Crown of Crystal Flame

by C. L. Wilson

  You will keep this necklace with you at all times. Waking, sleeping, in the bath. You will not take it off for any reason, understood?

  Yes, master.

  Good. There is one particular danger you must watch out for. The Tairen Soul keeps one who was once dahl’reisen by his side.

  Yes, master. Gaelen vel Serranis.

  They say he can detect Mage Marks. If they discover you are Mage claimed, they will either put you to death or put you under such great guard as to be useless to us. So if vel Serranis is summoned to check you for Mage Marks, speak the word Gamorraz to activate the larger of the two white stones.

  What does the stone do? Is it a weapon?

  Of a sort. Just keep it close and use it if you must to keep from being discovered. The amber crystal will let me hear your thoughts, while warding against all but the most deliberate attempts by others to do the same.

  The runner returned and whispered in the gatekeeper’s ear. The gatekeeper turned to Lord Sebourne and said, “His Majesty will grant you the audience you have requested, Great Lord Sebourne. But you and your men will not be permitted to bring weapons into the castle.”

  Sebourne drew back. “I’ve come to defend my country against invasion, and I am not permitted to carry a weapon?”

  “I’m sorry, my lord, but not into the castle. Your weapons will be stored in the armory and returned to you in the event of an attack. His Majesty prays you will understand the precaution.”

  Dervas caught sight of a Fey warrior beyond the gate. The Fey was clad for war, his black armor bristling with a full complement of silvery Fey blades. “A Great Lord of Celieria must surrender his weapons, but Fey wander the castle freely, carrying enough steel to slaughter an entire regiment? Where is the sense in that?”

  The gatekeeper didn’t even have the courtesy to look embarrassed. “King’s orders, my lord. You must surrender your weapons here at the gate.”

  Dervas capitulated with ill grace. He turned in the saddle and nodded to his men. They all immediately began unbuckling their sword belts. Dervas tossed his to the gatekeeper, then bent down to remove his boot daggers and hand those over as well.

  “Two swords. Two daggers. Shall I surrender my shield, too? Who knows, I might bludgeon someone with it in a fit of rage.”

  The gatekeeper ignored the sarcasm and answered with studied politeness, “If you wish us to hold your shield, my lord, we would be happy to do so.”

  “Bah.” Dervas waved a gauntleted hand.

  “If you and your men will dismount, my lord, we will stable your horses.”

  Dervas dismounted and handed his reins to one of the guards. With his men at his heels, he walked through the gates of Kreppes.

  Once you are in the castle, you will make note of everything you see. Troop counts, location of the guards, artillery on the battlements, entrances and exits, defensive positions, any weakness that can be exploited. There is nothing too large or too small for you to consider.

  And finally, once you’ve had your audience with the king, you will make it your business to discover where in the castle the Feyreisen and his mate are lodged. Every detail you noted about the castle, you will also note about their location. Where it is, all the ways to access it, what time they rise and retire, how many and which warriors guard them, anything and everything you can think of. You will find a way to secrete this stone in their room or just outside it.

  The guards escorted Dervas across the outer courtyard, which housed stables, secondary barracks, training fields, as well as houses and workshops for the small, walled city that was Kreppes. A second gated wall surrounded the pentagon-shaped inner castle. Dervas noted the towers every two tairen lengths along the battlements of the crenellated second wall, the location of the armory and second barracks, each set of stairs leading up to the battlements, the number of guards standing the walls.

  Only a handful of Fey stood among the Celierians on the walls, and that surprised him. Dorian was such a Fey-lover, he’d hand over the keys to the kingdom if he could.

  “Great Lord Sebourne?” They had reached the main building entrance. A young soldier wearing the Celierian blue-and-gold tabard of the King’s Guard stood on the steps. He bowed deeply. “I am Lieutenant Arvin, my lord. My men and I will escort you to the king.” Another six Guardsmen stood just inside the arching doorway with its wide, steel-reinforced door. Arvin nodded to the gate guards, who saluted and headed back the way they’d come.

