Chapter 39
Maddox
My anger at Castor has fizzled out into exhaustion.
I know I’m being a hypocrite. I know I came here, dagger in hand.
Brewed a bottle of poison I had every intention of delivering if I hadn’t discovered his true identity.
But for just a moment, I thought he was good.
Actually good. Turns out, he was just good at pretending. Just like me.
At Magesté, everything continues as normal. No matter that their former mortal bookkeeper murdered their king. No matter that the “cursed” prince will soon be crowned the Cursed Redwood King.
Nothing matters but sex, drinks, drugs, and dances.
Outside, the purple lights are blurry. My tingling feet drag.
It’s been…I don’t know how long it has been since I’ve taken insulin.
Since I’ve eaten anything. My head pounds and my stomach aches.
I place a hand before my mouth, huffing air to find my breath smells sweet and fruity.
A sign of impending diabetic ketoacidosis.
The Magesté doors swing in. Evodia stands beside her desk, dressed in a gown of dazzling rubies. An exceptionally drunk satyr is telling her a dirty joke, and she pretends to laugh.
I pull my hood back, and Evodia’s focus moves quickly to me. “Oleander. You’re—”
“Alive?” The word comes out icy. “Yes. But don’t you worry, so is your precious prince.”
Relief slackens the shock on her face. “How—”
“I’m sure he will tell you all about it over wine and nepenthe later. Right now, I need to speak to the Myrtle Queen.”
Evodia straightens. “The Myrtle Queen is not to be bothered, Miss Oleander.”
“Trust me, she wants to be bothered by this. And my name is Maddox. I’m not a fucking flower.” I move toward the feathered curtain on the left.
Stepping around the desk, Evodia blocks my way. “I will give you one more chance to—”
A familiar form enters through the green curtain. Tan skin, braided mohawk, permanent scowl, and black antlers. “The axeling is with us,” Drosera informs her.
Face morphing from annoyed to surprised to almost amused, Evodia turns eyes on me. “So that is your little secret, then. You made a deal with the Myrtle Queen.”
“Yep. I’m a desperate mortal cliché.” I follow Drosera into the uncharacteristically empty theater. The crimson stage curtain is closed.
Drosera looks me over. “Not going to lie, axeling, I am truly shocked you’re still alive.”
“I’m shocked you care.”
“Oh, I don’t,” she assures me. “Just shocked. Anyway, Queen Amanita has made the stage her suite, but she won’t mind you interrupting, I’m sure.”
Drosera leads me up the stairs and halts at the front of the closed curtain. “Atlas,” she hisses to the slit in the material. “I have a delivery.”
I flinch at the word. “Don’t call me that.”
“Sorry, I have a pain in the ass out here. Please take it off my hands.”
The curtain twitches open to reveal Atlas. Dark blue eyes grow round when she sees me. They hold shock, like Drosera’s, but also relief. Despite everything, I offer her a tired smile. Among the thorns and brambles, kindness has still managed to grow in some places.
“Who is it, Atlas?” The Myrtle Queen’s chilling voice rings out from the shadows of the stage. “Tell them I’m rather busy.”
Atlas pulls the curtain open and waves me inside.
A massive bed sits upstage, its headboard replaced by a shattered mirror with gold running through the cracks.
The queen lies in the center, dressed in leather armor enrobed in a decorative bodice.
Our most requested male orchid, Adonis, hovers over her, completely nude and erect.
I would’ve blushed two weeks ago. Now my eyes merely pass over him to the dryad he’s worshiping.
Queen Amanita Umbellularia pushes his face away from her neck, a slow-spreading grin unfurling. “Maddox Sinclair. What a wondrous surprise to see you after the night’s thrilling events.”
“Ah, you do remember me,” I say. “Funny, I thought you’d forgotten.”
“We were in the middle of a celebration meant to keep the two kingdoms allied together. Admitting I recognize the mortal trying to kill the Redwood King wouldn’t be the wisest choice on my part, now, would it?”
An angry breath catches in my chest. “King Durian is dead. Our deal is done.”
Adonis goes white, sliding from the bed like syrup dripping off a stack of pancakes, terror-struck eyes fixed on me. The Myrtle Queen shoos him away. “Leave, boy.” She waits for him to scurry out of the theater before she speaks again. “And the horns?”
