He cleaned the blood off her, working with small, soft strokes, as though afraid of hurting her. He pulled the tube out of her throat and tossed it into the water, wiping around the wound until only a pale red slit remained visible.
Blood showed on the gold thread of her clothes, the cloth sodden. He touched it, tracing the golden vines of roses which crept down the edges of her gown.
He did not keep track of how long he stayed like that, gazing down at her while his mind moved in sluggish circles, before Pike found him anew.
“They’re locked away,” he announced, his voice thick with emotion. “What are we going to do with them?”
“They are living on borrowed time,” Rodan replied, stroking her hair. It remained up, coiled on top of her head. She had been lovely, with her back arched while she lifted the strands and twisted them into the perfect knot. “I will deal with them soon.”
Pike fell silent for a moment, coming around to the other side of Maeve so their eyes locked over her. “What would she want now?” he asked. “Do you know?”
In Ishtem, they would give her body to the birds to devour. In Nucifera, it would be the flames or the deep ocean for her. In Karst, she would be buried with her favored belongings and gifts from those who loved her. Here, in Visantium, they sometimes mummified their dead, but otherwise burned them and kept the ashes in urns and ornate boxes.
None of it right for her.
The sensation returned. Something he was missing. His hand twitched on her head.
“I will not put her in the ground,” Rodan murmured. “I could not bear to consign her to the darkness. She was everything but dark.”
“We have to do something,” Pike said. “She must have wanted something.”
“She was too young to think overmuch on her own death,” Rodan replied, finally pulling his eyes up to his tentative ally. “She might have had an inclination, but she had not shared it with me.”
Pike reached out a hesitant hand and placed it on one of Maeve’s. He flinched but wrapped his scarred and calloused fingers around hers. “She’s not the one who was supposed to die,” he murmured. “If anyone was to pass on this journey, it should have been me. I’ve lived my life.”
Rodan did not say anything. He did not disagree.
Not that Pike was to blame, but to lose her—the reality of it still evaded him.
“Pike,” Rodan murmured, “I need to secure the palace. I need to get rid of the party goers.” He must be alone. He was being consumed.
The man nodded and pulled his hand from Maeve’s. “I’ll do what I can.”
Rodan tugged at the copious amounts of matter around him and handed Pike two daggers that shone like moonlight, the hilts silver with moonstone inlays and perfectly balanced against the blade. “For you. A slice of my power to bolster you.”
Pike took the weapons, and his face relaxed as soon as his fingers wrapped around the hilt. The magic Rodan imbued them with erased some of the worst of Pike’s scars and smoothed the wrinkles around his eyes and mouth. “Why?” he asked, his voice a dull croak.
“I need you to be my emissary. Speak with my voice. Watch with my eyes. I cannot—” He paused; his eyes pulled back to Maeve’s still form. “I cannot leave her yet. The power I lent you will allow you to use my authority until—” Again he paused, unsure. That sensation of missing something returned. Like he lost something important, though he failed to pinpoint what it was. “I need this palace secured,” he repeated instead. “Please, Pike. Do this for me.”
The cutthroat nodded and without another word slipped from the room, his footsteps fading as he took the stairs down toward the gathering.
The party seemed like it happened a lifetime ago. The mass of bodies blended together. All he clearly remembered was Bairam’s face and the twisted smile that creased it while Rodan demanded to know where Maeve was.
You’ll be too late.
He covered his face with his hands and went to his knees beside her—he would not think of her as a body. Not yet. Not when only that morning he brought her to pleasure at his hands, passed her the bowl of peaches, watched her dress...
What would happen if we bonded, and I was human, and I died? Tell me the truth.
“Death or madness,” Rodan whispered aloud to the empty room.
He witnessed it before. The spiraling despair of other Fae when they lost their bond mates.
It did not take long.
He reached up and clutched at the fabric of her skirts, willing some movement from the table. To have her voice say his name once more.
But there was only silence.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Rodan
PIKE SLAMMED A TRAY DOWN on the table near them, and Rodan lifted his eyes, his movements slow.
“You have to eat something,” the cutthroat said in his trademark snarl. “Maeve wouldn’t have wanted you to starve yourself.”
“Maeve wouldn’t have wanted to die,” Rodan said.
“It’s been four days,” Pike replied, ignoring Rodan’s words. “We have to do something. She’s going to—you know.”
He did. But his magic wrapped around her, preventing the rot from setting in. He would not bear it. He could not. Not any of it. Not the entreaties from Bairam’s family to let the head of their household go, not Pike’s demanding nature. None of it.
He needed Maeve.
And she lay here.
Sometimes, her hand rested on his shoulder, guiding him, her voice whispering to him. During those moments he knew if he turned his head fast enough, he would catch her move.
He was not quick enough. Not yet.
“I loved her too,” Pike said, his tone thick with emotion. “I thought of her often when we were parted. I always wanted—always hoped she was okay. That she was safe and alive in her world, that—”
“She’s not alive,” Rodan interrupted. “Not safe. We could not keep her safe.”
I promised I would keep her safe.
You can’t promise that, she said so many times.
