The Mad Queen (The Fae War Chronicles Book 5)

by Jocelyn Fox

  Ross took a deep breath and swallowed, shoving down the little string of panic that uncoiled in her chest. She wasn’t alone. She had Mayhem. And the Exiled must want something from her, or she would have attacked already. If she ran, that would just mean turning her back on the threat and waiting to be caught, taken down to the ground like a fleeing deer dragged to its death by a wolf. No, thank you. She’d rather face it head on. Keeping her eyes trained on the little sliver of white in the branches of the tree, she called out, “Corsica! I know you’re up there. If you have something to say, come down and say it!”

  For a moment, nothing happened. The slight breeze lifted a few leaves on the tree. Mayhem took a step forward, putting herself between Ross and Corsica. Ross’ heart warmed at the unwavering loyalty of her faithful dog. Then her heart surged into double-time, pounding in her chest as Corsica dropped silently from the branches, landing gracefully in a crouch, the shadows and sunlight painting a pattern of bright and dark across her body.

  The Exiled Sidhe bared her pointed teeth in a humorless smile. “No less than I expected from you, though it would have been fun to fight you without your gun.” She arched a pale eyebrow, azure eyes glimmering.

  “Ever been hit with pepper spray before?” Ross tilted her head and widened her stance challengingly, even though she didn’t know if her pepper spray would even work on the Fae woman. Corsica had touched the wrought-iron handle of the screen door without any problem at all…but that didn’t mean that she was invulnerable. “Plus, May took you down pretty handily last time.”

  Mayhem lifted her lips from her long white teeth in a snarl.

  Corsica slid a long knife out of her sleeve and giggled. “Oh, I have a soft spot for your tamed little wolf, but I will spit her like a roasted rabbit if she tries to rush me again.”

  Anger burned away some of the fear rolling like fog through Ross’s mind. “You touch my dog and I’ll kill you.” She heard the feral growl in her own voice. “That’s a promise, bitch.”

  Corsica laughed, tossing the dagger between her black-gloved hands, spinning it at dizzying speed. “I would look forward to seeing you try, my pretty South Sea girl.”

  A tart response rose to Ross’s lips: I’m not your pretty anything; but she just watched the whirling knife in Corsica’s hands and tried to think of a way to survive the encounter. Corsica seemed content to stare at Ross, her gaze hungry. Ross noticed a spatter of dried blood darkened the Exiled woman’s long silver braid, and several of her bristling earrings were missing, angry red weals marking her delicately pointed ears. Ross decided that maybe a different tactic would work.

  “Did Tyr fight back when you jumped him this morning?” she asked acidly, putting as much derision into her voice as she could manage. “I don’t know your deal, but even I think that’s cold.”

  Corsica licked her lips. “What makes a monster, my sweet South Sea girl?”

  “Stop calling me that,” growled Ross.

  The ethereally beautiful woman cocked her head and smiled slowly. “Such fire. A pity you have none of the blood.”

  “Did you mean to kill him?” Ross pressed, pushing aside her irritation at Corsica’s enigmatic words.

  Corsica tossed her knife into the air and caught it neatly. “I did not kill him.”

  “Do you really know that?” Ross said seriously. “He was already weak, and he lost a lot of blood from that leg wound.”

  The flashing knife paused. Corsica peered at Ross, suddenly somber. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m just saying, you left him to die,” Ross said in a hard voice.

  “I did not leave him to die,” Corsica countered immediately and furiously, eyes flashing. “Tyr is strong! He would not die!” Fear flashed across her face.

  Ross shrugged. “How would you know? You didn’t stick around to find out. You broke the bone sorcerer’s cage and you left with him.”

  “You think you know everything,” hissed Corsica, lowering herself until her fingertips touched the ground, coiling like a snake about to strike.

  “You attack me now, I won’t be able to tell you if he lived or died,” Ross said calmly, feeling like she was facing down a panther. Mayhem, too, lowered her body, quivering with anticipation.

  “I can just go and find out myself,” sneered Corsica.

