The King of Faerie (Stariel Book 4)

by AJ Lancaster

  53

  Oberyn

  Wyn stood on the edge of a familiar lake. Cicadas chirped, but no other sound disturbed the placid heat of the evening, and the smooth surface of the water lay untroubled by wind.

  The single note of discomfort in the tranquil scene came from within, a scratch of thought he couldn’t quite catch. He stood beneath the gentle drapery of the willows and tried to draw it forth, but the longer he stood, the less it seemed to matter. Tension drained away, unknotting his muscles and settling his wings into a lower position so that they almost traced the ground when he abandoned his ruminations and walked slowly down to the shore. Dry grass brushed against his primaries, as reassuring and grounding as the smell of warm earth and water.

  The sun was setting—wait, were there two suns?—but, no, he was mistaken. In any case, the sun was setting, its golden light spilling out across the water and limning in fire the figure standing a little way into the lake.

  The figure. Everything tilted, became unsettling and sinister. It hurt to look directly at them, their shape blurring with a primal, untamed power that warped reality around them.

  They were fae—the most purely fae being he’d ever seen—but he couldn’t tell which court they hailed from, not when their form flickered so swiftly. A recollection sparked, so deep below conscious thought he could only feel it rising towards him, a connection as yet without comprehension.

  Statues…an undersea library…many forms… He nearly had it—

  “Hallowyn.”

  He opened his eyes, and the world shifted again, his train of thought evaporating into so much steam.

  He’d been… There had been…

  He stood on the bank of a lake, looking out across the water lit by the dying sun, the light too bright to stare at directly. The sun slipped behind the distant cliffs between one heartbeat and the next, revealing a blue-winged male stormdancer standing thigh deep in the still waters. He was facing away, but he had deep brown skin, ebon hair, and gold horns. His wings were a match for Wyn’s, deep blue, edged with silver, iridescent with flecks of purple and emerald at the feathers closest to his body.

  Wyn blinked, the sight somehow not what he’d expected. He didn’t recognise the fae, and yet…something in his chest twanged in anticipation. The stormdancer turned and met Wyn’s gaze with eyes of brilliant, impossible emerald, and the twang became a shock, a jerk of recognition and powerful emotion.

  Wyn couldn’t breathe, drinking in the sight like parched earth as the stormdancer tilted his head, green eyes glinting with interest. He was changed, of course, his face and form hardened from the more feminine version Wyn remembered, but his signature remained the same. It held the sea in storm and smoke from a driftwood fire, a hint of strange spices and apple blossom on the wind, and Wyn knew it as well as he knew his own.

  And those eyes… There were only three people in the world with eyes that impossible shade. Two of them were Rakken and Catsmere. The third…

  Wyn was moving before he knew it, striding into the lake, heedless of his clothes, heedless of everything. Water splashed up his wings, and he drew to a panting halt a bare two feet away from the—no, not a stranger. Never a stranger. Wyn still had to look up to meet his eyes. That hadn’t changed.

  “Mother?” he asked, his voice catching.

  “Well met, little Hallowyn,” the fae man said softly, and the voice was almost but not quite the same as Wyn remembered, the timbre lower. But still so familiar, falling into place as if it hadn’t been more than two decades since Wyn had heard it.

  “Mother.”

  He wasn’t sure which of them stepped into the embrace first. For a heartbeat there was only the cutting joy of the boy he’d been, reunited with a parent long-lost. The signature winding around him twisted in his chest, so true and right it hurt.

  And then he was no longer a boy. The moment passed, leaving a terrible, clawing anger in its wake, and he stumbled back as if bitten. He’d believed, with iron certainty, that his mother wouldn’t have abandoned them willingly. But to find his mother here and well, not dead, or imprisoned, or trapped… A bigger question beat against his consciousness for a second, pounding against his skull, but he looked into his mother’s green eyes and the pounding faded away, leaving only a faint bruise in its wake.

  “You’re—you’re alive. Why did you leave? Did father— How long—” Wyn didn’t know what he wanted to ask. “You left us.” That’s what it came back to. “You left us.”

