by D. D. Chance
I stared at her and knew she was right. A great well of despair opened within me, one I didn’t know how to cover over again. I could not right all the generations of wrongs done to the Hogan witches. I had only loved this one.
What if my love wasn’t enough to keep her?
Once again, I put that idea out of my head, though it was getting harder to do. I was the king of the Fae. Even if Belle was the most stubborn woman in all the realms, I knew she wanted me. I knew some part of her was inextricably linked to me, the power of our connection partly magical, partly emotional. But was that emotion truly love? Though she might recognize her need for me to a point where she could not or would not willingly leave me, would she ever love me with her full heart? And why were humans so confounding?
I didn’t want to ask her this. I wanted to know her completely, to understand her, and not to let on that she confused me more with every passing day. In all the books of the academy, why wasn’t there one on understanding the heart of human women?
The answer to that was obvious enough—there probably was. Not in the academy proper, but in the halls of the castle itself. Humans had once been our allies in a battle against the Fomorian, and humans had been able to convince us to leave their realm. We had done so in large part because we had understood their need to be free of us, and perhaps we had wanted to be free of them, at least of the responsibility of them. That all spoke to an understanding of their emotions and drive.
Cyril would know. He had to. And I would become truly educated before setting out to win Belle over once and for all.
I couldn’t wait for perfect knowledge to give her what she wanted, though. I needed to offer what I could now, in this moment. Whatever I already had was hers, but maybe—maybe she simply didn’t understand that.
“I want to help you,” I murmured, leaning forward as she stared at me with eyes still swimming with confusion and anger. “But how? Anything you ask, it’s yours. If I cannot give it to you by my own hand, I will move the very oceans to bring it to you. I swear that to you.”
She blinked at me, whether at the vehemence in my voice, or the emotion that I put forward in the declaration. The room around us seemed to hold its breath, not just the room, but the castle and the surrounding lands—even the breeze and birds stopped their whistling for the heartbeat it took Belle to respond.
And then she baffled me once again.
“Can you take me back to my tavern?” she asked softly, her eyes filling with tears she hastily blinked away. “So I can understand the damage there? Can you help me see if it can be fixed?”
“It can be fixed,” I said. There was no other alternative. The surge of satisfaction at being given a task I knew I could complete made me grimace, but that didn’t blunt my pleasure at being able to serve in such a tangible way.
“Hey! Oh gosh, I’m sorry!”
The door to Belle’s study flung open, and Celia raced into the room, her color high, her eyes wide. “I didn’t realize you were here, King Aiden. But Belle, you totally need to see this. Like right now!”
I half expected her to turn around and exit the room as quickly as she’d bounded into it, but instead, she crossed over to the tidy office’s bank of windows. She pointed down. “Seriously, just look.”
Belle shot me a startled glance, but got up and crossed quickly to the window, then gasped. I stood to see what had so fascinated them.
The children were all standing around staring at the newest addition to the academy grounds, a heap of human gold, distinguished by its darker hues. One of the bolder kids reached out for the gold, then yelped and withdrew his hand. That earned me a second surprised look from Belle, but a knowing grimace from Celia.
“I told him not to touch it. It seems to bother them, maybe because they’re Fae?”
I turned to her, mild annoyance quickly replaced with pride in my own witch’s ability, and in the ability of those she helped.
“You could handle the gold because you’re human, Celia. No monster, Fae, or wizard from this realm can transport it back to the human realm, but you can.”
“I’ve never been able to make so much, though,” she said. “Or, like, any gold at all, before now.”
I shrugged, suspecting that Celia hadn’t actually made that giant pile of coins, but that a certain Hogan witch had spelled it into being simply by getting pissed. “Belle believes you have need of it, you and others like you. And so you shall have it.”
I turned to Belle. “Let’s go see what work your tavern needs doing. It would appear, we now have the funds to pay for it.”
35
Belle
It was another two hours before we left. Faced with the reality of returning to the human realm, especially with a pile of gold in tow, both Celia and I were struck with similar awkwardness. I legitimately didn’t know what to expect when I returned to the tavern, for all that Aiden assured me that time only needed to pass to the extent I wanted it to. That the Hogan witches had always chosen to return in the natural number of years they had been gone, but that had been their choice and not a requirement. A piece of crazy for another day.
Celia certainly had no desire to return to the past—and she would be safe in the future. She had been chased out of her mother’s home at the age of seventeen, no matter where that home was. The intervening five years she’d spent in the Riven District, believing she was a shifter cat abandoned by her pack, had been difficult, but she’d survived. Besides, it wasn’t like she was going back to her old stomping grounds. She was going to my tavern, which was probably a heap of ashes. No one would know her in Boston or wonder where she’d been for the last five years.
