by Imogen Sera
“Their sentence,” she said, nodding.
“You’ll punish both of them?” he asked.
“She knew exactly what was happening. She was my lady. I can’t tolerate that.”
He leveled his gaze at her. “Don’t do anything you’ll regret once Helias is home again.”
“If,” she said, “if he’s ever home again. Thanks to them.”
Her ladies arrived then, ready to prepare her for the sentencing. Tarquin left quickly and Morwich hobbled over to her and put a hand on her shoulder.
“I already knew what you would do last night, Ingrid,” he said, looking right into her, “but that doesn’t mean I’m not proud of you.”
Her eyes widened as he disappeared from the room.
.....
At Vivian’s insistence, Ingrid wore a high necked black gown and diamonds at her throat. Her hair was pulled back severely and on top of her head sat not one of her usual tiaras but a brilliant golden crown. As she examined herself in the mirror she thought that Vivian might have a point about impressions; she was certainly making the one she’d like to right now. She was not a queen to be fucked with.
“Why did you lie to me?” Ingrid asked as Vivian knelt at her feet and fussed over the way her skirts lay. “You let me believe that you had arrived after I did. You spied on me.”
The redhead looked abruptly up and Ingrid, and Ingrid could see regret clearly in her face. “You should understand, majesty, that it wasn’t presented to us that way.”
Ingrid raised her eyebrows as Vivian stood to face her.
“We were informed that you were here against your will,” she continued. “That you were mated to a tyrant. We were to protect you as best we could, and to report back so that Cassius could help to protect you as well. It seemed dangerous to leave you alone together, so I tried to arrange it so we could be present as much as possible. I’m sorry for it. I can see how thoroughly we were deceived. Please trust me, though, that we were working only for your benefit.”
Ingrid nodded slowly. She believed Vivian. She thought of her ladies constantly barging in on them and smiled to herself.
“You’re forgiven,” Ingrid said. “In the future please trust me to take care of myself.”
“I do now,” Vivian responded, smiling slightly. “Especially in that dress.”
Ingrid swept down the stairs to the throne room. She had ordered Vivian to meet with Tarquin to describe everything she could possibly remember from every interaction she’d ever had with Cassius. Ingrid knew that Elsie and Olive would also need to follow the same procedure, but she wanted them questioned separately in case one remembered something differently. Vivian seemed to have been a good candidate to go first; Olive would just try to get him into bed and Ingrid laughed out loud imagining poor weeping Elsie being questioned by Tarquin.
The throne room was fuller than she’d ever seen it. As Ingrid seated herself on her throne she glanced at the empty one next to her. She shouldn’t be doing this alone, she thought for the hundredth time, she had no idea what she was doing. She liked to imagine, though, that Helias would be proud of how far she’d come.
The room quieted as the prisoners were escorted forward. Ingrid looked at the bandage on Grace’s cheek and felt guilty for a moment, and then glanced at the empty throne next to her again and set her jaw defiantly. She should have killed her.
Ingrid gazed at the couple for a long moment. Grace was clutching at Cassius’s arm, her eyes firmly on the ground, as Cassius stared back at Ingrid.
“Well,” she said, raising her eyebrows, “do you wish to defend yourselves?”
Cassius remained silently staring, but Grace dropped to her knees, her red eyes filling with tears. “Your majesty, please,” she sniffed, “you have to look underneath our actions. Who we are under it all. I know we betrayed you and our king, but if you look below the surface you’ll find what you’re looking for.”
Cassius turned to watch Grace with wide eyes.
“That’s all, your majesty. Look underneath,” she repeated oddly.
Ingrid considered them for a moment. “I want to be clear,” she began, “that if I thought either of your deaths would bring our king home, you would both already be dead. As you have both utterly betrayed your regent and your country, you’re banished. This land will be warded against you. If you’re ever found on the king’s land I’ll use your heads to decorate his throne.”
Grace’s body shook with a sob. “Thank you,” she whimpered. “Thank you.”
Cassius stared at Ingrid, expression unchanging. She wasn’t sure what she saw in his face, but it no longer mattered.
CHAPTER TWENTY
“Well,” said Ingrid, standing in the war room with Tarquin, “That was heavy handed. Grace is nothing if not subtle. What’s under the palace?”
“Just dungeons, as far as I know. I’ll ask some of the older inhabitants if they know of anything.”
Ingrid nodded, chewing on her lip. “Is it a trap? Why would she tell us? Cassius must have told her I wouldn’t actually put them to death.”
Tarquin shrugged. “Guilt? You treated them better than they deserved last night.”
“They loathe me,” she said. “I don’t think guilt would be a factor.”
“It may be a trap then. We’ll approach anything we find as if it were.”
Ingrid nodded again, staring down at the map covering the table. Unbidden tears sprang to her eyes. “I’m afraid to get my hopes up,” she admitted quietly, not looking up.
