by D. D. Chance
“Well, what about the gold from the Riven District?” Celia asked. I shot her a glance as Niall snorted in dismissal.
“Monster realm gold has no magical value,” he said. “It’s the same as human gold in that respect.”
“No, you’re wrong,” Celia said, frowning. “It’s the same pale gold color as Fae gold. I never had any of it, of course, but I saw it often enough. The lizard assholes used it, and they totally had magic. You saw it yourselves.”
I frowned at her, but there was no doubting her sincerity. She believed what she said, even if it wasn’t possible.
“We need to see some of that gold, then,” Niall said. “Because if it’s Fae gold, they’ve stolen it.”
“Stolen it,” I echoed. “That tracks. If they stole a stash of Fae gold, they could easily have used it to make deals with the witches of any of the human covens. I’m not sure for what purpose, but the witches would not necessarily know or care how they came by the gold, they would want it for their purposes.”
“So we have to go back to the Riven District?” Celia asked, sounding resigned. “I knew I wasn’t going to ditch that place so easily.”
“You don’t have to go,” Niall began, but she shook him off with a snort.
“Oh yeah, right, ’cause you guys are super experts on the Riven District having been there for all of five minutes. Yeah, that’s gonna turn out great.”
She waved her hand vaguely at the space in front of the bar. “Go ahead and open up one of those portal things. What would be the odds of you being able to pass us all off as lesser Fae? If you think that the high Fae gold has been stolen, it would make sense for the lesser Fae to be sent in to find it, you know what I mean? For when we get caught.”
“If we get caught,” Niall said.
Celia rolled her eyes. “Oh, we’re going to get caught. You guys may be lords and masters of the realm of the glorious high Fae, but this is the Riven District. They don’t screw around.”
If she’d meant her words to be quelling, they had the opposite effect. Niall and the other two warriors stepped forward, not bristling in indignation, but thoroughly delighted. A fight was in the offing, and they were more than up for it.
For her part, Belle stayed with her hands on the counter, as if absorbing the magic still flowing through the veins of the building.
“Are you okay with coming with us?” I asked her, because there was no way she was remaining here.
She smiled a little, as if realizing the question was a formality, but as she glanced up at me, she stiffened. When she spoke, her words tumbled over themselves.
“We will be caught in a place filled with guards, the lizard men we saw before, and we will fight.”
“Do we win?” Niall asked, but his playful gibe didn’t pierce Belle’s intensity.
“We don’t need to win,” I said, trying to draw Belle’s attention as she went pale and stepped back. I sensed her genuine dismay at what she saw, but pushed on. “Why bother going in and getting caught at all, actually? If they have Fae gold, we can track it. I can see it anywhere in the monster realm, once I know to look for it.”
As I spoke, I sketched a portal to what I knew now to be the Riven District, but the images remained indistinct and filled with smoke.
“Are they on fire too?” Celia asked, peering at the portal. “Because I think I’ve about hit my quota of the stuff today.”
I shook my head. “There’s no Fae gold there,” I told her.
Her expression turned mulish, looking so much like Belle’s, I nearly laughed.
“I’m telling you there is,” Celia insisted. “Or gold that sure as hell looked exactly like the fancy stuff you guys are toting around, with a light, pale color and the spark of magic.”
“Well, it sounds like Fae gold, and it works like Fae gold, so even if it’s not Fae gold, I kind of feel like we may need to check that out,” Niall said, clearly still hoping for a fight.
“Agreed,” I said. I changed the tenor of the portal requirements to search out magic within the district. Instantly, a building snapped into view.
“Annnnnd bingo,” Celia sighed. “Complete with the assholes outside, standing around a fire. Never get between a lizard man and his fire, I’m telling you what.”
I tore my attention away from Belle and refocused on the portal. “Let’s go.”
I didn’t have to ask anyone a second time. Less than thirty seconds later, as one unit, we leapt through the portal to the courtyard of the warden’s keep.
