by Joey W. Hill
“You completed the task, Lord Keldwyn,” Rhoswen said, drawing closer. Her gaze was sliding over him, assessing his injuries. She made a motion to one of her attendants and the young woman disappeared. Probably to get him first aid he wouldn’t be here long enough to need.
“Yes. And no. The souls are released, and the demon has been dispatched back to its proper place. The Shattered World is in no danger from it being released there. But Lord Uthe—”
“Good. The relics remain there.”
He had a momentary image of Uthe lifting the Spear and driving it through the skull. The Grail had been knocked across the altar, but he expected it was still lying there. “Yes. The Cross was on fire, burning, but…it may have survived. I need to return immediately.”
“Not according to your presence here. I set the spell to hold you in the world until the task is completed, and we were more than fortunate it worked to pull you out.” Rhoswen spoke patiently. “And I wasn’t asking you to confirm the relics are there. I was telling you they are. I could not bring them out, but they are safe there for the moment.”
Keldwyn blinked. “Your Majesty, Lord Uthe is still there. Why was he not drawn back with myself and these others?”
“I do not know.” She shrugged. She had her hair swept up and captured with an array of tiny icicle clips. The soft white strands fell over her pale arms and the silver gossamer dress she wore. Today she had scrolled tattoos on her arms like an ice skater’s pattern in winter.
“Perhaps it was the Shattered World’s price for your being there,” she said. “It had to keep one of you. Perhaps he was too entangled with the magic he wielded to dispatch the demon. Perhaps because he was bound to the skull by blood, he is now destined to stay with what remains of it. Or he has been consigned to the same fate as the demon, a truly noble sacrifice for us all. But ultimately, it is no longer our concern.”
He hated her then. Truly hated her, in a way he hadn’t allowed himself to feel in a very long time. Sometimes there was just too much of her mother in her. That compartmentalization of empathy in a damn box, hoarded like a scarce commodity she refused to waste on anything that truly mattered. When that quality surfaced as it did now, he saw Reghan’s executioner, rather than Reghan’s daughter.
“Is that the royal ‘our’, Your Majesty? Because it is very much my concern.”
“And ours,” Gideon said, stepping forward.
Keldwyn saw Jacob give him a warning gesture. Though Jacob himself wasn’t always known for showing the proper obedience to a queen, one didn’t speak in the presence of the Fae Queen until spoken to, a matter of intelligence as much as obeisance. If she was annoyed, she would simply turn him into an ice sculpture or a fish in the moat beneath her feet until she was ready to hear him talk. Recuperating from being turned into ice could take a mortal weeks.
Keldwyn shifted between her and Gideon, drawing her sharp attention back to him. “It is not simply a matter of him being adrift in the Shattered World, Your Majesty. Lord Uthe has Ennui.”
He was aware of Gideon and Daegan’s surprised reaction to that, as much as Jacob’s lack of expression. It was as he’d expected. Lyssa had known. “His mind comes and goes, so it will hamper his survival chances if I am not there.”
“From what I understand of Ennui, it might be best if the Shattered World finishes him off. You should not prolong his suffering. There is nothing you can do to reverse it.”
“That remains to be seen.” Keldwyn met her gaze. For all that he had thought about the repercussions these past few months as his feelings for Uthe grew, now he spoke without hesitation, sealing his fate once and for all in his own world. “He has given me two of their marks. I am his blood source now. My blood seems to rejuvenate him. It may reduce the effects of the disease.”
He didn’t startle her often, not deeply enough for it to be reflected in her face. He saw shock, which was echoed by the advisors around her. Cayden’s normally impassive expression was twisted in an expression that showed he thought Keldwyn deranged. Or guilty of incomprehensible stupidity.
None of that mattered now. Only one thing did.
"If you feed him, if you are marked as his servant, you are no longer of the high Fae," she said stiffly. "It is a sentence even Tabor will have to accept, because it is in our laws. You know this. You had to know it when you let him mark you.”