“Yes,” he agreed. “Me too. Just do what I do: expect the worst and occasionally you’ll be pleasantly surprised.”
She smiled at that.
.....
“Ingrid,” said Morwich, “I would feel it if he was in this castle. You would feel it.”
She nodded, leaning back in her chair and looking up at the ceiling. Half of the guards were currently in the dungeons, searching for any sign of anything, the other half were in this room with them, examining floor plans and maps and old texts. Ingrid felt eerily calm, aside from the familiar bone-deep ache of missing her mate. She’d been working alongside everyone else when Morwich had decided to drop the bad news on her.
“You can find him,” he said. “You know you can.”
“I’ve been trying!” she snapped. “Don’t you think I’ve been trying? Why don’t you find him?”
“I don’t have the mate connection, you insolent snot,” he said without any venom behind the words. “You know he’s underground. You just have to picture it. Dark, damp, cold. You can find him.”
She sighed and shut her eyes, taking a deep breath. As it always did, her home as it had been immediately came to mind. Crumbling arches, stone tunnels, sprawling gardens. She pushed away the thought and accompanying nostalgia and tried to clear her mind to focus.
Helias. It wasn’t hard to think of him, but it was hard to think of him somewhere dark and cold. He belonged in the sunlight. She breathed deeply as she pictured his hair glinting in the sunlight, a lifetime ago when she’d feared him and he’d helped her with chores. She saw his bare, broad back sprawled across her bed as the golden morning light made its way across the floor. She imagined his hard arm around her as they’d watched his brothers soar and soaked up the afternoon. She wanted to focus, really she did, but remembering was all she had of him, and it felt unfair to have to stop.
Helias in the dark. She thought of kissing him late at night in the garden, and half asleep whispered words with only moonlight to see his face. She thought of the inky darkness under the trap door, and how for the first time she’d held his hand there, only to pull him along, but she touched her wrist as she remembered the electricity he’d sent through her.
Focus.
Helias underground.
Her eyes flew open and she gazed at Morwich. “Dragongrove. He’s under Dragongrove.”
.....
“They’re coming,” Glen said as she descended the stairs. “I don’t think we’re
quite ready, unfortunately, but you’ll try your best to cooperate, right?”
Helias just watched her, expressionless. He’d been her puppet for a month, and although he ripped and pulled and snarled at the mental strings when he was given an order, he wasn’t any closer to being able to fight them. It terrified him what she might do. She seemed to enjoy his furious reactions, though, so he had taken to just staring at her.
“Very well, continue to act like a sullen child,” she said, smirking at him. “We’re going to have to change our plans slightly because of this, I’m afraid.”
He watched her as she bent over the table and scribbled something down.
“You know why we’re here, right?” she asked, setting her pen down and gesturing across the underground lake. “That is an excellent source of power. You dragons have been hoarding it, but I’ve figured out a way to use it for human magi. I think my discovery will make me quite popular. These shrines won’t fare well for your kind, but I doubt you’ll be around to worry about it by then.”
“We destroyed this,” he said.
“Not quite.” She smiled, reached into her bag and reapplied her lipstick. “You people are never as thorough as you think you are. That’s not important right now, though. I’d like to discuss our new plans.”
She turned to him and grinned, her ageless facade swimming in front of his face. Stand, he heard, and he did immediately.
She clapped her hands with delight. “So,” she asked, her grin looking more like a baring of teeth, “are you ready to kill your mate?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
They left within an hour. Ingrid’s heart was in her throat as she clumsily scrambled onto Tarquin’s back, Morwich behind her. Twelve guards traveled with them. Helias was at Dragongrove, she Knew it, and if she had paid more attention to what her intuition was telling her while she was trying to find him she could have known weeks earlier. Every time she’d shut her eyes she’d seen him, but never at the cottage or traveling or in Arnes, only ever at Dragongrove.
She took a deep breath to steady herself as Morwich patted her arm gently. She flashed him a grateful smile.
“Do you think he’s alright?” she asked before she could stop herself.
“I certainly hope so,” was the old mage’s unsettling response, and Ingrid found herself pulling her cloak tightly around herself.
The evening passed torturingly slow. Ingrid couldn’t focus on anything except her heart pounding in her chest. Morwich pulled a small velvet bag from his satchel and passed it to her, and when she peered inside she saw it was a small set of runes. She looked at him questioningly.
He shrugged. “Reassure yourself.”
She did. She asked every question she could possibly think of, phrased every way she possibly could, until it was too dark to see any longer. The answers she found were ambiguous, so Ingrid focused on the positive: he was definitely alive.
They flew through the night, and it was so cold that Ingrid’s fingers ached and jaw quivered. Her tiny grunt caught the mage’s attention, and he scooted closer to her and put his arm around her in a fatherly embrace. She was surprised by his warmth, he positively radiated heat.
“You’ll have to teach me that trick,” she said quietly, enjoying the affectionate touch.
