Misrule, page 24
Yes, pet. Forget her.
“Perhaps you should have flown off with Prince Theodoric, then.”
Aurora stiffens. Callow fixes me with a reproachful stare. And I sulk as waves hurl themselves against the base of the cliff, picking up brittle pieces of rubble and crushing them between my fingers.
“Do you love me?” The question is almost too low for me to hear.
I drop a scrap of wood. “How can you ask me that?”
She turns, backlit by the watery sunlight. “Because you haven’t said it. Not once since I woke.”
The sea heaves and my mind reels, riffling back through all the moments we’ve shared since her curse lifted. I must have said it. Even if I hadn’t, she must know it.
“And now I’m worried,” Aurora goes on, “that you don’t love me anymore. That in the last hundred years, you became obsessed with the idea of me. And that is not the same as love.”
Grackles trade their calls outside.
“But the garden, and—”
“I appreciated the garden,” she says, and I think she means it. “And when you gave Elspeth the book, and when you helped us hold the funeral for Briar—though I know you didn’t understand our need for one. That is the Alyce who loved me. The Alyce I need.”
My throat tightens. “You speak as though I’m a completely different person. That I woke up one morning and decided to seize Briar on a whim. But I had reason—good reason.”
“And I know from watching my father that there is a right way and wrong way to use power.”
“And who decides what that is?” I throw up my hands. “You? Are your intentions better—worthier—than mine because you’re a princess and I’m what? A villain?”
“You were never a villain to me,” she’d said, years ago. But she does not repeat it now. She doesn’t say anything at all.
Wind pushes in from the sea, salt-laced.
“Sometimes I think we could compare our wounds for the next century and still discover fresh ones.”
A shudder runs through me. That’s exactly what I’d thought about the war—how we don’t heal because we like to bleed. But it’s not how I want things to be between us. I sit down on a fallen beam. “And so we’re just going to bicker for the rest of our lives?”
Callow mutters something that is unmistakably exasperation.
Aurora is quiet for a long time, tapping the ring against the casement. “When we were in the garden, you asked if I could start again.”
I cross my arms. “And then you threw the ring in my face.”
“Because I was furious with you. I still am. But…”
An eternity hangs in her pause.
She looks down at her father’s ring. The jewel glimmers. “I’ll never agree with the war and the violence. But I’m weary of this never-ending arguing and accusation. If we don’t start working together now, we never will.”
Mortania churns in the place where my magic lives. She is manipulating you.
My head begins to throb. My initial instinct is to trust the ancient Vila. But the way Aurora is looking at me…
“Alyce.” Despite everything, my name on her lips turns my insides to hot wax. She reaches for me, and I’m pulled like the tide. Like she was to that cursed spinning wheel a hundred years ago. “I’m willing to try if you are.”
Mortania vehemently objects, and a small part of me screams to heed her warning. But it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters, save for the spark in Aurora’s amethyst eyes. One of possibility.
“All right,” I say. “Let’s try.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
The next day, another storm rolls in from the sea. Winds pound the palace and rain drips in through the cracks in the windows. The Demon sentries are doubled, but there’s no sign of Malakar or his Goblins. Much of the court shelters in the throne room, their unease roiling in time with the punishing gales as the hours slog by. The Goblins cannot focus on their gambling. The Imps care nothing for pranks. Everyone huddles together in clusters, whispering.
“Do you think we’ve lost them?” I ask Torin. Even the Demon leader is unsettled. She fidgets with the loose threads on her sleeve and flinches at every fork of lightning.
“I do not know. The Fae steed was one of the Hunt’s. It might have been faster than a typical mount. Malakar would not have given up the chase, no matter the risks.”
Callow perches on the back of the throne. She bridles and chuffs, as if claiming that she wouldn’t have given up, either. “We should send a scouting party after the storm passes.”
Torin murmurs something in agreement and pulls at her pendant.
Across the room, Aurora is sitting with a circle of Imps around her, attempting to comfort them. I notice how Regan gives her a wide berth as she paces the perimeter of the chamber, flipping the serpent hilt of her dagger from hand to hand. The Vila leader and I haven’t spoken since our kiss, and I feel more than a little guilty at having avoided her. Especially since I was kissing Aurora in the meantime, and making promises that would cause Regan to want to skin me alive.
Thunder claps. The doors of the throne room swing wide. I’m on my feet in an instant, Callow shrieking and flapping to my shoulder. Two Demon sentries stride through the clamor of the court, carrying something. No—a small body. A Goblin body.
“Found him outside the main gates,” one of the Demons explains. The pair set their burden down gently at the base of the dais.
I recognize this Goblin. His black hair is matted to his head, which lolls to one side. His limbs are limp. Several other of his cadre hurry forward to tend him. The mossy green of his skin is waxy. Water from his drenched clothing pools around him.
“Is he…”
“Alive,” the other sentry says. “He carried this.” She holds out a plain burlap sack, crudely tied together and spotted with brown stains.
Dread slithers between my ribs. Callow’s talons prick through the fabric of my gown.
