by Ella Fields
Then she and my brothers were gone. I screamed for her to come back, but I couldn’t hear it leave my tight throat.
Trees faded in and out of view, taller than any trees I’d ever seen before, and among them, I swore I saw huts and homes.
A tail flicked. Blue or green, I wasn’t sure. Everything became a muted, duller shade of its true color. It made sense the darkness would steal it all. It made sense and… Two red eyes peered at me from beneath the water, pink lips shaping around words I couldn’t hear or make out. Her bronzed skin shimmered, her green hair clouding around her oval face as she repeated herself. “Hold on,” I think she said.
A waste of time, I thought, smiling slightly. A mermaid.
Then my wrist was in her cool, long-fingered hand. My eyelids flickered as I wondered if she’d tear my limb from my body or perhaps take a bite of my flesh, but the green-haired creature only covered my wound with her hand.
I would’ve flinched had I the energy as I felt another hand wrap around my foot and watched the merwoman exchange a look with something I could not see.
My eyelids continued to flutter, and my chest ached with the urge to breathe when I couldn’t. I tried, but it burned, and I coughed.
My sight began to thin even more, everything turning a muted shade of gray. I coughed again and began to heave, and that angry part of me tried to contain what little life remained inside me.
And then I was pulled away from the water, from the mermaids, the scent of mint and sun soaked winter mornings registering inside my fractured mind.
“She needs tending to,” I heard Truin say. “She won’t make it.”
“We need to leave, now,” someone said. It sounded like Kash, and then everything was black once more.
I woke alone, feeling as though I’d taken an axe to the back of my head, and immediately shut my eyes.
Dreams of a land far off the coastline held me captive. Its giant trees and soft as butter sand and its rainbow scent carrying me on a phantom breeze, high above in the cloudless sky. Of mermaids with evil eyes but kind mouths and hands that saved.
I woke five more times before I was finally able to keep my eyes open, and when I could, I found the lord seated beside my bed, reading.
For a time, I just listened, relieved to hear his velvet smooth voice. “…And her grandmother said, ‘those who wake wanting will forever roam unsatisfied.’ The child peered up at her, unsure what the old crone meant, and not so sure she cared…” He paused, his eyes lifting from the page.
“Did it work?”
Zadicus closed the book, the leg that had been resting over his knee dropping to the floor. Somber eyes, riddled with concern, fell on me. “Yes.”
I nodded, knowing the implications of that could be vast, but also knowing I was in no state to worry right now. “Do I resemble a corpse?”
He laughed, a dry, tired sound, and rubbed his hand over his whiskered chin. “You’ve never looked more beautiful.”
“Liar,” I croaked.
“I would never lie to you.” Rising, he dropped the book to the chair, then came to the bed. “You’re alive, and that makes you the most wondrous, stunning thing I’ve ever seen.”
My throat felt tight, words unable to form. His smile was soft as he reached for the pitcher and poured me some water.
He helped me sit up, and my hand shook when I tried to grab the goblet, so he held it to my lips and carefully tipped until I’d drunk it all.
Falling back to my pillows, I felt my eyes flutter. “Don’t leave.”
He didn’t respond, but he stayed.
When I woke again, I watched him for a time. His eyes were shut, his hands clasped over his stomach, but I knew he was not sleeping. “You knew of Beldine, and of what happened to my mother?”
His eyes opened, and he stared at me for a long minute before finally saying, “I knew of Beldine’s fate, but I was not aware of how it had happened. Not until the night of the ball when Kash finally decoded your father’s journal.”
Traces of memory raced in. “The one you had at your estate?”
He nodded once. “After seeing him with it, just the once, and how confused he’d looked as he’d stared at it in his study, I’d never forgotten. So I took it after he died. It wasn’t full of admissions so much as nonsensical ramblings. As though he’d tried to take up the pastime of journaling to aid in keeping his mind longer.” He brushed his thumb over his bottom lip. “As his thoughts grew more erratic, so did the entries. Some were nothing more than scribbled, unrecognizable drawings.”
