Accession

by Terah Edun

  A delighted smile blossomed on the queen’s face. “Excellent, welcome to the ruling class, Mistress Nimestra. Announce your position to your people, smooth over feathers in my name, and meet me for a full audit of all were-peacock activities in two days.”

  “Yes, my queen,” Nimestra murmured numbly. There was not much else to say. She had traded her bronze servant’s shackles for the silver fetters of a ruler under the Queen of Sandersville’s thumb. And she knew it.

  Finally the queen stepped away from her and the poor woman was finally able to make her exit.

  She fled into the night without a further whisper. Then the queen turned a dark gaze on the second guest in the room.

  “Why are you here, Nicern?” the queen asked flatly.

  The licorn snorted angrily and said, “I was told that you were handing over my land tonight. Without consultation. That is an act of war!”

  The queen all but rolled her eyes. “You were told wrong.”

  “We will not stand for this!” the licorn shouted. He sounded a tad bit drunk. Katherine winced. It was a well-known fact that the tavern where Trip, the brew master, worked was Nicern’s home and the home of most of his herd—a pack with a total of five perpetually drunk and angry licorns.

  The queen didn’t flinch. “As I have told you, no such negotiations have taken place and they will not. The Western Reserve is yours. Those feeding grounds are yours to do with as you will. We wouldn’t think of taking of it from you.”

  The belligerent licorn wasn’t hearing a word the queen was saying, though.

  He slurred his way through a couple of incomprehensible sentences before Katherine said, “You’re so sure that we want to take something from you when it is the coven community that has heard that you ally with the were-peacock.”

  “No!” squeaked the only were-peacock in the room.

  “How dare you, you impudent whore!” shouted the leader of the licorns.

  Then ice formed on the licorn’s horns and fangs and his eyes dulled to a distinct pink color, a sign that the sudden frost in the room was affecting him.

  “That is my daughter you speak of, Nicern,” the queen whispered in a deadly voice.

  The licorn bowed his head, not in anger but in regretful acknowledgement. He might be extremely drunk, but he wasn’t suicidal.

  “Apologies, girl,” he mumbled.

  The queen raised a cool eyebrow.

  “I’ll say again,” Queen Leanna said in a tense voice. “Why are you here? State your business, and it had better be convincing enough to show me that you had nothing to do with Mr. LaCroix’s power-grab, or your carcass will be joining him in the town square on the morrow.”

  The licorn leader tossed his head with an irritated harrumph, which came out like a wispy neigh.

  “Of course I had nothing to do with that irritating piss-sucker’s plan,” said Nicern disdainfully. “Why would I?”

  Tactful he was not. But honest...that he was.

  The queen nodded and tapped her bottom lip. “Indeed, why would you? I see no reason for you to join forces with LaCroix.”

  The licorn leader nodded triumphantly.

  “Unless, of course, you suspected your land was being given away to the faerie and came here to challenge that decree,” the queen said softly.

  This time Nicern did neigh in anger. “That’s a crock full of shit and you know it, Leanna. I came here first. To you, because I respect you. We know you may be a two-legged sympathizer with a stick up your bum about blood feedings, but you’ve always been fair.”

  Katherine blinked at the double insult snugly interjected right beside a compliment. If he had been a man like LaCroix, always aiming to please until he didn’t want to and then the daggers came out, she would have said it was deliberate.

  But because it was Nicern, and he was drunk higher than two skunks rolling in opium, she would give him the benefit of the doubt. Besides, he probably didn’t see it as an insult so much as the plain truth.

  Either way, Katherine’s mother smiled, her twitching lip indicating that she was fighting the urge to break out in laughter.

  I’m glad she found this amusing, Katherine thought while struggling to hold back an impolite yawn, although she very much doubted Nicern would care. He didn’t seem the type to be a stickler about manners. Besides, she was bone tired. She’d been up since before dawn and it was now well past dusk. She could have sworn she heard the midnight bell toll an hour ago, but she hadn’t been paying too close attention considering how busy she was at the moment. She didn’t bother trying to focus on the moon’s position in the sky and tell the time; she was too tired to get an accurate reading.

