Grave Destiny

by Kalayna Price

“That’s not important. I nee—” he started, but I cut him off.

  “Yeah, it kind of is.” I’d thought the castle was pretty secure.

  “I—”

  A knock came from the door on the other side of my sitting room, followed by a soft, “Alex? Everything okay?”

  Falin. Apparently it was middle-of-the-night party time in my room.

  “Come on in,” I yelled.

  The door opened and Falin walked in wearing only a pair of gray sleep pants, which almost distracted me from the fact that his gun was in his hands.

  “What set off PC?” he asked, his eyes scanning the sitting room as he stalked through it. He reached the bedroom doorway, and the gun twitched, but he didn’t actually aim it at Dugan. “How did you get here?”

  “Exactly what I just asked,” I said, as I knelt to scoop up PC. He was still growling at Dugan. He really didn’t like the Shadow Prince. As I considered my dog to have excellent taste, I noted that fact against Dugan.

  “We do not have time for this. Alexis, I need your help.”

  My first instinct was to tell him to contact me during normal business hours, but Dugan sounded frantic. He hadn’t sounded desperate when he’d shown up in my office because his friend was presumed dead. Nor when we discovered our best lead had been murdered after the revelry, but now there was panic in his voice.

  “We can negotiate whatever payment you wish, but we must hurry,” he said, stepping closer to me. He looked like he was going to grasp my elbows, but PC was still growling in my arms.

  I glanced to Falin. He studied the Shadow Prince with narrowed eyes.

  “Go where? To do what?” I asked.

  “The shadow court,” Dugan said. He turned and stalked from me to my dresser. He glanced at the items arranged on the top, though I didn’t think he actually saw them. The movement was what was important, like pacing could somehow work out his thoughts and words. Considering the sharp twitches of his hands and the heavy steps of his feet, I didn’t think it was alleviating his agitated nervousness. He turned back to me. “The king is ill.”

  Now I was even more confused. “I’m not a healer.”

  “He has basmoarte.”

  I frowned, no less confused.

  “Do you know how he contracted it?” Falin asked.

  Dugan shook his head. “Serri said he was fine when they went to bed. She woke in the middle of the night and found him . . . like he is. The fouled magic is covering most of him already, and he is unconscious. He doesn’t have much time.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Basmoarte was a death sentence; we all knew it. “I’m sorry” would have been the human response, but none of us were human.

  “What is it you want from me?” I finally asked, uncertain where this was going.

  “You’re the only person I’ve ever heard of who has reversed the spread of basmoarte.”

  “Only temporarily.” I held up my hand. The fouled magic hadn’t spread much further while I slept, but the entirety of my hand was covered in deep purple lines under the ever-present illusory blood.

  Dugan stalked up to me again. “Even a temporary reversal would bring him back from the brink of death.”

  “Alex, no,” Falin said, taking up a position beside me. “You would have to come in contact with the Shadow King’s magic to remove the infection. You were able to remove your own without further injuring yourself, but basmoarte is spread through infected magic. You could do an unknown amount of damage to yourself and your own basmoarte would spread that much faster.”

  “I’m aware of the tremendous risk I am asking you to take.” Dugan took a deep breath. Then he bowed. “I am willing to take the debt. Please, use the magic you used on yourself to cleanse the king.”

  With his words, the possibility of debt rose between us. If I accepted, it was a huge amount, at least as big a debt as I had promised the Mender. But that was because of the huge amount of risk. Cleansing the king wouldn’t kill me outright, but if I developed more wounds that spread the infection, the basmoarte would kill me faster. Though the Mender did indicate there is a cure.

  “No,” Falin said again, crossing his arms over his chest. “She can’t cash in a debt if she is dead.”

  “I am capable of making up my own mind,” I said, frowning at him. Then I turned to Dugan and studied him. If the king was as close to death as he said, time was of the essence, but I wasn’t following him into the shadow court without a couple answers first.