My situation was a little more complicated. I had no interest in the intervening few days that had transpired since the blaze had struck the White Crane. I didn’t want to come back to a tavern that had already been declared unlivable, I didn’t even want a few hours to have passed. In fact, I wanted to step right back into the fire.
Aiden didn’t even blink an eye at this request. He shouldered a heavy pack filled with gold from the great pile in front of the academy, somehow managing to get the entire pile into a concentrated form. Celia and I had smaller packs, more to keep our brains from scrambling than anything, but as Aiden sketched a portal in the middle of the open lawn, we all took a step back at the wall of heat that shoved out of the opening.
Someone yelled behind us, loud and gruff. Niall.
“For pity’s sake, Aiden!” he protested, bounding across the field. “You’re not going off without us, are you?”
I turned to see that behind Niall, who was pounding toward us at full speed, a small contingent of Aiden’s warriors had broken away from wherever they’d been amassing, apparently preferring to join our adventure over wherever else they were assigned. His warriors had a serious case of the oh, bright, shiny, especially if the oh, bright, shiny involved danger of any sort.
I didn’t give myself any more time to consider what I was walking into, though. I moved forward, taking Aiden’s outstretched hand, and didn’t balk when he gathered me close, one strong arm around me as we both jumped through.
Celia’s startled “Oh!” told me that Niall had reached her and offered her the same lift assistance.
We needed it.
We burst into the middle of the tavern at a point that seemed to be only a matter of minutes after I’d departed, luckily long enough that the witches of the coven of the White Mountains had already fled the scene. But they had left behind a dozen small blazes in addition to the ones that now climbed over the bar and up along the rafters. Despite the fact that the Fae wood was not immediately catching fire, it had begun to glow, and I knew it was only a matter of time before it went up like kindling. My heart surged in terror as I felt the old building shift and groan. I had betrayed it!
“Spread out,” Aiden ordered. He grabbed my hand again, jolting me back to focus. With his right hand, he sketched another portal, this one to the winter realm of the moun
tain Fae, widening it so that the frozen rain and snow blew in, the wind temporarily whipping the flames to a higher force, but the Fae precipitation pounding the fire down just as quickly.
The other warriors grabbed great armfuls of the snow out of the portal and flung it, the magical nature of it deadening the fire further. Meanwhile, I spoke the words of healing that I knew so well. Healing I’d used to put dozens of humans and monsters back together again, but had never needed or even thought to use for my own precious home. I reached out and ran my hand along the blackened counter, and bright, healthy, gleaming wood spread out in a radiating arc from my touch.
At some point Aiden let go of my hand, and I pressed my fingers more heavily onto the countertop, where I had leaned so many times, looking out over a crowded room, grateful for the opportunity to serve. It wasn’t until he tapped me on the shoulder that I realized the room had fallen silent. I turned around. The snow had melted, and three Fae warriors and Celia were pushing mops across the floor, sluicing it out to the drains in the corners or back through the open portals. The place smelled like wet ashes and soaked cardboard, but it was whole, it was complete.
A small, niggling thought struck me, quick as an arrow. Could I have done all this myself, now that I carried the emerald crown and steel shackles, invisible though they may be? I smiled at the foolishness of that thought and refocused on Aiden. “Nobody will know?”
He grimaced. “You’ll need to air the place out, but none of the fire appears to have been visible outside this building. If the witches of the high coven are watching, they’ll know something went wrong. But they’ll also know that magic greater than theirs is in play. They won’t bother this place, I suspect. Not without reinforcements.”
“They damned well better not.” I turned, moving to the walls and placing my hands upon them. I had spent the last three days learning warding spells from my great-grandmother’s ancient books—spells several times stronger than the ones she’d left us with. And I infused those spells now into the very foundations of my home. “This tavern is an entryway to the In Between. It has to stay safe, or all the witches we’ve helped won’t be safe.”
Aiden frowned. “As you say. It is not a Fae matter to take up arms in a battle between warring witches,” he said, though he sounded particularly put out that this wasn’t a fight he could fight for me.
“It’s a fight that’s been long overdue,” I said. “When this is done, I’ll have a reckoning with the coven, but for now, we’re safe.”
I lifted a hand, and the hidden panels under the eaves opened, filling the room with the sweet stormy wind of a summer rain in Boston. I lifted my brows and glanced at Aiden. “You conjured up a storm here too?” I asked.
He grinned. “It’s the easiest illusion to effect, and aids in the confusion that the witches might be feeling at the fact that the tavern didn’t burn up like tinder.”
“So what now?” Niall piped up, looking around expectantly. “If we can’t fight these witches of yours, can’t we at least find somebody’s head to crack?”
“You will need to move the gold, Belle,” Aiden said, ignoring Niall for a second. He gestured to the bags now sitting behind the bar, looking like backpacks left behind by college students.
“They’ll be safe here, with your wards and the illusion magic of the Fae, but they do you no good remaining hidden. It would be best for you to convert them into a currency you can distribute among the witches you would help.”
