by D. D. Chance
I squinted at him, regretting that I hadn’t fought against my shackles a little harder. “Who are you anyway?” I challenged. “Because you seem to know an awful lot for your average jailer.”
The guard executed a short bow and lifted his hand to ease back his hood. I steeled myself against the guard’s snake-like, alien face, made worse by the quick flip of his tongue between his narrow lips. “My name is Brahman, and my knowledge is a peculiarity of the Fomorian. We are hive minders, as you’ve already been told. There’s nothing of our people and our past and present we cannot know, unless held from us by King Lyric.”
“Lyric,” I breathed despite myself, the name vibrating through me.
He blinked his golden eyes at me, regarding me with an expression that may have been amusement. “So, yes, I know our past, and yes, I know the reasons behind our attack on humans, and our subsequent defeat. And yes, I know who you are—though I’m alone among the guards in that last bit of business.”
I curled my lip. “I’ve been in the Riven District before, a few days ago. Nobody knew who I was then.”
“That’s true. But things have changed since then, haven’t they?” He grinned me, a strangely unsettling look on him as his mouth stretched wide, his lips parting almost to his temples. As if he could open his mouth fully and swallow my head hole. Not a good image.
Something else occurred to me with a jolt. “Those men back there. They couldn’t see us, could they? You said you’re protecting me, but how is that possible if you’re hive minders?”
His tongue snaked out, then retreated almost playfully, and I answered my own question. “Because I’m under the protection of King Dickhead,” I said dully.
“You’re very much under his protection,” the guard agreed, making no comment on my naming protocol. “But here. I have something to show you.” We crossed the courtyard and came to another door, this one set into a thick stone wall. He reached forward and opened it. Sound flooded out, making me step back.
“You can hear it,” he said, pleased, his words once more sounding only in my mind, threatening to unmoor me. “The wards here are heavy, but you can hear. No one else can.”
I blinked, trying to make sense of what I saw. Children, families, a village that stretched out in tidy rows of businesses and homes, the industry of the monster realm everywhere in evidence, cooking, cleaning, blacksmithing, all of it clean, tidy. Happy, despite the doomsday gloom vibe the place rocked.
I shook my head, trying to fight off the nausea. “Why are you showing me this?” I asked aloud. This time, the guard answered me that way.
“The short answer, because I wanted you to see it. The longer answer, because we have a very smart king.”
“You do, maybe,” I muttered. “That asshat is not my king.”
The guard beside me chuckled. “Believe what you want, but he’s more than your king, no matter what you want to believe,” he said drily. “He’s your husband.”
16
Aiden
I crashed through the nearest portal right behind Belle, but when I rolled into the bright sunshine of an open glade, the trees surrounding the space immediately deepening into heavy forest, she was nowhere to be seen. I needed to get this wild magic under control.
I grunted with disgust as I rolled myself to my feet, and looked around. I knew immediately I wasn’t alone, but my head was still ringing from the transfer through the portal and I didn’t want to give too much away. Still, I also didn’t feel like facing a potential enemy alone. It wasn’t smart.
“Niall,” I muttered, wondering how I could get word to my faithful second-in-command.
“Stone and blood.” Without me lifting a hand, a portal sketched into being beside me, and two people fell through. Niall, which didn’t surprise me as much as it should have, and the shifter witch Celia.
“What the fuck is this?” Celia screeched, scrambling to her feet as Niall rolled upright, looking around with a grin.
“Is this the kind of bullshit I’m going to have to put up with if we start dating?” Celia demanded. “Because I’m gonna need a little more warning next time.”
She scowled at me. “He showed up on top of me in my bedroom, and then we got sucked back here. Was that your doing?”
“The rite is done.” Niall spoke over her, turning to me and stopping short of pounding me on the shoulder. “Congratulations. You did it.”
“I did,” I agreed, though it felt a hollow victory since I didn’t know where Belle was. “But I’ve lost my bride again.”