37
Belle
The moment we touched down in the Riven District, I knew this was a terrible mistake. All the images I’d seen still ricocheted around in my brain, and it was all I could do to keep Aiden from sensing them. He had developed a deeper connection to me, and it was frankly a dangerous one, given that I could not fully trust the images tumbling through my mind. They were changing too quickly.
Standing in the middle of my bar, I had seen him fighting with a monstrous warrior. A sea monster in the flesh, somehow human and vaguely reptilian at the same time. Had that been one of the lizard men of the Riven District? It almost had to be, and yet it had seemed so much worse, big and brutal, not like any of the guards or even the warden. And it was beating the absolute crap out of Aiden, though Aiden was giving back as good as he was getting. Still, the two combatants had opened up gashes on about every inch of exposed skin, though they appeared to be striking each other only with their open hands. Did they fight with magic? With weapons embedded in their palms? Were they secretly holding knives I couldn’t see, given how quickly they were flashing at each other?
But that gruesome scene that had played out in my mind’s eye only a few minutes ago didn’t seem to matter anymore as we fanned out silently in the courtyard of the warden’s keep, because now my future-casting image shifted. Instead of fighting with the bruiser lizard guy, I saw Aiden holding up a shimmering disc of gold, then dashing it to the stone floor, his face black with fury. But black with fury was better than broken and bleeding, so far as I was concerned. Still, I kept my eyes sharp for a giant lizard man with killer claws. Because I had no interest in seeing that guy.
“So what’s the plan here?” Niall asked, peering through the shadows at the lizard men around the fire, who appeared to be playing some sort of game with dice. “Those guys are low-level soldiers. They’re not going to have special gold.”
“You’re wrong,” Celia said. “The soldiers are exactly the ones who have it. They spill it out through the district in exchange for information. And you want one of those pieces of gold on you if you run into trouble, let me tell you. It almost becomes a badge of honor.”
“Where do they get it?” Aiden asked.
Celia frowned. “Ahhh…I don’t actually know. The warden has always just had money. But it’s not like there’s some sort of caravan with bags of treasure. I’ve never once seen that. People come in via portals or by breaching the outer boundaries, but as you saw, neither one is an easy passage, and people are almost always on foot. And getting out is even harder.”
“So a delivery method that no one sees,” Niall said, folding his arms over his chest and rocking back on his heels. “Got to be a portal. But from where?”
He shot a glance at Aiden. “One from the Fae realm?”
“No,” Aiden said. “There’s no Fae gold here.”
Something in his tone kept poking at me, a certainty that didn’t make sense given the obvious similarity in the gold pieces we were talking about.
“But how can you be so sure?” I asked. “What if they took the Fae gold, marked it in some way, changed it? Like it’s some sort of Fae money laundering scheme. You said it yourself, the Riven District is outside the bounds of the monster realm, outside the bounds of the Fae, even outside the human realm. Maybe ordinary laws don’t apply.”
Aiden sighed grimly. “It doesn’t matter if they apply or not. I can sense Fae gold. Each of us carries it,” he said, gesturing to his war
riors. “That’s why we didn’t notice it in your tavern at first, because I already sensed its presence. But I can tell you where every last disc of it is once I focus. There is no Fae gold in the Riven District. Which means this is something else.”
“Okay, so, what—we infiltrate their game, try to get lucky, and win a piece of gold?” Niall asked.
Celia hummed as she peered over to the huddled group. “There’s no dice game I haven’t played in this godforsaken hole. But these are Luacra. I don’t know what they play.”
A loud cry went up from the gathered lizard men, someone clearly winning that round of game. One of them stood, shrugging off calls for another round, stumbling a bit as he left the circle around the fire.
“I’ve got a better idea,” Aiden announced, breaking away from us and raising his voice at once.
“Good evening, sir,” he called out as he shifted form, taking on the illusion of one of the guards, his tongue sliding out experimentally. I would never get used to the rapidly shifting glamour of the Fae. They did it so unconsciously, but it was impossible to tell where the illusion ended and reality began.