  “I apologize for the armed escort, my lord,” Arvin said, as they walked through the keep. “Tensions are high. I do hope you understand.”

  Dervas wanted to snap that he understood a great many things, including the fact that the Fey had poisoned the king’s mind, but he held his tongue. He was here to mend fences and salvage what he could of his power and his standing in the court.

  “If surrendering my weapons and submitting to armed escort will set my king’s mind at ease, then I surrender and submit gladly,” he lied. They crossed the main hall. At the back of the hall, a stairway led up to a second level. There were two doors on the left and an open archway on the right. Two of the King’s Guard stood beside each of the doors and the archway.

  “Thank you, my lord. I appreciate your gracious understanding.” Lieutenant Arvin stopped beside the second door on the left. “The king has granted this audience to you alone, my lord. Your men must remain here.”

  Sebourne motioned for his men to step back.

  “There is one final thing, my lord. I have been commanded to search you before you enter the king’s presence.”

  Sebourne’s brows shot up towards his hairline. He had accepted every slight with grace, but this was too much. His ire spewed out before he could check it. “Search me? What in the gods name for, boy? Do you think I have a sword stuffed up my ass? I am a Great Lord of Celieria! I was asked to surrender my weapons, and I have done so. You have my word I carry no other weapon on my person. That should be more than sufficient for you!”

  The lieutenant would not be swayed or intimidated. He remained instead, polite but firm. “Please, my lord. I must insist. King’s orders.”

  Dervas huffed and snorted and glared—and muttered in a dark voice about the end of the civilized world—but in the end he submitted to the abominable indignity of a search. He knew exactly why he was being subjected to it. Dorian meant to humiliate him, to put him in his place, to remind him there was no right or power even Great Lord Sebourne enjoyed except by the consent of the king.

  What of the king, master? When we were in Celieria City, Master Nour said that when we reached Kreppes, I was to kill Dorian.

  That was the original plan, but now that the Feyreisen and his mate have come, the plans have changed. Your new mission is to assist in the capture of the Tairen Soul’s mate.

  Yes, master, of course… but Dorian… please, I would still like the honor of killing him… now more than ever. For my son.

  And so you shall, but locating the Feyreisa is your first priority. And it is to that aim that you will devote all your efforts. Once you have provided me the information I require and put that stone in place, your reward will be the honor of killing Celieria’s king.

  After a thorough pat down, the lieutenant led Sebourne through the door and down the connecting hallway. They passed five doors, three on the left, two on the right, before the hallway made a thirty-degree turn to the right. Two more of the King’s Guard stood at attention beside the fourth door on the right. The door led to a small, windowless interior sitting room, fairly bare by court standards, though the two couches and chairs that occupied the room were of obvious quality. There was a closed second door at the back of the room, flanked by more guards.

  “Make yourself comfortable, my lord. I will let His Majesty know you are here.” The lieutenant bowed deeply a final time, went to rap softly on the back door, then slipped inside.

  Dervas cooled his heels in the small sitting room for the better part of a bell. Though several people c
ame and went through that guarded back door, no one came to summon him. No one came to look after his needs or offer him refreshment. No doubt the waiting and the deliberate lack of polite comforts were more small punishments.

  And now, my umagi, I am going to erase all memory of this conversation until it is time for you to fulfill your task. This is for your sake as well as ours. With your memories gone, even a shei’dalin as powerful as the Tairen Soul’s mate could Truthspeak you but still learn nothing of value.

  At last, after what seemed like an eternity, the door opened again. King Dorian’s valet, Marten, stepped into the sitting room. “Great Lord Sebourne? His Majesty will see you now.”

  “That dimskull Dorian has reinstated Sebourne.”

  Ellysetta looked up at Rain in shock as he shed his golden war steel and prepared for bed. “What?”

