Fairy Queens: Books 5-7

by Amber Argyle

  Desperate to escape thoughts of the Sundering, Elice studied Cinder, trying to find something of herself in the other woman. After all, they both had Clannish and Idaran blood. But they were almost exact opposites. Cinder had golden skin, blonde hair, and gray eyes. Elice had pale skin, black hair, and dark-hazel eyes. But there was something in the way they were built—bodies lithe and yet soft.

  “Did you know that my grandfather and your grandmother are brother and sister?” Elice asked.

  Cinder’s head darted up from her work. “What?”

  “Otec is my grandfather.” She told Cinder the rest.

  That night, they lay in the same bed, telling stories of their childhoods. Cinder’s hadn’t been a pleasant one, but she’d managed to free herself and her mother and grandmother from the brothel. She’d even convinced a young prince—Adar—to change the laws so that slavery was abolished in Idara.

  “I think I could forgive him for kidnapping me from the queendom,” Elice confided. “He was just trying to end the war. But I can’t forgive him for tricking me into falling in love with him so I would go with him. Especially when he knew he would betray me in the end.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Adar,” Cinder said as she rolled over to face the ceiling.

  “What do you mean? He is a big flirt.”

  Cinder chuckled. “More like a tease than a flirt. You should see him with his sisters.”

  Elice rolled her eyes. “You can’t tell me he’s not a rake.”

  “Yes, the girls love him, but he never knows what to do with them after he’s caught them. So he just moves on to the next one. You’re the first girl I’ve ever seen stick.”

  Elice snorted. “He tried to leave me behind too. More than once.”

  “Because he cares about you and didn’t want you caught up in all this. There’s no other reason for him to have stuck around this long.”

  Elice mulled over the idea. “But he still betrayed me.”

  They were silent for a time before Cinder said, “Do you love him?”

  “Of course not!” Elice knew her words sounded a little too sharp and a little too vehement.

  Cinder let out a girlish giggle. “I think you must forgive him,” she said in mockingly formal tones.

  Elice rolled over. She didn’t want to talk to Cinder anymore. It only seemed a moment later that Elice woke to the sound of the door opening and saw Adar standing there. “I wondered where you were,” he said to Cinder.

  She squinted at him and then looked out the window at the dim morning beyond. “Why are you here so early?”

  He gave a smile that seemed forced. “Lots to do today. Elice, get ready. I have another friend I want you to meet.”

  She groaned. “Not another one. I don’t need any more revelations.”

  Adar rested his hip on the doorframe, then folded his arms and studied her. “Are you sure?” he asked seriously. “I, for one, would rather know the truth.”

  So he did have more revelations. Why was he pushing all this on Elice?

  Cinder sat up and chucked her pillow at him before collapsing back on the bed. He caught it with a grin. “Come on! I brought fig cakes for breakfast.”

  Cinder shot up, hair sticking up all over. “I get the bathroom first!” She disappeared from sight.

  Elice rolled her eyes and turned over with every intention of going back to sleep. But then a delicious, sweet smell set her mouth to watering and there was no going back. Still half asleep, she stumbled out of bed and followed the aroma.

  Adar was seated next to the fig cakes, which looked like a fluffy bread covered in something shiny and brown. He broke one off and offered it to Elice. She held it in her hand and sniffed it, then took a bite. Sweetness exploded across her tongue, along with pieces of pasty figs and crunchy pecans. Adar watched her eat with an unnerving expression. She’d eaten a dozen fig cakes by the time Cinder showed up,

  The other woman stopped dead. “You’ve eaten most of them!” Feeling guilty, Elice paused in the middle of devouring another. Cinder grabbed the remaining cakes and huffed over to the other side of the table.

  “Sorry,” Elice mumbled around her mouthful.

  “Elice chose fig cakes over primping,” Adar said with laughter in his voice. “You can’t blame her for being smarter than you.”

  Cinder shot them both a glare, her mouth too full of fig cakes for a rebuttal. Elice licked syrup off her lips. Adar chuckled and Elice turned to find him staring at her mouth. Disconcerted, she scooted a little farther over in her chair.