  “Are you scarred?” I asked, and when his eyes widened to incredulous shock, I added, “Under your armor. I know you aren’t hiding any facial scars with glamour.”

  “You are my betrothed. If you wish to examine my body, I will capitulate. But now is not the time.” He ground out the words through a tense jaw, clearly upset by the question.

  I shook my head. “That’s not what I’m getting at. Do you have any scars prominent enough that you could be called, or have been called, the scarred prince?”

  Dugan stared at me, confusion warring with his impatience. “No.”

  Falin watched me, and I could feel his curiosity at my questions, but he didn’t intervene. I would have rather have had time to discuss this with him first, but time was not on our side.

  I studied Dugan. “Are there any princes of Faerie known as ‘the scarred prince’?”

  “I am the only prince in Faerie currently,” Dugan said, his brow furrowing but his fingers flexing, betraying his need to move. He all but buzzed with his anxious agitation. Because of the questions? Or because of the king? My gut said the latter.

  I stared at him, aware that every moment I wavered could be the king’s last. Dugan had been with us from the time the sun set and the truce ended until the bodies were discovered. He hadn’t had time or opportunity to behead Lunabella or Jurin—at least not when we assumed their murders had occurred. He wasn’t the scarred prince and I didn’t think he was secretly working against us in this investigation.

  I nodded, the gesture more toward myself than anyone in the room, and then I said, “I managed to ask one question of Lunabella’s ghost. She said she was killed by ‘the scarred prince,’ but if you are the only Faerie prince . . .”

  “I’m not the scarred prince.”

  We’d pretty much established that. But he was the only prince in Faerie, so who could she have meant? We didn’t have time to puzzle it out now. We would revisit the conversation soon. For now, though, I could still feel the potential debt hanging in the air as Dugan waited for me to decide if I would go to the shadow court and help the king.

  I nodded again, this time in answer to his request. “I’m not promising I’ll be able to help the king, but I’ll see what I can do. If he is as bad as you say, you might need to prepare yourself to become the new king.”

  Dugan’s shoulders slumped. “Our court is already weakened. If he dies, there may not be a shadow throne left for me to rule.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Falin left to dress, and I sent Dugan to wait in my sitting room. Though I dressed in under two minutes, the prince was pacing by the time I opened my bedroom door. The sitting room wasn’t huge, but it wasn’t exactly small. Regardless, his agitated steps made the space feel cramped. I sighed in relief when Falin opened the front door to my suite a moment after I left my own room. It said something about Dugan’s desperation that he hadn’t wasted time arguing when Falin insisted on coming with us.

  “So how do we get to the shadow court?” I asked.

  Dugan lifted his hands and the shadows hugging the wall beside the fireplace scattered. Once they were gone, the space that should have been a stone wall instead looked into a cavernous room with a hooded figure standing in the center. He was short, no taller than a child. I recognized him. I’d never seen his face, but I’d seen the color of his soul before. Yellow, human.

>   “The planebender?”

  Dugan nodded. “Your castle has enough of Faerie that the planebender can reach it.”

  Well, that was an unintended side effect. I’d have to find out if his magics could be warded against. I didn’t want the shadow court members showing up whenever they pleased.

  Dugan stalked forward and stepped through the hole to the shadow court where my wall should have been. I followed close behind, opening my senses to examine the door—which was really more like a tear in space from one place to another—as I stepped through it. I could feel the change in layers of reality as I moved from my castle to Faerie proper, but I couldn’t begin to guess how the planebender moved Faerie to touch in places it normally didn’t. Of course, he was a planebender and I was a planeweaver, so while our skills might have been of the same family, they were quite different.

  Once Falin stepped through the doorway, the planebender grabbed the tear in space with both hands and tugged it back together. With my shields open, I could almost see the strands of reality repairing themselves. Then the seam was gone, as if the door had never existed. And now I have no easy way out of the shadow court. I didn’t like it, but I’d agreed to come and see the king, so I would.