  Finally her mother spoke. “It’s a good thing I believe you, Nicern.”

  “Yes, it is,” trumpeted the drunk licorn.

  Katherine’s mom sighed and rubbed her brow. “I’ve got a headache. You may leave.”

  The licorn looked confused for a moment but got the message when two guardians none-too-politely crowded him out the door.

  Two down, one to go, Katherine thought ruefully as she looked over at the sole remaining petitioner in their home.

  The funeral director sniffed and stepped forward to the center of the room. With a disgruntled look at the guardian he considered his adversary and a jerk of the front of his suit jacket to straighten the rumples, he said, “My queen, I came as soon as I can to inform you that the preparations for the ceremony are done. Your eldest daughter, Rose Thompson, lies in a protected outdoor gazebo awaiting your attendance.”

  The queen closed her eyes and opened them again as if pained. “My attendance?” her mother said numbly.

  For the first time the man faltered. “Yes, my queen. Your sister, Sarah Thompson, guards her body, as requested.”

  If the arrangement annoyed him, it didn’t show in his town.

  Finally the queen nodded. “Very well, I will attend to my duties for my eldest daughter. Katherine and I will stand watch as Rose transitions from this world to next on tomorrow’s dawn.”

  Katherine nodded wearily and turned to head outside. She was dead on her feet, but she wouldn’t complain about this task—it was her sister, after all.

  The queen caught Katherine’s shoulder as she attempted to pass by. Turning to her mother with a frown, Katherine watched her mother shake her head.

  “No, my dear. Tonight’s vigil is not for you. Tonight you rest. When the day has dawned you will walk with me to your sister’s final resting place.”

  Katherine protested, “No, I should be there tonight.”

  “That is not how it’s done,” her mother said gently.

  “I should be there,” Katherine repeated stubbornly, not quite sure why she was arguing, but not quite willing to give up the point. Perhaps it the weariness of the day bearing down on her and making her stubborn. Perhaps it was the hope to see her sister again before another sun rose in the sky, although it certainly wouldn’t matter to Rose.

  “Go to your bed,” said the queen wearily. “Cecily awaits you there. You will see Rose in the morning and be gladder of it.”

  “And you?” Katherine asked. “When will you rest?”

  “I already have,” the queen said with a mournful smile. “Your aunt made me while she sneaked out of the house to go to the shop.”

  Katherine had the grace to blush in embarrassment. “About that?”

  Her mother waved a dismissive hand. “I know why you went. It was the right thing to do.”

  “It was?” echoed Katherine in confusion as she wondered if she had heard her mother right.

  “You were right to seek the comfort of your blood relative’s presence,” the queen said. “It is what I did when I first learned of Rose’s death.”

  Katherine grimaced. There was nothing about her aunt that she would describe as comforting, a fact that her mother knew well, because she grinned impishly as she said, “You know there’s another side to her, right? A caring side.”

  “A caring
side for you, maybe,” Katherine pointed out. “She hates everyone else.”

  “That’s just the barrier she erects to protect herself from the world,” the queen said.

  “Or the world from her,” Katherine said while thinking over Ethan’s words about her aunt, his foster mother, kicking him out. And the woman certainly had no overwhelming love for Cecily, either. She treated her more like a house-sitter than a daughter.

  “I doubt she knows or cares where Cecily is on a day-to-day basis, either,” muttered Katherine.

  “What was that?” asked her mother as she peered down at her in her concern.

  “Ah, nothing, I guess I’ll go to bed then,” Katherine said in a hesitant voice.

  The queen nodded and let her go. Katherine turned around and headed up the stairs. As she ascended to the second floor where her bedroom was, she stopped for a moment and peered over her shoulder. She saw her mother, shoulders straight, heading out the door into the darkness. The funeral director just a few steps behind her.