Reaching into the deep pockets of my cloak, I pull out Durian’s horns, still wrapped in gold leaves. A gleam enters the queen’s eyes, and she slides to the edge of the bed, holding out her hands.
I stay where I am. “When does the other half of the pact happen? When do I get what I am owed?”
I’m so fucking tired.
A phantom grin casts darkly over her features. “When you hand me the horns.”
I hold on to them more tightly. “How do I know you will uphold your end?”
The queen’s mouth thins. “Heartwood pact magic is the most powerful of dryad spells, which is why it’s reserved only for the Sovereign. Not even I could stop it from giving you what you asked for.”
The Myrtle Queen stands, moving downstage. When she reaches me, she holds out her hands, palms up. She speaks in a low, melodic tone. “Hand them over, Maddox, and you will be granted everything you asked for. You have my word.”
My heart roars in my ears. All of this suffering, this desperation to survive, has culminated in this moment. With trembling hands, I place Durian’s horns into the cradle of her palms.
A sudden and violent shudder shakes the ground, and a blinding pain shatters through my skull, bringing me to my knees.
Time and space and existence blink out momentarily.
As if I’m no longer here. As if I’m no longer anywhere.
First, intense agony, so much that I think I might pass out. Then, nothing but darkness.
Slowly, every sense bleeds back in.
Hands pressed against Magesté’s stage.
Arms holding me up.
Legs and knees on the hardwood floor.
An odd taste settles on my tongue. Not metallic, but bitter, like I’ve been chewing on firewood. My head bows forward. Heavy. It’s so heavy.
My eyes open. All I see before me is my shadow, and a pair of two-pronged antlers jutting out from my shadow’s head, like those of a young buck. I sit back on my heels, my hands sliding up my face, over my forehead, stopping at the base of the antlers, confirming their existence.
What. The actual. Fuck.
Climbing to my feet, my eyes catch on the shattered mirror headboard. A hundred redheaded girls with a hundred tawny antlers standing a foot above their heads reflect back at me.
I turn my head to the left and the dryad girl does the same. Her gray eyes blink when mine do. Her mouth falls open like mine does.
She is me.
I’m the dryad girl. Those are my antlers.
Again, I reach up, jerking my hand away when I find they’re still there, rough and coarse like tree bark.
Everything is silent. Even my thoughts. Like a fractured cog in a clock that’s trying to tell the time but can’t, so it just clicks and clicks and clicks.
The jazzy music has stopped playing. No one speaks.
I turn my heavy head until my eyes land on the Myrtle Queen leaning against one of the four pillars of the bed, a sly smile on her scarlet lips.
“What did you do?” I breathe.
“I did as you asked.” She lifts both of her hands, still holding Durian’s horns. “You no longer have to suffer with your mortal disease. You are cured and will live for a very long time. And, as your service is now bound to me, you will never want for a home or gold.”
Drosera and Atlas appear just as stunned as I feel, standing together near the curtain. Atlas’s eyes sparkle with tears.
“You turned me into a dryad.”
“You didn’t ask me not to turn you into a dryad, now did you?”
A serial killer is all I want to turn into now. I already murdered the Redwood King. Might as well keep up my streak. “And my service is bound to you? What about that part?”
Her red lips curl up. “An added bonus for all of my kindness.”
“You bitch.” I bolt toward her, intending to wrap my hands around her windpipe.
Stop. Amanita’s voice echoes in my head. My feet plant of their own accord. Of her accord. I can’t move. I try. But I can’t.
“Why?” Tears thicken my words. “Why would you do this?”
Queen Amanita saunters to me, running a long finger across my cheek and tucking a loose piece of hair behind my pointed ear as she leans in to whisper, “Because I can.” I shudder as she pulls away. “Because I lost my most loyal servant years ago, and it was time for a new one.”
Something in her tone makes me pause. “Did you lose him, or did you dispose of him?”
She raises both of her hands. “Either way.”
Sparks of memories return to me, the cruel-faced dryads with the leather armor and spears. No trace of gold or grandeur. Of course they were Myrtlewood dryads. “You had my parents murdered.”
“I was fulfilling your father’s pact.”
“He made a pact to become your servant in exchange for his own death? Sorry if I call fucking bullshit on that.” I hate that my voice is shaking, betraying my unraveling.