As he moved off into the shadows, Celia peered after him, uncertain. “What, he’s a pickpocket too? They teach that skill to the king of the Fae?”
“Fae are light fingered from birth,” Niall boasted. “It is likely already done. So that means we simply need—”
“Stone and fire!” Aiden suddenly roared from halfway across the courtyard. “You dare to bring this black magic out of its accursed realm? Do you wish the fire of the Fae to blast your skin from your very bones?”
“Or, you know, that could happen,” Niall finished.
The courtyard exploded into movement. The dice players leapt up, shouting and scrambling, more soldiers rushed into the courtyard, lights flared from a dozen windows in the keep, and a heavy bell rang somewhere close by, as if there was a guard in a tower ready for such a disturbance.
Then Aiden was racing toward us, his face a mask of fury. He flung his hand out, and a portal flashed open. No need for subterfuge now, I supposed. We jumped through, and a moment later, landed in the Witchling Academy’s war room.
Aiden whirled around and thrust his hand down, and, replicating the image I’d held in my mind a few minutes before, he dashed a heavy gold piece to the floor. Why hadn’t I kept watching to see how this all ended? When was I going to understand what future I should pay attention to?
“Fomorian gold,” Aiden spat.
“What?” Niall stared at him as Celia and I exchanged uneasy glances and the rest of the warriors didn’t move. “How? There’s nothing in their realm but water and misery. How could they create anything like this?”
“I don’t know how,” Aiden fumed. “But this gold was mined, not made.”
He looked at me. “It’s a conceit of the Fae that we spin our gold out of thin air. We don’t. The dwarves free it from the rocky depths of the realm, and we turn it to our use with magic. This is mined the same. It’s the same weight and heft as Fae gold. There’s no magic in the world that can fake that. Which means they’re mining it, the bastards. From where I don’t know, but it’s for damned certain there’s a whole pile of Fomorians who aren’t stuck in their watery prison anymore.”
“But—how long?” Niall asked. “How long have they been out?”
“I don’t know,” Aiden said bitterly. He looked at Celia. “When did you first come to the Riven District, five years ago? Did the lizard men run it?”
“Oh, yeah. They’ve been in power for I don’t even know how long, since the Riven District started. But it’s not all that old. Maybe twenty years? Nobody knows for sure. It’s a boomtown.”
“A boomtown built on Fomorian gold,” Aiden said, disgustedly. “We can stamp it dead, but it’s only the tail of the snake.”
He turned to Niall. “Put out the call. We’re going to war.”
I practically vibrated with dismay as he cut another portal with a harsh gesture, then held his hand out to me. But he didn’t try to banish me—and certainly not kill me, no matter what evils his cousin Lena had prophesied. Instead, his face was filled with fierce resignation, and when he spoke, the very walls of the academy shook.
“You and I have other work to do, Belle, and it can’t wait any longer. I need to have you by my side in your full strength, which means you need to know the full truth and be completely free. We are going to right the wrongs of my family once and for all.”
Together, we crossed into the land of the mountain Fae.
38
Aiden
The meadow with the barrow mounds and the tall standing stone was as full of promise as when we had left it, bathed in sunlight, with new-sprung growth radiating into the forest. Belle gripped my hand tightly as I tugged her forward, her gaze going everywhere.
“These mounds all look alike,” she said. “How will we know where to look? I mean, they’re graves. Should we seriously disturb them?”
I shook my head. “I told you, the Fae don’t bury their dead. I appreciate your desire to honor the sacred space, but it’s not actual warriors who lie in these barrows, but the symbols of an ancient king.”
She squinted at me. “The one who tried to overthrow the ocean Fae?”
“Not him alone,” I said. “The mountain Fae were the first clan to rule, and this was their domain, originally. However, I suspect the totems of a different mountain king are here, one who lived three hundred years ago. He would have held some power if he contracted with the Hogans. It’s only fitting that he would have kept the relics of his own mastery somewhere safe, along with the artifacts of the witch who brought magic to the realm.”
