by Bec McMaster
It’s not loyalty.
It’s not for the insult to the queen.
Does Edain despise his role as much as I do?
“Iskvien.” Mother’s chest heaves as she coils the whip. “Where have you been?”
Picking grass out of my hair. I take smooth, cautious steps closer, trying to read the room. “Bathing. As one does when one wakes.”
Andraste sits stiffly in a chair beside Mother’s throne, her gaze drilling right through me as if she alone can see exactly what happened. Tendrils of Mother’s hair wisp around her braids, as if she’s been wielding the whip hard. And Edain cuts me an insolent look, as if he doesn’t like me seeing him in this state.
But it’s the stranger my eyes are drawn to.
There’s a strange tattoo between his brows. It almost looks like the golden outline of a flame, but it’s so faint it’s difficult to make out against his golden skin. He’s gorgeous. All of the fae are, but there’s something about the chiseled slant of his cheekbones, that sulky mouth and the alpine blue of his eyes that makes my breath catch. It must be killing Mother to keep her hands off him. I swear I’ve seen a tattoo like that somewhere before, but I’ve never seen his face. Of that I’m sure of.
“What’s going on?”
Mother casts the whip aside and wipes her hands on a rag. “Nothing that need concern you. What took you so long to answer my summons?”
“Maybe she’s avoiding you,” Finn says with a rough laugh. “Can’t imagine why….”
The presence of the stranger throws me off-balance. I expected her fury, but I also expected to be the center of its attention, and from the look she gives the wounded warrior, I’m not.
“If he speaks again, cut out his tongue,” Mother says.
Edain shifts on his feet and he and the stranger share an intimate look.
“I was celebrating Lammastide,” I reply, trying to swallow down the guilt in my throat. I barely had time to wash the scent of my handsome lover from my skin. “Is that not why we’re here? I woke in a glade somewhere near the forest and it took time to return.”
“Why we’re here? The queen of Ravenal is waiting for us in her tent,” she snaps. “Her nephew is there. Etan. You may remember him. You were supposed to dance with him last night, but you vanished in the middle of the unmasking—”
Heat and rage smolder in my gut like an ember. Here it is. Here’s my moment. Deep breath. Be brave. “Apparently I’m supposed to do many things, Mother, but I will point out that nobody ever asked me if I wanted to do them.”
Stillness coils through her. “You’ve heard.”
“I’ve heard something,” I point out. “Etan managed to tell me the most ridiculous lie. I couldn’t quite believe it, because I know you would never stoop so low as to sell me to that pathetic worm—”
“Careful, Iskvien,” she warns as she turns toward her wine. “My mood is much improved, but I won’t tolerate such disrespect. And Etan is merely a stepping stone to a greater game. He’s not lying. You will marry him. You will do Asturia proud.”
“He’s a wretched—”
“He’s the nephew of Queen Maren,” she counters. “And you are my daughter. Are you saying that you are too weak to handle him? Are you saying that my own flesh and blood cannot manipulate a witless reprobate like Etan? You disappoint me. I offer you a means to step into the Askan court and build a power base. I gave you an introduction. Why did you think I sent you to serve Maren?”
Because I still can’t access my magic, and you were so furious with me you could barely look me in the eye. “What kind of power base can I build? Etan’s only influence lies with the younger fae at court. He spends half his days drinking, the other half chasing sprites around the palace. He’s not Maren’s heir. He’s not even among the top ten on the list to be heir—”
“That can change,” she warns.
I reel back. “Oh, wonderful. Now I’m supposed to add assassination to my repertoire, am I?”
“Not you.” She doesn’t quite look at Edain. “Too many mysterious deaths in a short time would provide… uncomfortable scrutiny. But one or two might be overlooked. The Askan court is ambitious, and with Maren unable to give the court a true heir, the rest of them will climb all over each other like mountain goats. No, your task is to remain unnoticed. Bide your time, like a spider.
