Chapter 32 #2
The queen’s receiving room was all pale stone and living crystal; the kind of beauty that reminded one of her power, of all her stolen magic. The queen stood at the window, wearing yet another ethereal gown that could not have been fashioned from mere fabric.
She turned when we entered, her face brightening as if she were glad to see us, a beautiful smile writing itself across her lips.
I had been reading my mother’s face since before I understood that reading was key to my survival. The quality of her attention this morning—bright, interested, settled—told me she’d already decided every turn in this conversation.
Cara stood beside me. Her heartbeat was elevated, but her face was composed.
“Fieran.” The warmth in her voice was its own kind of weapon. It used to persuade me when I was a stupid boy. “And your wife.”
“Mother.” I kept mine easy. “You wanted to see us.”
“I heard there was some excitement this morning.” She moved from the window, unhurried, precise, the way she moved through every room she’d ever occupied. “Your wife leapt from the overlook. To get away from you, Fieran?”
She smiled, inviting me into the joke.
There was no hiding that Cara hadn’t shifted. Couldn’t. “Her dragon is reluctant to shift. We’re working through it.”
Her gaze moved to Cara. Settled there in the way she settled her attention on things she was assessing, both unhurried and inescapable. “I see. And before that? Your marriage has been so very short, and already it seems so very troubled.”
“Cara is worth any trouble.” I smiled down at her as if she were not trouble made mortal.
Cara was not reacting to the false smiles being flung around the room like weapons. There was stiffness in her shoulders, in the line of her throat, in the way her throat bobbed suddenly as she swallowed as if it were difficult.
My mother offered Cara an enchanting smile. “I wanted to congratulate you. On surviving the Hunt.”
“We’re difficult to kill.”
Might as well get to the point of the conversation. That was what she wanted to truly know: why was I still alive, and how could she fix that vexing turn of events?
“Yes. I heard there was some difficulty. In the labyrinth.”
“There were several monsters. That’s generally the design, for some reason.”
“She tried to kill you, Fieran.”
The words landed into the quiet of the room with the precision of a knife thrown.
Yes. She did. She saw your little performance with her family, your careful arrangement of every piece, and she drove the blade toward my back while I was trusting her blindly, and if Lightbringer hadn’t…
“Did she?” Pleasant. Mildly interested. The tone I used when someone had said something I found beneath me.
My mother’s eyes sharpened. “You’re not angry.”
“She was frightened. She’d been through a great deal. The circumstances were—”
I let a note of dry ruefulness into my voice, the note that invited the listener to feel they were being let into a secret I’d rather conceal. “Not inspiring her trust. But we are working through it.”
“She would have put a blade in your back.”
“She tried.” I let my gaze move to Cara briefly, fond and slightly exasperated, nothing more, and then back to my mother. “She has shifter volatility and mortal aim. I have quick reflexes and great affection. I’m still standing.”
“And we are supposed to believe you are not at all hurt by a murder attempt?”
“Annoyed, of course, but only that.” A lie. I was furious. “I understand exactly why she did it. As I’m sure your Nightwalkers already reported, she slept in my bed last night. I know, and I understand, and I do not hold it against her.”
She smiled at Cara. “I raised such a forgiving son, did I not?”
“Yes, your majesty.” Cara’s voice rasped just slightly.
“Tell me why you deserve his forgiveness. Why should I not have you cast into prison for trying to harm him?”
Cara’s chin rose. She didn’t look to me to save her, though we could all feel the trap rising around us. The queen had brought us here for a reason.
Cara said nothing. The silence stretched one beat, two…I was about to respond for her when she spoke, sudden and sharp. “I don’t deserve his forgiveness.”
The queen smiled slightly, her brows arching, the way she did when someone surprised her.
“I made my choice. I protected my family.” Cara’s words were each short and blunt as a dropped plate. “Fieran understands that some day, that same loyalty will be his. But it takes time to grow from the strange beginning of our love.”
I’d claimed once I did not expect her loyalty yet, but that some day she would give me that same fierce loyalty alongside her love. Apparently, the words had clung to her.
Her fingers brushed the backs of mine. Her gaze was still on the queen, so it was strange how her fingers found mine so surely. I caught her hand in mine, the two of us facing the queen together.
“I chose her knowing who she is,” I said.
“I knew what choice she would make when backed into a corner. It’s my responsibility as Bismyth’s leader to make sure no one ever backs her into a corner again.
It’s my responsibility, as her husband, that she never has any reason to feel she cannot trust me. ”
Cara’s fingers tensed against mine, but I didn’t dare look at her to see if she had reacted to those words. I was saying what the queen needed to hear.
“It was entirely my failure.” Sometimes when I heard the earnestness in my own voice, I believed myself in that moment. Was it all my fault?
When I told her that I did not expect her loyalty, had I been lying to us both?
Lying to myself was the one deceit in which I did not indulge.
“How devoted.” The queen’s words were laden with mockery. She looked at our joined hands, then she turned back toward the window, which meant we had stopped being pleasing.
“You’ve been busy,” she said. Conversational. Almost fond. “You must have truly bewitched my son, Cara, because here was the blade barely missing his back, and then he ran to steal for you.”
“She’s my wife.” That was enough.
Cara’s cold fingers tightened on mine. Protective or needy, or both. She didn’t realize she was doing it, and she certainly didn’t realize what it did to me.
“And yet, you hope she’s far more than your wife, or you wouldn’t do all of this,” the queen reminded me gently.
“I would.”
The queen was building toward something; that earlier look of dismissal as if we were boring her had been a lie.
She knew I was using Cara to rally the mortals to our side.
Shifters alone could not fight all the Fae, high and low, and the Nightwalkers.
It was perhaps to our advantage that Lightbringer had not yet flown, in a way; it trapped us in the Trials but made it appear as if we were weak.
When we were trapped before the queen, that perception might be a blessing.
She was going to release us from the Trials and send us on a mission. In the barracks, now that the Trials were over, we were safe from both monsters and the mortal gaze.
If we had to protect Cara because she did not shift, Bismyth would be in danger. Worse, the mortals would be waiting to see their hero fly.
“Take your prize with you.” Her voice carried the warmth of someone giving a gift they’ve been waiting to give. “And take your clan as well. Bismyth is dismissed from the Trials.”
“Thank you, Mother. How generous of you.”
“You’ve given us quite enough spectacle. I think we’ve all seen what we needed to see. Dragon bonds.” A smile ghosted over her lips. “Mortal hopes.”
She had the look of a woman with centuries behind her and no concerns about the centuries to come. “I have found that patience is its own kind of power. Unlike mortals, I have a great deal of it.”
She turned, and now, we were truly dismissed. “Take your miracle and go.”
The corridor was quiet.
The Nightwalkers had dissolved back into their shadows, and the world itself felt empty.