“So much gold…” Celia murmured. She drifted over to the packs, lifting a shaking hand. With the soft tug of one zipper, the nearest pack gaped open, revealing its gleaming contents.
“I totally thought it would disappear,” she said. “Humans can’t transport Fae gold.”
“Good thing for you it’s not Fae,” Niall said heartily. “Which makes it inferior, but it should still work for your purposes.”
He scanned the row of wrecked bottles. “Are any of these kegs still working?” he demanded, then pointed at Celia. “Aren’t you a bartender too? What’s with witches becoming bartenders?”
“I’ll find you something.” Celia laughed, looking at me and smiling as I nodded. I was still trembling with the exertion of the ward magic, but I was coming out of it somewhat. Still, as I looked across the bar toward her, I blinked, seeing her and Niall bending toward each other, swept into an embrace that vibrated with passion. I jolted with surprise, and the image cleared, even as my own eyes widened. Was that in Celia’s near future? Distant future? How far ahead could I see, and would it happen at all?
And speaking of Celia…
I hurried around the bar, glancing up to the backs of my cabinets, only to sigh with disappointment. There was nothing left hanging there but a few scraps of ashes. I scowled as Aiden grunted from the center of the room, and then followed his gaze over my shoulder to the newly restored mirror above the bar, the natural portal into the White Crane. Apparently, inherently magical constructs were rebuilt, just not the simple scraps of human memories.
“That took you to the monster realm?” he asked. “But how did—”
“What’s this?” Celia interrupted suddenly, standing over at the edge of the bar. She picked up a small golden disk. At first, I thought it was one of the pieces of gold we’d hauled here from the Fae realm. But beside her, Niall let out a whoosh of surprise.
“Now that’s Fae gold, and activated too. But it’s got witch magic all over it.” He took the gold piece from Celia and held it away from him, his nose wrinkling. “It smells nasty, though. I’ll bet that’s why the fire took despite your wards, Belle. Witch magic commingled with Fae gold is potent stuff.”
“But how would random witches have Fae gold?” Celia asked. But, of course, I knew. Aiden had already suggested as much. I turned to him, and saw the truth in his face. He’d gone sheet white.
“Bring that coin to me,” he said.
36
Aiden
I knew what I was looking at even before Niall brought it over to me. But I took the gold coin and held it up to the light streaming down from Belle’s ceiling. There was no mistake. “This gold is from my family,” I said, earning me a sharp look from Niall.
“You’re serious?” Niall asked. “I don’t see the markings.”
“No one but I or someone from my line could.” I looked at Belle. “There’s only one reason why the coven would have such a coin from our family. It’s payment.”
She grimaced, but I could see she wasn’t surprised. “Well, you thought that might have happened. You paid the coven directly for Hogan witch training, which makes that coin, what, over a hundred years old?”
“Worse than that,” I said. “This is new gold. Gold that has been paid in the past several days.”
“You’re shitting me,” Celia said. “Your coven gets paid automatically when you do the work?”
“That’s insane,” Belle muttered. “Like, I literally can’t understand it. First we were beholden to the Fae because of that contract, and then to the coven? I’m telling you, the Hogans were never that loyal. There’s no way we would have struck a deal so selfless.”
“Deals upon deals,” Niall murmured.
I nodded, still studying the coin. “If the original Hogan witch had struck a deal with the Fae and that deal was overlaid by a deal with the coven, who brought the witch forth in the first place, I could see it happening.”
“Except for the part that we got nothing out of it,” Belle protested. “Seriously, we’re not that bad at negotiating. It’s a point of pride for us.”
“Maybe a point of pride that you worked on over the past few centuries,” Niall pointed out, scratching his chin. “’Cause it certainly seems like it wasn’t a strength to begin with.”
Belle turned to him, then jolted a little, before shaking her head as if trying to ward off a vision of his future she didn’t want to deal with. “If that coin was from only a few days ago, that means that payments have started again. But you wouldn’t have p
aid for the coven all during the time that we didn’t teach you, would you?”
“Absolutely not,” I confirmed, while Niall nodded.
Belle drummed her fingers on the bar. “Then they’ve been getting money from someplace else, because their strength has only increased in the past century. So if you weren’t paying them, who was?”
I shrugged. “There’s nothing that would stop them from having other arrangements with other sources.”
“No,” Belle said, bringing her hands to her temples as if her brains were about to fall out. “They have increased in magic, not just wealth. And do you really feel like they would have used a brand-spanking-new Fae coin to augment this attack on my home if they didn’t need to? I wouldn’t, not if I had only now started getting paid again. I’d be tempted to hoard it. But that means that they’re either out of their supply of old Fae gold, or the coins they had received, they couldn’t use for something so obvious. These coins clearly don’t burn, so it could have been found by someone who knew what it was.”