  “Aiyah. Told me so himself half a bell ago.” Rain dragged a hand through his hair in a distracted gesture and sighed. “I suppose I shouldn’t call Dorian a dimskull. We’re desperate for troops. I can understand why he did it.” He met her gaze. “But I have a bad feeling about this, Ellysetta. I don’t trust Sebourne.”

  “You think he will betray us?”

  Rain shrugged. “I don’t know. I told Dorian he should at least let Gaelen check Sebourne and his men for Marks, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Sebourne is still a powerful, well-connected Great Lord with many supporters. He fears that alienating Sebourne—especially after what happened with Colum—would spark a civil war.”

  “He may be right.”

  “I know.” Rain slid under the covers and pulled Ellysetta into his arms. “But I still have a bad feeling about this.”

  Rain’s bad feeling left Ellysetta just as unsettled as he was. It took her a while to get to sleep, and when she finally did, she dreamed. Images flickered across her mind. Charred and broken stone, shattered glass, the ruins of a building. A dark hole ripped into a wall. Stairs leading down into a windowless room. A sconce lit, revealing a very large, dark oval mirror perched on a column of stone.

  As Ellysetta watched, the dark oval of the mirror began to glow with silvery-blue light, just like the phosphorescent mirror pool at the heart of Grandfather Sentinel in Elvia. The surface seemed to ripple, and a face rose from the glowing depths. A Fey face, strong and stern, with paleblond hair and eyes like deep green wells.

  A strange tug of recognition pulled at her. The Fey in the mirror was a stranger… but something about him struck a deep chord, as if she should know him—or once had. She reached out a hand, but before her fingers could brush the mirror’s surface, the mirror dissolved. The dreamview became a white blur.

  When it focused again, she was walking in a grim, denuded landscape. The glare of a harsh white sun blazed down on a world leached of all color, alien and yet somehow still familiar. A river flowed in the distance, its surface still and black—the Heras. The tumbled ruins of a stone fortress lay scattered before it. From the shape of the hills and the destroyed fortress, she recognized the ruins as Kreppes.

  The ground beneath her feet was covered in a thick layer of what she first thought were broken shards of sun-bleached shells. She stumbled on a rounded bulge hidden beneath the shards, and pain darted up her leg as her ankle twisted beneath her weight.

  Ellysetta nearly fell to her knees, but she managed to catch her balance. She turned to see what had tripped her, and her stomach clenched with a sudden surge of nausea.

  The rounded bulge was a skull… a man’s skull.

  White teeth grinned in a macabre smile beneath the gray-white shadows of empty eye sockets.

  She took a stumbling step backward, away from the skull, and the shells beneath her feet crunched and snapped. Only then did she realize these were not stones, nor shells. They were bones. Shattered as if by some god’s terrible hammer. Bleached white and brittle by the sun.

  The remnants of what had once been living, breathing people.

  Thousands of people.

  And in the center of that barren landscape, upon that graven sea of the dead, Ellysetta stood alone. Garbed in scarlet from head to toe like a splash of blood on the snow-white field.

  And she knew, with a certainty she could not explain, that every person whose shattered skeleton lay beneath her feet had died because of her.

  Ellysetta’s eyes opened. The brittle white boneyard of her dream became the night-dark ceiling of the room she and Rain shared at Kreppes. She could hear the low voices of her quintet just outside the bedroom door.

  She sat up, and out of habit turned to check the Sentinel blooms beneath her pillow. The flowering sprigs were still in place, as they had been every night since leaving Elvia. Not a Mage-sent dream then.

  Beside her, Rain stirred. His hand flexed against the bed-sheets, seeking her. Shei’tani. The sleepy call drifted from his mind. Not Spirit, merely an unchecked thought.

  She brushed back the silky spill of hair that feathered across his brow. “Las, kem’san. Ruliath.” Peace, my love. Go back to sleep. A push of encouraging Spirit accompanied the words, a gentle weave that she laid upon him without guilt.

