by Kendal Davis
She giggled like a girl. “I know! I remember the same feeling, when I was a student here.”
“You never were,” said Alder stolidly from the back.
“I was, too. I was a Tithe, just the same as Ciara.” Hellebore’s eyes shone as she warmed to her favorite subject: herself. “Only I managed to become Queen. That’s how good I am.”
Owain looked thoughtful. “I’ve been looking into that. I can’t find any record of how long the fae have followed the tradition of claiming a Tithe from the mortal world. It doesn’t make sense for the records all to be missing. Was there a natural disaster that claimed them?”
“Yes,” both Alder and Hellebore said in unison. I looked back at him, wishing he would stop engaging with her, but I saw that he was stiff with rage at having to do this. The Queen, on the other hand, was loose and confident. That was the thing that scared me.
“What are you planning to teach us?” I challenged her as I took a seat right in front of her. If I couldn’t get through a day at the Academy without being cast as a troublemaker, then I was going to have to get better at embracing it.
And at admitting who I was. I was no killer of mortals.
Except this one, perhaps.
Queen Hellebore licked her lips. “After last night’s display, I almost despaired. I have been so anxious since you’ve been here at school, Ciara.” Her mouth trembled as she cast herself as a beautiful victim. “I’ve worried that you would squander your fourfold gifts. That would be foolish. Then, when you finally showed me that you could never kill your own people, I was not at all surprised.”
“I was,” I said with faint regret.
“And yet you are my Slayer. It is a fact. You are the strongest mage here; something I never was. I will teach you to work for me.”
“I won’t ever do that,” I said dismissively.
The Queen lifted her hand again to brush back her hair, and I saw what she was trying to show me. I should have felt it right away. Alder surely had.
The ancient golden bracelet, the one remaining artifact from the darkest time in fae history, was on her wrist now. It gave her the power to kill a fae, an eternal being. The spells embedded in the metal destroyed magic. Stripped of that, a fae would perish.
Hellebore was too confident. “You see it now? I have had to change course with you so many times, you willful mortal. So unpredictable. At first, I thought you would work for me. Then I resolved to steal your lovers to make you do so. But they oppose me. Even Breze is not…” She let the thought trail off, then shook her head, not wanting to allow that I might have my own hold on the tall air fae. The notion made my heart leap.
“I won’t fall in with your plots,” I said. “I just need to reach my full strength, then I’m going to destroy you.”
“Sweet words,” she spat. “I just need you to reach your full strength, then I’m going to destroy you, you naif.”
I couldn’t take my eyes away from the gleaming gold on her wrist. The bauble had taken a life yesterday in the Great Hall. Every time I’d worn the thing, I’d felt murderous urges, but I’d never used it to kill anyone other than Alder, and that was as part of my plan to free him. “You killed a fae with it last night.”
“And I will do it again. If I must threaten your lovers to bend you to my will, then I shall.” Hellebore leaned toward me, her smooth skin shining with youth and power. “First lesson, children. Take notes.”
I waited, but I brought all four of my elements to my fingertips. I hummed with magical strength that she could never match.
Hellebore whispered, but her voice carried with ease. “Your first lesson is that Ciara gets to choose who lives and who dies in this room.”
16
Alder
I couldn’t watch the Queen’s grandstanding any more. She’d always been like this. When she was a young woman, when her beauty was natural and not the product of magical rejuvenation, she’d been stunning. She had looked like a young goddess, a mortal who came to us with an idea to help others. Or that’s what she said.
We had not known that she was pure evil, or that she would hardly even notice as she destroyed worlds.
“That’s enough,” I heard myself say harshly.
Ciara watched me with surprise as I came to her. She’d seen that I was holding back anger. Maybe she’d thought I could do it longer. But I’d been keeping this particular fury in check for far too many years now.
I took Ciara’s hand in mine and faced the Queen. “Of course Ciara gets to choose who lives and who dies. You speak nothing more than the truth.”
Rook butted in. “Isn’t that always true, no matter what we’re doing? Ciara is stronger than any fae there is. Obviously, she’s in charge. Duh.”
Hellebore tapped her feet against the desk she sat on. I’d annoyed her. Good. She twirled her hair and tried to move past it. “I don’t think you quite understood my threat, girl. I can kill any of these fae you call your own with this fascinating tool. Your best friend? Your lovers? Who shall I kill first with it?” With a satisfied smirk, she met my eyes again. “And that’s the main point of my class. The ‘Theory of Combat’ always boils down to that one question. Who first?”
“Then it’ll be a quick school year. Let’s tell Ciara who you’ve killed,” I said, a sense of urgency growing within me. We were only going to have one chance to surprise Hellebore. This was it.
“That seems irrelevant now, doesn’t it?” She purred, raising her eyebrows at me. I squeezed Ciara’s hand. “You were my sworn Assassin for so long. Do you really want to tell this girl you love what you did?”
“I do, actually.” I spoke humbly now. It was Ciara’s magic that had freed me from the Queen. If only I’d been stronger in the beginning, so much loss could have been avoided.