  He bit his lip, obviously trying to keep from smiling. “You have a little honey on your chin.”

  Elice licked her fingers and rubbed at her chin. “Did I get it?”

  He covered his mouth with his hand. “There’s some on your cheek too.”

  She licked her other fingers and rubbed her cheek. “How about now?”

  There was no denying the laughter in his eyes. “There’s some on your forehead too.”

  Elice rolled her eyes. “This is why I wait to bathe until after I eat.”

  She left the room, not feeling nearly as angry as she had pretended to be. Wanting to look really nice, she took a little more time with her hair than was necessary. Morosely, she stared at her red, flaking skin. But there was no help for it. With the realization that she wanted to look nice for Adar, Elice thrice cursed herself.

  When she came out, Cinder was gone and a man had taken her place, his back to Elice as he pored over a book. The air practically choked with incense—this must be a meeting they didn’t want any fairies overhearing. Elice tried not to feel abandoned; after all Cinder wasn’t really her friend, even if she was family. More like her minder and seamstress all in one.

  Coughing, Elice waved the smoke away. The man turned around and she gasped. He could have been Adar’s twin. They were both tall with the same high forehead, strong nose, and nearly black eyes. Adar had been telling her the truth about the blossom keeping his father young.

  He smiled gently when he saw Elice. He rose to meet her and squeezed her hand with fingers that were calloused and stained with ink. “I’m Rycus, Denar’s father.” His voice was low and rumbling.

  She looked between the two. “Denar?” Had Adar lied about his name?

  “My full name is Adar Denar Rycus ShaBejan,” Adar said. “It’s customary for the tribesmen to call their firstborn sons after their mother’s father out of respect.”

  “Why are you here?” she directed the question at Rycus.

  “Right to the point,” Rycus said with a wink to Adar. “I like her.” He gestured with large hands to the books covering the table. “Has Denar—Adar,” he corrected himself, “managed to convince you that the Sundering is real? That the past ages were real?”

  Elice lifted her gaze in silent agony. If she admitted the Sundering was real, she was admitting her mother’s wrath had caused it. And Elice had sealed her mother’s wrath the day her father died.

  Perhaps misinterpreting her lack of response, Rycus said, “Imagine that every age does end with the death of the old magic and the birth of the new. When the new age begins, many things of the old age are gone forever, and many new things have taken the place of the old ones.”

  “Any records of such creatures would probably be destroyed by the Sundering,” Adar added. “So all that would have survived are stories, told from one person to the next. Those stories would be jumbled and the details lost over time, but they would exist because that old world existed.”

  Rycus nodded, his eyes sparkling. “There are truths hidden in the old fables. Truths and histories.”

  Elice finally spoke. “I still don’t understand what any of this has to do with me.”

  Adar sat back in his chair. “Two fairies came to us a couple of years ago.”

  “So?” Elice shrugged.

  The two men exchanged glances. “One of those fairies was Chriel,” Rycus said.

  Elice gasped. “Chriel? But . . . that’s imposs
ible. She’s a winter fairy. She wouldn’t have survived here.”

  “She and another fairy, Nagale, were the ones who told us about you,” Rycus explained.

  “Though she left out certain details and flat-out lied about others,” Adar muttered before straightening up and clearing his throat. “Nagale led my ship to the Winter Palace. Chriel guaranteed us safe passage.”

  Between ragged breaths, Elice asked, “Chriel told you to lure me away?” It wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be.

  “She claimed to be one of the very first fairies,” Rycus answered. “She said she remembers the last unicorn. She saw dwarves and elves mix with mankind. And as the unicorn’s magic faded away, more fairies came into existence.”

  “But why would she betray me?” Elice choked out. “And then defy the queen to her death?”

  Pain flashed across Adar’s face. “I didn’t know she meant to do that. But I think, perhaps, she was trying to force you to leave the queendom.”

  “Why me?” Elice held out her empty palms.

