Page 3 of Disillusioned (A Lay of Ruinous Reign #2)
“ I assure you,” Lilac said, resisting the most unlady-like urge to uncross her ankles beneath her thick chiffon gown and start fanning herself in the late spring heat. “No one is attacking.”
The boy stepped up from the line of about one dozen townsfolk who had traveled to the castle for an audience. In the center of the Grand Hall, he had introduced himself as a blacksmith’s son from La Guerche . He couldn’t have been older than fifteen.
He clutched his cap to his chest. “But my father insisted I come and warn you.” The woman behind him, who was accompanied by a handcuffed prisoner wearing a burlap sack over his head, nudged the boy roughly in the back.
“Y-your Majesty. He saw plumes of smoke yesterday, just before dawn. Said they were signals.”
“Well,” she replied, her ears growing warm, unsure of the most appropriate way to argue with a near child.
“He might’ve misinterpreted them. There are scouts already all over Fougères and Vitré, and it is warming up.
Perhaps they were travelers,” she said, noting the fortress villages within a day’s trip north of his town.
“Trust me, if there was concern—which there is not—I would have received word by now.”
“This is why we waited a few weeks after your accession to accept inquiries at the King’s Bench,” John, the family scribe, muttered with a yawn. He rapped the desk from Lilac’s left. “Next.”
“Please, Your Majesty,” the boy pleaded, wringing his hands.
One of the guards stood from the table against the wall near the courtyard entrance. Some of the crowd behind him began to whisper amongst themselves.
“ Gods —there is no need for panic,” Lilac hastily announced to the room. “No one is coming. No one is attacking.”
“Is His Grace available?” the boy inquired, straining gently against the guard attempting to tug him away. “My father suggested I might appeal to him if there was any trouble.”
“No.” She’d specifically asked her father not to interfere, told him that his scribe was sufficient and had seen to enough of their family affairs to stand in place of a council or Henri’s supervision during her first Court of Common Appeals. “No, he is not.”
“Would you mind sparing your castle guards, then? Or direct some of the guards from Fougères to protect us and the smaller towns?”
Most of her kingdom’s experienced militia were nearly aged out of service, with the last skirmish they’d fought being over half a decade ago.
After the Raid led by Laurent and Garin, her grandfather had been forced to focus on quelling fear in the towns, meanwhile allowing for consensual vampire feedings to avoid something as gruesome from happening again.
The Le Tallecs did not agree, and when Armand inherited his title as a child after his father went mad and was denounced, the training of a new army—the next generation’s recruits—fell to the wayside.
Of course, efforts were not revived under Henri, either, and Armand’s attention had pivoted to hunting Daemons since her father undid her grandfather’s feeding law after her Daemon tongue was revealed.
She considered him carefully. Historically, that was what the fortress villages were purposed for. There was no harm in dispatching a few of the guards from Fougères, but doing so publicly would stoke panic in the towns.
“Until there is official word, until there is documentation of French troops at our borders, I will refrain. I cannot have the country in hysteria without reason, especially after my ceremony.” She eyed the guard beside him. “Take him. ”
The guard dutifully escorted the complaining boy out into the bailey through the courtyard.
Lilac leaned into the scribe. “Send my order to increase the perimeter presence in Louvigne and Fougères. Quietly.”
She sighed, rubbing her temples. The first three requests had been easy enough—not without trouble, but their complaints weren’t entirely unexpected.
The first two had blamed their drying crops on curses, due to the presence of the witches and warlocks allowed to live in the town.
Lilac had asked them if they’d simply considered asking the witches they suspected if they were responsible, if there was some obscure vendetta one held over them worthy of withering cabbages.
The answer, of course, was no. She invited them to perhaps see if those witches had anything to help their said withering crops.
The third asked if she could truly speak to Daemons, and when her answer was an unflinching yes, she had the nerve to ask if Lilac could then simply communicate to the creatures that the townsfolk of Paimpont wished to be left alone, citing a korrigan thievery that had long ago taken place at a bakery there.
She was reminded then of little Aife stuffing her mouth with the smooshed pastries from her bag and the korikaned’s horrified mother, fearing terrible retaliation.
Lilac’s answer was straightforward, that these issues would only lessen because she intended to make changes to the treaty that gradually allowed for the Daemons to integrate into society.