Ciara held her breath, perhaps not realizing it. The small classroom was totally silent as Rook, Owain, and Evana all leaned toward me. Nobody had wanted to bring up my past as an Eternal Assassin, but they were all curious.
Hellebore’s face was a picture of confidence folding into panic. “No, that’s not what we’re going to do. You can’t possibly think…”
“But I do. We waited for Ciara to learn how to use her magic, and to grow in strength. But I was never going to let her go into the final battle without the information she needed. Make that a bullet point in your syllabus.”
Hellebore lifted a hand and used her fire magic to close the door of the classroom. Her hand stayed faintly alight as she stared at Ciara. Not me. “This will not help you, Alder. You will only make her hate you.”
Ciara’s lips hardly parted as she said one word. “Never.”
“Good. But I will speak either way. Our Queen is no fae. That we all know. But she is no Tithe either.”
Hellebore lifted her chin. “There’s nothing wrong with that. It was so long ago. Who can remember these things?” She tried to laugh, but it came out a bit choked. “If the mortal world sends a Tithe every five hundred years, then it is a very long time for some to recall the details.”
Ciara spoke clearly and slowly. “They say the last Tithe, five hundred years ago, did not survive to graduate Fae Academy. Why not?”
“I took her powers early, of course. She had fire magic, as I do. I wanted it.”
“You have a little more now than you did then, right?” I knew I was holding Ciara’s hand too tightly, but she didn’t seem to mind. “You plant a speck of magic into a human infant, and then you watch it grow so you can devour it. You pick it like a grape from the vine.”
“Good system, huh?” Hellebore was settling back into her delusion of control.
Owain cleared his throat. “But not if you give the baby all four elemental affinities. That would be stupid, because it would result in a foe you could not overpower.”
The Queen looked away for a moment. “That was Breze’s idea. He said it was risky, but we could develop so much more power. I needed it, you see.” She closed her lips with a snap.
; “You required it because you were a husk. A dried out shell on the verge of being a corpse,” I said cruelly. “A mortal woman, but thousands of years old. Even the backs of all those you stood on could no longer keep you young.”
“That’s the thing,” Hellebore said tightly. “I need to be young, always, like the fae.”
Ciara was shaking her head. “You mean the entire program of the mortal Tithe to the fae is a sham? It is just a way to feed you extra power?”
Owain reached out to place a hand on her shoulder. “It’s not just that. We’ve known that since we bound Headmaster Landon in the garden.” He narrowed his eyes as he looked at me. He knew I had something more to say.
“It isn’t only the Tithe that gives life force to the Queen.” I would tell the whole story if it would empower Ciara. She was going to loathe me for it.
Owain nodded. “I’ve wondered about that. There are rumors, of course, about the ethical issues behind it. It is why I hoped to be selected by another of the societies. Most of us don’t see it as a significant loss of life, as they are only mortals. But I’ve had my doubts. ”
“They…” said Ciara, her eyes flashing now. “You mean the mortals that the Queen has her Assassins kill?” She dropped my hand. “I know you were an Eternal Assassin, Alder. I saw your mark myself.” She held herself back from looking at her own wrist, but we both knew the four-petaled symbol of the Queen was still there. “But I didn’t want to ask you what you’d done. How many you’ve killed. And what it was all for.”
Hellebore was still smiling. I couldn’t imagine why she thought I was going to stop there.
Ciara turned to the Queen in disgust. “I spent so much time wondering why you would even want to order the killing of mortals. It seems petty, doesn’t it? You fae are all so far above them, in every way. I couldn’t figure it out. Political intrigue, favors being traded, population control, none of that clicked. What was it all for?” She stood straighter, believing that she now knew the Queen’s secrets. “And now I get it. You’re nothing but a vampire. You were sucking the life force right out of them, just to stay young. Actual people, even if they were just proles.”
Hellebore chuckled. “You see? You do understand that society must have classes. You were raised in luxury, which was paid for by every government in your world. It is an honor for you to be the vessel from which I drink.”
The woman was crazy. I’d known it for a long time.
Ciara had moved slightly away from me since we’d stopped holding hands. I could tell that she was having trouble with the news that I’d aided the Queen in such a grotesque way.
“Alder?” She spoke in a low voice. “When we camped at the foothills of the forest last year, you had to answer a call to the Queen’s business. Was it that?” She was beseeching me for a response that we both knew I could not honestly give.
“Yes.”
She turned on Hellebore, unable to talk to me any longer. “And is that why you look so great now?”
“Why, thank you,” the Queen simpered, not even joking.
“It isn’t, though.” Evana was putting the pieces together. “She said it was because of Breze. That he’d found a new treatment for her. Remember, at dinner on the first day of school? But he’s the one person ever who refused to become an Eternal Assassin.”
“Right,” I answered. “He was invited to join, when the secret societies made their selections, but he declined. He was expelled for it.”
Ciara leaned forward against the desk in front of her. She looked like she might faint. “He left school, but he never left Hellebore’s influence, did he? Alder, you knew him. You keep saying you were friends. But why did that end?”