“I give you a gift, Iskvien. The boy is an idiot. Gullible, easily controlled. He sees only flesh to own, and a will to conquer. Let him think that. Move behind the scenes. Build your base. Birth a child or two. You can never rule the Askan court yourself, but you could place a puppet on the throne. Whether that is your husband or your daughter is your choice.” Her voice roughens. “But you will do this for me.”
It feels like a whirlpool, sucking me toward some hideous fate.
To defy her means punishment. She’s never baulked at any cruelties.
Memory chokes me….
“Wield the flame, Iskvien.”
My gut knots up tight as she brings the candle closer. I can’t stop a hint of dread from breaking over my skin in chills. My magic’s been slow to come in, and my mother thinks forcing me into these training sessions will help me, but if anything, my ability to weave fire is getting worse.
“Touch the flame,” she says.
“I can’t,” I cry, and it’s a little girl’s voice.
“You will.” There’s no mercy in her voice. “Whether you touch it with your magic, or with your skin is the choice you must make. I will not have a weak daughter.”
I break free of that moment, sweat dripping down my spine.
There’s no sign of a burn on my skin anymore—my fae blood is strong enough to heal almost anything she can do to me—but I can feel it there, like a scar that sunk into my bones.
The question is: How far do I dare defy her?
What could be worse? My mother’s certain punishment, or marriage with Etan? It’s only trading one monster for another.
And yet….
There’s the memory of a kiss on my lips.
There’s a flame of defiance in my heart burning faster and faster….
“I won’t marry him,” I whisper.
“Pardon?” My mother spins toward me, as if she can’t quite believe her ears.
I force myself to meet her gaze. “I will not marry Etan.”
“Do you defy me, Iskvien?”
I don’t want this to happen here, with Edain watching, but there’s no help for it.
“He’s a monster,” I blurt. “He’s cruel and—”
“I don’t care.” Movement flashes toward me and her fingers dig into my jaw. “I don’t care if Etan fucks you into the stone of the court. I don’t care if he locks you away in a tower. He will not harm you. He will not dare. But I set no limits on his being kind to you. If you were strong, if you had your magic, then you could make him sweat. Your weakness is your own fault. Your inability to force him to dance to your tune is your own fault. You want to be weak? Then you will suffer your own consequences.” She shakes her head. “I can give you everything, Iskvien, but you have failed me again and again and again. I must find some means to turn your birth to my advantage. You will not fail me this final time.”
“Mother,” Andraste starts.
Mother stabs a finger toward my sister, though she doesn’t tear her gaze away from me. “Not another word.”
I tear my chin free of her grasp. To speak now is dangerous, but I’m so fucking tired of biting my tongue. “If I am weak it is because you have made me so. I remember, Mother. I remember what you did to me.”
The blow snaps my head to the side, and I stagger back, fists coming up protectively to defend myself against the next one—
It never comes.
Instead, Edain is there, one hand manacled around my mother’s wrist. “My queen.”
“What?” she demands, violence seething through her green eyes. “You dare lay hands on me?”
“I dare urge caution.” He bring
s her hand to his lips. “The tent walls are thin and soldiers gossip. We don’t know how many of our people are loyal, and how many of them work for other queens. Maren’s no fool. She cannot hear of this. She cannot afford to see any bruises left on Iskvien’s skin.”
“Iskvien will heal.”
“Not before your meeting.”
Mother rips her wrist from his grasp and turns on her heels to pace, her skirts slithering after her. But there’s a thoughtful gleam in her eyes. “You’re right. You’re always right, my love.”
I don’t know if he just saved me from a true beating.
He despises me and the feeling is mutual.
But if he hadn’t interrupted just then….
A murderous look comes into her eyes and her smile becomes a sharp edge.
Oh no. I recognize that look.
“I cannot leave a mark on my dearest Iskvien’s skin,” she whispers, stalking toward me. “I can’t harm a hair on her head. You want to play these games, my dearest child? Then let us play them.”