“Well, you called me to your side,” Niall reasoned. “Couldn’t you call her? Or couldn’t she call you, for that matter?”
I opened my mouth to counter that, then shut it. “Yes, she could call me. And I should be able to call her, unless she’s been trapped…” Irritation flared. I was her royal husband now, and she was my queen. Surely my call overrode anything.
“Belle,” I snapped, not missing how Niall and Celia both flinched. The word carried more resonance, more emotion than it should. It revealed more than I wanted to.
Unfortunately, Belle didn’t appear, though all around me, doorways flashed open and crackled away in an instant, as if the magic summons went out searching for its part and was denied at every turn.
“Interesting,” Niall said, turning around in a tight circle, trying to track the pattern of flickering portals.
“Well, where is she?” Celia asked, cutting to the chase as usual. “I don’t like you, and you got me here.”
“Oh, but you like me, see?” Niall said as she rolled her eyes. “That counts.”
“Something is blocking me,” I decided, my hands going out. I could feel it now, the shudder of magic pressing against mine, two opposing forces. And once again, I understood the other problem here. “There’s something in the forest.”
“Well, you’ve got that right,” Celia scoffed. “This close to the Riven District, there’s definitely something in the forest.”
I slanted a glance at her. “You know where we are?”
She grimaced. “I’m surprised you can’t tell. The district has a smell to it, and it smells like the ocean today. Can’t you pick that up?”
She looked at Niall, but I was gratified to see he appeared as mystified as I did. “Anyway, to answer your question, yeah. There’s going to be bad things in the forest. You can pretty much bet on it.”
“Luacra?” Niall asked, and she shrugged.
“Maybe? Typically they don’t go outside the bounds of the district, but those boundaries get a little sketchy in places. So I’m not sure what’s possible.”
“Luacra.” I nearly spit the word. “Half-breeds. They’re an abomination.”
She squinted at me. “Not half-breeds, leastwise I never saw that. They’re their own kind, and they keep to their own kind. They have this air of injured royalty about them, but definitely standoffish. That’s why they make such good guards. They don’t like anyone. Plus, they look creepy.”
“Can you sense them in the forest now?” Niall asked her.
Celia shook her head. “No, that’s not the stink I’m getting. It’s sort of like you guys, but not as strong.”
“So the Laram,” I murmured. A moment later, I whispered the words of summoning that had bound the lesser Fae to our realm since the beginning. They appeared at the edge of the forest a blink later, not through portals, but simply stepping out from the trees. One of them I recognized, and in seeing him, I jolted. I read his thoughts; I knew his memories. And he knew Belle.
“You. Rennick. Somewhat delayed in your report to me, aren’t you?”
I had to hand it to him, the Laram lord didn’t flinch. With his silver hair and eyes, he seemed at home in the mists. Tall, lean, and skeptical, he rested his hands on his belt, which also served as a harness for his weapons, and eyed me coolly.
“Looks to me like you found her quickly enough on your own,” he returned. “I barely had time to return to the monster realm before I heard
the news.”
That caught me. “Heard what news? And from whom?”
“That the Hogan witch had returned to the realm of the High King, the exalted lands of the ocean Fae. As for who…” He frowned, seeming surprised. “You know, I can’t give you an answer for that. It was general knowledge among the Laram when I returned, but they’d gotten that information secondhand.”
He half turned and issued a soft whistle. Another of the Laram appeared a second later, younger, slighter in build, with fair hair and pale green eyes the color of sea glass. Rennick put the question to him in the old language of the Fae, and my heart sighed a bit to hear it. Spoken this way, it easily carried across the quarter-mile distance to the boy, who brightened and whispered something back, delighted to be able to share intel with his leader.
Rennick glanced back to me. “He said he heard it from the witches, who heard it from the forest Fae.” The Laram smirked at me. “You’re really going to have to keep a tighter hold on your people, King Aiden, if you don’t know who is telling tales out of school.”
He was right, but that wasn’t the piece of his information I found the most troubling.