  “Good luck with that,” Ross replied mildly. “Niall’s put some new wards and spells around the house. Have fun trying not to set any of them off.”

  A strange look of uncertainty passed over Corsica’s face. “Perhaps just tell her,” she murmured in a soft voice. “She is a monster too, yes, this little beast, and she will understand.”

  Ross bristled but didn’t interrupt Corsica’s conversation with herself.

  “But then she will tell them, the halfblood and the Unseelie bound to the treacherous Queen,” Corsica said angrily, pointing her knife at Ross for emphasis.

  Ross shrugged. “I don’t know Molly or Ramel that well. I know Ramel was under some sort of controlling spell, but he hasn’t even been awake much since, well, you blew him up.”

  Corsica chuckled. “That was your red-headed friend, the one who smells of the Old World. Yes, she would make a fine meal.”

  Ross tried to focus the Exiled woman’s mind. “What is it you were going to tell me about your plan?”

  “See, she knows it is your plan,” murmured Corsica in her soft voice. “She understands.” The knife wavered, pointed to the ground, and then came up sharply again as Corsica growled, “No. We can trust no one. We learned that lesson long ago. Centuries ago. Bound and broken and banished to a world not our own. We learned that lesson.”

  Maybe a second run at it from another angle would succeed, thought Ross. “Why did you lure me here, Corsica? If you don’t want to kill me, what is it you do want?”

  “Oh, I do want to kill you, pretty thing,” purred Corsica, her shockingly blue eyes alight with hunger and something else that Ross couldn’t name. “I want to open that throbbing vein on the side of her neck, the one where I can see your heart beating fast with fear, and then I want to lap up your lifeblood until your skin cools and your eyes stare unseeing into death.” Her pointed teeth gleamed in the shadows as she smiled.

  Ross swallowed down the bile rising in the back of her throat. God, what had possessed her to think that going for a run was a good idea? Why had the guys agreed to it? They had all been too complacent, and now she was staring down this crazy woman with her silver hair and beautiful eyes and layers of scars. “Well, maybe I’ll give you a taste someday,” she said, trying for a light tone and mostly succeeding. “But for now, I’ll have to decline the invitation, tempting as it is.”

  Corsica hummed to herself. “Perhaps I will eat you anyway.”

  “You can try,” Ross said. “But that brings me back to the question…why did you want to talk to me, Corsica?”

  Without Tyr, the Exiled woman seemed unable to follow a master plan. She seemed to have set this trap and then forgotten exactly why she’d gone to the trouble. Ross felt a strange stab of empathy. Corsica’s brutality contrasted bizarrely against those strange glimpses of vulnerability, even in these strained few minutes of interaction.

  “Why did we want to talk to her,” muttered Corsica. “Why, why, why.” She made a low sound of frustration, tilting her head from side to side in an odd weaving motion that reminded Ross yet again of a snake. The remaining rings studding her ears glinted in the scraps of sunlight.

  “If I’m not back soon, the others will come looking for me,” said Ross. Her stomach hurt from the extended adrenaline high. “And I’m pretty sure they won’t be content with just conversation.”

  Corsica growled and threw her knife into the ground in a quicksilver flash of speed. Ross jumped slightly, but it was more the motion of a petulant child than a cold-blooded killer. She reminded herself that Corsica had probably slaughtered thousands of innocents over the centuries, draining them of blood to survive.

  “I didn
’t,” said Corsica sharply. “Didn’t ever kill…unless they fought, or unless they did bad things.”

  Ross held very still, nausea gripping her again as she realized that Corsica had just neatly plucked her thoughts from her head.

  “And I wouldn’t kill Tyr,” added Corsica, almost sounding like she was trying to convince herself. She covered her face with her black-gloved hands suddenly. A high-pitched keen of sorrow emanated chillingly from her shaking body.

  Again, Ross felt that perplexing nudge of compassion. She pushed it aside. She wanted to end this encounter soon, one way or another. “Corsica. I’ll tell you what happened to Tyr if you tell me why you wanted to talk to me.”