She didn’t realize that she’d fallen asleep until she awoke at sunrise, her neck aching and her heart pounding out of her chest until she remembered where she was.
Morwich sat next to her. “We’ll be there soon,” he said, gazing at her strangely. “Remember what you’ve learned.”
Ingrid nodded. The landscape far below started to look familiar, and Ingrid’s heart seized as they approached the ruins of Dragongrove. The once proud estate was no more than a pile of torched stones, the land surrounding it all turned to ash. Not all, though, she saw as they came closer, for Helias’s work there had taken hold. The earth was black below, but vines and flowers of every color crept over the scorched earth, a carpet of vibrant life. They landed near the property, not wanting to be too close and alerting Helias’s captor of their presence. Ingrid supposed that such a powerful mage would have known long before now that they were coming, though, and that it didn’t matter much. She just prayed that Helias was still here.
Her breath was ragged as they approached. The entrance to the shrine under Dragongrove had been through a trap door, but she wasn’t sure what they’d be looking for after the whole place was torched. A giant hole in the ground, perhaps. She walked next to Morwich who was muttering all the while about his bad back, despite having easily hopped off of Tarquin. Tarquin and the guards had shifted to their human forms so as to be slightly more stealthy, and she smiled internally at the thought of thirteen massive naked men, one loudly grumbling old man, and a woman in a ridiculous dress being stealthy.
The entrance was a giant hole in the ground. Tarquin and several guards hopped down easily, while Ingrid, Morwich and the others stayed above. They would scout it out and call back if it was safe to enter.
Ingrid bounced on her heels as they waited, every nerve ending standing on alert, every breath feeling like a lifetime. She would know what they faced soon enough, would know the fate of her mate.
Morwich called her attention skyward. She squinted against the sun and was able to make out green wings high above, so high she could scarcely see them. Her heart leapt into her throat. It was him, she would recognize him anywhere.
Why, though, would he be flying, she wondered. Surely the only thing that could keep him from home would be imprisonment, and he didn’t appear to be constrained at all.
“Something’s wrong,” she muttered to Morwich as he spun around and shot a blast of energy toward an unseen target.
Ingrid spun too, and then she could see her, a beautiful, ageless, terrifying woman. Her red lips were curled into a smile that looked as if it were painted on, her eyes light and wrong. The woman’s focus was on Morwich entirely. She was unmoving and Ingrid couldn’t tell if that was Morwich’s doing, or if the woman was trying to cast a spell.
Ingrid didn’t care. She put up a shield, weak and likely pointless, she knew, but she had to do something. Calling for the guards’ attention, for only a moment had passed, she looked around and saw that they were all collapsed.
“Unfortunately it only works on dragons,” the woman said, in a sweet voice that sounded strangely familiar to her. “I can take care of you two the old fashioned way.”
“Glenaria, stop this,” Morwich hissed, and then, to Ingrid, “He’s ensorcelled.”
Ingrid glanced back at the hole, trying to figure out if she could make it down before the woman could stop her. A great roar shook her thoughts away, and as she looked up, she saw Helias descending.
.....
His body was not his own. He’d fought so hard, pulled against the strings in his mind, pulled with every fiber of his being to no avail. He saw that Ingrid had spotted him from far below, and the relief he could see on her face made him ill. He wanted her to run or hide or do anything, but she stood there, unaware, precious and pure and vulnerable. His only hope was that Morwich was with her, and he prayed that would be enough to protect her.
The awful woman approached them, her pretty face twisted by a scowl. She called him to her side, and although his mind commanded his body not to heed her call, his traitorous form began to descend. Slowly, more slowly than she wished; it was his tiny rebellion, his only sign of control of himself. He was aimed for Ingrid without trying to, his will twisting the strings of his mind, the force of his resistance causing pain to radiate in his head. He was able to veer from his path slightly, so slightly, but not enough to make a difference. Ingrid watched him, unsuspecting, her lovely face worried.
Not Ingrid, he begged, not her, anything but that.
The awful woman didn’t respond, but refocused her efforts on him and his course was corrected with more speed. He descended faster and faster, watching her beloved face, wondering which moment would be her last.
>
He was seconds away when a massive black form shot from behind her and hurtled into him. Tarquin, he realized, relief and gratitude flooding through him even as he tore and bit at his brother. They fell to the ground, locked together, fangs and claws and wings all grappling wildly. They should be evenly matched, Helias knew, having sparred with his brothers many times before, so why was Tarquin being beaten so easily? His little brother was trying to avoid hurting him badly, he realized, and pleaded silently for his brother to rip his throat out. Anything to stop him and protect Ingrid.
Helias’s jaw locked around Tarquin’s shoulder, and a nauseating crunch later a black wing was dangling uselessly from his back. He took off again, scanning the ground for Ingrid. She must have run because he couldn’t see her anywhere, and he said a silent prayer of gratitude for it.