“The witches,” I repeated. “What witches? The coven of the White Mountains had to have told them, and they don’t seem to be the gossiping type.”
“No, but there’s all manner of spies everywhere you look.” Rennick shrugged. “If Belle got tangled up with a grumpy monster in her bar, he would have shared intel on her if he knew it. If there are any demons around, they can be bought too. The witches in the British Isles are not to be trifled with. They give a good show if they’re in the mood for it, talking their nonsense about tiny fairies and hedge magic, but they’ve never relinquished their connection to what truly is. And don’t forget those Isles served as the headquarters of the human’s druid priestesses back in the day. I would not underestimate them.”
I lifted a hand to my head, rubbing my brow. I was coming to understand I couldn’t underestimate anyone or anything, except for my own grasp on the situation. Now I felt the magic crackling inside me, threatening to boil over. With the royal rites finally completed, I had no doubt I was the strongest magical being in this realm or my own, possibly the human realm too, but it meant nothing without good information and the people I could depend on.
“Then I thank you, Rennick,” I said. “Without you, I would know none of this and be the worse for it.” Almost on a whim, I gestured toward him, granting him…what? A blessing? A shiver of magic glittered in the air before me, then rolled lazily toward the Laram, who didn’t seem to notice it at first. He nodded.
“You’ll want to know this too, then,” he said. “Only just happened, so we’ve had our hands full. But the Riven District is shifting its energy. All the monsters in the realm can feel it, and some are girding for war.”
“With the Luacra?” Niall asked.
Rennick stared at him blankly. “We don’t know with whom,” he said. “We can’t step foot inside—”
The touch of magic I sent his way finally reached him, and Rennick swore in the old language, jerking back a step. His arms went wide, his fingers outstretched as if he was catching a gale-force wind, and in fact, he lifted a few inches off the ground, stumbling backward.
“What?” he began, then broke off as he glowed like a torch. In the next instant, three dozen more Laram stepped out from the forest, looking surprised. And from the other side of the glade, through a portal I did not sketch, another contingent of Fae stepped out. These I recognized. The young warriors of the valley Fae.
“What is this?” Rennick asked, his silver eyes going wide.
“I have asked you to do much without any support,” I said. “If war is coming, I need to do better.”
Confusion flashed across his face, but I pushed on. “Have you seen or sensed Belle in the monster realm?”
“No,” he said, the ring of authority in his voice. “And I would’ve, having tracked her once. Unless she was blocked from me.”
“Not by my hand she wasn’t,” I muttered, and Celia shifted behind me, sighing in resignation.
“Then she’s in the Riven District. We wouldn’t be here otherwise.” She turned toward the forest and gestured for us to follow. “I’ll show you how to get back in.”
17
Belle
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I would have remembered marrying your king and if I don’t remember, then it can’t rightfully have happened.”
It was a stab in the dark, but at least it gave the man, lizard, whatever he was pause. He stopped, tilting his head, his tongue slipping out to wet his lips in a habit I was sure was automatic, but no less creepy for it.
“That definitely is one for the king to consider, but then again, the king makes the rules. We are all connected, but there is the one voice that guides us. The one voice that seeks to keep us safe and well. And that is King Lyric.”
Unbidden, images of the Fomorian king assaulted me. My memories crashed together in a swirl of confusion. It was a man, or a creature who looked like a man, much as the Fae resembled humans. That humanlike appearance wasn’t exactly their natural form, Aiden had assured me, and yet I suspected, knew, it was one of their preferred forms. And not the most useful, I suspected.
But when the Fomorian king hadn’t presented as all tall, blond, broad, incredibly gorgeous hunk of a man, he’d rocked the guise of a slithering muck monster from the Black Lagoon. If that mode had been intended to frighten me, he’d succeeded. But once again, there was no way possible that a contract made with a pile of seaweed was binding in any sense. I refused to believe it.
“Have you not experienced an increase in your own magical abilities?” the Luacra guard asked.