  He was so weary. The fact that her dream had woken her but not him was proof of his utter exhaustion. He had been so strong for so long, but his vast power was beginning to flag. Madness—both from the trauma of war and from their uncompleted truemate bond—was chipping away at the powerful barriers that held back the torment of his overburdened soul. Yesterday, his thoughts had been so loud her quintet had heard them on several occasions.

  Since the moment she’d called him from the sky, he had taken care of her, looked after her, put her safety before his own. Now it was her turn to give him back a fraction of that devotion. She loved him so. No longer because he was the hero of her dreams but because he was the Fey, flawed and yet so fine, who had won her heart. He was a king, a great and noble leader of the immortal Fey, but he was also just Rain, her beloved, hers to protect.

  And she would protect him… just as fiercely as the tairen defended the pride.

  When she was certain he was well and deeply asleep, she rose from the bed and dressed quietly, drawing a thick, furlined velvet cloak over her gown. There would be no more sleep for her tonight. The strange, disturbing dream hadn’t terrified her, as her dreams often did, but it had left her tense and unsettled all the same. She needed to get out of this room and go for a walk to clear her thoughts.

  In the antechamber outside the bedroom, she was surprised to see the five warriors of primary quintet instead of her secondary.

  “What are you doing here?” she whispered, closing the door behind her. “Shouldn’t you all be asleep?”

  “Shouldn’t you?” Gaelen countered.

  She arched a brow, then had to smile. “Mei sorro.” The phrase, which meant well struck, was one Fey warriors used in training when their sparring partners hit a good blow. It was a phrase she’d become quite familiar with since Gaelen and her quintet had begun training her in the use of Fey weapons. She was getting better at hitting precisely where she aimed but still had work to do to improve her own defenses.

  “More dreams?” Bel asked softly. He watched her closely, his gaze filled with a mix of certainty and concern.

  “Aiyah.” She grimaced, then confessed, “I’m beginning to question the real reason Lord Galad gave me those Sentinel blooms. They seem to make me dream more, not less.”

  “You’re starting to learn the true nature of Elf gifts,” her uncle Tajik muttered sourly. “When an Elf gives you a rose, always look for the thorn.”

  She turned to the red-haired Fire master with a puzzled frown. “Why do you hate the Elves so?” Her uncle never had a kind word to say about his woodland kinsmen.

  “I don’t hate all Elves,” he clarified. “Just their king.”

  “What has Lord Galad done to earn your wrath?”

  “You mean besides sentencing my sister and her mate to a thousand years of torment? “

  “You were bitter before you lea
rned that.” She pinned him with a level gaze.

  Tajik looked away. “I loved once. An elf maid named Aliya. With her brother’s consent, we would have bound ourselves to one another in e’tanitsa.” He shrugged. “Instead, he sent her to her doom.”

  Ellysetta’s hand flew to her throat. “Aliya was Lord Hawks-heart’s sister? Tajik, are you saying Galad Hawksheart sent his own sister to her death? “

  Tajik nodded. “I could have saved her, but he made sure I didn’t. Had she lived, it would have changed a Verse in a minor Song, but he said that one change might have rippled to a greater, more important Song, and put its outcome in danger. He wasn’t willing to take that risk. Her death ensured that change wouldn’t happen.”

  “Oh, Tajik.” No wonder he harbored such enmity towards the Elf king. If Galad Hawksheart had intentionally sent Rain to his death, no power on earth, the Seven Hells, or the Haven of Light would have spared him from her wrath. She laid a hand upon her uncle’s arm. “Kem’san avi i ver’baloth.” My heart weeps for your sorrow.

  “Beylah vo, kem’jitanessa.” He covered her hand. “Now perhaps you will understand that when I say you be wary of Elf-gifts, it is no idle warning. I know just how far Hawks-heart will go to protect his precious Dance. If he thought tormenting your dreams with those Sentinel blooms would benefit the Dance, he would give them to you without a qualm and never tell you their true purpose.”

  Was it possible? Could the Elf king have gifted her with the Sentinel wreath not to protect her from the Mage’s dream-attacks, as he had claimed, but rather to open her mind to prophetic Elvish dreams?