Mother draws the jeweled knife from her hip and turns toward the stranger on his knees. Finn tilts his face toward her defiantly, and it’s not until she sets the tip of the knife to the hollow beneath his eye that I see the flicker of his pulse kick in his throat.
“No!” I lunge toward her, but a single bead of blood drips down his cheek and I freeze.
I remember this game.
I remember what she did to Nanny Redwyne, when my nurse begged for mercy for me.
“No, no, please. Don’t.”
The entire room is still.
Edain follows the movement of my mother’s knife like a charmed snake. Gone is the insolence, the grace, the lounging pet. Instead, he’s a coil of tension, prepared to move at a moment’s notice.
“Adaia,” he warns.
But I don’t know what he’s warning against.
Finn freezes, leaning back into her touch as if to escape the pressure of the knife. Maybe my urgency has finally made him realize this is no game.
“I offered the bastard of Evernight a trade,” my mother whispers with a savage glee. The knife digs into the flesh beneath Finn’s eye. “Maybe I’ll send him a little gift to convince him. What say you, Iskvien? Go ahead. Defy me. Tell me you won’t do as you’re told. Tell me you won’t marry Etan.” She throws her head back and laughs. “Every time you defy me, I’ll cut another piece off him.”
Her knife starts to slide through skin and Finn screams, jerking back into her, helpless with his hands bound behind him and the iron collar shackled around his throat.
“Maybe we’ll start with an eye.”
“Stop!” It’s a scream, a desperate pledge. “Stop! I’ll sign the marriage contract.” The words burst from my throat. “I’ll sign it.”
Mother stills. “What did you say?”
I slump to my hands and knees. I want to be sick.
“I’ll sign the marriage contract.” The words are dull. Empty. There goes my defiance. But first…. I look up. “Let him go. Unharmed. Promise me you will not hurt him and I will give you what you desire.”
“Oh, Iskvien.” She looks almost disappointed in me. “You’re so easy to manipulate. I promise.”
“Promise it thrice. On your power. On your throne.” Because I’m not falling for that trick.
“I promise that I will not hurt him.”
“Now or ever,” I counter. “You will not instruct any other hand to cause harm to him either.”
She concedes with a faint little smile, and repeats herself twice more.
I’ve earned some reprieve by holding her to account.
She hates my empathy, but she’d despise my stupidity even more.
“Done,” I whisper, as the magic of Mother’s oath sweeps around her and binds us together.
Mother shoves the stranger forward and he hits the ground face first. But I can see his wild eyes, finding mine. Blood drips from the little wedge she’s carved from the skin beneath his eye.
We stare at each other for a frozen moment.
I’m sorry, I want to say.
And I don’t even know what for, because I’m not the one who put him in chains. I have no power here. I can’t change his circumstances.
And to even breathe those words with my mother in the room will earn him more than an unkind death.
“Get up.” Mother steps over him and sweeps toward me as if she didn’t just threaten to cut his eye out, right in front of me. “Get up and straighten your skirts. You are my daughter and you will not appear before Maren looking like some slovenly slattern.”
I can barely breathe, but somehow my body pushes itself to its feet. I move like a puppet on her strings.
There has to be some way out of this mess.
I can’t just give in.
I won’t.
But… how?
I’ll sign the contracts, I promised. But I never said I’d marry him.
The world slows down around me as I lift my gaze to my mother.
She wants me to learn how to be manipulative?
She wants me to learn to play the game?
So be it. It’s a heady, unbalancing thought. I don’t even know what I can do, but now it feels like there are options out there if I can just find them.
“What am I supposed to do with him?” Edain calls, reminding us both of Finn’s presence.
Mother stills, casting the stranger a hard look.