“No. He asked for me to save you. So I did.”
Acid fills my stomach. “Save me?”
“You two asked for the same thing, actually. Ironic, isn’t it?
” She chuckles. “Though he didn’t word it quite so precisely as you.
Your father and I knew each other for quite a while, in fact.
He’d been my mortal servant for many years.
King Cyperus’s pathetic excuse for military aid was doing rather little in the way of protecting my forests.
So when your father found me, I thought…
who better to serve a dryad kingdom than the very thing it was protecting itself against? A mortal axman.”
“So…that’s when he asked you to save me?”
“No, no.” She waves a dismissive hand. “That was long before you were even thought of. Your father wanted something quite different the first time we met.”
“What did he—”
“Now is not the time for that story. Anyway. For a time, he was an excellent asset. He would report to me the forests his company intended to fell, and I would suggest alternatives. Preferably in the Redwood Kingdom, just outside of the Redwood Court wards. But he got clever with me. Started felling only some trees and leaving the ones housing dryad souls behind.” She shakes her head in disappointment.
“Then when he came to me again, beside himself with grief, he said his daughter was very sick. Afraid you might die, the poor thing. He told me about your disease, about your ailments. But I’d been watching you, watching your family.
I knew you both had the Sight, that he was a mortal axman. And I saw what your mother did.”
What my mother did.
The images from the Bloodwood Tree return, poisoning my mind.
I always knew, deep down, that what my mom was doing wasn’t okay.
I knew that she was the reason I kept getting so sick.
It wasn’t me sneaking an Oreo or having a low blood sugar.
It was her keeping insulin from me, keeping glucose from me when I needed it.
But she wasn’t like that all the time. Sometimes she was gentle, loving. She taught me how to play piano and the ukelele. She sang me to sleep in the hospital beds her actions put me in.
My father, though, had no idea. He didn’t deserve to be punished for his wife’s actions.
“So my father fulfilled his side of the pact with you, killed the Redwood King…and you repaid him by taking his life.”
“I punished him for betraying my trust, for thinking he could find a work-around in our first pact and then come crawling back to make a second one. So, yes, I took his life…but I satisfied the pact by saving yours. A few more weeks with that abusive mother of yours and you would have been the one lying still and cold on the ground.” Queen Amanita promenades around me, stepping slowly.
The spotlight makes her shadow giant. “You should be grateful.”
This is why I ended up in foster care? This is why I ended up here?
Sure, my mother was flawed—greatly flawed, even—but she was still my mother.
I never really thought of what she’d done as abuse, not like parents who hit and hurt their children.
She was…ill. Maybe she could have gotten better with time.
I will never know. Because of the dryad queen before me.
“Well, thank you so much, Your Majesty,” I intone. “How shall I repay your kindness? Leap off the edge of this treetop kingdom? Guzzle poison? Murder the final Redwood King?”
Her laugh catches me off guard. “No, we can keep dear little Castor alive…for now. I have need of him yet.”
I shake my head, trying to process everything, still unused to the weight of my antlers.
“Oh, don’t look so sullen, darling,” she says. “I did you a favor.”
“By changing me into a dryad? Taking away my autonomy?”
“You should be glad to be rid of your mortal stench,” she growls, animallike.
Somehow, now that I am her physical equal, she has never seemed more alien.
“Mortals have done nothing good for the world. Besides, I gave you what you wanted. Gave you more than you even asked for. Not only will you get to live a full, human lifetime, but much longer. Dryads live as long as their heartwoods.”
Right. I have a heartwood now. I wonder where it is. The thought of my life source being tethered to a tree anyone can access makes me feel oddly vulnerable and exposed.
I run my hands up the base of my antlers to the pointed prongs.
I’m not even upset anymore. I’m not sad.
I’m just angry. Livid. So mad I’m shaking.
For a bizarre moment, I wonder about my blood sugar.
Then I blink, shaking my head. I don’t have to worry about that anymore. A lump forms in my throat.
A surge of dark rage spreads through my veins. I glare up at the Myrtle Queen through my lashes. I have no physical barriers now. Nothing to stop me from plotting against her. Mark my fucking words: Saving the axman’s daughter will be the greatest regret of her life.