by Ella Fields
Silver speckled trees with drooping branches swayed beneath us. We curved around a giant oak intent on curling itself around us. Greenery with splashes of forest circled a diamond of tiny villages and what looked to be a small city, all of it undulating beneath the castle, which sat a healthy distance from the base of the cliff.
Seeing enough, I encouraged the bird to turn back, knowing the king’s warriors would soon be upon us.
In doing so, we loomed closer to the treetops, and as they untangled from one another in the brutal wind, I glimpsed the rot. Patches of darkened soil, deadened stumps, and blackened grass snaking between the trees in trails they appeared to try to bend away from.
An empty village resided near the base of the cliff with thatched rooftops overgrown by blackened vines. Charred earth zigzagged through homes, their sandstone exteriors marred with whatever ill health was spreading throughout the land.
Dead earth morphed into cracked, unstable rock, and I knew if not for the fact they couldn’t survive off the dying land around them, then the residents of the village would’ve moved more so out of fear of the land eventually crumbling into the sea.
It seemed I was blessedly alone and unable to come to terms with what I was seeing.
I’d seen the beauty, the incomparable magic of this continent, but I’d now seen the damage caused by Zad’s absence, too.
He hadn’t known it would happen—I knew that—but it didn’t change the fact that it had. And it wasn’t only the soil that was dying; the ocean threatened to swallow not only the rotting corpses of the village homes but the people too.
I had enough of a heart to know it was wrong and that he should help, own up to a responsibility he’d never thought was his, even if the heartless part of me wanted to snatch him this instant and fly us home.
Across the sea we flew, and my breath caught. A manor, entirely made of bronze stone, sat in the middle of the next isle. A maze, rife with golden flowers, circled the glittering fortress.
Water, trickling underneath the night sky, laced itself around the queen’s home before doing the same to the rock-built homes surrounding the maze.
Gliding as low as I dared, ferns and rose bushes came into view, the land dotted with an array of flowers and smaller shrubbery. To the east of the castle was a rainforest, and in the trees, glowing lights twinkled inside bamboo-constructed huts.
It all seemed so classically normal in a world where nothing was expected, and everything was possible for the right price.
I was nothing but an insect buzzing across this vast world. A world that belonged to a tyrant king by law, but to my linked male by heart.
Heading back over the sea, its spray licking at my bare, scratched-up feet, I found the king’s fleet.
I smiled when they paused in the air, and we soared right past them, back to the isle of onyx and into its High King’s clutches.
I had no idea what I’d do when we arrived. Perhaps the bird would eat me since I’d stolen it. Perhaps the king would shoot an arrow through my heart before we’d even neared the isle.
As expected, that didn’t happen. The king’s warriors stayed behind me, following me back to where the audience had now faded upon the precipice.
The bird creature was all too happy to land, though it didn’t exactly know how to do so gently and refused to wait another moment to heed any instruction from me. Courtiers and warriors dove out of the way as we hit the ground with a jarring boom that knocked me off. Feathers careened into my face as I tumbled to the hard earth, and I did my best to roll to keep any bones from breaking.
The creature screamed high above, already flying away by the time I pushed my half-braided hair from my eyes and brushed rock and dirt from my arms.
My right arm throbbed, and I gingerly stretched it out. Not broken. A small mercy as the king’s guards surrounded me.
The moon haloed his head, his hair swept back off the harsh planes of his face to reveal the full extent of his displeasure. Ryle’s eyes appeared almost entirely black, his voice infused with malice as he asked, “You dare to escape from me?”
Now was not the time to be a smart-ass, but I’d never been adept at mincing words. “Well, I’ve been cooped up for so long that I felt like taking a bit of a wander around.”
An unseen force pulled me up by my hair as the king’s boots crunched over the ground, and he stopped before me.
“Ryle,” Zad shouted, a biting threat.
The king’s eyes flashed, the only warning I had before he buried his fist into my stomach.
I fell to the ground, everything turning darker than full night, my breath stolen from me.
Roaring and shouting entered my fogged thoughts, forcing open my eyes. Lying upon my side, I tried to breathe. Which was made harder thanks to Zad, who’d somehow escaped his scrap of a cage and was now upon the king on the ground.
“Zad,” I said, but I had no voice.
Zad’s fist smacked into Ryle’s face, but his next attack hit the air as three guards hauled him off the king.
Face contorted with enough wrath to have the warriors holding him appear concerned, Zad’s burning eyes fell upon me. Feral with unspent frustration and worry, they roamed over every part of me.
“I’m fine,” I said, lying but glad to hear I had my voice back. It felt like my stomach had left my body, and in its place, something hollow and aching had taken root.
Zad’s nostrils flared. He knew I was lying, but he could do nothing.
“Your little display of defiance will cost you dearly, Audra,” the king said, brushing blood from his nose and dirt from his dark tweed jacket.
Rising to my feet, I withheld the urge to groan, my torso wanting me back on the ground. The cage Zad had been in was nothing but metal shards, and I blinked at it, slowly gaining control of my lungs.
