Hidden Crown

by Emma L. Adams

  I stepped around her, deliberately treading on her foot. “Oh, sorry. It’s my clumsy human feet. I’ll be more careful next time.”

  None of the other half-Sidhe stepped in to defend me, but if I didn’t know better, Darrow looked a little impressed when he caught my eye. Whatever. I wasn’t here to make friends.

  I halted next to him. “I was under the impression I was here to learn how to fight.”

  “You are.” He gave me an appraising look. “What did Coral give you? I smell herbs on you.”

  “A tonic to stop this bothering me.” I held up my wrist.

  “If you’d asked, I would have found a way to alleviate the pain.”

  “You didn’t seem that bothered when I mentioned it earlier.” Perhaps he was trying to appear fair in front of his fellow half-Sidhe.

  “I’ll show you the training room.” He swept down a short tunnel and through a door into a room filled with makeshift targets. I glimpsed a weapons room next door and took a mental note of the location. “The number of Trials you might face varies. They’ve been different for every Gatekeeper.”

  “I know.”

  “From this point on, any of your actions may count in your favour or against it,” he went on. “That means my goal is to target your weaker areas.”

  “Surely it makes more sense to play to my strengths.” I’d always accepted I would never match one of the Sidhe for speed or grace or magical prowess, but I’d learned to harness my own advantages. Now, Darrow seemed determined to strip them away from me, one by one.

  “From what I’ve observed, there’s nothing more I can teach you about fighting,” he said. “As for defending yourself against magic, you have something of an advantage with your natural deflecting abilities. No weaker magic can touch you, while you can learn to undo much of the rest.”

  I blinked. “I’m sensing there’s a ‘but’ coming.”

  He raised his hands. “Let’s see how good you are with glamour.”

  Oh boy. I had an inkling I was about to get schooled. Big time. Using glamour wasn’t an issue for me. As my siblings delighted in telling anyone who asked, I’d once conjured an illusion of a fancy car as a teenager that was solid and real enough to drive. It had handled like a dream… right up until I drove too far from the Ley Line, at which point it had vanished, leaving me stranded in a muddy trench.

  I wouldn’t have that problem in Faerie, which had no spirit lines to limit the strength of magic, but Darrow’s skill was on another level entirely. The troll had felt real, and as for his doppelganger…

  I pushed the thought aside and conjured up a quick glamour of a red squirrel. The squirrel gambolled around us, chasing its fluffy tail. “There you go.”

  Darrow snapped his fingers and the glamour collapsed, winking out of existence.

  “Hey!” I said. “You can’t do that to my squirrel.”

  “I just did.”

  “It’s a figure of speech. Since when could you break another person’s glamour without touching them?”

  I could see through others’ glamour, up to a point, but I couldn’t break it. Especially not a Sidhe’s glamour. To them, illusions were as real as reality itself.

  “Show me another one.”

  I spun a glamour of a horse, which appeared next to me and gave a realistic whinny.

  Darrow scanned it from nose to tail. “Climb onto it.”

  “Uh, no,” I said. “You’ll just snap it out of existence and let me fall on my arse.”

  “I want you to fight me.”

  “Fight…” I trailed off. “You mean I can stop you from breaking my glamour?”

  It sure would have been nice to cover that in my earlier training, but then again, only a Sidhe could truly break glamour, and they were too busy to be bothered with training me before now.

  This might hurt a little.

  I swung up onto the horse. It felt solid, but only if I didn’t think too hard about the empty air beneath the illusion. Grabbing the reins, I steered the horse around to face Darrow. “You might wanna tell me how to fight you.”

  “You know how.”

  He rested his hand on the horse’s head, which flickered in and out of existence, threatening to send me pitching forwards. I shuffled backwards, conjuring up the glamour again, but no sooner had it formed than he broke it. I slid off the horse’s back, and I’d have hit the floor if he hadn’t moved blindingly fast, catching me in his arms.

  Well, this is awkward. He was stronger than he looked, but I was solid and heavy and didn’t like being carried.

  Darrow laid me on my feet. “You need to learn faster if you want to master glamour in time to make use of it in the Trials.”

