Page 17
Chapter seventeen
A Halfling and A Cursed King
“C asseiopia. Why am I not surprised?”
“Father, please. Just listen.”
They were already talking before I could even right myself. I stumbled sideways, reaching out blindly and finding a table to brace myself upon. Once the room stopped spinning, I looked up from where I leaned against an enormous mass of obsidian molded into the shape of a dining table to find Cass, with arms outstretched, imploring a middle-aged man with salt and pepper hair and immaculate thick eyebrows. I fought the nausea roiling in my gut to stand up straighter and keep my mouth shut, as instructed.
“Your sister told me you’d go to him,” the man said in a tone that seemed utterly exhausted. “That you’d help him find his way back somehow.”
“I didn’t,” Cass argued. “I didn’t help him back, father. He called me when he was back and I went to him. Of course I did. But I didn’t break the banishment. I didn’t bring him back. But father, please—”
“Forty more years, Casseiopia. That’s all he needed to stay away for. Forty more years and his sentence would have been up. He could have returned to open arms and welcoming embraces.”
“A welcoming embrace. Is that what you call Ursa trying to slit his throat?”
Her father frowned.
“I can’t control the succession,” he muttered, glancing around as if looking for a seat. He found one at the dining table by which I stood, his eyes flashing over me with disinterest before settling into the chair at the head of the table.
“What succession?” Cass bellowed, throwing her arms up in annoyance as she strode forward and he sat down. “You’re here. You’re alive. There is no throne to ascend to, no succession to take place.”
“Not yet.”
Cass stilled, halting mid stride in the center of the room. Her father’s frown deepened and she resumed her walk until she stood beside him again.
“What do you mean?” she asked, her tone lowering.
His eyes slid to me.
“Who is your friend, Casseiopia?” he asked, shrewd gaze examining me from head to toe.
“This is Ren,” Cass introduced simply, with no further explanation. But that did not satisfy the King . He raised a brow and she sighed. “Lark brought her with him from the mortal realm.”
The King slammed his hand on the table.
“See?” he bellowed, pointing a finger at his daughter, jaw clenched in a way that reminded me of his son. “He goes too far! Always too far. I told you. I—”
“She is Ariadne’s daughter.”
He faltered, finger dropping as he turned to face me with fresh interest.
“Half Fae,” he muttered, jaw slackened.
“Welcome here,” Cass said as if in reminder, “by your own decree.”
He blinked at me, lips still parted in surprise.
“Yes, yes,” he agreed, waving his daughter off and pointing, instead, at me. “The last I saw you, you were but a babe. How old are you now?”
“Sixty,” I told him.
“Sixty,” he repeated, taking me in again, no doubt examining my appearance, the way I looked nineteen or twenty. “Fascinating.”
“It’s a real head scratcher,” Cass said then, obviously irritated at the change in the course of the conversation. “But father, about Lark—”
“Canis.”
“Yes, Canis.”
“I always hated that Lark business. Doubtlessly, he came by that wretched name from that boy he was always hanging around with. The one I banished too.”
“Father, please. Forgive his premature return. With you falling… ill, and Taurus having run away to the Court of Rivals and Ursa off doing God knows what—”
“I know what. I know what she’s doing. I sent her there myself. I don’t need your lecture, Casseiopia. I’m still the boy’s father. I know what’s best for him.”
“Canis hasn’t been a boy for four hundred years, father.”
I balked. Four hundred years.
“Leave us, Casseiopia,” the King commanded then, his gaze firmly on me. “I wish to speak with the Halfling.”
Halfling. I flinched. That was almost as bad as hybrid.
Cass’ gaze flicked to me, uncertain. But I gave her a solemn nod and she departed, the skirts of her dress billowing like the night itself behind her. Neither one of us spoke until she was gone. Then, the King was smiling up at me.
“Sit,” he said, gesturing toward the table. “Are you hungry? My servants should be here any moment with dinner. Please, join me.”
I blinked at him for a moment, wondering if this was a trick, but then decided that even if it was, it was too late for me to get out of it now. So I sat in the chair across from him, staring at him over the endless table between us. It was the most distance I could put between us while still meeting his request. Without my companions, I wasn’t comfortable interacting with another Fae, specifically a King, whether what Taurus had told us about him having lost his magic was true or not.
“I’m hoping you’ll tell me how you find yourself here, dining with the Fae King of the Court of Blood and Bone,” he said and I did not respond, Cass’ words echoing in my head.
No matter who speaks to you, no matter what they ask, don’t say anything.
“Loyalty is a funny thing,” he continued after a moment of waiting for my answer only to find that I wasn’t going to give him one. “It can be so easily misplaced and, once it’s dug in too deep, it can be nearly impossible to root out. I see my son has inspired such loyalty within you.”
I did not answer as a servant appeared and placed trays of roasted meats and steaming vegetables in front of us. The King gestured for me to eat so I reached hesitantly for the serving spoon sticking out of the stack of carrots.
“I wonder, though, if he has told you why he was banished.”
I stilled, my hand hanging frozen over the plate in front of me, my eyes flicking up to the king. He smiled at my surprise.
“I thought not,” he said, pleased with himself. I averted my gaze, busying myself with piling more food onto my plate than I truly intended to eat, if only to keep my eyes away from his. “Since it has something to do with you.”
My hands were shaking so I hid one under the table and lifted my fork with the other.