  “I don’t know,” wailed Corsica. Then she shuddered and stiffened, slowly rising from her hunched position, her body unfolding into a straight and elegant line. “Stop,” she said firmly. “Put yourself back together. Hold yourself together. You are so close now.” She raised her cerulean gaze to Ross. “I brought you here because I need you to deliver a message.” She tilted her head. “And I would not have minded scaring you a little by dropping down on you out of the tree.” Her pink tongue caressed the sharp point of one of her incisors.

  “What message?” Ross said. Hope bubbled in her chest. Maybe she’d survive after all. But she crushed the buoyant emotion. Enough. She was losing her edge, losing her ability to focus on the moment at hand and make decisions without catering to weakness.

  “Tell the halfblood that I wish her to join me,” said Corsica.

  “And why would she do that?” Ross didn’t know Molly well, but she’d come to trust Tess in those few action-packed days. She knew that Molly had been Tess’s best friend.

  Corsica smiled. “Because I am going to take my revenge on the Mad Queen, and I think that perhaps she would like some revenge of her own.” She shrugged. “And I may have a way to save that damaged Unseelie Knight she seems to care for.”

  “Why did you do all this?” Ross asked. “It doesn’t make sense. Why break out the bone sorcerer and disappear – and leave Tyr to die – when we already said we’d honor Merrick’s deal to let you talk to him?”

  “I don’t want to simply talk to him,” sneered Corsica. One her gloved hands caressed a sleek pouch on her belt. “I want to make him my instrument of destruction.” Then she smiled. “And your silly Seelie had no clue about the care and feeding of a bone sorcerer.” Her trilling laughter echoed through the tree branches. “He would have been dead within a week, and I need him for much longer than that.”

  “You swore an oath,” Ross said, even though she couldn’t believe she was saying those words in real life.

  “I am keeping that oath,” said Corsica serenely. “I swore that I would guard the bone sorcerer Gryttrond until the Bearer’s return. And so I am.”

  “You’re not guarding him, you broke him out,” pointed out Ross.

  Corsica shrugged with one shoulder. “I am merely holding him in a different place.”

  “You make no sense,” Ross said, forgetting her fear for a moment. “What, you just drop Tyr because he’s not convenient to you anymore?”

  “I did what was best for him,” snarled Corsica. “We did, we did, poor Tyr with no stomach for blood even now,” she added in a softer voice. Then she looked searchingly at Ross. “Is he alive? You said you would tell me.” A note of pleading entered her words.

  Ross stared at the Exiled woman for a long moment, Mayhem’s growl escalating again. “Easy,” she murmured to the dog. Then she took a deep breath. She couldn’t continue the conversation forever. If Corsica decided to kill her, all she could do was give the pointy-toothed bitch a run for her money. “Tyr didn’t die. He’s very weak, but we helped him. We saved him.”

  Corsica lowered her head for a moment. Ross frowned, not entirely sure whether Corsica was overwhelmed with relief – or maybe disappointed that she hadn’t finished the job. The unpredictable woman was hard to read…then again, most people who’d gone off the deep end really weren’t reliable in any sense of the word.

  Then Corsica whirled and wrenched something from the trunk of the tree, the thing that had gleamed in the sunlight and caught Ross’s attention. Corsica spun and threw the object. With a sickening lurch in her stomach, Ross realized it was another knife. She lunged and caught May by the collar as the dog surged forward and the knife flashed through the air. The blade landed barely an arm’s length away from Ross and Mayhem, the sharp point slicing down into the earth as though it were soft butter. Ross sternly repeated a command word until Mayhem stopped straining against her. When she looked up, Corsica was gone.

  “What the hell,” Ross breathed, her hands suddenly shaking as the adrenaline drained from her body. “Jesus. What the hell.” She put her pepper spray back into her pouch and released her grip on May’s collar, resting her hands on her thighs and taking deep breaths until the head rush passed.