Her tone was accusatory, and he stood impassive before it, neither acknowledging nor denying. A flush suffused her pale cheeks.
“You will be stripped of everything. The Seelie and Unseelie courts, as well as the vampire Council, will no longer have your skills as advisor or liaison. You will be denied entry to the Fae world and you will never be allowed to return. In time, without a connection to the life force here, you will die."
"Given my strength…that gives me at least another hundred years. I am already over fifteen hundred years old, Your Majesty. I can end my life with his. It is a fair exchange."
Rhoswen stared at him. “I will not permit it, any of it. You may not return to the Shattered World. Once he is dead, it will break that bond. You are too valuable an advisor for us to accept your banishment. You will instead be punished by this court for your infraction of the law, and continue your service once you complete it.”
“No.”
Cayden shifted to a more offensive position, registering the change in mood between him and the Queen. Daegan, Gideon and Jacob, all fighting men, picked up the same vibes and moved closer, but Kel knew they needed to stay back. They all did.
As he looked at her proud, beautiful face, the deep anger in her blue gaze, he knew what the rage she was experiencing felt like. The right trigger could always bring it to life, no matter how deeply he’d buried it, and he expected it was the same for her. No one had ever had the misfortune of being this close to both of them when that ignition point happened at the same time.
His lover, his best friend, her father. Until now, nothing had ever hurt like having Reghan taken from him in a way he could have prevented. Reghan had forbidden it. Keldwyn had thought about killing himself when Reghan had been transformed into a rose bush and placed in a desert world, an ancient and enchanted Fae prison, to suffer and die. How long had it taken? For years Keldwyn had dreamed he’d been standing over Reghan, watching him slowly die, knowing his suffering but helpless to stop it.
Uthe had felt the demon through his blood link, even in the Shattered World. Ah, gods. Had Masako felt Reghan’s actual suffering, his dying? If so, her strength to survive long enough to see Lyssa raised to adulthood had to be commended, for Keldwyn had been overcome simply from imagining it.
It was a feeling that made one want to tear down the world, incinerate it whole to escape that pain. It was the feeling gnawing at him now like a vulture ripping out his intestines, as he thought of Uthe in the Shattered World. How much time had already passed there?
Rhoswen knew that pain, in a different way. She’d lost Reghan before he ever died, her mind poisoned against him by her bitch mother. He wondered if Rhoswen killing Magwel years later had helped assuage that pain in any way. Given the way she was looking at him now, he would say no.
They claimed themselves superior to vampires, and perhaps they were, but one thing was a leveler between all humanoid species. They fucked up their heads and hearts over one another in ways beyond comprehension. He wondered if their destructiveness was a mystery even to whatever Creator had made the whole sad lot of them.
“This doesn’t involve any of you. It’s between me and her,” he said. It wouldn’t stop Cayden, but it would safeguard the vampire and mortals at his back. “What is it you seek here, Your Majesty?” Keldwyn said stiffly.
Her lip curled. “I want to know you can learn humility, Lord Keldwyn.”
"You first, Your Majesty."
One quick step and she was close enough to slap him, nails raking his face. He caught her wrist. He had her easily on weight and height, but that meant nothing in a fight between two F
ae. Cayden started forward, sword sliding from his scabbard, and Keldwyn proved the point. A lift of his hand, and the captain was trapped in place, caught in a force field spun by summer winds. Rhoswen countered with ice that flowed up Keldwyn’s arm to his shoulder. He showed no reaction to it beyond a muscle twitching in his jaw.
“You have been guilty of a thousand insults to my person,” Rhoswen said through gritted teeth. Her fingers curled in his grasp as they stared at one another, inches between his sparking dark eyes and her cold blue ones. “This will be the one that gives me what I’ve always desired—a reason sanctioned by law to strip your powers from you. I will keep them as long as I wish, and you will beg me to give them back. On your knees, a hundred years from now.”
Kel thought of the section in the Templar Rule about penances, where a Templar was stripped of his mantle and required to eat off the floor for a year. Every action had consequences.
