Chapter 2
Chapter Two
The balcony overlooks an azure sea.
The Court of Dreams is anchored to the real world, but it exists in a plane outside of time. The only way to reach it is through a portal Keir controls. Indeed, he controls every aspect of the entire island, because he created it with his power.
It was the first sign he wasn’t quite as fae as he seemed.
Platters of food rest on a table in front of me. Dates and stuffed figs, along with the finest cheeses, and biscuits cut so thin they’d melt in your mouth…. My mouth waters, even as my mood plunges. Keir can’t know how long it’s been since I was fed, but this feels like a new sense of torture.
If my father ever discovered it’s the key to breaking me, then he’d have more than my soul. I would give him everything.
“See something you like?” Keir’s voice is rough velvet as he gestures and one of the chairs sweeps back on an invisible gust.
My stomach twists. It wants food so desperately that I have to dig my fingernails into my palms to control the urge to stuff my face. “Are you referring to the cheeses, my prince?” I glance at him from beneath my lashes. “Or a certain dragon?”
He smiles a little dangerously. “You don’t need to pretend to flirt with me anymore, Merisel.”
That’s not my name.
And he knows it bothers me. This is only a means to force me to tell him the truth.
“Fine,” I tell him. “The food looks delicious.”
I pluck a grape from a platter and stuff it in my mouth before he can even reply. Sweetness bursts across my tongue. I swear I almost have an orgasm. I need more.
“Is this even real?” It feels real beneath my fingers, the date sticky as I squeeze it. “This dream?”
“What makes you think it a dream?”
I laugh. Because my life is a nightmare, and this is a mirage. “You’re the Prince of Dreams. This is not the first time I’ve woken to find myself walking these halls.”
He pauses. “You never came. I’ve summoned you a half dozen times.”
Maybe they were fever dreams.
Keir leans back in his chair, one arm slung over the chair beside him as he watches me. “It can be.”
“Be what?”
“Real.”
I pop the date into my mouth, and flavor bursts over my tongue.
Gods, I barely chew it before I swallow it down.
Maybe it’s not real enough to fill my stomach, but I don’t care.
With a flash of the knife, I slice a thin, crumbly wedge of cheese.
“So you seduce you me with such pleasures first,” I murmur, “and then, I presume, comes the torture.”
His gaze drops to my fingers as I lift the cheese to my lips. “This is not seduction, Merisel. You will know if I ever decide to seduce you.”
“Then what is this?” The cheese melts on my tongue. I’m a little too quick to reach for another piece.
“Why would you think I intend to torture you?” There’s curiosity in his tone.
I pause, swallowing my mouthful and then licking the remnants from my thumb. That was a slip. He’s questioning it. “Why would you not? You own me.”
“Ah, yes.” There’s a quirk around his mouth. “Our bargain. I was a little angry with you when I made it. I thought I’d found a bride and here you were, using false pretenses to try and steal from me.”
This time, it’s my turn to arch a brow. “I never tried to capture your interest. If anything, quite the opposite.”
I can’t help hearing the words he spoke to me when he realized my deception: “I've never been more intrigued by you.”
I set the fork down. “What do you want? It isn’t to watch me eat. It isn’t to remind me of the past.”
“You dined with me once. Perhaps I wished to repeat the experience.”
“Now I see how you dance around the truth.”
Keir laces his fingers together. A dangerous intensity springs to life in his eyes.
“Rumor abounds that an ancient magic is reawakening. The world trembles with its presence, and every power-hungry lordling and prince in all the lands will be desperate to find it. I want to get my hands on it first.”
I pause, nibbling on the stuffed fig. This feels familiar and it’s a relief to finally get to the crux of the matter. “An ancient magic…?”
“The cauldron,” he replies. “The Goddess’s Cauldron.”
I drop the fig, and my fork ricochets off my plate as it lands on it.
He cannot be serious. The cauldron was gifted to the fae by the goddess herself.
When the dragon kings used the power of the cauldron in order to defeat a half-bred monstrosity, they were forced to surrender their magic to it and retreat from the world.
It left behind an enormously powerful magical relic created by a goddess, and filled with the power of ancient dragons.
And every fae in the land wanted it.
A wise old king at the time stole the cauldron and sailed out to a small island off the coast of the Court of Storms. He begged the Goddess of the Sea to take the cauldron and hide it, for fear that one would rise with the power to wield what should never be wielded.
The other courts hunted him but they were too late.