  The room we’d stepped into appeared to be a long hallway. The shadows seethed and writhed along the walls, and I made a point of staying squarely in the center of the hall as we walked. We didn’t have to go far. Dugan turned to a patch of shadows and they moved aside to reveal a dark gold doorframe.

  Dugan stepped through it, and I moved to follow but something caught my sleeve, holding me back. I glanced down to see the planebender, his hand tentatively wrapped in the knit of my sweater.

  “You can help him, right?” His voice was young and worried, but something about it was incredibly familiar, as if I’d heard it before, long ago.

  I had the urge to kneel down and reassure him that everything would be okay, but he wasn’t actually that short, so it would come off wrong. Also, while he sounded prepubescent, he was almost certainly a changeling, so he could be far older than me. I didn’t want to insult him.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” was all I ended up saying. Which felt like not nearly enough, but I wasn’t going to bind myself with a promise I couldn’t keep.

  With that, I walked through the door and into what could only be the king’s bedchambers. A female fae sat on the large four-poster bed, her body cradled protectively forward, her large leathery wings stretched so that most of the bed was shielded from sight. She looked up as we entered. Her face was other, but beautiful, and her red eyes were glassy, her long eyelashes clumped from tears.

  “Serri, this is Alexis,” Dugan said as he approached the side of the bed. “I brought her to look at Nandin.”

  She stared at me, assessing. Ever so slowly, her wings retracted, the leathery membranes lifting to reveal the Shadow King tucked neatly in the bed, his head and shoulders on her lap. He appeared to be sleeping, but not peacefully. His face was pale around the dark purple lines of fouled magic, sweat beaded on his skin, his brows were furrowed, and his eyes darted behind his lids as if he was caught in a dream he couldn’t escape.

  “You are a healer?” Her voice was high and harsh, the worry in it almost a tangible thing.

  “Not exactly.”

  Her red eyes shot to Dugan, the look questioning and slightly hostile.

  “She’s purged basmoarte before.”

  I frowned at Dugan. I hadn’t agreed to more than look at the king yet. Serri wore no circlet and she hadn’t been presented at the king’s side at the solstice, so she wasn’t an official consort, but she clearly cared about him. I didn’t want to offer her false hope.

  “If I can do this, do you have a receptacle?” I asked, looking around. While the space in the room felt large, most of it was lost in shadow, as if the bed were adrift in a sea of living darkness.

  “Trees are not exactly plentiful here,” Dugan said, frowning. He clearly hadn’t thought about where I would put the basmoarte, but if I was able to purge the king, the fouled magic would need to go somewhere.

  “Alex,” Falin said, concern and censure in his voice. He stepped up behind me, into my space. I thought he’d put his hands on my shoulders, but he just remained behind me, close enough that I could feel his heat, a reminder that I wasn’t alone in the darkness surrounding us, but leaving me the space I needed to make my own choice.

  I considered the king. He was distantly related to me—a great-granduncle several times removed—but I didn’t actually know him and certainly had no pressing familial feelings for him. And yet anyone suffering so horribly when there was something I could do was awful. And then there was the conversation I’d had with my father to consider. Faerie required balance. If Dugan was correct and the already dwindling shadow court would fall with its king, the balance would fail. My father believed if the balance tilted too much more the wheel would break, and Faerie as we knew it would fracture once again. Faerie was beautiful and terrible, but did I want to see it shatter?

  Change? Yes. Faerie could use some change. But I didn’t want it to break.

  I stepped closer to the bed and opened my senses. While the king looked like he was on his deathbed in my normal vision, when I peered at him through the planes, it was so much worse. The fouled magic covered his entire body, the tendrils digging in deep.

  “How did it spread this fast?” I whispered, talking more to myself than anyone present.

  “The basmoarte of ages ago never spread like this.” Dugan hovered close to the side of the bed as if unsure where he should be. “It took weeks to consume a fae. Not a night.”