“I will meet that price. Debase me, make yourself feel better about the past that we cannot change. But you will do it after you give me access to the Shattered World to find him, to help him.”
“You claimed to love my father, yet you stood by and did nothing. Nothing. You let him die, and now, you want to give all for this…vampire." She was spitting at him. The ice was petrifying the bones of his arm, making it numb and excruciatingly painful at the same time. He channeled it into his savage response.
"Because Reghan told me not to stop it,” he snarled back. “Because he loved her more than anything. Because apparently love means standing back and letting your heart be ripped from your chest without lifting a finger to stop the one ripping it out. I swore I'd never do it again, and I won’t. Even if it makes me the most selfish bastard who has ever lived, I will not let the noble, fucking, self-sacrificing nature of someone else I love take him from me.”
Her expression was as frozen as his hand manacling her wrist, but he didn’t stop. “Years ago, I stood before your mother when she passed sentence on your father, for no other reason than she hated him for not loving her more. Your father told me to let him go, to let things unfold as they should. I should have stood against the Fae court then. I should have stood against what was nothing more than a woman scorned, who knew nothing of what being a queen truly meant.”
The energy building between them was so intense it had pressed everyone against the walls of the chamber. It overwhelmed Keldwyn’s initial restraint on Cayden, such that the captain was there with the others, no way to get to his queen's side. Since sometimes those walls were conjured to be sheets of moving water that disappeared into a knee level mist, it was good that today they were simply walls hung with tapestries. Their audience would have been soaked, though Keldwyn reflected the water would have absorbed blood spatter better.
“If you want my head, Your Majesty, it is yours,” he said between his teeth. “You do with it as you will. But I will not see history repeat itself. Not for something as trite as your feelings.”
It was the final trigger. A burst of ice and cold met fire and earth. The reverberation that shook the room blinded and deafened their audience, knocking them to the ground. Cracks ran across the floor and glass rained from the ceiling. The Fae advisors fled out the side doors. Without glancing that way, Keldwyn shot a burst of energy toward Jacob, shoving him from one of the larger cracks before he fell through and was trapped in the moat. Daegan yanked Gideon into an alcove to protect him from the shards of glass which rained down on his own shoulders. Kel was sure the vampire hunter would give his Master hell over that move. But protecting the one you loved was second nature, wasn’t it?
Then it was over. He and Rhoswen stood a few feet apart, staring at one another, the residual magic drifting around them like smoke from fired pistols.
"Fine. Go then," she said through stiff lips. "Go to your vampire lover. Perhaps I will leave you both in the Shattered World and you can wither and die there. All that awaits you here is banishment. Forever."
His laugh was contemptuous. "You have not been listening if you think there is anything you can do to me that would hurt worse than what I have endured. When will you ever grow up and decide the past is the past, and had nothing to do with you? Nothing.” She flinched as he fired the words at her. “The things that hurt the worst are inflicted by those who do not intend you harm at all. Because you are not the center of their world. We never were."
He stepped back up to her, toe to toe, but this time there was no anger left in him. It was that way with loving someone, that vacillation of passion. Now he could see the traces of vulnerability beneath her strength, the fragility in the tight set of her jaw. All of those qualities came from Reghan. It was just her curse that his stubbornness tangled with Magwel’s bitterness in her genes.
“But when you find someone to whom you are that important, it heals some very deep wounds, Your Majesty. You will do anything to claim that love.” His gaze shifted to Cayden, then back to her. The gravity that had kept the others away was gone. As soon as the captain had realized it, he was back at her side. He stood only a stride away, his gaze pinned on Keldwyn, though he did not interfere, sensing the change of mood.
“How long will you let the love you feel for him burn inside your ice heart before you let it melt and heal your soul?” Keldwyn said quietly.
Cayden was almost as good as his Queen at concealing his thoughts, but Kel saw the brief slip. He would always stand at her side, protect her, love her, care for her. Yet if Rhoswen allowed that love to become an open thing, growing without restrictions, it could change everything inside her soul. Cayden knew it, hoped it, wished for it.
