Page 21

Twenty-One

Ayna

Tori doesn’t ask before he grabs Myron’s and Royad’s hands and site-hops them out then returns within a heartbeat to get Herinor and Silas, who have the good sense to shift into their bird forms first so they make it easier for Tori to transport them. Kaira takes his open hand, and I hop onto his shoulder before he can object or, worse, leave me behind. The last thing I see is Tata’s blade flash silver and crimson as she runs through the leftover soldiers with a stone-hard expression.

Unlike I’d imagined, Tori doesn’t drop us off in the throne room but takes us to the highest point of the palace: one of the towers marking the corners of the building.

“Fucking Hel,” Silas breathes as the two Crow males shift back into their fae form, staring down into the streets behind the palace walls where fairies lay slain on the cobblestones in puddles of their own blood, their faces contorted in frozen horror.

My chest constricts as I scan the city as far as my eyes will allow and find more and more bodies scattered along the alleys. The lively buzz usually defining the city during the days and early night hours is gone, replaced by the stench of death and panic. But what’s worse is the utter silence.

There are no lights flickering in the windows, no hooves clopping along the roads, no merchants shouting out their goods.

“What happened?” Herinor takes my words right from my tongue, whispering them into the grave-like quiet.

Tori’s shoulders lift as he heaves a breath so deep I wonder if he’s breathed at all since Recienne ordered him to bring us back to Aceleau. “We don’t know. We haven’t had the chance to question anyone.”

His tone is too calm, too quiet, and I barely dare ask, “Where are the others?” Kaira shudders as my thoughts drift through her mind link.

By the others, I mean all of them: the Fairy King, Myron, Royad, but also those who remained at the palace when we set out for battle. Clio, Sanja.

My crow ears strain for any sound that might give away they are somewhere in the solid stone building beneath us.

“Recienne, Myron, and Royad are securing the premises.” Tori nods at the gardens below where I indeed spot three dark forms gliding between bushes on silent feet in the falling night. “But what we can say so far is that it’s only the western part of the city. They left the eastern and southern districts alone, probably out of fear of alarming the soldiers camping right outside the walls.”

The audacity to attack in a city crawling with powerful fairies…

“Who would do something like this?” The shock weighs heavy on Kaira’s shoulders, even when she straightens them, defying the horror unfolding before us.

Tori’s head turns toward her even when his eyes keep scanning the palace grounds like he could weed out any danger by sheer willpower. “Who do you think?”

“Erina wouldn’t dare set foot in this city. Not without a host of soldiers,” I think at them, and Herinor bobs his head, hand twitching to his sword as he seems to be counting the corpses in the streets.

“This has Ephegos written all over it,” the male agrees, and even Silas dips his chin, for once at a loss for words.

Kaira faces Herinor, turning her back to where I’m still perched on Tori’s shoulder. “If you know him so well, why don’t you tell us where to find him so I can slit the bastard’s throat.”

Terror isn’t the right description for what flickers in Herinor’s eyes at her statement. It’s something similar laced with a deadly calm on the surface that keeps his emotions buried deep enough that they don’t leap from his tongue or his sword as he growls, “You are not going anywhere near Ephegos.”

It’s an order, and Kaira isn’t having it.

She merely turns toward Silas standing next to Herinor, grabbing for her bow as if she’d shoot Ephegos from the skies. “Since your friend isn’t cooperating: where do you think we can find the traitor?”

With a sharp shake of his head, Silas gently pushes her hand away from her bow. “Ephegos wouldn’t be stupid enough to show his face in this city. He must have sent a magic-wielding unit to slay so many fairies that quickly. A unit of Crows who are masters at unweaving wards,” he says, reminding us of how they got free of the spells binding them into the Seeing Forest to begin with. “That also explains how they got into the city.”

Tori nods his agreement, and the rumble of rage in his chest makes my entire bird body tremble. “The patrols haven’t found the assailants,” he says after another deep breath that makes me feel like I’m sitting in a boat on a rocky ocean. “They were already out searching when we arrived. Clio gave the order when the screaming started.” He lowers his head an inch as if he can’t bear the thought of Clio anywhere near the slaughter having occurred in this city. “The patrols only found the dead. In the streets and in their homes. This isn’t the work of soldiers. It’s the work of assassins.”

“Lots of assassins,” Silas adds in that dark, toneless voice he normally uses to deliver jokes, but there’s no humor in his eyes. Nothing but the cold promise of violence as he shifts his gaze from the grave this city has become to Tori and me. “Ephegos had a small army of assassins deliver a message.”

“That he can get to us whenever he wants, wherever he wants, and there is nothing we can do about it,” I think at them, and no one objects.

As if it’s the only thing keeping his shoulders from hunching, Tori squares them an inch before facing Silas fully. “The battle was a diversion,” he says with that dry analytic tone of the general despite the trembling of his muscles straining beneath my claws as he fights to hold himself in place when he hasn’t been able to make a full assessment of the damage. “The city was the real target.”