How right she was.
Rodan wished, not for the first time, he had left her in her own world. That he ran the trials on his own.
He wondered if the news reached Sebastian’s ears, if the usurper realized his old ally and friend lay deceased. Rodan pictured him, crowing over the news, tears of mirth streaking his ruddy cheeks, and wanted nothing more than to run a sword through his black heart.
The assassin they assumed to be sent by Sebastian had been sent by Bairam. Pike extracted the knowledge from his wife, Alexis. Rodan didn’t ask how. He did not care. Pike possessed his methods, and Rodan left him to it.
“Maeve would have wanted us to push on,” Pike said, repeating the words he’d said a number of times in the last few days. “We can have her put to rest here and come back for her once you take back the throne. You can lay her in state at your palace.”
That thought, that maddening thought that kept brushing against his consciousness and retreating like the tide, swept over him again. He did not grasp it. Every time he tried, it slipped further away, like a frightened bird.
“I will not leave her,” Rodan said.
Pike sighed. “At least take something to eat.”
“I do not hunger.”
The man approached him, kneeling down next to the deposed king. His single eye caught Rodan’s gaze. “You can’t do this anymore. She’s gone. The time to weep is over. The time to act is now.”
Rodan wanted to strike out with the magic that lay closer to call than it had at any other time in his long life. As though it sensed his distress, his grief, and wanted to aid him.
Or it wants to aid the madness.
Sometimes the tendrils crept over him, like vines taking over a dead tree, tightening their grip. How long until he became devoured?
Even now, he sensed the whispering press of something horrid and malevolent. Something that wanted to tear the palace down to its foundations, and the city as well. It wanted him
to rend and destroy, to tear and bleed.
He swallowed hard and pushed the thoughts away.
“Tomorrow,” he said instead. “Tomorrow, I’ll—”
The thought returned. Pressing, this time. Painful, almost.
Rodan gasped, and he clutched Maeve’s cold hand. “Dear gods.”
Pike’s eye sparked. “What? What is it?”
He grasped that maddeningly flighty train of thought and held it, captured it, at last.
Was it possible?
Might I make it back to you, my love?
He did not tell her he loved her, at the end.
Perhaps he would be granted another chance.
“At the Fae court, there is a rumor,” Rodan said in a slow voice, pitched so no one who might be listening at the door might overhear them, “that once, King Oberon succumbed to wounds and died. But Queen Titania journeyed to the underworld and brought him back.”
“What?” Pike demanded. “You knew this the whole time, and you—”
“I forgot, until now. I heard it two thousand years ago. It is only a rumor. A tale told around the fireside. It supposedly happened long before I was born, when the court was new and the Fae at the beginning of their long lives.” He cast his eyes around the large room. “I need a mirror. Now.”
They rose together, and for the first time since he laid her down, Rodan left Maeve’s side.
They searched the study for a mirror, but none could be found. Pike rushed from the room and returned some minutes later with a gilt-edged mirror that had obviously come from a woman’s chambers. Rodan snatched it from his hands and set it against one of the walls of shelves, kneeling down in front of it and murmuring some words of power before he pressed his fingers and his magic against the surface.
“Kabira,” he called. “Your son has need of you.”
He waited for an interminably long time before she responded, a face other than his own filling the polished surface and looking up at him with arched brows. “My son, the deposed king,” Kabira said, her tone bored and flippant. “What do you want?”
“You’re one of Queen Titania’s ladies,” he said, not bothering with polite necessities. “What can you tell me of the time she went into the underworld to retrieve her king?”
His mother laughed, the sound high and tinkling like bells. She tossed her head of golden curls and crossed her arms in front of her chest. “You believe that old tale? I thought you a grown man, not a boy to be misled by nonsense stories.”
Rodan’s heart sank, and to one side of him Pike let out a murmured curse, but he understood his mother. He understood the Fae. They did not lie, but they did not always come at the truth in a direct line. “Then she never journeyed to the underworld?”
“To make such a journey would not be easy. You would have to have a sacrifice. Several sacrifices. Death magic is forbidden.” Kabira’s eyes narrowed. “What happened?”
Rodan raised a naked hand, so she would view it in her own mirror. His mother’s frown turned into an O of surprise, and her eyes widened. “You bonded? With whom? When?”
“She’s gone, mother,” he said, his voice pleading. “I felt the bond take hold, and then she was—she was gone. Help me.”
Kabira backed up from the mirror, as though his growing madness would be contagious. “This isn’t done, my son. If it could be done, if we thought it might work, we would help others who lost their bond mates. Don’t ask this of me.”
“I must,” he insisted, pressing closer to the mirror’s surface. “Please, mother. If you love me, if you ever loved me, you will tell me how this thing is done. I cannot go forward without her by my side. I cannot. You know what fate awaits me now.”
His mother shook her head, her expression grim. “You stupid, stupid boy. What were you thinking? Who was this woman?”
“Maeve.”
She shrieked, and her face filled the mirror. “Have you completely lost your wits? The woman—the girl—who caused you to lose your throne in the first place, to make you the laughingstock of the Fae court? This is the person you chose to bond with. A human?” she demanded.