  Pride filled Katherine Thompson. Pride in Leanna Thompson’s stance. Pride in her mother’s effortless switch from mother to queen and back again without batting an eye.

  Chapter 20

  It had been three days since Rose’s death. Three days of mourning. Three days of rattling around a seemingly empty house which was in fact only emptier by one body. With the guardians on constant rotation now inside their home, not just outside of it, it certainly hadn’t gotten less crowded. But with Rose gone if felt like a yawning gap that Katherine couldn’t fill.

  At the moment Katherine was outside meditating. She’d been doing so for the last half-hour, legs crossed in the style that mimicked Native American practices, hands calmly at her waist, head tilted up to catch the last rays of the morning sun before it gave way to the stifling heat of a bright, cloudless afternoon, and her mind in turmoil with emotions. She couldn’t think straight. It felt as if her thoughts were racing a mile a minute, and that as soon as she settled on one it was off to the other, and she felt anything but at peace.

  Katherine decided that the last twenty minutes of sitting on her ass in the brown grass of fall had been a wash. So she stood up and stared down at Gestap, who reclined by her side with a frown.

  “We should do something,” she ventured.

  “Like what?” said the kobold that currently lay on his back with nothing on but a pair of blue boy’s swimming trunks she’d bought out of the pre-teens’ section.

  Well, she was meditating. He was sunbathing. A ritual he loved to do in his natural form and loathed in his adored second form as a giant toad.

  “Like get out of this house and this yard,” Katherine muttered while kicking the dirt.

  She glared down at the too-relaxed kobold until he peeked open a beady eye.

  “Is this you being restless or is there a reason for this excursion?” he asked pointedly.

  “You know what?” Katherine said in a huff. “Never mind.”

  She got up, dusted her pants off, and ran back to the house. Opening the front door in a loud enough huff to make her feel like a child having a temper tantrum, she slammed the door shut and rush upstairs to her room, to peace and to the sanctity of private quarters.

  It wasn’t Gestap. It really wasn’t. It was life. It was the unfairness of living in a society ruled by one class and feeling like it’s an injustice but not knowing what to do about it. It was having her older sister die and having a knot of pent up rage in her belly that wouldn’t go away. It was her messed-up family, her lack of a wide circle of friends—it was her whole life. Katherine Thompson just felt like she was drowning in a whirlpool of doubt and she couldn’t help but be miserable at her own thoughts because...well...what did she have to be miserable about? She was the daughter of a queen, the heir to the throne, alive and sane.

  Katherine threw herself on her four-poster bed and in a fit of irritation grabbed her stuffed tiger and lobbed him across the room as hard she could. He hit the bathroom door with a solid thunk, and she felt a small corresponding well of happiness for just a moment. It lasted no longer than that, because her door opened with no fanfare or knock a second later. Staring up at her mother, Katherine glared.

  She was never angry with her mother. Ever. They weren’t best friends like she and Rose had been, but Katherine knew her mother cared for her just as much as she did for Rose. She was there when Katherine needed her to detangle her hair, she was there when Katherine brought her first pet home—a fire snail her mother promptly made a cage for out of old Styrofoam packing boxes—and she was there to bake a surprise cake for Katherine when she came home crying over breaking up with Ethan and wouldn’t even tell her why.

  But as Katherine stared up at her, she didn’t see her mother. She saw the queen.

  And that was a different person entirely. For Katherine’s entire life there had existed a dichotomy between how she acted around and approached her mother in the public eye—at town events, human christenings, public openings, compact signings between the fae communities and the like—and how she approached her in private when they baked cookies, painted bedrooms, looked up vacation rentals in the county over and stuff like that.

  There was almost never a day when her mother as queen overtook her role as mother in their home. But Tuesday—the day Rose had died, the day everything had changed—had been such a day, and it looked like today was another.

  “And what about Rose?” she asked, exasperated. “Are we just going to forget about her? That she was killed, even murdered?”