  “You need to work on your pep talks,” I said. “Look, I didn’t grow up in Faerie. In the mortal realm, if I use a glamour, it falls apart the instant I walk away from the Ley Line.”

  He stepped back. “Then I hope you’re ready to learn fast. We’ll try again.”

  We did. Multiple times. After the first couple of attempts, he stopped bothering to catch me when I fell, so I had a nice collection of bruises by the time he called the lesson to an end.

  “You have ten minutes to change and make yourself presentable before the Sidhe arrive,” he told me.

  “Wait, the Sidhe are coming here?”

  “That was implied, yes.”

  Faeries. At this rate, I’d strangle him before my Trials were over.

  6

  I hurried back to my suite to shower and wash off the sweat and dirt I’d accumulated from being thrown to the ground. then I spun a fresh glamour to change my clothes into a green-and-gold dress worthy of a Sidhe ceremony and make my hair look elaborately styled and not damp and tangled. It’d have been nice if he’d warned me the Sidhe were coming beforehand. Hopefully, they wouldn’t try to arrest me this time.

  Coral knocked on my door. “Are you ready?”

  “Just about.” I checked my reflection one last time. “As long as Darrow doesn’t undo my glamour again, anyway. Why are the Sidhe coming here?”

  “To formally recognise the Gatekeeper.” When I opened the door, her gaze went to my arms. Even my glamour hadn’t covered all the bruises from today’s session. “I can brew you a tonic for the bruises later, but the Sidhe will be here any second now.”

  “Maybe it’ll make them be a little nicer to me.” I smoothed down my dress and walked with her to the main cave. The bodyguards wore a more formal version of their uniform, while Darrow had changed—or re-glamoured himself—into a green and gold ensemble that fitted his slim form and brought out the aquamarine colour of his eyes. His hair glittered like a waterfall of silver. He sure was stunning to look at. Too bad his personality left much to be desired.

  The other half-Sidhe didn’t seem to think so. They clustered around him like seagulls around someone holding a tasty snack. Maybe they thought if they played their cards right, they’d get a promotion. I rolled my eyes when the half-Sidhe who’d bitched at me earlier attached herself to his arm. He should have put the binding on her, not me. She didn’t look like she minded being forced to hover over his shoulder. I just hoped the tonic Coral had given me would help with the pain from the binding, because I really needed a decent night’s sleep after today.

  A dazzling flash of light engulfed the room, heralding the arrival of a group of Sidhe. Among them were Lady Aiten and her dark-haired friend, Lord Pointy Spear. His glamour wasn’t quite as dazzling as the last time I’d seen him, and he seemed a little worn at the edges. Perhaps the stress of looking for the Erlking’s murderer was getting to him.

  “The Gatekeeper will take to the stage now,” said Lady Aiten. “And formally introduce herself.”

  Stage? I scanned the hall and spotted a clear spot that was more of a raised platform than a stage, but one did not argue with people who came to parties armed to the teeth. Making my way over there, I called Mum’s lessons to mind. Hold your head high, so they can see the circlet. Never flinch, and never let t
hem see your fear.

  As I climbed onto the platform, the Sidhe carried on with their conversations as though I wasn’t even here. All right, then.

  “I am Hazel Lynn, Gatekeeper of the Summer Court,” I said. “I’m honoured to serve the realm and to maintain the peace between humans and faeries.”

  Assuming they don’t go to war first.

  I glanced across the crowd at Darrow, whose eyes were on me instead of the half-Sidhe attached to his arm, and hid a smile. “I’ve had a wonderful welcome to the Court, and I look forward to filling my mother’s shoes as Summer Gatekeeper.”

  The Sidhe’s expressions didn’t change. Sarcasm wasn’t their forte. Lucky for all of us, really.

  “And you will be welcomed,” said the Summer ambassador, Lord Raivan, in tones that implied he’d rather be cleaning a public toilet than celebrating my status as Gatekeeper. Blond and perpetually miserable-looking, Lord Raivan wore a coat with gold cuffs and a vibrant new hat that made him look like an angry tropical bird. “Let us toast the Gatekeeper.”

