“It’s…pretty,” I say, my words stumbling over themselves. “Everything’s so pretty.”
She smiles. “Of course it is. We are Fae. Beauty is what we do best, the trait we admire the most. What about your realm? What do your kind value?” The diamond pendant on her headband shines in the darkness, illuminating the garden.
“I…” My voice wavers. Instead of saying something dumb like I don’t know or I can’t remember, I say, “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“A shame,” the Queen says as she plucks the outermost petal off the flower. As it falls to the ground, its luminescence dies. “For I had hoped to inquire about your world.”
“Why? You have everything you could ever want here.”
“Of course, but something is wrong.” The Queen opens her palm, letting the flower magically lift in the air. Its light grows brighter and brighter until it forms a picture. “There is a part of my world that is…dying, where nothing can grow.” The picture of light reveals giant, dead trees, a blackness that seems to grow and consume everything it touches.
I reach out, gently touching the light, and somehow the Queen and I now stand in the dead part of the forest. A stench fills my nose, my happy-go-lucky spirit is gone, sobriety replacing it as I cover my nose. As I glance to the Queen, I see that even her light is dwarfed by the blackness.
“Never in my lifetime have I seen such a thing. She is not happy with the intrusion.”
“She?” I sound nasally.
“Gaia,” the Queen states.
The word is familiar, and I know I’ve heard it before, but I cannot recall where.
“She comes to me in my dreams, begging me for aid, but I do not know how to help her.” The blackness on the forest floor coils upward, like hungry snakes. “From the Veil thinning, I know little, but not enough. Your world is dying, and somehow it is seeping into mine. I cannot let that happen, you understand.”
I don’t. Not really.
The Queen tilts her head, and we are transported back into the garden, still sitting, as if we hadn’t moved a muscle. The flower showing us the picture has faded, now dim as it falls to the grass. “Tomorrow I am sending you to her. If you choose to fight me, I will break you. Do you understand that?”
I sound like a kid as I mutter, “Yes.”
“Good. Raegar,” she raises her voice, calling for him. He stands at the edge of the garden, awaiting her command. “Escort her to her quarters, and make sure she does not try to run. She has an important job come dawn.”
Raegar simply nods, and I dumbly hold my arms up. He gets the hint and picks me up, tossing me over his shoulder again, more calmly this time.
With an elbow on his back, I put a curled fist under my chin. After I lose sight of her, I mutter, “I thought she was nice. She’s not nice.” My voice is petulant and wounded.
When we are far enough from the Queen and the garden, Raegar sets me down, a frown deepening in his otherwise perfect skin. “Of course she is not nice. She is the Queen, and she is Fae. We do not know kindness.” He continues to walk, and I have to job to keep beside him. Darn those long legs of his.
“Ashyr and Tailyn,” I start.
“Ashyr and Tailyn found you accidentally, as they were hunting their wolfen brethren. When they saw who you mauled, they knew they’d gain the Queen’s favor if they brought me back—something they’ve never had. As for you, well. You’re more of a curiosity than anything.” Raegar slows when he sees that I’ve stopped a little ways back. His orange gaze narrows. “What?”
I fiddle with my hands. “I thought they were my friends.”
He laughs at me. “Fae are not friendly. We do not have friends. We do not feel friendship—”
“So…I’m alone,” I say faintly, meeting his stare.
Something passes over his eyes, and for a moment their orange hue softens. Just when I think he’s going to say something comforting, something polite and kind, his dark demeanor returns and he states, “Yes, you are.”
I’ve never felt worse than I do in that very second.
My sleep is dreamless.
I yawn as I wake, sitting and stretching. I must’ve kicked the covers off sometime during the night. Something touches my foot, and I open my eyes to watch a multi-colored spider scuttle across my bare skin. Yelping, I jerk away, standing and backing up slowly. The spider, which is as large as my foot itself, has a face painted on its abdomen.
I don’t have time to question how a spider like that got in my room, because—I look around—I’m not in my room anymore. I’m in the forest, on its floor. Green grass pokes between my toes and the glowing mushrooms give off enough light to fully light the area around me.