“What,” I started, gathering scrambled thoughts. “What was it that made you realize?”
“A picture of a heart, large in size, and a smaller one beneath it. It was his last entry.”
I wasn’t sure what to make of that. Why he’d left behind evidence, however poor, of what he’d done.
As if knowing so, Zad murmured, “Perhaps some tiny entity inside him, a fragment of who he once was and could have been, resurfaced. It would make sense,” he said. “For there were not many entries after you were born.”
Numb, I absorbed that for some moments, staring down at my bedsheets. “So you finally figured it out.” Remembering how he’d left the ball around the same time Amelda had, I shot accusing eyes at him. “You also knew what Amelda was planning, and you did not deign to warn me.”
Seeming unaffected by my tone, he stated blandly, “No.”
“Then what?” I snapped, tired of his carefully said truths. “How?”
“We knew she was up to something, but we lost her that evening. Landen discovered her whereabouts the following morning.” Sighing, he straightened in the chair, leaning forward to clasp his hands between his knees as he looked at me. “Kash and I followed you when you left the Rosaleen, but we lost you when you headed back to the castle with Truin. By the time we found the alleyway you’d been taken from, you were gone. They were quick, too quick.”
“She’s a vanisher,” I supplied.
His brows lifted, and he continued. “And so it took far longer than I’d have liked to find you.” A hand dragged down his face as he said those last words, as though he were reliving the moments all over again.
“How did you figure it out?”
He smiled down at his hands. “Fae senses are rather… extraordinary. We assumed it would need to be in proximity to Beldine, and once we’d hit the water, I could feel you.”
I stared at him as he crossed to the bed and fed me water, and I stared some more as he smoothed the hair back from my forehead. “Sleep.”
“We need to—”
“Sleep, Audra. There will be time for that later.”
“Promise?” I asked, my eyelids closing when his fingers swept down my cheek.
He did not answer me.
The following morning, Truin and Azela were trying to force food into me, and I knew without asking that he was gone.
A month crawled by, and I slowly regained my strength, but the lord of the east did not return.
After a week, I wrote him and received no response.
I wrote him one more time before I made myself stop, fearing the messengers might sneak a look at what I’d written—even though I’d been careful to word it plainly—and have themselves a good laugh at my expense.
I would have rode there myself, but I was quick to tire while my body tried to regenerate all that it’d lost to the Whispering Sea, and the land it had helped uncover. And the thought of going all that way only to have him reject me yet again… I preferred to tend to the battered remains of my heart in private, and such a thing would not happen with my guard accompanying me.
I was alive, a miracle I often caught myself marveling over. I was alive and angry and at a loss for what it was the stubborn lord wanted from me.
As it turned out, my cousin was aware that Amelda had less than desirable plans for me, but he had thought she was all talk, and he enjoyed her in his bed too much to come to me. With an honesty I respected, he’d stat
ed simply that he and his mother had never much cared for me. That did not mean he wished me dead, he’d said. It meant he did not care to stop it.
As punishment, I’d sent him over to Beldine with a boatload of goods as a token of apology, and then I’d made sure the ship left without him.
He could stay, or he could swim. I didn’t much care, just as he hadn’t when he’d decided to sleep with someone who needed me dead.
Whether the token had been received well, or received at all, I wasn’t sure. The captain of the ship had returned and informed us it was done, the packages and my cousin left upon their shores.
As for Amelda… I’d given her to Raiden, being that she was supposed to be working for him, and not for her own nefarious cause. It wasn’t long before he gave me the gift of her hand, stating the rest of her had been incinerated.
I leaned back against my throne, yawning as Mintale delivered the past month’s mail.
Raiden had said he’d sort through it with me to help get the tedious task out of the way as fast as possible.
After the lord had left my bed chamber, the king had taken his place. He’d been silent, a guard I wasn’t sure whether I could trust, seated in the shadows beside my bed.
