun! You don’t know. Tell him, my love. Tell the king what you plan to do.”
“Why do you keep calling him the king?” I snap, clinging to something that isn’t her spilling the details of my pact. “He’s the prince.”
Lorelai’s laughter doubles in volume. “You foolish mortal! Why do you believe every dryad you cross? This man is King Durian Sempervirens. Do you not see his crown? See how big? How golden?”
“I—”
No. No, that can’t be right…
But there isn’t time to process her words because the siren’s laugh begins to morph into another song and suddenly vines are barreling toward her. In the next breath I unholster my throwing axe and send it tumbling through the air.
An agonized scream pierces the clearing just before I realize I’ve hit my mark.
The throwing axe protrudes from the siren’s forehead like a macabre unicorn horn.
Her screams grow louder rather than fading with death, and she begins to thrash and stumble toward me, black blood streaming down her face.
Durian’s vines travel up her legs, wrapping around her torso and arms. When they reach her neck, she looks like she’s being prepared for mummification.
The sounds erupting from her mouth now are otherworldly.
A cacophony of demons escaping hell. Her black eyes turn up, retreating into her skull as Durian’s vines squeeze her tighter and tighter.
Inky blood pours from her mouth, her nose, her ears, her eyes.
I swear I can hear her bones snapping and crunching. The screams stop.
An eternal moment passes, and Durian lowers his hands, the vines slithering back into the branches. We stand in the suspended meadow, chests heaving, regarding each other, ignoring the crushed form of the siren with the throwing axe horn.
Durian approaches the body, wrenching the axe out of her skull. A sick squelching sound fills the silence. The blood spilling from the cuts along my arm, cheek, and collarbone fill my head with stars as he approaches, weapon in hand. I don’t back up this time. He offers the axe to me, handle first.
I take it with trembling fingers, fixing Durian with new eyes.
There’s always been something odd about him.
He reminds me of those mortal men who believe they deserve to own the world.
Because they want it. Because they were born into the privilege of being able to buy it.
I note the signet ring on his pinkie finger. A swirling letter S.
My breaths come faster as a million moments tumble through my mind.
Things that I’d overlooked or dismissed as dryad oddities suddenly turn into dozens of white flags soaked in crimson blood.
Castor’s bemused expression when I first addressed him as king, Evodia’s hurried whispers to Fern in her room, the courtiers at that feast giggling and murmuring behind cupped hands, Castor’s nerves at the dinner table, Archer bringing me to Durian’s room when I asked him to take me to the king. Castor’s words at the masquerade.
You should not believe everything you hear.
The siren’s maniacal laughter when she learned of my foolishness.
Never trust a dryad. Written all over my father’s journal. Over and over and over.
“Why?” is all I can say. My blood is pounding in my ears, my eyes, pumping from my wounds. Without the siren’s song, the sting of it intensifies.
“It’s best you knew sooner rather than later, Maddox,” he says in a mockery of a placating voice. “I fear you were getting dreadfully close to falling for the cursed prince.”
“But Castor is…he’s…” Everything is starting to spin. “At the feast…you said—”
He looks up, grinning like a devil. “Apologies for the ruse, dear one. I confess there is little I love more than playing games.”
Gravity presses on my skull, and blackness seeps into my vision like slow-rolling fog. Durian says something else, but I can’t hear him. Then his hands are beneath me, and I’m being carried away.