  Rycus sighed. “The original plan was to force a peaceful surrender in exchange for your safe return.”

  She chewed the inside of her cheek. “Original plan?” Rycus shot Adar a glance, and something passed between them that Elice didn’t understand. Dread shifted through her ribs and settled in her lower belly. “Tell me.”

  Adar looked down. “Elice, she isn’t coming.”

  Elice shut her eyes and covered her mouth with her hand. Her throat worked as she tried to swallow the bile rising in her throat. One simple refusal had confirmed what she’d suspected for years: her mother didn’t love her. Not in the ways a mother should.

  Rycus leaned forward and said kindly, “Child, you need to understand something about becoming a fairy queen. It either burns or shatters the human soul. They are never quite . . . human anymore. They’re a force of nature. You know this. Deep down, you have to know this.”

  Elice closed her eyes, remembering the cold, distant woman who left her alone for months at a time with nothing but the darkness and her grandfather for company. “Yes,” Elice said softly and lifted her head. “But she is not evil.”

  “No,” Rycus agreed. “But she isn’t good, either.”

  Elice clasped her shaking hands. “She loves me and my father and my grandfather. Isn’t that good? And besides, if my mother is broken, so is Nelay.”

  Adar looked to his father as if for help. Rycus quietly closed the old book. “Elice, was your mother not more human before your father died?”

  “Yes.”

  “A consort has a softening effect on his queen,” Rycus said. “Without your father, Ilyenna is more fairy than human.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because we think there might be another way,” Rycus said.

  Elice glanced up, hope mixing with the dread inside her in a sickening swirl.

  Adar and Rycus shared a knowing look. “Maybe you should tell her,” Adar finally said. “I have a feeling she’ll be more likely to believe it coming from you.”

  Rycus eyed her, his expression unreadable. “You met one of my daughters, Zahra?” Elice nodded. “And did you notice her power over summer, like Adar’s?”

  Elice wet her lips. “No.”

  “That’s because she doesn’t have power over summer,” Rycus answered. “None of my children do—except Adar.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?” she asked.

  Rycus leaned forward. “You have powers too, Elice, just as he does. Have you never wondered why?”

  “I didn’t know he had powers at all until we came here. And since then, I’ve been pretty busy hating him.”

  Rycus watched her. “You are your mother’s heir because she was pregnant with you when she became queen, as Nelay was pregnant with Adar.”

  Elice rubbed at the ache in her forehead with the heel of her palm. “That’s impossible. My mother became the queen forty years ago. I am only seventeen.”

  “And how old is your grandfather?” Rycus asked.

  She grew tired of this. “He is sixty.”

  “Yet his older sister, Storm, is in her eighties,” Adar said.

  Elice frowned. “Yes, his older sister.”

  “But only by a few years,” Rycus said. “Otec is eighty-five. Both of your parents are in their sixties. And you, Elice, are forty years old.”

  She laughed at the ridiculousness of it. “Do I look forty to you?” Adar and Rycus only watched her, compassion in their gazes. She sighed. “I know the queens don’t age, but I remember my father before he died. He was still a very young man. Had he lived, he would be the age you claim me to be.”

  “The Elice blossom,” Rycus said softly. “Nelay gives it to Jezzel and me every year. We’re both over forty and still look like youths.”

  Elice turned away from them. “The Summer Queen has the blossom, not my mother.”

  “Not at first,” Rycus said. “Leto—the previous Summer Queen—must have given the blossom to your mother, who in turn gave it to your grandfather, your father, and you.”

  Elice pushed to her feet and began pacing. “I would have twenty more years of memories!” She wished Adar would stop looking at her.

  “Not if you were a very young child,” he said.

  She froze in her tracks. “You’re saying I was an infant for twenty years? But why? Why would they keep me as a baby?”

  Adar shook his head. “Not an infant. A toddler.”

  Elice felt dizzy and hollow. She braced herself against the back of the chair. “I can’t—I don’t believe you.”