Keldwyn knew it would, because it had for him.
Rhoswen was now looking into the space beyond Keldwyn’s shoulder, away from everyone. She was barely breathing, it seemed, her energy glowing blue around her. Keldwyn passed his fingers through that aura, making it curl around his fingers and dissipate. He’d done that when she was younger, making her laugh, snapping her out of a tantrum.
"Most of my life, I've watched over amazing, powerful and supremely frustrating children. Uthe is no child. He is my equal.” He met her gaze when it shifted to his. “Just as you know that Lyssa is yours, with or without Fae blood. He is balance and intelligence, steady as the earth itself, and I have ever been a creature of earth. For me, he is the fire in the center of it."
She turned away from him. The unbroken tiles beneath her feet changed to cracked ice as she stepped upon them. A blast of cold air whistled through the chamber, rustling the tapestries on the wall and frosting the skin of those left in the chamber. Stopping in front of her throne, she tipped her head back. A ripple went through her body, a hard shudder. Cayden moved to her side, closer this time. Once there, he stopped, paused. After a long moment, he dropped to a knee and bowed his head, but he put his hand at her waist, long fingers wrapping around her hip. It was an intriguing mix of messages. She tilted her head away from him, but her fingers touched his, curved into them and held. She said something too low to be heard, and Cayden rose to his feet. As she turned and faced him, the two of them exchanged a long look. Then she brought her attention back to Keldwyn.
“Lord Keldwyn, you have ever been a thorn in my side. I have imagined many ways to destroy you, yet I am not so caught up in the pleasure of such visions that I overlook a crucial truth. I rely on your counsel, your arguments and your clever insults that veil wise advice.”
“Though you are a pain in my ass, Your Majesty, I would not offer counsel unless I thought you were a monarch worthy of my time.”
“Proof that your arrogance is one of the least charming things about you, my lord. But…” She took a step toward him. She seemed to be struggling with something. Cayden moved a step closer again, and his proximity steadied her. She straightened, met Keldwyn’s gaze. He caught a breath, for in the pain, resolve and raw honesty he saw there now, he remembered Reghan’s face in their last days together, when so much had been about baring the soul, and saying their good-by
es. He also thought about Uthe, calling him Master as they stood outside the Shattered World, admitting his desire to be Keldwyn’s.
By the gods, he needed to go, now. He was quivering inside like a wolf in desperate need to go on the hunt. But she was his only gateway back to him.
“You have been the constant in my life since my father’s passing. You loved him.” Rhoswen’s lips tightened. “I knew that. Countless times, when I felt the pain of his loss touch me from some passing memory, I saw it had touched you also. Since you hold so much away from the rest of us, I could only imagine how deeply that emotion ran. It changed, hurt and remade us all, didn’t it, my lord?”
Her voice had become soft, her eyes weary. He nodded, not trusting himself to speak. He thought of Uthe, asking, “Was he the love of your life?”
“You have stayed by my side to help me learn to be a better queen,” she said. “You have counseled me in ways large and small to keep my baser emotions from dictating my rule. Mostly. I think there were times you deliberately made yourself a target so I could channel my anger toward you rather than toward the responsibilities of my throne.”
He didn’t deny it, and her lips twitched, though there was no humor in her face. Pain was still a living thing in her eyes. “You watched over his other daughter as much as you were able, cared for her interests and brought us together. You suffered guilt over her mother choosing to meet the sun, because you felt you owed that to him as well, to protect the happiness of the woman you despised for taking him from you. But you figured that out, too, didn’t you? He loved us. Just never as much as he loved her.”
“Yes.” Keldwyn spoke through stiff lips. “We cannot help whom we love, my lady.”
“Nor whom we don’t.” She sighed. “That’s the dark side the poems do not address. You have now given your heart to a vampire, and you are willing to let that love take you from my side. Forgive my reaction to that, but it opens old wounds.”