I look up, where Raegar crouches atop the nearest mushroom, his arms flexing.
“Did you bring me here to kill me?” I timidly ask.
He shakes his head.
“To eat me?”
I tense as he leaps down, standing tall above me. “As much as I would like to taste that flesh,” Raegar whispers, “that is not the reason you are here.”
I step back. “Remember what happened the last time you tried to—”
He chuckles. “We are not wolves. If I brought you out here to eat you in another way, I’d have you beg me first.”
A part of me shivers. Something about such vulgar talk makes me uneasy. “The wolves…”
Raegar sighs, annoyed with my many questions. “Look around. Does this look like the wolves’ forest?”
Mushrooms: check. Glowing stuff: check. Giant trees: check. To me, it looks exactly the same. When I don’t respond, I gather my courage to run. Before he knows what I’m doing, I dart away from him, slipping under a root and crawling. I don’t get far. His hand—stronger than it appears—yanks me out, and as I thrash, he attempts to hold me still under him.
“This is not their forest,” he says, his bare chest rumbling, “they will not find you, nor will they find me.”
“Then where—”
“I am going to do what I’ve thought about doing ever since the Summer Queen made me her favorite consort.” Raegar places a hand on my neck, hissing, “And I’m bringing you with me.”
I don’t ask why. I don’t need to.
Raegar stands, laughing as he watches me get up and dust off my dress. “If you thought the Summer Court was unwelcoming, wait until you step foot in the Winter Court.”
The Winter Court. I shiver just thinking about it.
We hike for days. Days, hours, weeks. I don’t know. I lose track of time after I get bitten by the millionth bug. My arms start to scratch. They’re going all after me and never once try biting Raegar’s skin. Maybe red blood tastes better.
“So, why were Ashyr and Tailyn on the hunt if they were once part of the pack?” I ask, trying to piece it all together as we go. I’ve got nothing better to do, although a nagging suspicion that lingers in the back of my mind tells me otherwise.
“They did not know how wild the Beast was. They were not accepted at Court due to their unusual births, and so they ran with us. They were frightened by It. With tails tucked between their legs, they ran back to Court. As penance, the Queen commanded them to hunt every day until the pack was no more.”
Running my tongue across my teeth, I mutter, “And yet she gave you no penance. Funny.”
Raegar says darkly, “My penance was not in the forest. It was between her legs.”
“Oh.”
The look he gives me asks: is your curiosity sated now?
It is.
About that particular subject, anyway.
I step over a mound of insects, holding in my disgust as I notice they scurry along a skull of some rodent-like creature. Eaten alive by the voracious things. “What do you think the Winter Court can give you that the Summer Court couldn’t?”
His expression changes, and for a moment, I feel sorry for him. “Freedom,” he whispers the word as though it’s the most important thing in the world, as he literally kidnaps me, taki
ng away my own freedom (not that I had any in the Summer Court either, but still).
“Freedom,” I echo, and the word sounds strange to me as well.
The snarky, demeaning Raegar is back as he glares at me. “What would you know about it? You have never been bound to a will that is not your own. You’ve never been driven to madness, trying to escape—going so far as to turn to the Beast Himself. Daughter of Man, until now, you’ve had it easy.”
“And you don’t feel bad, doing the same thing to me?”
“No,” he says quickly.
Wow. That’s…not nice. But then again, Fae, by nature, aren’t nice.
I can be just as not nice as the lot of them
My skin shivers, and I curl in the fetal position, trying to get warm. Night has fallen on the forest, the glowing plants and animals dimming in respect to the moon that hangs high above, past the towering canopies of branches and leaves.
What I wouldn’t give to be someplace warm. What I wouldn’t give for…for who? Or, for what? Whatever direction my mind’s about to travel in, it stops abruptly, and I can’t remember.
Something’s not right here. Something’s wrong.
