Page 10 of Brutal Fae King (Dark Faevea King #1)

She storms by my side, cute little face pouting as I walk us both out to the carriages. She is very much back to herself—which I have to admit, I’m pleased about. The way she barks back at me makes me feel a way I haven’t felt for a while, if ever. I’d never say it out loud, but I’m happy to have her talking back to me again.

There’s a certain smugness to her angry walk, but I know actually seeing the outside world is going to knock the conceitedness right out of that stride.

As we arrive at the carriages, there’s already crashing in the far distance—not close enough for me to worry, but enough for the horses to be tossing their heads, whinnying lightly in fear. The staff hold onto their reins tightly, but it hardly helps.

The lost queen startles next to me. Her green eyes dart around the scene, taking it all in.

“What is that banging?” she asks me eventually.

“It’s outside,” I answer vaguely, then shoot her a wide grin. “Are you sure you want to go out there?”

The grin seems to inspire her; her gaze steels over and she nods. I give her a slow shrug back and bark my orders at the staff. Before long, we’re sitting in the carriage, chugging away, the curtains closed, closing us in.

“It’s too late for us to go out of the castle town,” I say to her. “This is just to demonstrate my point to you.”

She folds a leg over the other and crosses her arms at the same time.

“I grew up in the human ice villages,” she grunts. “There’s no worse in the kingdom, I’m sure.”

I snicker.

“We’ll see.”

“Do you expect to shock me with poverty?” she asks me, eyes as sharp as flint. “Or pestilence? In Thawallow, we had an outbreak of the Weeping Fever every single winter, and it was so cold all year round that we never truly recovered. Most crops were impossible to grow. Every one of us survived by the skin of our teeth—I’m sure nothing a spoiled usurper like yourself could show me would surprise me.”

“Hm,” I grunt lightly.

She was glaring at me during her tirade, but she turns back to staring at the wall as we continue to travel.

“I know you grew up in the castle,” she continues. “You’ve been in the lap of luxury your entire life—I’m sure what you think is shocking is nothing short of mundane to me.”

That’s when I break out into harsh barks of laughter. Her head snaps back over to me:

“Lap of luxury?!” I snap. “You call being groomed to rule a kingdom via a cat o’ nine tails to the back luxurious? You claim that having an entire realm’s worth of lives in your hands is relaxing? Or making the decisions that inevitably end their lives a privilege and not some ongoing horror?”

She rolls her eyes at me.

“At least you had people around you,” she snaps. “Councils and advisors who inevitably truly make those decisions! When my sister’s life was in my hands, I had no one to help!”

“Councils and advisors who hate me! ” I clap back.

“My entire village hated me!” s he sneers.

“Yes, but have they tried to kill you?” I ask

She glowers but drops her gaze; I take that as my answer.

“My council has! I had to fend off my first assassination attempt at eleven years old! ” I snap. “If all you’ve had to deal with is village gossipers, then don’t ask for pity from me! ”

“Well, don’t ask for pity from me either!” she grunts. “Your council hating you is no excuse for all the kidnapped and murdered women—and everything else you’ve done!”

I can hear the outside now. The screaming, the chaos. She hears it, too; as she finishes her sentence, she’s trailing off, looking worriedly at the windows.

“You want to know why I do what I do?” I demand.

She looks at me, a little fear dancing behind the strength in her eyes.

“This is why!” I snap, and I draw the curtains around the window back.

She looks around, out into the castle town of Eyston, and gasps.

I take a second before I turn to look. I know it’s awful, and it takes me a second to build myself up to seeing it up close again.

The castle town was once the pride and joy of Faevea, as glorious and beautiful as the keep itself. It used to have shining white marble cobbles and carved pillars on almost every building. It had a glory to it that every citizen shared in, feeling grander by association with the city. That was before.

Now, every cobble is stained with so much mud and blood that they will never be white again, I’m sure. The pillars have been overturned, whether by exposure to nature, collateral damage from the wars, or purposely overturned by the bitter. The city is drenched in the remains of chamber pots, carelessly overturned in the streets. Corpses rot, with none caring enough to even drag them away. There are too many dying daily for any to keep up with digging graves. Even mass graves. And so, rotten flesh flecks off the bones of skeletons, both humanoid and animal, mingled together in a horrendous orgy of putrefying meat.

Even now, they fight. We pass by, and I see a Naga hanging from the roof of nearby ruins—once a fine building, I’m sure—and throw something. As we continue rolling by in the carriage, we see it land and explode. She flinches away from the window as it does. There’s screaming from where it lands, and I see others—either human or dark fae, I cannot tell—begin sprinting toward where the Naga was, weapons in hand, set on revenge.