The sea rose in anger, driving their boats back to shore. By the time the storm died down, the island had vanished. The king and the cauldron with it.
No one has seen it since.
“Well, fuck.” I stare down at my shirt. Clots of soft goat cheese are spattered across my breasts, and leaves of thyme cling to my skirts. The fig is nowhere to be seen. I haven’t been that clumsy since I was a girl.
“That’s all you have to say?” Keir looks amused. “I’ve just offered you the greatest quest of all time and this is your response? You could be famous.”
“Or dead,” I point out. “The answer is no. No, I will not steal your cauldron—”
“I don’t need you to steal my cauldron,” he purrs. “I just need you to find it for me, and to do that, I need you to get your hands on the Horn of Shadows.”
More myths. “The horn that leads the Wild Hunt?”
He leans toward me, every inch of him fixed in predatory intent. “The hounds of the Wild Hunt were born of the cauldron. They can find it. But to control them, I need the horn.”
There’s a moment where I consider pushing my chair back, climbing onto the railing, and diving into the water far below.
And right now, I hate water with a passion.
Maybe I can appeal to the Goddess of the Sea? Maybe she’ll make me disappear too?
But this is his realm.
He’ll probably simply pluck me out of the sea. There’s no escape there.
“The hounds of the Wild Hunt make Wyrdhounds look like a child’s bedtime story,” I grind out. And one of them nearly killed me three months ago. “To blow the horn means binding your soul to it forever.”
“’Til death,” he corrects. “Only one fae can blow the horn at a time. Once bound, the horn becomes useless to anyone else. Unless the blower is killed.”
“There’s an easy solution to that problem, Your Highness. If you get your hands on that horn, every prince in the land will make it their personal prerogative to slit your throat.”
“Worried about me?” There’s a slight quirk to his lips, and his eyes flare gold as he lets his glamor slip, just for a moment.
I don’t know how I never saw it before.
The dragon peers back at me, smoldering in golden flames.
My heart skips a beat. “You can still die. The fae managed to kill the rest of the dragon kings. Even you can’t survive the removal of your heart.”
“Did they?” Another faint smile.
I stare at him.
Keir sips his wine. “Some of my brethren chose to fight. Some of them chose to sleep. And some of them… chose another way to live.”
He’s not the only dragon out there?
“How many? Who?” Because surely they wouldn’t be masquerading as lowly peasants. No, they’d be kings. Princes.
“If I tell you that, my love, then I will either have to kill you or capture you.”
“Capture me?”
His smile holds all manner of sin. “Bind you to me forever. Lock you away in a tower where you can’t ever escape me.”
On second thought…. “Keep your secrets then.”
“Aren’t you curious?”
“Not that curious.”
“About the horn,” he whispers, a dangerous hint of smile tugging at his wicked mouth. “About the cauldron. An ancient prophecy states it will be reborn, Merisel. Someone’s going to find it. Don’t you want to be the one who does?”
My thief’s soul quivers at the thought.
But I wipe at the goat’s cheese staining my lovely gown.
“There’s always an ancient prophecy. There’s always an angry goddess—or god.
And there’s always some idiot thief who finds themselves talked into a job like this.
” I toss the crumpled napkin aside. “Do you know what happens to that thief? They die. I know how this story ends, and my answer is no. Find yourself another thief. I don’t want fame.
I don’t want glory. I don’t want anything to do with power-hungry fae princes and a mythical cauldron everyone wants to get their hands on. ”
“You haven’t heard all the details.”
“I don’t want to hear all the details!” I drag my finger across my throat. “Because this is what happens to curious thieves.”
“What do you want then?”
Freedom.
“Something I can’t have.”
He gives me a considering look, but wisely, he doesn’t pursue that line of thinking. “You owe me a debt.”
I set both hands on the table and glare over it at him. “Then take it out of my hide.”
He leans forward. “You tried to steal from me, and I’m just as dangerous as any of the fae princes in the lands. Don’t tempt me, Merisel, because if I demand payment, then you won’t like my terms.”
Every inch of me stills.
“Perhaps this will help you change your mind.” He tosses something on the table between us, though I swear his hands were empty just now.
It’s a sheet of paper, curled up on itself. I unroll it and a line drawing of my sister’s face appears, along with the word “Wanted.” The reward is ten thousand groats, which makes my shoulders deflate.
For ten thousand groats, every hob and selkie and brownie in the lands will be looking for her.
Soraya and I have a complicated history.