  The Sidhe’s conversations rose in volume, and they moved away from the ‘stage’. While I’d been speaking, banquet tables had sprung up from nowhere, along with vats of wine and even a band. Assuming I’d been dismissed, I left the stage. Lord Raivan gave me a scowl on the way, and I returned it with a smile. He was supposed to be the ambassador for half-bloods and humans, yet he’d been notably absent when the Sidhe had accused me of murder and it did not look like he had any intention of offering an apology.

  I walked over to the buffet table to join Coral, who was so far the only person in the room who hadn’t treated me like dirt. Always a good sign. The Sidhe didn’t skimp on parties even for lowly Gatekeepers, and the tables were piled high with fruits and bread, cheese and meats. I hadn’t eaten a proper meal all day, and I was bloody starving, so I loaded my plate. “This has all been checked for poison, right?”

  “It has.” Coral picked up a plate of her own. “You’re just the right level of paranoid. Good job.”

  “The ceremony is normally held in the ambassador’s palace, isn’t it?” I said in an undertone. “I’m pretty sure my mother didn’t have an underground revel on her first night in Faerie.”

  “It’s better this way.” She picked out a few grapes and set them on her plate. “At the last initiation party, two half-faeries disappeared into one of the portraits and never came out. Anyway, it’s easier if you stay here tonight. Darrow’s planning a test for tomorrow morning.”

  “He might have told me that himself.” My gaze flickered over to him. He’d shaken off the clinging half-Sidhe and was now talking to Lord Kerien, the other ambassador for human-Sidhe relations. No doubt they were deep in a discussion of how much of a disappointment I was. “Has a half-faerie always been in charge of running the Trials?”

  “I don’t know,” she replied. “I’ve only worked here for a year or so. I assume there’s always been someone without ties to either Court selected, in the interests of fairness.”

  “You grew up human,” I observed. “You talk like one. Plus you move like someone who learned to walk before learning to swim. Most selkies I’ve met aren’t anywhere near as steady on their feet.”

  She smiled. “I went to school in Aberdeen. My dad was human, and he had custody of my brother and me until we were old enough for the Sea Court to come knocking.”

  “So the Sea Court claims half-faeries, too?” I asked. “Summer and Winter only started recently.”

  “I know,” she said. “We were luckier than some, but I’m still in touch with my human family.”

  Reading between the lines, I figured that meant I could trust her. I was all in, considering it was a welcome relief from the backstabbing and betrayal I’d come to expect from the Sidhe. Feeling slightly better, I dug into my food. “I have two siblings, both in the human realm. And a cousin, but she’s… you know. Winter’s.”

  Her mouth formed an O. “I didn’t know the Gatekeepers were that closely interrelated.”

  “There aren’t many of us left,” I said. “I guarantee there are a lot more people in line for the Erlking’s replacement than the Gatekeepers.”

  I was the last of the line, in fact, and so was Holly. Which meant if we didn’t have kids, the Sidhe might well target someone else’s children and haul them into Faerie instead. The vow was eternal. We weren’t.

  Ilsa and I had once made a promise to break the curse, back when we’d been twelve years old and brimming with overconfidence. I wouldn’t lie, I sometimes missed those days.

  “I hope they find the killer soon,” she said. “Darrow wasn’t happy that he had to go out there into the Court when the Sidhe were on the warpath.”

  “Oh?” I said. “Why?”

  “Because he’s not from Summer,” she said. “I assumed you’d guessed.”

  “He hasn’t been forthcoming with sharing information.” My heart began to beat faster. “Is it because he’s a hybrid with ties to both Courts?”

  “No,” she said. “I think he’s from an independent Court, like I am, but not the Sea Kingdom.”

  No wonder he’d been annoyed at my earlier questions. Maybe it was a requirement that all the people involved in the Trials weren’t beholden to either Summer or Winter, so neither Court would be able to accuse the other of giving their Gatekeeper an advantage. It also prevented them from giving away anything the Sidhe didn’t want them to, because non-Court members couldn’t access any confidential information. Including the Gatekeepers, in most cases.

  “So did he think they might accuse him?” I kept my tone casual.