As the days passed, I’d decided he probably could be trusted, even after all he’d done. For if he wanted me dead, he had many hours in which he could’ve carried out the task with little to no fight from me.
He returned to the Sun Kingdom the following week and arrived here again just yesterday.
“An issue with an irrigation system,” Raiden said, his nose crinkling as he no doubt struggled to understand the contents of the letter.
“Riveting,” I muttered, sorting the read from the unread.
“What in the darkness do they think we can do about such matters? I’ve no idea what he’s even blathering on about.”
“Pass it on to Mintale.” That was what I did with most of them anyway.
“Oh, look, another love letter.” With a loathsome amount of glee to his movements, Raiden unfolded it, then frowned. “Damn, this one’s for you, and it’s… quite long.” His brows jumped. “Detailed.”
I snatched it from him, growling when I read who it was from, and balled it up to throw it across the room.
“So it’s not from your lord?”
“Shut up.”
He chuckled.
Inkerbine, the first one since the kings return, was the following week, so we had agreed he’d return to oversee the preparations with me.
Raiden watched Mintale scurry out of the throne room, then looked at me. “We should talk.”
“About?” Judging by his cautious tone, I would much prefer we didn’t.
“Your linkage to the lord.”
I lowered the letter I’d been reading to my lap. “There is naught to be done about it.”
Raiden’s lips rolled, and he nodded. “I know, and I’m making peace with that.” His tone brooked sincerity. “Trying to.”
“I do not wish to remain married to you, and you know it.” I drew in a quick breath. “If you refuse to agree out of it, then you must deal with what I do within it.”
His eyes stayed on the ground between his splayed legs. After a moment, he lifted them to me, a brow arching. “Then you must deal as well.”
Our eyes stayed locked, a silent battle of wills that would never end, until finally, I conceded, “Why won’t you just agree to terminate it?” The very thought alone excited me to no end. To have my castle, my land, and my prickly lord back…
“Because,” Raiden murmured, giving his eyes back to the pages before him. “Not only does the continent need this marriage, but as we both know, I do not walk away from things I want.”
“You cannot possibly want me anymore.”
Without looking at me, he shrugged. “I do, but most importantly, I want to remain king of Rosinthe.”
Of course, he did.
From behind the podium, I watched as the sun began to set. People, young and old and magical and everything in between, spread all the way to the horizon.
A scent I’d remember until my dying breath, of sweets and rainbows and pine and many things I could no longer name, clouded.
Kash clasped his hands behind him, staring straight ahead.
After observing his unreadable, sharp profile, I did the same. “How?”
“I’d been watching the female for a few weeks after she tried to bed me. Mainly due to the vague way she’d spoken, as if she wanted to share something she couldn’t.”
I nodded. “Was I bait then? A way for you to go home?”
His tone carried humor. “I am still here, am I not?”
“Does your king frighten you that much?”
Kash chuckled, and I stiffened at the rare, heavily deep sound. “That is not why I remain.”
I absorbed that for a moment, watching as Mintale berated a scowling local squire. “I saw her.” I cleared my throat. “I saw them.”
Kash stilled, and when I felt his eyes on me, I gave him mine. “She seemed… happy. At peace,” I said, unsure if it was true, but hoping it was. “With her babes.”
His lips parted, his eyes began to shimmer, and I felt mine well. He studied me as though weighing what it meant for me to see her. Knowing it meant everything and nothing. His Adam’s apple shifted, and then he faced forward again. “I am glad.”
Zadicus, accompanied by his two other friends, sifted through the crowd to the side of the podium that had been erected upon the border.
The soft swaths of my dress, a deep dark blue, tickled my arms as a cool breeze arrived. Between the land of winter and summer, it was perpetually spring, and I couldn’t say it wasn’t growing on me as I watched the golden-orange leaves flutter and twirl to the ground.