“You sure about that?” she asked wryly. “Seems to me that first witch didn’t do such a great job, since they didn’t win.”
“The mountain king of that time did not win, but the Fae did overall. There was magic in the realm, when all was said and done, even if it went to serve the ocean Fae. Power is a tenuous thing among the Fae. There’s a reason why the ocean Fae have held the crown for so long.”
“Because you’re assholes?” Belle asked, and though she was half joking, I nodded.
“Because we wanted it more. Ruling the Fae is a service more than a status symbol. To us falls the obligation to protect the whole. But make no mistake, there is still status involved, and we wanted that. There is very little that can destroy like the ocean. The valley is meant for growing, the forest is meant for secrets. The mountains are meant for strength, but the ocean is always moving, always cutting, shifting the sands of whatever land it touches.”
“Yeah, I’d say you guys were well suited to lead,” Belle said, and for once, there wasn’t dry humor in her voice, but simple statement of fact.
She gestured at the standing stone. “So, how are we going to get inside to where all the artifacts are? You can’t tell me we’re actually going to dig our way down.”
I smiled and shook my head. “We won’t have to. The land is ready to give up its treasures to honor the king of the Fae.”
With that, I moved over to the standing stone, its top slanted at an angle. Ancient glyphs were barely visible on the rock’s surface, but I didn’t need to read them to know what they said.
“For the might of the Fae, may they ever walk in Light,” I murmured.
I laid my hand on the pillar and spoke the ancient name of my family. I could feel the whisper of magic leap from my fingers to the marble beneath, and then flow farther down and out across the meadow, burrowing deep within the mounds. A sigh of a breeze flowed out from the trees, parting the long grass, and there it was—a narrow door cut into the side of the nearest barrow. Magic fairly radiated from the ground around us, and a deep sense of rightness filled me. This truly was a sacred space, and I was proud to accept its trust.
“That wasn’t there before,” Belle said, and I nodded.
“It didn’t need to be.”
I reached for her hand, and she let me take it, follo
wing me wordlessly as we approached the low mound. The schism in the rock seemed to widen as we approached, and by the time we were right up on it, we could easily step inside. It closed behind us, leaving us in darkness, and Belle’s hand spasmed in mine. With a whispered spell, I illuminated the chamber, which was little more than a corridor deeper underground. We moved ahead maybe ten steps before the rock pathway gave way to carved steps, which curved around to an open room.
“I didn’t foresee any of this,” she muttered, sounding put out.
“There is some limit, it would seem, even to the magic of the great Hogan witch,” I returned, but my gaze was fixed on the beauty of what lay before me. A marble table, hewn from a single chunk of stone. Upon it sat three silver platters.
The first platter held a pair of wicked iron blades with hilts of gold. The second held an emerald necklace on a heavy chain, its stone the size of an egg. And the third held a scroll of parchment, secured by a dark red velvet sash.
“I’ve never seen that necklace,” Belle breathed, and I grimaced.
“Nor have I. But did Reagan Hogan leave it behind when she abandoned her post, or has it been here for longer? Either way, I can feel the magic spilling off it.”
“So can I,” she said, sounding startled. She slanted me a glance. “But should we leave it here? Should I take it? What will happen if I do? Because, for the record, I’m looking right at it and I can’t predict its future, or ours. That’s seriously not cool.”
She sounded legitimately annoyed, and I bit back a smile. How quickly we got used to the expansion of our powers, and how angry when they were taken from us.
“It’s yours to do with as you please,” I decided. “And if it can help us in the coming war, then you should take it. I fully intend to take those.” I pointed to the wicked blades. “I suspect there is a story behind them for them to be here.”
“And then there’s the contract,” Belle said, finally giving voice to the first thing we both had fixed on the moment we entered the room.