  “I told you,” the queen said quietly. “Our preliminary investigations and all evidence point to the contrary. I’m sorry, my love, but it was an accident, a tragic one, and we’re just going to have to live with that.”

  “That’s bullshit and you know it!” Katherine said.

  “Katherine Jane Thompson, you will watch your tongue.”

  Katherine gritted her teeth to keep from another outburst. “Surely, Mother, you can see that it was no natural cause.”

  Her mother sighed and raised her hand to rub a furrowed brow. “What proof do you have, Katherine? What do you know that half a dozen investigators don’t?”

  That was the trouble, though. Katherine didn’t have any proof. Only suspicions. And suspicions weren’t enough to convict anyone or anything in court, not her mother’s and certainly not in any high queen’s.

  Shoulders slumped, Katherine mumbled, “Nothing.”

  The queen lifted her daughter’s downtrodden face to meet her own. “I would do anything to bring Rose back and I would move heaven and hell to avenge her if something or someone had wronged her. But there’s nothing to avenge. Now it is time for us to move past this and remember her in death as she was in life. We want to celebrate Rose, not let her death fester in us like an open wound that won’t heal.”

  Katherine didn’t say anything. She couldn’t say anything. The burial ceremony was done. Her sister was in the ground. But nothing about this felt right. Nothing.

  Emotions crossed Katherine’s face until she finally settled on one—resignation.

  Finally Katherine did the only thing she could do: she shook off her mother, rolled over on her bed, said, “Fine,” and promptly stuck in her headphones.

  Her mother didn’t move from the bed. When Katherine still wouldn’t look at her from where she stared adamantly at the walk, the queen tugged off the headphones Katherine wasn’t really listening to anyway and cleared her throat.

  “Yes?” Katherine asked while managing to imbibe one word with both resentment and loathing.

  “It’s a hard time for us all, dear. But you need to leave the house and get back to your life. As such, I’m letting you know now...you will be going to school tomorrow,” said her mother.

  Katherine looked over at the Queen of Sandersville, her jaw on the floor.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “The Thompson clan must always set an example. You’re going,” said her mother.
>
  Katherine slid off the bed and sat in a slump on the floor.

  “Just what I need,” she muttered disdainfully. “More high school.”

  Her mother sighed and walked around the bed to see her face-to-face. She would never roll across the bed—no, not her mom. But still, the queen did kneel down in front of her daughter in her linen skirt suit and take one of Katherine’s trailing hands.

  “With the right to rule comes responsibilities, Katherine,” she said.

  Katherine fought hard not to roll her eyes. “Yeah, like the responsibility to take a human teacher’s crap and be criticized for every move I make.”

  Her mother dropped her hand and reached up to tip Katherine’s chin up with her fingertip.

  “No, dear,” she said. “You’re confusing responsibility with duty. It is our duty to be in the public eye, to set an example and to follow the rules. Because if a queen doesn’t confirm to her own rules, then anarchy will soon set in.”

  Katherine scoffed, “I get it. I do. But can you really say that because you don’t open your shop every week day and sell at a normal price, the entire town will go to hell?”

  The queen sighed. “You wouldn’t think it would, would you? But yes. Because if I do, what’s to say the baker down the street wouldn’t raise his prices twenty cents just because he could? If he did, people would starve.”

  “And you could punish him.”

  “Punish him for the crime of making a living for his family? If I raise my prices, he would need to raise his, as would every other business on the main street.”

  “Punish him for being greedy. Set the guardians on him.”

  “A queen who rules in fear is no queen at all,” her mother replied.

  Katherine shifted in unease. She agreed, but silently she wondered how they had gone from her perfect attendance to economic graft in one conversation.

  Her mother stood. “It is our responsibility to rule the people with honor and with respect. We are Sandersville, and without that responsibility we would be no better than the dark queens.”

  Katherine’s head snapped up. It was the second time she had ever heard her mother refer to the other queens. The ones who ruled with fear and blood. She didn’t think it was a coincidence that both of those times had happened within a week of Rose’s death and both of their lives turning upside down.