“He took it too far,” I said grimly. “He was a strikingly talented air mage. He refused to be sworn to the Queen in that way, because he already knew her too well.”
“That’s right,” said Hellebore spitefully. “I was never at school here, but I knew you both already. From the other thing you did for me.”
“You just can’t stop talking, can you?” I watched her as she glared at me, again wishing she had held her own tongue.
“I don’t mind telling it. It can’t be any worse than having lived it.” I took several steps back from Ciara now. “You won’t want our bond after this. Nor one with Breze. Look at the Queen, all of you. Add it up. She’s a mortal. She needs regular injections of life force to even look like she belongs here, the pretender. But how do you think she got her fae magic in the first place?”
Owain saw it first. “She was never a Tithe. She didn’t receive a gift from the Queen of the fae, as Ciara did. The mortals did not send her to this land with their blessing.”
“No, they did not,” Hellebore snapped. “I had to tear through worlds to get here.”
She turned toward the door. “There’s my right hand man now.” She sent a tendril of fire and released the locking spell. Even as she did so, Breze pushed forcefully through the opening, his eyes wild.
“What sort of class is this supposed to be?” He strode toward her as if he might break her neck.
“We’re telling secrets,” I said starkly. “Shall I tell yours?”
Breze’s eyes went to Ciara. “It is the only way.”
“Fine,” snapped our pink-haired mortal lover. “It’s nice that we’re finally being honest with each other.” She sent me a withering glance. Then she fastened her eyes on the blue-eyed air fae I’d once called my best friend. That was before he became an even worse person than I knew I was.
Breze couldn’t take his eyes away from hers. She had that effect on all of us. As I looked at him, his resolve to stay away from Ciara evaporated. We could all feel it fade along the connections we shared with her. Just like that. His reserve was simply gone.
He was hers.
And yet she would not want him, not when she knew.
He did not wait for me to spill the secret out on the floor between us. “I’ll tell my own story,” he said softly. “Ciara. Your world has had contact with the fae since the time you call the Great Upheaval. Longer ago than anybody can remember, except in legend.”
“Yes.” She sounded wary.
“You think they are there to help you.”
“Yes.”
“No,” Breze said. “The truth is different. The Great Upheaval was no natural disaster. It was nothing more than the effect of what Alder and I did to your mortal land. We extracted enough power from it to give Hellebore what she wanted. She begged us to help her acquire fae magic. She said she wanted to do good in the world.”
“So we assisted her. Two young, idealistic fae. We’d never even been to the Academy when we met her. We just wanted to help.” I couldn’t believe how stupid it sounded.
Breze forged ahead, his eyes never leaving Ciara’s. “We helped her by destroying your world. The dust storms, the buried cities, the fact that none of you have ever seen a river in your life. It’s all because of us.”
Hellebore leaned back, less sanguine than she’d been before.
Her next move depended entirely on what Ciara did.
The Slayer, the Tithe, the girl I loved. She was all those things. I thought I knew her. And yet she never failed to surprise me.
Ciara nodded. “Breze. You’re saying you destroyed the world I come from. You’ve caused endless misery and death, all in the name of aiding this upstart mortal who calls herself the Queen of your people? Is that all true?”
He nodded, not apologizing. There were no words that could explain what he’d done.
She walked to him, her curvy hips holding my gaze as she moved around the desks. Without a word, she brought her face to his, rising onto her tiptoes, moving slowly and deliberately. Her hand crept to the back of his neck.
Then she kissed him.
17
Ciara
When my lips touched Breze’s, I felt a sense of rightness lock into place in my center that I’d never known before. He had always been mine, our connection pulsing wi
th energy despite his refusal to accept it. This was our destiny.
I leaned against him, sensations raging through every atom of my being. His kisses answered mine with increasing passon, as if he was releasing a lifetime of wanting from its floodgates. Our breath was ragged and gasping as we held each other tight.
Breze’s hands caressed my cheeks, holding my face to his. I wanted nothing more than to kiss him forever. I’d been unsure if it would work when I first stepped forward to him. I hadn’t known whether he would be able to embrace our bond. But my heart knew his. All the time that he’d spent denying our connection had only made him want me more.
It made me smile against him, then even chuckle at the pleasure of the moment. I couldn’t explain it. This was so right. It was the only thing my life had been hurtling toward, the only thing that mattered.
I had all four of my lovers now, here in this room. Right here, where I could draw them to me, not only with their elemental power, but with their abiding love for me.
And yet I also had the one thing that could threaten our union, right here in this room. Hellebore was reckless enough to do anything if she could somehow preserve her hold on the life forces that kept her young. She was pale now, staring at us. I didn’t even need to turn around and look at her to know that. I felt her chagrin at losing Breze to me. I did not require the sight of it.
And still I laughed. My jubilation was because she was there, not in spite of it.
We would finish the game, here and now. But first…
Breze held me tightly against his hard chest, his hands exploring to my waist, then lower. He was smiling too, with pleasure, with joy. The taste of his lips set me into a whirlwind of desire. Our shared jubilation was more than that, though. It was the realization that we’d surrendered to our bond.