46. Aldrin #3
I grip the edge of the table hard as a cold sweat breaks out all over me.
As gasps sound around me. I take in the dark skin and long white hair of the fae half hunched over, struggling to put one foot in front of the other, but pushing guards away from him so he can take the last few steps to stand before me on his own.
Rainier.
Badly bruised, beaten, sunburned and covered with shallow bloody gashes.
Rainier, who was meant to be on a safe diplomatic mission in the court of our closest ally with Drake and Cedar.
Rainier, alone, without them.
Our eyes lock as he fights to keep his chin up, then his gaze slides to his mother’s, and his entire face crumples.
Klara doesn’t hesitate. She leaps over the table, knocking chalices and dishes, tearing her formal gown as she rushes to her son.
Immediately she begins to heal him, her magic flaring a golden white, but he cannot look at her.
He stands swaying on his feet, staring straight at me but unable to speak.
Then my eyes drop down and I notice the bag he clutches with a white-knuckled death grip. It has a large, ball-shaped bulge in it and the fabric is soaked red.
My stomach drops.
“What happened to you, Rainier?” My voice is a distant rumble. I am dissociating, because I am too fucking afraid of the answer. “What happened in the Summer Court?” The burns, the dust, the sheer fatigue and the bag in his hand all tell me exactly what happened.
Their ritual.
I don’t want to believe it.
He opens his mouth, but no words come out.
“Where are Drake and Cedar?” Cyprien asks at my side, tone pleading. Desperate.
“He needs to be taken to a bed and healed, not paraded like this in front of everyone,” Keira urges.
Basil wrings his hands. “He insisted on coming straight here.”
The murmur of voices rises and more questions are called out to Rainier, but he can hardly move, much less speak. He is frozen in horror.
“Where is your father?” Klara grips his shoulders, trying to peer into his face, tears slipping down her cheeks.
“Tell me, Rainier. Where is your father?” She gives him the tiniest shake while he still refuses to look at her.
More people stand, throwing questions his way, and I throw up my hand, about to silence them, but it is too late.
Rainier breaks, screaming the most heart-wrenching sound I have ever heard. He drops the bag and it hits the ground. A severed head rolls out of it and stops before the table.
Drake’s severed head.
Rainier collapses on his knees, bent in on himself, wrapping his arms over his face as he screams gutturally.
Klara races after the head, falling on hands and knees before it, repetitively reaching out to touch Drake’s face, her hand crumpling away each time before she makes contact, like she just can’t bear to confirm this is not an illusion.
I have no idea what to do for them. How to make this better. I look down into the eyes of one of my oldest friends and find them unseeing. Filmed over and cloudy with death. My heart breaks.
Everyone in the room is frozen, even the guards.I swear not a single one of them even breathes.
I climb over the table and collect Klara off the floor, pulling her up and away from all that is left of Drake. Her entire body shakes violently. “No. No. Nooo!” she moans. Her body goes from limp to very suddenly fighting me. “I can’t just leave him there! I can’t leave him on the ground!”
I glance up at a nearby movement. Keira is bundling up her golden velvet cloak and tossing it at me.
I catch it in a single hand, then very gently lift Drake’s head into it and wrap him up.
The cold, dead, leathery texture of his skin will plague my nightmares for the rest of my life.
The fact that his features have distorted in death, swollen, not quite right.
I hand him to Klara, who bundles him to her chest and sobs into the fabric.
Then I lift Rainier to his feet, holding him before me by the shoulders. “Do you want to speak of what happened in front of the entire court? Is that why you came here?”
He nods, focusing now that he can only see me.
“They forced me to take their Ritual of Banishment,” Rainier chokes out, and his mother lets out a loud cry as everyone else gasps.
He pulls Klara into his chest, placing his chin on top of her head while she clutches onto him.
The connection seems to steady him. “I have no idea where we went wrong. I don’t know—we didn’t—everything seemed so amicable…
then they tore me out of my bed before dawn.
The guards, I mean. I didn’t know they had already—I had been sleeping like a baby when he—” Panic fills Rainier’s eyes as tears drip from them.
I clutch his shoulders tighter. “Breathe. Tell me slowly.”
He takes in a shaky breath. “The Summer Court guards stormed me while I slept and took me to the edge of the desert. I was sentenced by the briefest trial as an enemy of the court before I even had a chance to understand what was going on. Then they handed me the bag and set me out to wander the desert as the sun rose. I was told to find the portal home among the dunes if I wanted to live, but not where it was.”