That had silenced the room. Needless to say, no one had seemed satisfied with any of her answers so far.
“ Next ,” repeated John, scribbling onto the piece of parchment unfurling onto his lap.
The woman who stood behind the boy dragged her prisoner to the desk, his hands tied with a familiar reddish-brown rope.
She snatched the bag off his head—it was a man whose black hair had been chopped crudely as if with a knife, reminding her of her own lopsided haircut done by the blade at her thigh.
She shifted, suddenly reminded how uncomfortable her scalp felt beneath the ridiculous towering wig that squeezed her head, thanks to her mother and Yanna, who’d insisted on cramming her into it for court .
Lilac tossed a pale yellow ringlet out of her eyes. “What are we looking at?”
“This,” she croaked, reaching into her apron pocket and pulling out a sheet, holding it for the room to see.
It was the WANTED illustration her scribe had drawn under Adelaide’s spell.
The pair on the poster resembled what could be described at best, a caricature of a vampire and witch—the former with huge fangs and wide ears, the latter with hollowed eyes and gaunt cheekbones. “Is one of your dungeon escapees.”
John leaned forward, peering closer. He blinked. “Did I draw that, Your Majesty? I don’t recall?—”
“Yes, you did. We were all very shaken after my ceremony.”
“How much is your reward?” the villager pressed.
Lilac held up a hand. This was absurd. “That is not him.”
“Well,” the man said, his words barely audible through the cloth wrapped around his mouth, “what might the bail amount be?”
“It resembles him perfectly.” The woman slapped a hand on his back. “He entered my bedroom as I was asleep.” She yanked down the collar of her dress, showing a large red mark upon her throat. “Tried to suck me dry, he did.” She tapped the man again. “Didn’t you?”
“I did.”
“Is that so?” Lilac leered at the pair. “Is that… hawthorn on his wrists?”
“Yes.” Then her eyes widened at the man’s unaffected hands. “I-I mean no, it’s not.”
Lilac forced herself to swallow the sudden wave of frustration that rose. This formality had proven pointless. It might’ve helped if someone actually came in with an valid complaint.
No one had taken her seriously. Not one of them.
And why would they? a voice in the back of her mind asked. She had no real experience in ruling, no experience out in town except for that day at the Le Tallec manor, and Adelaide’s marsh was the closest she’d been since then.
She trailed her clammy, sticky fingers over the worn cherrywood. Several decrees and rulings had taken place here, some that had changed the course of history for Brittany, for better and for worse.
Tonight would mark one more at The Fenfoss Inn, forever altering the history of her kingdom and completing her and Garin’s bargain with Kestrel.
They’d settle and sign the Accords that would reinstate her grandfather’s law and set a new precedent in defining the Daemons’ rights as citizens of her kingdom.
The faerie king had been gracious with his time—by the day of her coronation ball, as marked in their contract.
It had been scheduled for the middle of summer, but shortly after her accession ceremony her parents advised she move the date up.
Lilac had protested at first, but once Garin informed her in passing—under the dramatic guise of uttering a prayer over her—that he came upon an agreed date with all their invitees, she had no qualms. The sooner she got both the meeting and her ball over with, the better—and so, her coronation invitations promptly went out for the end of May, and so did those for the Accords meeting at the inn on the eve of the third Sunday after she ascended the throne.
In two weeks, the crown would be bestowed upon her head in this very room, and Kestrel would be appeased, then relieving the threat of Garin’s becoming possessed with the urge to kill her again.
By all means, she would’ve very much liked to avoid it.
“Actually,” she began, and the small crowd and even the guards looked shocked to see her rise from her seat.
“The two in question have been pardoned. There are no wanted witch and vampire; they were only prisoners in the first place under Sinclair’s orders and not mine.
” Lilac gripped the edge of the desk. “And, might I remind you— where is Sinclair and his family today?”
She raised her brows. Lilac’s rhetorical question hung uncomfortably in the still air. She nodded in answer, not caring that the heat was getting to her. “Prisoners in their own?—”
The double doors at the front of the room flew open, and in barged a small brigade. Armand was at the front, carried by four guards, writhing, his face twisted in a gruesome grimace, mouth open in a silent scream.