  “So maybe this isn’t basmoarte.” At least not the same strain that had infected Faerie in the past. I considered what the Mender had said on his parting. I’d thought about it quite a bit before sleep had finally consumed my exhausted body earlier. He’d said the cure. Not a cure. Which made me think there was, in fact, a cure. Which meant that all the king—and I—needed was to stall. To survive until the cure was located.

  “Bring me a receptacle for the fouled magic,” I said, looking at Dugan.

  “I will take it,” Serri said, bowing her head to kiss the king on his sweat-slicked forehead.

  I shook my head. “No. It would kill you.”

  “It would be my honor to die for my king,” she whispered, tears welling in her eyes.

  “One, this is not a cure, it’s a stopgap, so you’d be throwing your life away. The infection will spread again.” Though mine hadn’t spread as fast as it had during the initial outbreak in my system. Hopefully it would be the same for the king. “Two, I’m not being the instrument of your death.” I turned to Dugan. “Bring me something nonsentient.”

  Dugan stared into the space beyond me for a moment, and then he turned and vanished into the shadows. I stepped back from the bed as I waited. Falin moved to my side.

  “You’re sure about this?” he asked, his voice a harsh whisper. He sounded angry, and maybe he was, but I knew it sprang from concern. And he didn’t try to stop me, or talk me out of it, so two points for him.

  “There is a cure.” I tried to keep my voice low. I was certain there was a cure, or I wouldn’t have been able to state it as fact, but that didn’t mean we’d find it in time. For the king or for me.

  Falin’s lips compressed in a thin line, and he studied me. Then his gaze dipped lower and focused on the small silver locket hanging in the open V of my sweater. “Did he tell you where to look?”

  I blinked in surprise at the raw hurt in his voice. My hand moved to the locket that wasn’t really a locket. Of course, no one else knew that it was actually a ball of reality. It just looked like a pretty piece of jewelry I’d never worn before. A bit of jewelry I’d acquired after meeting with Death on the hillside and then running off without explanation. Falin hadn’t been able to hear Death’s side of
the conversation, so he didn’t know I’d gone to meet the Mender. Everyone in the castle had figured out Death and I had broken things off a month ago—my moping around and copious consumption of chocolate ice cream for a few days had been a good hint. Yesterday Falin and I had spent the longest night at the festival together, and there was that kiss . . . Then I abandoned him with some bodies on a hill after talking to Death.

  Yeah, that looked bad.

  “It was the Mender who told me,” I said, trying to keep my voice blank because part of me wanted to wrap my arms around him and reassure him nothing had happened with Death. The other part of me was irritated that he’d made the assumption and wanted to remind him that he and I weren’t together, so it didn’t matter if I had rekindled things with Death. Which I hadn’t. Neutral was better. I pressed my hand flat against the locket, feeling not the expected metal but the cold layers of the land of the dead. “And this isn’t a gift. It is part of the favor I owe the Mender.”

  I turned away, leaving it at that.

  Thankfully Dugan reemerged a moment later, saving us from further conversation on the topic. Unfortunately, he brought with him something that moved.

  Dugan carried a small black goat in his arms as he stalked back into the room. It bleated pitifully, and my stomach tightened into a knot.

  “That’s not—” I started.

  “There are no trees here, Alexis.” Dugan set the goat beside the bed, holding it by one horn to keep it from running. “Unless you think mushrooms or moss will do as a receptacle, this is the best I can do on short notice.” He produced a shiny red apple from nowhere and held it out to the goat, who calmed and rolled its lips back to munch on the proffered fruit.

  I stared at the goat. I wasn’t aware I was shaking my head until Dugan glared at me. “You eat meat, don’t you? In the mortal realm, this goat would be food.”

  That made sense. I didn’t think twice about buying a steak at the grocery store—well, okay, maybe for a moment because of the price, but not because it had been alive. There was something completely different about an animal that was literally still walking around and bleating.