I nod, having suspected as much. The Ritual is an ancient, brutal practice.
“I didn’t know what was in the bag.” Rainier’s voice becomes high-pitched.
“And by the time it started dripping blood, I had to look, but I was so fucking terrified. It broke me, seeing him…like that . Knowing I slept while they killed him instead of fighting at his side.” A violent shiver runs through him as his voice breaks.
Klara lets out a sob and Rainier clutches her tighter.
“I wanted to lie down in the desert and let the sun take me. It was already burning my entire body, but I couldn’t do that to my mother.
I couldn’t allow her to lose both of us. And I had to let you know.”
His eyes pull away from mine and pure rage curls his lips as he raises his voice to my court behind me.
“The Summer Court are not our allies.”
Bile rises within my throat. My guts twist and an intense pressure builds within my head from all the unshed tears I cannot release for my friend, because I cannot accept my grief.
Drake never left my side once. He never stopped fighting for me or for the better future we envisioned, and now, he doesn’t get to live the fruition of those dreams.
I bend down slightly to look Rainier directly in the eye and speak loud enough for only him to hear. “Thank you, for bringing this news back to us, and for surviving. It is what your father would have wanted.”
“I have no idea what became of Lord Cedar,” Rainier murmurs back, his eyes becoming distant.
I glance up, looking for Basil to have Rainier and Klara escorted to their chambers where they can rest, but find him at the grand door again.
He is arguing with the servants who control the magical mailroom that receives communications from across the realm, including those from other courts.
When my butler glances up at me, there is desperation in his eyes.
I expect a single scroll to have been magically transported into my palace, but he clutches multiple as he walks toward me. Time seems to slow to a crawl, all the angry, roaring voices around me falling away, as I watch the color blanch from Basil’s face.
He arrives with three scrolls, each with a different royal seal: Summer, Autumn and Winter. And I just fucking know.
I take the first scroll from his hands and break the seal, the magic that ensures I am the only one who can tamper with it evaporating as I do. I read the words as everything inside of me screams and screams. Then I turn to my people, who have fallen silent, holding only Keira’s wide eyes.
“The Summer Court has declared war on Spring.” I take the next scroll mechanically and break it open. “The Autumn Court has declared war on Spring.” My hands shake on the third scroll. “The Winter Court has declared war on Spring.”
Chaos breaks loose, but I only have eyes for Keira, whose rosebud lips hang open.
I am so fucking afraid of losing her all over again that my legs almost give out on me.
We won’t get the luxury of time in peace to grow old together.
To get married and have that family she spoke of.
Not with these odds stacked against us. The gods must have cursed our stars.
“This is Torin’s doing, I just know it.” Keira’s voice shakes. “The letter he sent by arrow. What he said to me in the dungeon. I didn’t believe him at the time. This was his contingency plan, if he lost the throne to us.”
I pull her into my chest, kissing the top of her head. I squeeze her tight for a heartbeat, then another, needing her to ground me when we don’t have the luxury of time, while everyone yells and cries around us.
“One thing is clear,” I snarl. “We need to find out what in the Darkest Realm is going on.”
I look for Sasha in the crowd, but she is gone. Our royal hostage and assurance that the Winter Court wouldn’t attack us again, fucking gone. The one person who clearly knew this was going to happen and could give us answers right now.
I grab Cyprien by the shoulders. “Sasha?” I ask him.
“She left an hour ago,” he growls. “I didn’t think anything of it at the time.”
“Find her,” I demand. “Hunt her down. Bring her back by any means possible. Tonight. She couldn’t have gotten far.”
He nods, turns on his heel and strides away.
“And Cyprien,” I call over the top of the crowd. “Bring the hounds with you.”
Chills run down my spine as I watch him leave. I hold Keira even tighter in my arms, focusing on the rapid beat of her heart, on the fast expansion and contraction of her chest as she pants. I breathe the scent of her in.
I take a moment, before we need to leap into planning another fucking war.
With the way the Spring Court has been ravaged in our battle for the throne, with how Titania ran it into the ground before that to pull its wealth and resources into her own pocket, we could hardly win against a single court right now.
Three courts declaring war on us will be our ruination.
The End