The array of pink cast over the large clearing between two villages livened the gold and silver ribbons that danced from tall maypoles. Vendors were preparing feasts from carts, saturating the air with the scents of sizzling pork and spiced chicken.
A night of dancing, eating, and getting to know thy neighbor in various ways was underway, as it had been in the center of each year for centuries.
Regardless of the rumors of what’d happened to my mother, any violence on Inkerbine was not tolerated, and people stopped trying and learned to cool their tempers and hostilities many years ago. To act out in any way was to die by the crown’s hand the following day.
I had hope that, like the ball, everyone behaved, and this alliance I couldn’t escape was not for nothing.
Kash bristled as Raiden and his advisor, Patts, approached. Patts joined Mintale on the podium where they fussed over the thrones that were used each Inkerbine and erected the megaphone upon a stand of steel.
“You look delicious,” Raiden whispered, and Kash shifted beside me.
I smoothed a hand over my hair, which I’d left down, and straightened my crown. “Are you ready?” I didn’t wait for his answer. I held my hand in the air, and slowly, he dragged his eyes from me and laid his arm out for it to rest upon.
Mintale and Patts joined Kash behind the podium, Zad choosing to remain at the side.
I didn’t allow myself the treat of gazing at him, for it was no treat. It was staring an addiction in the face, knowing you could no longer have it. It was allowing the festering ache inside to throb in harsh, breath-stealing waves.
Silence greeted us as the crowd settled, and Raiden approached the megaphone, his smile large. “Welcome to Inkerbine, a celebration of peace and love.” Clapping and whistles and shouts ensued, and he waited for them to quiet before continuing. “It is our great pleasure to introduce this year’s Inkerbine as not two halves of a country celebrating peace but as a unified whole.” More shouts and clapping as arms holding candles lifted into the air.
I stared at our people, then at the king wearing his giant grin and crown beside me, and I knew he’d prattle on, speaking for the both of us.
Too bad what he had to say was of little importa
nce compared to what I’d planned, and in any case, I was done letting him take the lead in this partnership.
I lifted my chin, and with as little movement as possible, I nudged him out of the way.
I didn’t look at him, but I could feel him frowning as he grudgingly stepped aside, making room for me to talk.
“Before we begin,” I said, my voice carrying over the faces before me, to the trees surrounding us, to the foothills in the distance. “There are some amendments to the law that must be made known at once.”
As though a faucet had been shut off, the excitement in the air evaporated, and murmuring began. “Almost eleven years ago, a law came into place regarding who is believed by some to be the ancestors of royals.” I gave them a moment, then said, “The Fae were hunted, chased from this land that had always welcomed them, and that had been home to them before our existence was even a speck on the growing horizon.”
More and more were coming out of hiding, but their presence was stirring unrest, and it needed to be dealt with swiftly. “From this evening forward, should any harm befall a creature of any sex, of any age, by the hands of a human, mixed blood, or royal, the punishment shall be instantaneous and unmerciful.” I paused for effect and then gazed back at the stunned faces before me. “Death.”
I waited for that to sink in, expecting outrage or distress, yet there was only silence, and as I peered at some of the faces in the first rows surrounding the podium, even some smiles.
Drawing in a quick breath, I went on. “As you all know, any royal and human who mate and give birth to a healthy mixed blood must surrender their offspring to the king and queen when that offspring comes of age.” I paused. “From this evening forward, all mixed bloods will remain with their rightful parents or guardians until they so wish to leave of their own accord, and they may take up whatever job or education they desire.”
Screams cleaved the burgeoning night, and my heart kicked forcefully as thunderous clapping sounded.
Lifting a hand, I motioned for quiet. “However, due to their magical abilities, no matter how little, they must attend training within the castle grounds as soon as they come of age. Failure to enroll your offspring into the training program will mean they forfeit their right for a free life. Should they be discovered”—I glanced around—“and we all know they will be, they will serve under the crown’s command until their dying breaths.”