  Adar reached a hand toward her, but she pulled away. “Think of the trees of your room, Elice. You knew the proportions of the pine needles, the creased shape of a blade of grass, even the soft spines of a poppy.”

  “The pictures in the books—” she began.

  “Are a poor replica for real life,” Adar said. “Only someone who’d experienced summer could have known those details.”

  Elice was dizzy and her hands felt numb.

  “Think of the landscapes you carved into the ice,” Adar continued. “The same landscapes Storm wove into the walls of her tents.”

  “My grandfather described them for me so many times . . .” Elice’s words trailed off uncertainly.

  She looked up at Adar, her gaze begging him to tell her this wasn’t true. He pressed his lips in a thin line and forged on. “Have you ever tasted an elice blossom?”

  The memory came swift and sudden. It was one of the first days of spring, when Elice’s mother had returned from spreading winter. The sun was back, vanishing the never-ending dark. And Elice’s father was so happy. The Winter’s End ceremony should start any moment, but they were putting it off. Playing first.

  Her father chased Elice through the palace, dancing and laughing through the throne room. Her mother caught up to them, her aurora wings surrounding them with colors that Elice had never stopped craving. Wrapped up in her father’s arms, with sunlight drifting through the columns, Elice felt the hole inside her fill up.

  Her mother stood before Elice. “Here, my girl, I brought you something.”

  “A present?” Elice squealed.

  Her mother held out a single petal, white with a burgundy center and a yellow tip. Elice rubbed the petal in her hand, relishing the impossible softness.

  “Ilyenna . . .” Rone said. “You promised.”

  “Just let me keep her little a while longer. I will only ever have one child, Rone.”

  Elice looked between her mother and father, not understanding the tension between them. Her mother smiled one of her rare smiles. The smile that softened her hard face into something almost gentle. “Put it on your tongue, and the dream will come.”

  Elice did so eagerly, for the blossom always took her to a field of green so bright it hurt her eyes. There were new buds forming on the trees. The sun was directly above her instead of circling the horizon. There were mountains in the distance
—mountains that seemed to cup the picturesque valley in the palms of their hands. Elice never wanted to leave this place, never wanted to go back to the endless cold.

  Now, Elice raised haunted eyes to meet Adar’s gaze. “They taste like summer.” Somehow, the petals had taken her to the Shyle, which was how she knew what it was like. Why the mountains and trees of the Shyle adorned the walls of her room.

  Adar nodded as if he could see the realization come over her. “I had an elice blossom a couple times,” he said. “First when I took a crossbow quarrel to the back. Another time when it saved my life after the chariot accident, and I was never quite the same after.”

  Elice remembered the story about the chariot—how he’d wanted to teach some boys that had insulted his deformed sister. And she suddenly realized the sister he’d stood up for was Zahra. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because you are your mother’s heir.” Adar came around the table, his arms reaching for Elice. She backed away. “Because you are the only one who can stop her.”

  Elice came up against the opposite wall, cool against the sweat gathered in the small of her back. “Stop her? I can’t stop her.”

  “You alone can get close enough,” Adar said. “As the new queen, you could declare peace and restore the Balance. Then the combined strength of summer and winter can stop the Sundering and redirect the magic into its new form.”

  Elice’s mouth came open. “You want me to kill my mother.” Their silence confirmed it. “I would never!”

  “You’re the only one who can get close enough,” Rycus said, repeating his son’s words.

  Adar watched her, pity in his gaze. “Not even to save the world?”

  Elice desperately shook her head. “You can’t ask this of me.” He started toward her, but she held out a staying hand. “I can’t! I won’t!” She was sobbing hard now, barely able to breathe.

  Adar gathered her in his arms. Furious, she tried to resist, but he only held on tighter. “Don’t, don’t push me away. Please, Elice. We only have today.”

  She wavered. He had betrayed her, but he’d done it to save the world. He hadn’t thought she would be harmed in the process. She crumbled, the sobs coming hard and fast. Adar’s arms tightened around her as if he could keep her from breaking apart. When she finally managed to calm herself, Rycus was gone.