“Oh, my… Gods! ” she gasps. “This… this can’t be—!”

“This is the world,” I grunt. “A stranger to itself now.”

“B-but Eyston is this magnificent city!” she gasps, looking at me. “It’s a hub of art and culture! I-its streets are paved with gold! It’s where the beauty of Faevea lies!”

“All ash in the wind now,” I answer. “That’s what it once was. The human settlements are so far away that it doesn’t surprise me that the news of its ruin hasn’t reached you.”

I glare at her.

“So, tell me now—tell me now— how unjustifiable everything I’ve done is!” I snarl. “Look me in the eye and tell me a harsh guard response isn’t warranted or that large-scale magical assault to prevent reinforcements from sieging the city isn’t necessary.” I lower my head and glare at her even more sharply. “That keeping the humans in the frozen North wasn’t the right thing to do.”

Her gaze softens a touch.

“You’re whining about crops being hard to grow up North,” I growl. “But this is the alternative! War! And not just any war—war between magically empowered species that have no qualms about taking humans as spoils! Your people could barely survive the Weeping Fever—you think they would survive being poisoned by Naga? Or struck by sirens?! The ice settlements are the only territory none fight after—it’s the only territory where humans would be safe!”

She just stares at me for a moment. I glare back.

“What?” I ask.

“I didn’t know your sympathies lay with humans,” she notes.

“My sympathies lie with every species!” I snap back. “But this land does not need a sympathetic king right now!”

Again, another moment of silence—relative silence, considering the chaos reigning outside—where she nods.

“And,” I say. “despite every effort on the part of me or my war council, things continue to decline. Our only hope to save the kingdom was the lost queen—the one fated to save us all, or raise the kingdom to the ground, depending on who got his hands on her first.”

She looks up at me, frowning.

“Who got…?” she begins to ask, trailing off.

“I wasn’t the only one looking for you,” I explain. “In fact, everyone aware of the legend of the lost queen was looking for you. Only the fact that you were, in fact, a human wasn’t common knowledge is what kept your villages peaceful for so many years. Since so many assumed the lost heir to be a dark fae, as many had always known the royals to be, they kept their searches to the other cities in Faevea.”

“I see…” She says.

“Every faction of this war had their eye out for you,” I continue. “With each of the factions aiming to use your power to win the kingdom for themselves. You are the only one who can fix the kingdom from its sorry state now, and many interpret that sentiment as their species being the oppressors. I want to return the kingdom to the era of peace it once was in.” I narrow my eyes and hang my head. “It just seems that I cannot be peaceful to achieve peace…”

“Right,” she says. “So… you say I cannot go see my sister in Thawallow because we wouldn’t survive the journey, basically? That we’d be attacked by every Naga, siren, dwarf, and dark fae who found us as we went?”

“That is a large part of my certain,” I tell her. “They know not who you are now, but they surely will. If nothing else, they’ll notice you by my side and make an educated guess. But there is an even greater threat—someone else looking for you, and this one knows you are a human. Worse still, this one doesn’t even want to save the world in their own way—this one wants to destroy Faevea, and he does so willingly.”

“Wait, what?” she asks. “Who would want to destroy Faevea? What idiot would actively aim to destroy the world they also live in?”

I take a breath to tell her, but then my stomach clenches, and only a half-truth slips from my lips:

“I know his name is Dralis, and he worships the god Mischevil,” I answer. “Mischevil is one of the more ancient gods of this land, and whilst those who worship him would defend him as a trickster god, truly, he is a god of suffering and sadism. Mischevil wants to burn this land to ashes and frolic in its charred remains.”

Her face has utterly curdled in disgust.

“But… why?” she asks. “Why would someone want to follow a god like that?”

I groan lightly before I answer.

“I don’t know, in truth,” I say. “I suppose to some people, being special is so much more important than the wellbeing of others. That’s one thing that Mischevil promises his followers: that they will be the special few who survive as the rest of the land burns away. They will be the special few. That appeals to some people.”

I look at her.

“One thing I do know for sure is that you are the key to all of this,” I tell her. “You, as the lost queen, have the power to either destroy or redeem this vile land, and if Dralis ever got his hands on you, every person in this land would likely be killed at the hands of Mischevil. The worst part of all of this is that I know for a fact that Dralis is out there, looking for you right now.”