“Touch her again,” Zad said, grunting in the warriors’ hold, his hair loose and falling into his face. The shifters had to be stronger than most creatures in this land to keep him contained. Then again, I was sure that was why they served the courts as they did. “And you’ll not get what you need from me.”
The king’s perfectly groomed brows lifted. “You mean to say you’re finally ready?” Stepping closer to his brother, a dangerous thing to do, king or no, when Zad was nothing but barely leashed anger, he murmured, “No tricks, no foul play, no begging for another way?”
Zad didn’t look at me as he gritted, “I swear it. Let it be done.”
Those words filled me with an even mixture of dread and relief. Yet I refused to allow myself the space to think of what he’d have to do. Of him with those three beautiful queens.
We were quickly escorted back, but I was no longer allowed free rein of the castle.
The invisible door became permanently so. Still damp from the bath Temika had run for me, I slid down the wall where it used to be, wiping some dried blood from my cheek that I’d missed in my haste to wash off the night’s events. It’d come from my ear, I realized, remembering the trickle I’d felt, courtesy of the giant bird dragon’s screech.
I must have fallen asleep because a series of knocks on the other side of the patterned wall had my eyes flicking open.
“Audra.” Zad.
I turned as though I could see him. “I can’t get out.”
“I know,” he said, and in his soft tone, I heard the pain of admitting he couldn’t free me either.
In silence, we sat, the sun threatening to outshine the approaching moon through the windows, throwing its false golden promise across the floor.
“I love you,” he eventually said. “That will never change, never cease.”
I didn’t hear that. Instead, I heard, “I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry, too,” I whispered, for we both knew nothing would ever be the same once the full moon arrived.
Audra
Forced to stay inside my rooms, I had a hollowing suspicion I was to remain here until the act was over.
The drums began with a
slow beat, a call to the wild, to its creatures and the land, to something within the skin and bone that longed to dance and be set free.
I was no slave to it, locked within my rooms as I was, but that didn’t negate its effects.
The soft strains of flutes were swallowed by the increasing violence of the drums, hypnotizing in an entirely unsuspecting way. I found myself at the window, my fingers curled over the round wood. Longing and fear and defiance made it impossible to sit still for too long.
The night grew, the full moon a glowing face over the rushing river below, its reflection eerily undisturbed.
Was my prince afraid? No, I knew better than to think that.
If I was hungry, locked high within the castle, he had to be starving wherever the gathering, the act, was to occur.
The drumbeats grew louder, faster, taking time with them. It would happen soon. Midnight, I’d guessed, being that the moon would then reach its highest point in the sky.
I couldn’t do this.
I had to do this. He had to do this.
But was it really so much better to remain locked away? To ignore it? I decided no.
I had to see it. I had to desensitize myself to it. If I had any hope of ignoring the bond we’d forged, then I needed the reminder of what he’d done—of what he was doing. A scarring, unforgivable kind of betrayal.
I wanted to look him in the eyes as he took another female and shattered everything we were.
I wanted to support him in a way I never could again, knowing he had no choice and that this heartbreak was not only inevitable but necessary.
I wanted to see him. I had to see him.
Temika arrived a minute later with my supper, boiled quail eggs and cheese wrapped wild berries, as I’d requested earlier with little thought.
I waited. When she set it down, smiling as she curtsied, lips parting as she no doubt was about to ask if I needed anything else, I saw the dark flush in her cheeks.
She could feel it too. That energy in the air. The potent desire that felt as if it’d cleave you in two if you did not seek its source and let it unleash itself upon you.
Seeing it, the way her legs brushed together beneath a short ruffle of silver material, reminded me to stay on task. It made what I had to do easier.
Her hands clawed at her throat, her eyes flooded with fear, and I caught her as she fell, brushing some tendrils of hair off her face. I released my magic from her lungs once I knew she was out and grabbed the knife from the tray, tucking it within the flimsy elastic of my lace undergarments.
In a peach silken nightgown that only reached my thighs, I raced out into the dark hall and followed the noise.
Winding down and down, deeper into the castle until I wondered if I were underground, I tracked that beating heart all the way to a sealed round wooden door. Leaning forward, I exhaled over the hinges, and they iced, then cracked. Wincing at its weight, I did my best to remove the door and prop it against a dirt wall. It slipped from my fingers, and I stilled, waiting to see if someone heard the crunching of wood upon the soil. After a moment, it became painfully clear that there was likely no one inside the castle besides Temika.
The tunnel led to a grove, long spindly trees with branches so high you couldn’t see them, towered above a large expanse of clover. Faeries were everywhere. In the clover, they laughed and mated, smaller goblin-type creatures dancing upon the backs of some couples.
My feet carried me forward, my hunger growing more desperate with the crazed sights before me. The deafening beat of the drums flooded my heartbeat, changing its rhythm to match.
A screech from high above in the trees, and I blinked and shook my head. Looking back, I realized my error. It was not a tunnel I’d walked through but a cave, and a little way around the bend was the giant mouth.
I ducked back inside, begging my eyesight to adjust to the dim, and tried to find a way to reach the back entrance to the cave. With it being beneath the castle, there had to be one.