“I urge a cautious response,” Edain tells her. “Finn can still be useful to us. Perhaps Evernight won’t pay your price for him, but the prince is known to be loyal to his men. If he wants his little pet back, then he’ll have to agree to some sort of arrangement.”
“Fuck you.” This Finn spits a bloodied gobbet of spittle at Edain and bares blood-stained teeth in a smile.
Edain tears a silk square from his pocket and wipes the blood off his hand and shirt. “Careful now. We’re bartering with your life, and I seem to be the only one who gives a damn if you live or die.”
“Kill me then. I’ll die for my prince here and now if it will spare him your trap.”
The loyalty in this Finn’s eyes steals my breath, because nobody in my mother’s court would ever offer their life for her like that.
“Throw him back in his cage,” Mother finally says, before her fingers dig into my wrist. “I care not. If Evernight can be brought to heel, then I will have him grovel at my feet. Right now….” She wrenches me cruelly toward the door flap of the tent. “My daughter and I go to greet the queen of Ravenal and pay her respects.” Her fingers leave cruel marks on my arm. “And she will be signing a marriage contract today.”
7
Iskvien
If Mother was surprised by my smile when I greeted Maren, and the easy grace with which I signed my name to a marriage contract between Aska and Asturia, there’s no sign of it on her face as she leads us into the heart of the Hallow.
I keep waiting for the lash to fall but it occurs to me that the reason she doesn’t suspect something devious in my heart is because I’ve never dared openly defy her before.
She thinks me cowed.
We climb toward the Hallow.
It’s a nexus point where leylines meet, and we used it to arrive here yesterday morning. The power of the Hallow can be used as a portal, except one is bound by the leylines. You can only travel to another nexus point, another Hallow.
It’s also the place where the Seelie Alliance meets whilst at the queensmoot, and there is to be a gathering of the heads of the alliance.
The gently sloping hill is capped with ruins, with the Hallow right in the center. It’s a sacred place and to spill blood here is forbidden. Each queen is allowed to bring five guards only, and the space around the Hallow has been cleared for two hundred yards around it so that any threat can be seen coming.
The enormous standing stones of the Hallow cast ominous shadows as we walk between them.
Some still bear lintels; enormous wedges of stone
somehow hauled on top of a pair of sentinel stones. Other lintel stones lie cracked and shattered at their feet. Some of the scholars at the Akvaran University in Aska have tried to study this Hallow, and believe they’ve found the quarry where the stone came from—nearly a hundred miles away from this place.
Nobody has been able to fathom how the otherkin who once ruled this world managed to get those stones into place. Their tools were primitive, their magics bound to the Hallows and their gods. And yet the floor of this particular Hallow is polished slate so smooth it almost seems like an obsidian mirror. Bronze glyphs are etched into the stone, and research has proven that on certain nights of the year, moonlight will spill through little holes in the sentinel stones to create a perfect circle of moonlight on each glyph.
It wasn’t just a portal to the otherkin.
It wasn’t just a place of worship and sacrifice.
It was also a calendar of all the celestial events, and right now, the little circle of moonlight lights up the glyph that corresponds with Lammastide—or as some of the Askans refer to it, Lughnasadh.
Five golden thrones have been brought into the Hallow.
We’re the last to arrive.
“Greetings, Adaia,” calls Queen Maren, her smooth dark hair tumbling in a silken fall over her shoulders. A black crown circles her head, the points akin to a spear. She’s rumored to be the most beautiful woman in the world, and if she’s not, then she’s very close to the top of the list.
Lucidia of Ravenal slouches in her chair, looking irritable. She clutches a shawl around her shoulders as if she feels the cold, and maybe she does, because age is starting to settle over her face and hair like a mantle. The fae live for enviously long centuries, but Lucidia has taken that first step toward the grave.
It doesn’t make her any less dangerous.
She squints in our direction. “You’re late.”
“My apologies.” My mother leads us toward the throne in front of the Asturian standard. “I had a little… issue to deal with within my camp.”