  Mayhem padded forward, inspected the dagger in the ground, and then proceeded to investigate the tree. She trotted back to Ross after a thorough search had convinced her that the Exiled woman was gone. Ross checked her watch and groaned as she realized that she only had fifteen minutes left of the forty-five minutes that she’d been allotted to complete her run. The whole encounter with Corsica had only taken ten minutes, but her body was starting to ache from the draw-down of all the crazy chemicals that got released in high-pressure situations. And now she had to high-tail it back so that Jess wouldn’t call the cops.

  She turned toward the road, but then spun and retrieved the dagger from the ground. The blade was roughly long as her forearm. After a moment of thought, she stripped off her shirt and folded it carefully around the blade. Better to ruin a relatively cheap shirt than cut herself on the sharp edges of a knife that she couldn’t be sure wasn’t poisoned.

  “Come on, May,” she said, turning back toward the road. Another thought struck her with ridiculous simplicity. She pulled her phone out of her pouch, sighing as she realized that she’d almost overlooked the easiest solution. She’d just call Jess and have him pick her up. Canceling the last two miles of a run was understandable after that encounter. But her phone refused to turn on, the screen remaining dark despite her attempts to power it up. She growled a curse, stuffed it back into the pouch, and stretched her legs into a lope, her shoes crunching on the gravel as she thought about how exactly she was going to explain her unexpected encounter to everyone else.

  Chapter 12

  “I think we have discussed this as far as possible in this public space,” said Calliea in a low voice, glancing about the large entryway to the healing ward and the apprentice healers trying to look as though they weren’t straining to hear every word as they replenished the healing supplies.

  “It was a very public display,” said Tess, her voice tired. The Bearer looked much older than when Calliea had first met her – not in the sense that she looked aged, but she looked world-weary. The once-mortal woman’s eyes carried weight now, and Calliea could tell that the experiences of the war still lurked like shadows in the back of the Bearer’s mind. She didn’t think any less of Tess because of the mark that the war had left; Calliea herself had drunk white-shroud tea as often as was safe in the days after the battle over the White City. Sometimes she dreamed of the flames and the screams of dying creatures mingled with the smell of burning flesh. She’d known that some of those screams and some of that burning flesh had belonged to her own beloved Valkyrie. Sometimes they appeared in her dreams, too, the dead ones, walking toward her with scorched faces and savaged bodies torn to shreds by Malravenar’s creatures.

  Calliea shook herself free of her gruesome thoughts. “All the same, Lady Bearer, I think we should move this to a private area.”

  “It’s Tess, Calliea,” sighed the Bearer. “I thought we’d already been through this. We were practically roommates for the past six months.”

  “One can’t be too formal in public,” Calliea replied with a small nod, but she smiled to reassure
Tess.

  “Everything is back in order,” said Liam, approaching the group. “Or as much as it can be. We’ll have to replace some things.”

  “The clay schedule will be the most difficult to replicate, but I have a parchment copy of the format, and that will suffice for now,” said Maeve. “With your permission, Lady Bearer, I will see my daughter back to her bed and then continue on with the business of this ward.”

  “Of course,” said Tess.

  “Laedrek. Arrisyn,” said Maeve, nodding to each of them in turn.

  Calliea returned the respectful gesture. It still felt odd to her, for those so much more experienced than her to treat her with such deference. But then again, she’d heard most of an entire ballad devoted to the great dragon hunt the other night around the fire, and no less than five verses had described her courage and prowess with blade and whip as she slew the great beast. She’d been glad for the shadows so that the others couldn’t see the hot flush that stained her cheeks.

  “Might as well move this to my room since Vell isn’t here,” Tess said.

  “We could still use her quarters,” said Calliea. “The Vyldretning made it clear that we were to continue to use all her resources as necessary.”

  Tess chuckled. “Maybe I just want to show off my new digs.”

  “Digs?” Calliea frowned. She hadn’t heard this mortal colloquialism before. It rang no chord of recognition.

  “Sorry. New room.”

  “My lady,” said Haze from above, addressing the Bearer, “the mortal Quinn says that he will join you momentarily, and he courteously requests that you wait for him to see Lady Niamh back to her bed.”