I was tricked by the wolfen Fae, which means I’m not a Fae. I’m a Daughter of Man. I’m not from this place—I’m from earth. I…ran from something, or did I voluntarily go? I roll to the side, where Raegar sleeps. My mind races; it’s like I’m blocked in. I know there’s more to it, but for the life of me, I can’t get there. I don’t know how.
Common sense says I should run, but I wouldn’t make it far. Plus, I have nowhere to run, no friends. It’d be a wasted effort.
I study his scarred chest, wondering how he could be shirtless and not awake and trembling in the cool air like I am. Inching closer, I exhale loudly. The notion is that he’d given me body heat, even if he’s unconscious, but when I graze his chest with my arm, I find that he’s cold as ice. It sends a chill down my spine.
Backing away, I shake off my confusion. He’s touched me before, and not once was he that cold. Granted, his skin was never hot, but to be ice cold and alive? How is that even possible?
I have a feeling I’m not going to like the answer much.
It takes us another week to reach our destination. All the while, Raegar’s skin becomes colder and colder, his white tone turning blue. He looks like he’s dying, but he’s not. There must be more to it than that. During the last leg of the journey, we don’t talk much. I don’t have anything to say to him; I’ve said my peace, and he knows how I feel about this whole situation.
And he doesn’t care.
The forest abruptly ends, and my bare feet step out, into a field of white. A wall of ice separates the living forest from the rest of Fae, a winter wonderland of cold and sleet. I hug myself for warmth as we trudge through the snow. It gets deeper and deeper until we’re wading in it, until I can no longer feel most of my limbs.
“Raegar,” I stutter his name, stopping. My legs shake. “I don’t think I can…”
The sheer cold knocks me out.
“And why would I accept anything from one of Aislinn’s favorite pets?” a strong, bold voice breaks into the silence in my head. I stir, but my eyelids are stone, too heavy, too much work to lift them.
Another voice, this one belonging to Raegar, responds: “Look at me. My allegiance is not to the Summer Queen. It is to you, my King.” I hear ruffling of leather, and it sounds as though he kneels.
“Say the oath.”
“My loyalty lies with the Winter Court. My words belong to its King. My body is Winter’s. I will never harm the Court nor its inhabitants, nor will I go against its best interests.” There’s a pause. “Your will is my own. Everything I have, everything I am, everything I will be belongs to the Winter Court.”
It is a long minute until the first voice says, “Very well.” A sigh as he must stand, saying, “Now let me look upon your gift. My ears and eyes have told me that a Child of Man was spotted in the forests, but I had heard that Elysia’s pack had found it.”
“Yes, but Aislinn’s hunters found us. They brought us to the Mere.”
“Ah, I thought I still sensed some of the Beast inside you.”
My head is jostled to the side, and I can feel someone touching me, inspecting me, studying me like I’m some kind of science experiment or newly discovered species. My eyes peek open, and all I can see is ice. They close as quickly as they open.
“Does the Child of Man know anything useful?”
Raegar says, “There was a meeting with Aislinn, one I was not invited to.” When the other Fae makes an unimpressed sound, he adds, “And it is a Daughter of Man. Rumor is they are unlike the Fae. Human women are bountiful.”
The original voice says, “I have heard that, and I admit, I am curious. The Winter Court could always use more soldiers, especially with Summer’s rule coming to an end. Bring her to the healer; she is unwell.”
Unwell? I’m perfectly fine. Just tired. I’m—
My thoughts faze out as I meet unconsciousness.
Chapter Ten
After a dreamless blackout session, I slowly come to, blinking my eyes open, still very, very cold. A blanket made of some itchy material clings to me, a pillow under my head, though they do little to block the coldness that seeps off every surface. Icicles line the ceiling, my bed’s frame made of a cool, light blue stone. Even the glass on the small windowpane in the corner is frozen over.
I’m alert enough to see that this tiny room is like a jail cell. I struggle to recall how I got here, the exchange between Raegar and, I’m guessing, the Winter King, but it’s getting more difficult to remember anything. I can barely remember being a wolf, and the Mere transforming me; anything that happened before that is, weirdly, already lost.