Up a set of ten earthen stairs, I raced down a narrow passageway, my fingers trailing the packed dirt walls in search of something—anything. I stopped when something shifted underfoot and backed up to where tiny, almost imperceptible, flickers of light shone through the dirt.
Dropping to my hands and knees, I dug as fast as I could, needing him. Needing his skin sweating against mine and his hoarse breaths cocooned in the shell of my ear as he trembled beneath me.
They might need to have him, but I needed him first—just one last time. I had to.
It was a compulsion, a creaking whine within the marrow of my bones I could not ignore.
He needed me, and I needed him.
My nails protested as they hit wood, but my heart sang. I dug until I found a latch, about to open it when crumbs of rational thinking finally returned. I’d need to be quiet. I had no idea where the hole led, nor who I might find beneath it.
This was a bad idea.
I opened the latch, the hinges squeaking, but there was no way it could be heard above the music that stampeded inside this snake hole of a tunnel as I lifted the door open a crack.
Down below, shadows bounced off the walls from an unseen fire and floating bubbles that drifted through the air. Inside them were flickering bugs with giant glowing bulbs on their backs.
I bit my lip, unsure and unable to see anyone, then I opened the door all the way and jumped.
My teeth sang, one of my canines piercing my tongue. I swallowed the rush of blood, hurrying back to the wall. The bubbles floated by, most of them bouncing toward the mouth of the cave. Which, judging by the light flaying off the walls from the fire outside, was right around the corner.
A groan came from behind, catching and dragging my feet. I pressed back into the dark as two guards, armor glinting, rounded the darkest patch of the tunnel, carrying a bound Zadicus.
His eyes were downcast, lashes fluttering at the ground.
Focused on trying to maneuver Zad’s near-dead weight to where he was needed, they didn’t seem to notice me pushed up against a small crevice in the wall. Dirt sprinkled over my shoulders, but I didn’t care. He was struggling, but only imperceptibly, as though he were asleep but would then wake, remembering where he was.
But his eyes had been open.
Something was wrong. But then the king’s voice echoed through the tunnel, throughout the sprawling meadow and grove beyond. “It is time. Now remember, stay back, do not enter, or you shall forfeit your life.” I crept forward, shimmying along the wall. “And we do not want such dramatics during this joyous, momentous occasion.”
He said nothing else, and I had no clue where he might have gone, but as I slid past the opening I’d jumped through—the above passageway thankfully too dark for the guards to notice the open door—I dared to keep going until I could peer around the corner.
A bed of furs, pelts of grays and cream tufted whites, were spread upon a low-lying dais. And upon the furs, his mouth gagged and his hands bound behind his back, hair dripping over his golden eyes and the sharp cliffs of his cheeks, was my lord.
The mouth of the cave, dressed with a translucent veil, was wide, but it was also low, giving Zadicus and his queens a modicum of privacy. Their lower bodies might have been visible, should anyone be close enough to watch, but unless the act took place lying down, the top halves of their bodies would not be seen.
A sense of sickening reality washed in, knocking me from the drugging haze.
About to dart forward and shake Zad, beg him to sweep us back home, consequences be damned, I almost growled when a wintry voice said, “What are you doing here?”
I spun back around the corner.
Este, dressed in nothing but a thin, white silken robe, gazed back at me with unnerving copper eyes. Her white-blond hair was unbound, curling over the rise of her breasts, sneaking inside her robe to rest over her creamy skin.
Those eyes, rimmed with kohl-lined lashes, as well as her height and that haunting stillness, were a reminder tha
t she was not only a queen but a faerie queen at that. Regardless, I was tempted to shove her back to wherever she’d come from, but then someone ducked under the curtain, calling her name.
The drums grew louder, deafening, and those unreadable eyes gave a flash of what I thought might have been pity. “You cannot stop that which is inevitable, young queen.”
I wanted to try. Gazing at her, her thin, towering body with barely a curve besides her breasts, I wanted to beg her to go back, to find her mate and forget this insanity.
But she’d already lost him, and I knew she would not let that be for naught.
Every limb turned to ice, heavy and painful to move, as I slunk back into the shadows.
Este stood there, the drums droning on, swaying us all on our feet, but not her.
I watched her pull her shoulders back, and with my dying heart clenching my fists, setting fire to each ragged breath, I watched her round the corner.
I was going to vomit. I swallowed the urge and closed my eyes.
There was little sound coming from the mouth of the cave, and I wondered if he was enjoying her even though he was bound and to be used. Surely, I’d feel it.
With a bond like ours, in life or death or extreme emotional situations, I could and should feel him—feel something.
But looking back on this eve, I’d felt nothing but my own anguish. Perhaps that was his too, the same kind of torture. Perhaps that was why I was here, for it was too much to bear. It was a horror I thought I could handle... until it was time for it to unfold.
My feet made no sound over the soil as I drifted back to find Este upon Zad’s lap, trying to rouse him it seemed. Naked beneath her robe, her body rubbed over his, trying to get a reaction, but his head only flopped to the side.
“Rosesake,” she murmured, as if to herself, and let out a low, strangled cry.
Those outside must have heard it and thought she’d made it in pleasure, as shouts and jeers plundered beneath the curtain.