Torin descends from her seat and accepts the bag from her sentry. She tugs at the rope and looks inside. There’s a moment of charged silence as she pulls something from the bag—and then a roar like the keening of a wounded beast, so loud that small bits of mortar fall from the ceiling. The floor vibrates with the stomping of a hundred boots.
It takes my mind a moment to process what I’m seeing. Lightning brightens the angular features. The snubbed snout of a nose. The scaly hemlock-green skin and small horns poking through bristly curls.
Malakar.
His bloodshot Goblin eyes stare back at me, leaden and void. His lips are open in a final scream, teeth reduced to broken nubs. His head is mounted on a gilded plate like those served at royal dinners. Like the Goblin who was returned to us at the start of the war. The floor lists wildly and I stumble.
A folded parchment flutters from the plate. Regan snatches it up, then reads:
For your collection.
Like a stone dropped into water, the impact of the Etherians’ message reverberates outward.
“Malakar!” a Goblin bellows. Renard, one of Malakar’s closest warriors.
Torin slumps to the floor with the plate on her lap, tears hissing on her cheeks when they meet the molten grooves in her skin. The court is wailing, vowing vengeance and death and every other torture their minds can conjure. Regan raises her staff and leads the Vila in their battle cry. Mortania thrashes in the place where my magic lives.
And in the feral howling of the court, in the aching of my heart, I feel the first fissures in the vow I made to Aurora. It wouldn’t matter if I tried or not. There will never be a way forward with the Etherians, not after this. Torin’s philosopher was right. The hatred between us is in our blood. There’s no scrubbing it out. And I’m not even sure I would if given the chance.
* * *
—
The unconscious Goblin survives.
His name is Clip. He’s badly burned, half-drowned by the storm, and wounded, but he awakens the next day and insists he’s well enough to debrief with the council.
“The Hunt was waiting for us.” A mug of hot wine sits before him in the war room and his small form is cocooned in a thick blanket. Still, he trembles. “We chased the boy for ages—his steed was faster than any creature I’ve ever seen. But as soon as dawn broke, the others appeared. It was too late to turn back.”
My gaze travels involuntarily to Malakar’s painfully vacant seat.
“If the Hunt was skulking near our lands, why was there just one rider that night?” Valmar’s hooked nose is swollen from weeping.
“A ruse, probably,” Torin says. The grooves in her skin are dim with the shade of her grief. “They likely sent the rider to lure Nimara out, presuming she would pursue the boy herself, and then they planted themselves far enough away from the palace so that she couldn’t summon reinforcements. Neve may know more when she returns.”
The Shifter leader left us immediately after the debacle of our last council meeting, supposedly to glean information from her Starlings. But who knows what she’s really up to.
The knots of my stomach cinch tighter. This is my fault. I should have fed Derek to the Goblins as soon as he set foot in our court. Should never have let Malakar and the others venture after him alone. Mortania’s presence undulates in its cave.
“And the boy?” Regan is trying to be respectful, but the question is tinged with impatience.
Clip’s snout quivers. “We was gaining on him. But then the Hunt—I never seen them coming. They popped up from nowheres.” He swallows. Fat tears track down his moss-green face and splash on the table. “I was behind, but Malakar and the others couldn’t stop fast enough. Rode right into them. One of the Hunt caught me. Held me while…while they…” A thousand gruesome ends swarm within his choked silence. “After, they dropped me outside the gates with…Malakar.”
Callow mutters from her perch on the back of my chair. And I swallow back another bout of tears with a deep drink of wine.
“There was nothing you could have done,” Torin assures Clip. “Malakar would be relieved to know you live.”
Valmar grunts his agreement. “And he would tell us we need to strike. Regan can lead the next campaign in his stead.”
“And be intercepted by the Hunt or some other battalion?” Torin asks. “Oryn will expect such retaliation.”
“I don’t give a Goblin’s tit about what the Fae king expects.” The Imp leader climbs onto the table and rearranges the markers.
Clip wipes his snout with a corner of his blanket. “I want to go, too. Give ’em what they gave us and worse.”
I study the boundaries of the High Court on the map. It’s shielded by the strongest protections known to the Fae, and Oryn is squatting inside them like a toad, waiting for us to send armies so that he can return their heads on golden plates.
Anger crackles in my wrists. Mortania whirls, and the scent of charred steel and loam fills me up—the same as it did when I swept Tarkin’s archers off the battlements and loosed my green fire on this palace. We do not have time for treaties or amicable resolutions.
“He’s right.” The attention of the table veers to me. “Caution has served us in the past, but that time is over. We stop sending piecemeal forces. One last battle to end it all. And then these lands will belong to the Dark Court alone.”
Valmar and Clip cheer their approval. Torin studies me with that unreadable Demon expression, but she nods. And Regan looks at me like it’s the first time she’s seeing me in a long time. The corners of her lips curl up.
“Ours alone,” she echoes.