  Ryn’s expression turned grim, the light of h—his—eyes, Wyn mentally stumbled over the unfamiliar pronoun, a trivial thing but still clumsy in its newness.

  “I did,” Ryn said. “I left you.”

  The betrayal hurt, worse than breaking his wings, worse than having his Spire-sense torn out of him. Accusations and questions tumbled together, fighting their way up his throat, but in the end all that came out was a hoarse cry.

  “Why?”

  Ryn trailed a hand in the waters, his fingers creating ripples that spread out and out. “I did not belong there.” He sounded impossibly sad. “I let myself forget that, for a time. I made myself forget that, for a time.”

  Wyn felt as if he were falling, despite the firm lake gravel beneath his feet—they weren’t even hip deep in the water. “Because…you changed forms?” He didn’t understand why that should be the case, but, then, nothing currently made sense to him.

  Ryn absently lifted a hand to touch Wyn’s jaw. “You’ve been too long in Mortal, little one, to ask such a question. No. This form isn’t what made me leave. It’s hardly the first time I’ve changed in such a way.” Ryn examined Wyn slowly from head to toe. “You look well, my son.” Ryn flexed his own wings with a swish of water, blue glinting with silver. “I confess I hoped at least one of you would bear my colours when you came of age.”

  “Father was planning to kill me.” Wyn hadn’t meant to say that, not with so many other questions jostling for space on his tongue, but somehow that was the one that came tumbling out. “He encouraged Aroset to maim Irokoi, and he was going to kill me to continue his war with DuskRose. Did you know that, when you left?” There was no way Ryn could have known, since the latter event had happened years after he’d left, but Wyn couldn’t contain his bitterness.

  “Aeros.” The way Ryn said the name held too many complicated layers of emotion to decipher. A half-smile, fond and bittersweet. “You didn’t know him when he was young, little one. He would not have done such a thing, when I first knew him.” The smile faded. “My being with him changed him. I thought I could change myself into what I was not, but it only hurt us both. I had hoped, with time, he would stop trying to draw me back…” He shook his head, and for a moment his dark braids looked as if they’d unravelled, as if strands had taken on an energy of their own and were dancing like snakes around him. Wyn squeezed his eyes shut and when he re-opened them, the odd double image had dissipated.

  “I don’t understand,” Wyn said plaintively. It was like scrabbling through shards of glass, trying to piece together his senses, cutting himself to ribbons in the process. He tried to find his centre, to ground himself as he’d been taught since his earliest days of magic, starting with the heart and moving out, but it hammered too hard, as though he were mid-battle rather than standing in perfect tranquillity. There was a bright green thread within him, worming upwards against the tide of confusion. He didn’t know what it was.

  Ryn looked tired. “Love can make you forget duty, but I remembered mine eventually. But I made sure you would be kept safe, after I had gone, at DuskRose. Princess Sunnika would have grown to love you.”

  Wyn frowned. “You knew about the engagement? How? Where have you been all this time?” That green thread thrashed within him. He glanced around at the lake, confusion filling him once again. “Where are we?”

  There was something he desperately needed to remember… The bright green threads were still relentlessly worming through him, bringing clarity in their wake, enough
that he finally recognised what they were.

  Rakken. This was Rakken’s anti-compulsion at work. He touched the amulet Rakken had given him; it burned to the touch. He needed it to remember because his mother…his mother…

  “You compelled us. You’re compelling me now.” It was like crashing into ice-cold water. He stared at his mother, horrified. “Why? What don’t you want me to know?”

  Ryn looked at him. His eyes were the same green as the twins’, but somehow more penetrating, as if they could see clear to the heart of the world. “Oh, my Hallowyn.” He reached out to cup Wyn’s face again, and Wyn jerked back from the touch. Sorrow etched Ryn’s expression—and then a sudden dark amusement, turning inwards.

  “Children,” Ryn grumbled, his wings swishing irritably in the water. “Never doing as one wishes them to do. I suppose I have only myself to blame. None of you have ever shown much inclination to do as told or stay safe where put.”

  “You’re avoiding my question—why did you compel us to forget? Why are you still compelling me now?” Even to ask was a great effort, a fog only kept at bay by the sharp burr of Rakken’s spell.