“Sixty years ago,” he added, clearly intending to tell the story whether I asked for it or not, “a council of every King of every court was called to determine whether we might reach out to the mortals. Sentiments were changing. Some Fae among the leadership, myself included, were relaxing our laws against your kind, relinquishing our hold on some of the hatred we’d felt for you for millennia, and we thought it might be time to offer the mortal plane an olive branch of sorts. An ambassador. Someone to go back and forth between the planes for purposes of communication, to open access to our realm to your people by only the tiniest sliver and see what they made of it, if they could be trusted to attempt a peace.”
I stared at my hands, now busy cutting through a thick slice of beef, and refused to look up at him as he continued.
“Canis offered himself for the job. He campaigned for it. He wanted it more than anything I’d ever seen him want in his life. And, in the end, when it went to your mother, when Ariadne Dawnpaw became our ambassador to the mortal plane, he raged and raged. He made every claim he could against her. That she wasn’t fit for the role, that she couldn’t be trusted. But he didn’t tell any of us why he felt that way. Not until he had proof. Not until she was pregnant.”
My fork stilled again. I was trying very hard to remember to breathe.
“It could have been taken care of quietly. He could have told me, or he could have gone directly to Alban. But instead, he decided to announce it at the next council meeting to all who had gathered. Alban had no choice but to punish her on the spot. To strip her title from her and worse. And when the news traveled that the baby had been conceived by a mortal, every bit of work we had done to extinguish the hate the Fae held for your people crumbled to ash.”
I took a deep, shuddering breath.
“He is my son, Seren. I hope you can understand that. I should have stopped him. I know that now. I should have known that he wouldn’t be satisfied with Ariadne’s punishment, with her humiliation. He wanted to destroy her. So he did it the only way he knew how, the only way to truly crush a new mother’s soul. He stole you.”
The breath went out of me and I raised my gaze, slowly, to meet the King’s. I shook my head slowly, tears welling up as I processed what this powerful Fae King was trying to tell me.
“So I banished him,” the King finished then, leaning back in his seat and drinking deeply from his goblet. “One hundred years in the mortal realm, living among you and thinking about what could have been, about what he ruined when he lashed out at having not gotten what he wanted like a petulant child.”
I blinked once, twice, trying to clear my mind, trying to think through every ounce of information I had just received. Lark was the one who had delivered me to my uncle so many years ago. He was the one who told Professor Xavier Belling that my father was dead, that my mother was Fae, that there was an entire plane of existence full of magical wonders we could not even imagine. I had grown up thinking that man was my savior or, at the very least, just the messenger dispatched to deliver me to my only remaining mortal family. But he was my kidnapper.
A shudder went through me as I took in a shaky breath and gripped the edges of the table. The man that had come to me, flirted with me, joked with me, protected me, and promised me. He had promised me. My heart pounded.
I had grown up believing that my mother had abandoned me, that she had never wanted me, and he let me. He let me believe that. He brought me here and gave me that whole bullshit speech about finding my way and learning about my people when he knew. He knew he was the one who took me away from it all in the first place, who took me from her.
“He’s the one who left you in the mortal plane, Seren,” the King told me, his voice sympathetic, almost pitying. “He’s the one who sent you away.”
I went completely rigid. I was an intelligent person. I was an academic, a professor, a scholar. And yet, my feeble mortal brain couldn’t comprehend what this ancient, immortal king was telling me.
Lark, the Fae prince who had closed the rift and used its power to bring us here. Lark, the one who had stood before me and promised me he wouldn’t drag me anywhere against my will, that it was my choice whether to stay or leave. Lark, the man who had protected me, just moments ago, from another Fae that wished me harm. The powerful Fae who looked at me like I might be something more to him than a mere mortal.
But it was all an act.
The pieces of the puzzle I hadn’t realized I had been looking at started falling into place all around me. Why he had come to me that day, why he had allowed me to stick around ever since. It wasn’t friendship. It was guilt. Or maybe it was some last ditch effort to right the wrong he had committed and win himself an early release from his banishment. And he hadn’t told me. None of them had. Just as they hadn’t told me about my grandfather being the King of the Court of Peace and Pride. Just as they still, even now, weren’t telling me everything they knew about my past, about who I was or what I might become.
I gripped the edges of the black table with white knuckles. How foolish had I been? To believe such a powerful Fae, the Prince of the Court of Blood and Bone, and his immortal friends would ever want anything to do with me, would ever care about me at all.
“I am certain they have instructed you not to speak to me,” the King said then, with a tone that was more understanding than I could ever have expected. “Which has Cassiopeia’s name all over it. But you should know I decreed long ago that any being with so much as a drop of Fae blood in their veins is always welcome in my court. For any wrong my son may have done you, I sincerely apologize. You will be treated as an honored guest just as much as any of our kind would for the duration of your stay at my court.”
With that, he clapped and two servants emerged from the shadows. I just stared at them for a moment before realizing I had been dismissed. I rose mechanically, hardly making the conscious decision at all, and followed them toward the exit.
“And Seren,” the King called out behind me. My escorts froze so I did as well. “I will try not to take it to heart that your grandfather is the one who did this to me.”
His smile had fallen from his face completely. Gone was the compassion he had shown me moments ago. In its place was a stone cold glare, a cruel frown, and the twitch of a hand. My blood ran cold as I followed the servants out of the hall, now completely surrounded by enemies I had thought were my friends.
Table of Contents
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- Page 16
- Page 17 (Reading here)
- Page 18
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