  “Maybe,” she said. “I doubt it. No half-Sidhe would dare touch the Erlking.”

  I heaped cheese on my bread and took a bite. “You know the others quite well, then?”

  “I do,” she said. “Aila hates all non-Sidhe, including her own family. Sorry I had to leave you to deal with her, but Darrow ordered us not to intervene if anyone challenged you.”

  “Of course he did.” That figured. While half-faeries were a little easier to understand than the Sidhe, those who lived in the Courts shared their belief that humans were inferior. They spurned their human heritage and spent their time hoping that if they spent enough time with the Sidhe, some of their longevity might rub off on them. Nonsense, but there you have it.

  “Those are Laurel and Clove. They’re half-dryads.” She pointed to two fae clad in gowns made entirely of leaves, their skin the colour of bark and their vine-like hair pleated with flowers. “And that’s Willow.” She indicated a pretty female half-Sidhe dressed in a magnificent silver gown, and her cheeks went pink when head tilted in our direction. “She’s the daughter of a noble, I think, but I’ve never managed to find out who.”

  She went on, pointing out all the main players in the room. I generally had a good memory for names and faces, but I couldn’t help wondering if any of the people here fit the descriptions in the note the Erlking had sent me. Perhaps he intended me to do some sleuthing of my own. Not that I really felt like questioning the Sidhe, but maybe more of the elf wine would get me in the mood to mingle.

  “That Sidhe is staring at you,” Coral commented. “I think he wants to talk to you.”

  I looked to see who she meant and recognised Lord Kerien. Like most of the Summer Sidhe, he was eerily stunning, with bright green eyes and tanned skin. Gold jewels studded his deep green coat.

  “Oh, him,” I said. “He used to be the Gatekeeper’s ambassador, but he quit for some reason. Bet he’s glad of it, now Darrow’s dished the dirt on me.”

  “Excuse me?” The female half-Sidhe noble in the white dress walked past us. “I was just admiring your cape.”

  Coral choked on her wine. “Thank you.”

  With a smile on her face, Willow walked away. A grin swept my mouth. I might not know many selkies, but I did know that handing over their skin was an act selkies only did to express romantic interest. In selkie terms, she’d blatantly been flirting with Coral.r />
  I nudged her. “I’m taking a wild guess that she wants to talk to you alone.”

  She looked down at her wine glass. “I’m not supposed to slack off on bodyguard duty.”

  “Aren’t both of you supposed to be my bodyguards? Tell her I’m giving you both a break. For as long as you want.” Coral went brick red, and I gave her another nudge. “Go on. I’m off to mingle.”

  I left Coral spluttering and headed across the room to refill my wine glass. Lord Kerien stepped in to waylay me. “Hazel Lynn.”

  “Lord Kerien.” I gave him a smile and walked past. “Excuse me.”

  He snagged my arm with his fingertips, just enough to give me a warning bite of his magic. His melodic voice dropped to a whisper. “What do you know of the circumstances of the Erlking’s death?”

  He seriously wanted to do this now? “Probably a lot less than you do. Darrow already questioned me.”

  “I’m aware of that,” he said. “However, there are gaps in our knowledge of the events that led to his death.”

  My mouth parted. “Wait, you’re not accusing me?”

  “No.” He took a step closer. “We know the Erlking was shot with an iron-tipped arrow, but not who fired it.”

  Holy shit. That was practically a declaration of war. The Erlking’s defences should have kept a simple bow and arrow out. “Darrow said he had a security beast.”

  “Also shot, multiple times. Each arrow was a perfect shot.”

  Damn. I scrambled to get a grip on my thoughts. “I don’t understand why you’re telling me this.”

  “We have reason to believe the truth lies in the mortal realm,” he said.

  Did he know the Erlking had sent me a message after his death? Maybe. I’d have thought he’d come out and said it if he had.

  “You’re saying…” I hesitated. “You need someone to take another look at the crime scene?”

  My pulse accelerated. I hadn’t wanted to get involved, not a bit, but that note had been for me alone. If I went to the scene of the crime, I might stand a chance of figuring out who’d killed him. This was an opening I’d be a fool to miss.