“I don’t believe she’s human,” Rodan said in a rush, and explained some of his suspicions to her, his voice pitched so as not to carry. “I love her, mother. I loved her for years. Please. Please help me get her back. Tell me, please.”
Kabira shook her head again. “What you ask is next to impossible. The only one to attempt it and succeed was Queen Titania. She forbade the practice at court. It requires death magic.”
So, she had done it.
Hope surged in him, and he leaned closer to the mirror, almost touching his forehead to the glass. “Please,” he begged. “You do not owe me a boon, but I am your only child. I need her back, mother. Please. I will give you anything you ask for. Anything. Just do this for me.”
His mother set her mouth in a tight line, and let out a breathy sigh, looking away. Her voice lowered, “My son, do not do this. You will not survive.”
“If I do not, you know the fate which awaits me. Inaction will damn me just as well.”
Kabira’s lip trembled, and she lowered her eyes for a moment, taking a deep breath. Then she let it out and nodded, her dual-colored lavender and green eyes glimmering with unshed tears. “Alright. I will tell you.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Rodan
HE CARRIED HER DOWN to the main entrance of the palace, where the jeweled walls sparkled in the diffused light of the twin suns. Pike had already gathered Bairam and his family, they waited and stared in silence as he set her body down on a marble bench near the central fountain. The water burbled and splashed in a sweet cacophony that belied the deeds he would perform in mere moments.
Still dressed in the imperial colors he chose for the gala, he mirrored Maeve. As he rose from putting her down, he touched a hand to her chest. Wait for me, my love.
He stepped back from her and cast his eyes over the assembled group of men and women. There were more than three dozen of them in total, men and women of various ages. The young men he sparred with days ago. The women he dined with. And then there was Bairam himself, who stood apart from the rest, his white tunic coated with dust and torn in places from his time in imprisonment. Alexis stood closest to him, back erect and shoulders back, a challenge in her light eyes. As Rodan stared at her, those eyes lowered, a flush racing up her neck to her cheeks.
She belongs here, his mind whispered, and because of her, the others must be here as well.
It was not his fault, what was about to happen.
They brought this upon their own heads.
Pike stood at the edge of the room, a hand resting on the silver and moonstone hilt of one of the daggers Rodan wrought for him. His mouth was set in a grim line as he looked over the Sultan’s family, prepared to step in if one of them attempted to flee.
They wouldn’t be able to. Not for long.
“What is this?” Bairam demanded, his imperious nature coming out once more.
Rodan stared him down, and eventually his traitorous friend lowered his eyes as well, a scowl twisting his lips.
He stood before the assembled group, with his bare hands clasped behind his back, and tried to push away the thoughts whispering to him. Whispering that this was necessary. That he should call for the grandchildren. That the work would not be complete without them.
Destroy his house.
The madness did not reach so deep. Not yet.
“Pike has spoken to each of you,” he said. “All who stand before me had knowledge of the plot to take Maeve Almeida’s life.” His eyes landed on each of the faces in turn, some of whom stared back at him, while others avoided his gaze. “At any time, one of you might have taken me aside and told me of the plans. You did not. That is why you are here.”
He let his magic unfurl, and the fountain behind him began to bubble and hiss, steam rising off it. A few people took a step back, but a quick glance at Pike kept them in their places.
&nb
sp; Rodan’s power grasped Bairam first, and then Alexis, and then scooped up the rest of them. A collective gasp went up as feet became rooted to the floor and arms grew too heavy to lift. They jerked their heads and twisted their torsos in an attempt to escape the magical bondage, but the small amount of power he expended to hold them was more than enough to contain a few dozen humans.
If this did not work, this would be the first of many atrocities he would commit. A whispered voice urged him to do more. To call for the children. To call for the entire household, and those of every man and woman and child in Visantium. If this did not work, nothing would be enough to satisfy him.
Rodan lifted a hand and pulled at the molecules of the air, a thin, short dagger appearing in his hand, the grip festooned with black diamonds and dull rubies. He swished it through the air, testing its balance, and strode to the left side of the gathering - the side farthest from Bairam.
Bairam would be last.
The boy was just into manhood. Rodan did not think on it, grasping the hair on the back of his head and tilting his head back before dragging the blade across his throat.
Bairam screamed, echoed by his family a heartbeat later. The sound reverberated through the chamber.
The arterial spray coated Rodan’s face and neck. His instinct to step back from it was assuaged by the knowledge that he must do this, must take every drop of the life’s blood. When he released the boy’s head, the body sagged against the magical constraints, mimicking the look of a marionette with its strings cut.
Rodan moved on to the next one.
“No,” the girl begged, her eyes widening and white. “Please, sire, please.”
By the time he reached the fifth in line, Bairam’s screams were unintelligible. He grew hoarse as he begged and cursed Rodan in the same breath. The blade became difficult to hold, drenched in blood, and Rodan found he had to be careful how he stepped. It would be easy to slip on the blood pooling on the polished marble floor. Half of the bodies hung red and lifeless, their heads bowed.
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