The skin between my shoulder blades prickles. I try not to think of Aurora.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Malakar is laid to rest with a ceremony that rivals any other. The Goblins bury him in the palace crypt. Not alongside the effigies of the queens, of course. There is a special chamber they dug out years ago to bury their own, and they fill their leader’s stone casket with piles of jewels and treasures, as well as weapons he designed. We feast in his honor through the next day, sharing stories that cause us all to laugh and weep in the same breath. I recount his arrival at court—Malakar and several other Goblins hid in barrels on a human ship, then commandeered the vessel and navigated to our shores. He’d stood on the prow as the ship pulled into the harbor and kneeled before me for the only instance I would allow him to do so.
As the memorial ends, the Goblins unanimously elect Renard as their leader. And the whole of the court is desperate in their cries for vengeance. A final stand against Oryn, so that none of us will ever fall victim to the Fae again. I give more blood than I’ve ever shed to the blight elixir in preparation. We trade plans and counterplans around the council chamber table as the inevitable battle takes shape.
My renewed vigor toward our cause is a balm to the hundred tiny rifts between myself and Regan. We’ve still not spoken of our kiss, and there’s an unsettled energy between us when our heads are pressed close over the map of Etheria or when our hands brush, passing markers back and forth. But we’re slowly finding our way back to each other, and I’m grateful for that.
I avoid Aurora entirely. She sends me notes from her chambers, asking for texts on various subjects or to speak with me. I comply with her requests but decline to visit. I’ll speak with her later, when I can better explain myself. She’ll understand.
And what if she does not?
* * *
—
I get my answer sooner than I anticipate. Aurora is waiting outside the great dragon doors before the next council meeting. She has a book in her arms and a look in her eyes that tells me she has plans of her own. Dragon’s teeth.
“What are you doing here?” I ask, pulling her to the side.
“You gave me no choice.” She shrugs. She’s wearing a dress of dark green that might once have been satin. But the Imps have altered the fabric so that it appears rough and scaled, like the hide of a dragon. Talons curve out from each of her shoulders, securing a cape that is veined like wings. “You’ve not replied to my notes, so I decided I’d come to you—and the rest of the council, while I’m at it.”
I let out a sigh. “I’m sorry. But you can’t just show up here.”
“Why not?” She raises an eyebrow in challenge. “Will you restrict my access to important meetings, the same as my father used to do? I thought we were going to try to work together.”
“We are, but—”
“But what?”
I twist my signet ring, unable to think of anything helpful to say in my defense.
“Is that the princess?” Regan strides toward us, and I curse my terrible luck. “I didn’t realize we would have the pleasure of your company today. But you’re alone. Where are—”
“The Imps are otherwise occupied.” Aurora lifts her chin. Her dragon wing cape flutters in the draft. “I let them know my wardrobe needed freshening.”
“I see.” Regan looks to me. “You invited her?”
“No,” I admit, flustered. “I didn’t know she was coming.”
“Ah.” Regan smiles, but it carries an edge of haughtiness. I’m not surprised. Aurora wasn’t exactly polite at their last encounter, so I’m sure Regan is relishing this opportunity to return the favor. “Then I’m afraid whatever you planned on reading to us”—she gestures at the book—“will have to wait. Won’t it, Nimara? Seeing as the princess is not a member of council.”
Twin spots of pink bloom on Aurora’s cheeks. She glares at me, plainly asking me to take her side. The others—Torin, Renard, and Neve, who has returned far sooner than I would have preferred—are making their way toward us. It would be so easy to tell Aurora to go. That I’ll speak with her alone, later. But I did promise to try in the black tower. And I know how much it infuriated her when Tarkin barred her from all political matters. I don’t want to be like him. Perhaps if Aurora sits in with us, she’ll better understand why our attack against Oryn is our only option. And this could be an opportunity for her to smooth things over with the council after what happened at her party. They’ve been distracted since that night, but that won’t last forever. Her rejection was too public to be ignored.
“I don’t see the harm in hearing her out,” I say.
A faint twinge in her jaw is the only sign of Regan’s annoyance. She dips her chin. “Very well, then. This should be entertaining, at least.”
She pushes her way through the dragon doors, boots clipping against the marble. Aurora follows me after her and grants me a grateful smile as a seventh seat is added to the war room table. But I’m not sure she quite understands what she’s gotten herself into.
“Never thought a human would be among us,” Renard comments, stuffing a healthy wedge of cheese into his mouth.
“And a princess at that,” Neve adds. She winds the end of her tangerine-colored hair around one finger.
I deal her my most disdainful glower. The Shifter leader shouldn’t be sitting here at all after what transpired with Derek. I pour out a glass of wine and nudge it in Aurora’s direction. “What was it you wanted to present?”
“Aye,” Valmar says. “Thought you made yourself clear at that party.”
Aurora presses her lips together. I give her a subtle lift of my shoulder. If she wants to be here, she’ll have to learn to handle them.
“I was angry that night,” she begins. “But that doesn’t mean I didn’t appreciate your effort to include me. This”—she gestures toward the windows and the scene beyond—“may not be what I predicted for my future, but it’s been an honor to get to know each of you. To hear your stories. An honor I’m ashamed to say that I likely would have missed if I’d been Briar’s queen.”
Her answer hums in the quiet. And I’m a little stunned that she allowed herself to be so vulnerable. The energy of the table softens. Pride beats out a rhythm in my chest.