  Ryn sighed, and his gaze bore into Wyn’s, burning, painfully bright. “Oh, Hallowyn, it will only hurt you to know.”

  Wyn was sitting on a flat rock on the shore, the tips of his bare feet just touching the water. Next to him sat his mother, their wings overlapping. The cicadas sang in the dusk as the shadows deepened. His chest ached.

  “Mother.” How had he come to be here? There was something…something he had to say…

  Wyn bent his wing around, touching one of his primaries as if that would help centre him. Feathers…he had given another feather to Hetta—

  He sat bolt upright, glancing around wildly. “Hetta!”

  “The mortal,” Ryn said flatly.

  “Where is she? How did we—” His memories were disjointed; he couldn’t seem to pull them into shape.

  Ryn brushed his wing against Wyn’s, the reassurance steadying. “She is safe. Tell me, what future do you envisage for the two of you?”

  “There is a child. Mine and Hetta’s.” He held the knowledge tight; how could it have slipped his mind, even for a moment? “We need help.”

  “I know,” Ryn said. “What if the child weren’t fae? Perhaps the High King could do such a thing, separate Mortal from Faerie once more. Would you bring back the Iron Law, if you could?”

  Wyn frowned. “Is that the only way?”

  Ryn picked up a pebble, weighed it in his hand, and Wyn had an eerie recollection of Hetta performing the same motion. Ryn threw. The pebble skimmed across the water in a series of declining arcs and sank out of sight. “It is a way.”

  The High King. That’s who they were looking for, weren’t they? Only Wyn couldn’t remember how he’d come to be here, exactly, or why his mother was here, asking such things.

  Ryn held his gaze, waiting for an answer.

  Wyn didn’t need to dwell on it for long. “If—if that were the only way to save them, then perhaps. But it wouldn’t be my preferred option.”

  Ryn laughed, the sound bright. “That’s a very fae answer, Hallowyn.”

  “I am fae.”

  Ryn smiled. “You are. Would you be mortal, if you could? Would you give up your fae nature?”

  “I—”

  Hallowyn Tempestren.

  His name rang through him, a summons. It came again, and again, and there was magic in it; magic he knew intimately, connecting him to his faeland. It was furious and fire-tinged, and he burned bright in response. He might not understand what was happening, but that connection—that, he was certain of.

  He pulled his wing sharply away from Ryn’s. “I have to go,” he said.

  He backed away from his mother, who watched him unblinking. The world began to change. The forest surrounding the lake was melting away. The lake itself shrunk, becoming a mere pond, and around them stretched more ponds in a wild variety of styles and edgings. Not ponds. Fountains.

  Had it all been glamour? He looked at the fountains in confusion.

  One of them was humming his name. As if in a dream, he walked towards the fountain edged in the shimmering blue of star indigo. He was missing something, something important. If he could just think!

  “Hallowyn,” his mother said from behind him, a warning.

  Hallowyn, said the summons. It tasted like coffee on the back of his tongue, and he knew its name: Hetta.

  He didn’t need to think to know there was one place in the world where everything would make more sense; it was the only place that had ever really made sense, in his soul.

  He stepped into the fountain.

  He was standing in Starwater, but he barely had time to process this before a wet, furious Hetta threw her arms around him.

  He blinked down at her, his arms coming up automatically to return the embrace. Home, he was home, although Stariel felt a little bit different, and Hetta was shining with triumph and fury both, her power blazing more brightly than he’d ever seen it—and that odd sense of wrongness had gone from her signature.

  “What is—there’s no charge building in you anymore.” He’d never been more terrified.

  She stepped back. “It’s all right—I fixed it. No thanks to the High King.” She gave an angry laugh. “What did he say to you?”

  The High King… His thoughts moved strangely as they made their way to the shore. He whirled back towards the lake, his hand once again going to Rakken’s amulet.