“First the Night Child, and now a Child of Man,” a feminine voice speaks from the hall. “I know you’d like to see it, but on the King’s orders, I am the only one allowed in.” The voice stops behind the icy door, and I try to roll out of the bed, to hide, to…do something.
But all I do is roll onto the floor, face-first. My body’s reactions are slow, and the pain that should’ve come from the fall doesn’t; I’m too numb. When I hear the knob turn, I try to scuttle under the bed, but I find that it’s a block of rocky ice. No nooks or crannies for me.
“I will see you at the feast tonight, from what I hear, the King plans to announce his engagement.” A giggle. “I know, I know! Just get out of here so I can do my job, all right?” Her laughter dies the moment she enters the room, a bundle of something in her filmy, translucent dress. She dumps it on the bed and runs to my side, helping me up, forcing me to sit on the bed.
I cannot fight her. I’m too weak.
“You are fighting the chill of Winter,” the Fae says, her eyes a glowing yellow, a stark contrast to the whiteness of her hair. Its long lengths are pulled back into a braided bun atop her head, her pointed ears pierced in nearly a dozen places. Though she sits beside me, she has to angle her head down to look at me. “It will not kill you, but if you fight it, it will hurt.”
“I don’t suppose,” I start, my voice rough and scratchy. I sound horrid. “That you’d let me go?” A dumb question, really. To the Fae, I’m an oddity, something to be marveled at and poked and prodded.
She gives me a sad smile, and I have to remind myself not to trust her. I cannot trust any of them. “Please do not ask me that. I can do nearly anything for you, but not that.” Before I know what she’s doing, she grabs one of the items that fell onto the bed, placing it in my hand. “I know your experience with my kind has not been pleasant, but know that the Winter Court is not a bad place to be. If you let it, it can become your home.”
My fingers smooth over the surface of what she gave me: an apple. Its skin is blue, little icicles on its stem. I’m fairly certain I’ve never seen an apple quite like this before.
“It tastes of Winter himself,” she says. “Once you taste it, you will never wish to leave.”
“What does your King want from me?” I whisper, afraid of the answer.
“What the King wants is anyone’s guess. Be truthful with him, and he will respect you. If you lie to him, try to hide something from him…he has Winter’s wrath in his heart. When he is angry, the entire Court knows.”
The apple feels unimaginably heavy, and my fingers nearly drop it to the ground.
“I have staved your dehydration,” she tells me. “But your hunger, and the cold, will not dissipate until you eat.” She stands, moving to the door. With her long, delicate fingers on the handle, she looks at me, pleading. “The sooner you give in to Winter, the sooner you may have a real room, with real clothes.”
I glance at the green dress I wear, torn and ragged from the journey. Not nearly as pristine as the outfit she wears—icy, snowy fabric that clings to every inch of her lithe body, matching her hair and pale complexion.
“Please do not wait long. The King is not known for his patience.” And with that, she leaves, shutting me in the ice-cold room alone, with nothing but the apple as my company.
I imagine throwing the apple against the wall, smashing the oddly-colored thing. Or against the window, breaking it and escaping. It feels like it’d be a lot of work, and right now, I don’t think I have that kind of energy.
So instead, I simply drop the apple, watching it roll away from me, and lay back down, trying to block out the eternal cold.
Hours pass, and when the same Fae peeks her head in, she sighs. “He wishes to see you.” She is saddened that I have not bitten into one of her apples and given in to Winter. When I do not stand, she comes to me, pulls me up, and straightens my clothes and hair. “Do not entice him, do not incite him. He is not a Fae you would wish to see angry. If there is ever a time for meekness and agreeableness, it would be now.” She intertwines her arm with mine, the coldness from her skin stinging.
As I take a step, I nearly fall. My strength is nonexistent, and my legs shake terribly as I lean on her for support. All she does is watch me, wordlessly telling me that if I’d eaten, this wouldn’t be an issue.
A Reckoning so Sweet (The Reckoning Book 3) Page 13