He gestured me forward into the small village square, and an unreasonable dread crept up within me. More so than the Fae, the Fomorians were masters of lies and deceit. I knew better than to believe anything they said, and yet, I had experienced a surge in my abilities. Several of them. How much of that was simply returning to the land of the Fae, how much was shedding the shackles of my coven’s control, and how much was completing my marriage rite with Aiden—and also consummating the marriage, full stop…and how much was because of my ill-fated side trip to the land of the Fomorian?
“I didn’t go to your king willingly,” I said. “I was forced there.
“Forced or not, you went. You wouldn’t be the first Hogan witch to be made to do something she didn’t want to do.”
I looked at him with the first pulse of confusion. “How do you know anything about me?” I demanded.
He shrugged. “Hive mind, remember? There is nothing that the king knows that we don’t know, should he wish us to know it. And there are some he trusts more than others.”
“Oh, right, like a low-level guard in the Riven District of the monster realm is who he chooses as his closest confidant.”
I’d meant the insults to sting, but the guard laughed.
“When the need serves, he can choose any of us he desires. That comes with being king.”
“And you put up with it?”
He sent me an amused gaze. “If you knew, if you could ever understand what else comes with being the king of the Fomorian, then I think you would understand that this connection is the least of that which I could do to repay him. King Lyric sustains us. Whatever effort he expends is for the good of his people.”
“Yeah, the guy’s a real humanitarian, or Formoritarian or whatever you want to call it. He and King Aiden should sit down and have a conversation sometime. It’s like you guys are working from the same playbook.”
The guard huffed a soft laugh and gestured me forward. “You can ask any of my people what they think.”
That, of course, caught my attention, as it was meant to, I was sure. I stopped short. “We’ve got one of two options here,” I said. “Option one is that you’re doing your hive mind trick, Lyric, and you’re talking through this unfortunate guy, who’s such
a good little soldier that he’s willing to serve as your personal Cyrano de Bergerac.”
I didn’t know if they streamed French literature to the Fomorian underworld, but I didn’t feel like waiting around to see. “The other is that you’re actually the king, in the flesh, here in the Riven District. Which seems like a party foul if nothing else.”
I stumbled a little with this last, unsure of what I wanted the answer to be.
The guard remained impassive. “The king of the Fomorians has always played by the rules set down by the victors who defeated us millennia ago. There is power in following rules to the letter, and power in agreeing to follow the rules to the letter. There is also power in taking advantage when others choose to break them. Your Fae king is now your husband.” He said this last bit with a delicious twist to his lips that made my skin shiver. Not exactly in revulsion, not exactly in pleasure, but in some deeply screwed-up space between the two. “He entered the Riven District, when he didn’t know what it was, and in so doing, he trespassed on my land. But if he does it again, as your royal husband, it will be an act of war.”
Something about the unnatural way in which the guard was speaking made me realize maybe this wasn’t Lyric himself but a stand-in. I didn’t know the Fomorian king well, at all, really. But I got the impression he wouldn’t appear as a humble servant if he could avoid it. Not to me anyway. Not if he felt safe.
“Oh bullshit. Aiden didn’t trespass onto your precious territory. If he had, you wouldn’t have needed me to show up on your doorstep. No. You’re trapped here, aren’t you? After all these stupid stunts you’ve pulled, you’re still trapped.” The sudden flash of anger that crossed the guard’s face was gratifying, and I pushed on. “You’re just pissed that Aiden can go where he pleases and you can’t.”
My arrow struck home.
“Ah but that’s where you’re mistaken,” the guard lashed back, practically spitting his s’s. “Aiden also cannot go where he isn’t allowed, as I cannot go where I am not allowed. I can send my people out, and they can forge their way, understanding the risk, leveraging the relationships we forge and paying the consequences should they come. But you are right in one respect. I cannot come here. It remains my enemy’s territory, though my people have created a home here. Just as Aiden dares not enter the land of the Fomorians. If he does, the terms of war are violated.”