Recienne and Myron confirm as much when we meet them half an hour later in the throne room, all of us caked with blood from the battle we so foolishly ran into while Ephegos used the time to slaughter half a district in this city.

The four Crow males are standing a few feet from the stone dais at the front of the pompous room, next to Clio, Tori, and Kaira, on whose shoulder I’m now perched, not because I don’t want to be close to Myron but because I can watch him better from my current spot, his serious expression, the grief in his eyes, the contained anger at what happened.

Rubbing his face, Recienne leans against the dais where his carved throne stands ready for the king of Askarea. Beside him, Queen Sanja is perched on the stone lip, her hand sliding back and forth over her belly as if soothing the unborn babe growing there. “It’s not your fault,” she says to her mate, her tone not gentle but scolding, as if the Fairy King frequently beats himself up about things he didn’t have a hand in.

Recienne merely shakes his head. “I should have known?—”

“You couldn’t have known,” she cuts him off.

“I should have anticipated , then,” he corrects, but the anguish in his eyes when he places his hands left and right of his hips on the smooth rock speaks volumes about how it doesn’t matter what anyone says. He’s taking full responsibility for his people’s deaths, even when it wasn’t his hand that delivered it.

Sanja twists to the side, her small, bronze hand covering his fingers, squeezing. “Listen to me, Rogue,” she says in a strict tone that has me flinching where I hover on Kaira’s shoulder. My sister tenses beneath my claws.

“Rogue?” she echoes in her mind and I realize what the Fairy Queen called him.

“A nickname, I suppose.” It’s all I can think before Tori shoots both of us a forbidding glance.

“No one outside this room can know,” he tells me, as always, privy to my thoughts, even without the mind link Kaira is still keeping up. “Recienne is Rogue only to his friends.”

And even with the alliance we forged, we aren’t considered friends. Not really.

Recienne murmurs something to Sanja that is swept up by his unique power and delivered to her ears only, I expect, but his eyes meet mine. “It’s not that I don’t consider you a friend, Crow Queen. I’m just careful who I let see this real side of me. Not the king but the male.”

I understand, I want to say, but I don’t push my thoughts outward. If he decides I’m the only one to hear this, I want to keep it between us.

“Sanja is my heart, my soul, my life, the same as you are for the Crow King. It frequently proves impossible not to become Rogue with my mate at my side.” His words are still for me only, and I cherish this moment of trust between two allies who have fought battles together and survived. Between two monarchs who both learned to hide their true selves from the world, to lock up their emotions to ease the burden of others.

I see him, then. Rogue, the male: the slightly hunched shoulders, the weary expression that means countless sleepless nights.

Whether he finds that recognition in my eyes or he senses the change in me by different means, I don’t care as he says for everyone to hear, “You can all call me Rogue.”

He doesn’t reprimand his mate for spilling his secret, instead placing an arm around her shoulders and tucking her to his side, the face of the king returning, but much softer, more open as he lays out all the things he’s set in motion.

The patrols have been tripled in the untouched districts while a few units of soldiers are helping take care of the dead. Some of the corpses have been brought into the healers’ quarters for examination with the result that there were two sorts of assaults: simple cutting throats of the low magic fairies who would have been too weak to fight with their powers even against a strong human soldier, and those involving the magic-nullifying drug. Those fairies must have been splashed with the serum the same way the Flames did in the ambush in the Plithian Plains. They show more signs of putting up a fight, but eventually, all their throats were cut.

“I’ve ordered additional sentries on the battlements. Even when the palace wasn’t touched in the attack, we can never be too careful,” Recienne explains. “The army is ready to react should another attack happen.”

But it won’t. Herinor, Royad, Myron, and even Silas are all sharing that same expression, telling me they know, if this was Ephegos’s doing, he’s not going to attack immediately again.

Tori must have picked up on it as well because he pins Myron with a look. “You don’t think they will attack again?”

Myron’s throat bobs as if he’s put on trial, but his voice is steady as he answers, “Ephegos relishes terrorizing others. If this attack was truly ordered by him, he’ll enjoy our fear and confusion. He’ll draw out the time until his next attack, keeping us on edge, restless, wondering when he’ll strike next. The Ephegos I’ve gotten to know in Erina’s dungeons wants us to fear him, wants us to not dare close our eyes at night.”

He means it, and that’s what scares me more than the thought of another attack. Myron is afraid. He hides it well, but I know better, know the little tells even when, in my bird form, I can barely feel him through the mating bond.

“If the battle was a diversion to guide our attention and forces away from the city, making this statement probably wasn’t all he wanted,” Herinor says between gritted teeth. I wonder how much it hurts to speak those words.

He knows something, and no matter how diplomatically he puts it so he won’t upset his bargain with Ephegos, I can tell by the way his light green eyes shine that he wants us to know.

So I flutter to his shoulder, ignoring his cringe of surprise and Myron’s of concern, and dig my claws hard into his leathers. “Whatever you know, Herinor, you better spill now, or I’ll kick you out of this court so fast you can’t even curse your own stupid bargain for it.”