  The lake of his childhood, or at least the glamoured appearance of it, had been in the High King’s realm. Why had his mother been there? He’d seen the High King in the lake when he’d arrived, but then his mother had come, and he’d somehow forgotten what he was doing there…

  An older memory rose: his mother, playing with nightwraiths on that same lake, unhurt by their flames despite using no magic. Powers a stormdancer shouldn’t have. Compulsion so strong and long-lasting even Rakken had trouble breaking it. Changing forms. Everyone knows the stormdancer children are unnatural.

  He gripped the amulet so tightly it hurt.

  “Wyn?”

  Something terrible rose up in him, bringing clarity with it. His heart thrashed like a bird caught in a net.

  “Oberyn!” he shouted. “Oberyn!”

  The summons had gone unanswered the last time he’d made it. This time, he drew in his power, his unnatural power, calling blood to blood. He was the Maelstrom given form, lightning churning through him, spooling down his arms and into his clenched fists. He didn’t ask; he demanded. You owe me this. Stormcrows, if I am right, you owe me this.

  “Oberyn!”

  And the High King came. Sorrow hung on the air around him, his traitorously green eyes dark with it.

  Wyn had never been so angry. “Mother.”

  Hetta’s hand spasmed on his.

  A long pause, time for the world to fall apart and be remade. “Oh, my Hallowyn.”

  Accusations and questions tumbled together, fighting their way up his throat, but in the end all that came out was a hoarse cry.

  “How could you? How could you!?” His voice emerged distorted. He could feel his wingbones snapping under the force of the Maelstrom. Images flashed like lightning: Irokoi’s eyes as they’d been before one of them was blinded; Father’s expression as he’d piled compulsion onto his own children. “Don’t tell me it was all part of some grand plan; that you had no choice!”

  “Not all of it was part of some grand plan.”

  “You left us! You lied to us! You compelled us! Why?”

  The High King’s feathers rustled, the sound barely audible above the soft lapping of the waves.

  “You owe me that, at least. Stormwinds, no wonder the Spires couldn’t bond properly with any of us.” Wyn had only been a boy, the burden of compulsion lightest on him; he’d had less to forget, he supposed. How many signs were missing from his memories, small discrepancies, seeing his mother with powers an ordinary stormda
ncer shouldn’t have had? How much more must his older siblings have seen and forgotten? They’d been grown when their mother had left. How could a faeland possibly penetrate that many layers of compulsion, laid down over so many years? Compulsion performed by the High King?

  Rakken is stronger than he knows, to undo that, Wyn thought with sudden horror.

  “I lied to myself. I compelled myself.” The High King smiled, a bitter thing. “Do you know what happens when one such as I forgets their duty in such a way?”

  “You’re Wyn’s mother?” Hetta burst out. “How? I don’t understand.”

  There was a long, tired silence from the High King. “It will hurt you to know,” he repeated, meeting Wyn’s eyes.

  Wyn didn’t blink.

  “Very well, then.”

  The story came in a flash of memory not his own.

  Centuries ago, as the Mortal Realm gained in power and the humans grew more numerous, the High King decided to intervene: an injection of powerful fae blood into the oldest bloodline in Faerie, twins intended to bridge the divide between realms. It had been a long time since he’d allowed himself children; he’d forgotten the joy and terror of it. He had brought Nymwen, the oldest, with him to the Court of Falling Stars. Where better to start than the one faeland already poised halfway between two worlds?

  Except it had all gone wrong, and both Nymwen and her mortal lover had ended up dead at her own hand. In grief, the mortal lord had demanded the fae be kept away from humans, to prevent what had happened to his son happening to others. The High King had agreed to the bloodprice: for seven generations of mortal faelords, he would keep the ways closed, a heavy recompense for a heavy loss.

  In his own grief, the High King had wanted to retreat further than ever from the Mortal Realm, retreat and forget the pain of the loss, the burdens of duty. Become something other than Faerie’s ruler, just another greater fae. He would have more children. He could not bear to remember Nymwen.

  He carved the memories and sorrow out of not just himself but all of Faerie—anyone who knew of his link to Aeros, everything anyone ever knew of Nymwen—and put them into a living creature. That creature he bound to the great library, for what better place to keep memories? And then he cast the last and greatest compulsion upon himself.