Page 2 of Queen of Ever (Curse of Fate and Fae #2)

Chapter 2

Tarian

‘Y ou cannot cross the Sunder.’ Arun said the words with the unyielding patience of someone trying to reign in an unbroken horse. Calm, but without room for argument. He had repeated the phrase so often now that it might have been easier to just carve it into his forehead. He always stood in doorways when he said it, like his body was a physical barrier to support the words, and I had the impression that he was preparing himself to wrestle me into submission if the need arose.

I suspected that moment was drawing closer and closer.

‘I could,’ I retorted, fists balled, full of restless energy as I faced him down. ‘It’s just a river.’

‘You and I both know that’s not true.’ His patience was aggravating. Surely, he was as frustrated by this repetitive conversation as I was. If he would only start yelling at me, I could yell back, and then I’d have an outlet for the aggression boiling and churning inside me. ‘If you go after her, you’ll only make things worse.’

‘Not for me. Nothing could be worse than this incessant waiting .’

‘You’d make it worse for her.’ This helpful contribution was thrown in from behind me, where Ethan, Imogen’s half-breed friend, was sitting in one of the library armchairs, tutting at one of the scrolls Arun had presented us with. ‘These reports make it sound like she’s having a grand old time over there, all feasting and lessons and new gowns,’ he said, his words sounding reasonable, but that lift of an eyebrow saying something he wasn’t. ‘Dumping her into the middle of a war probably comes a distinct second to that. And it hardly seems like a good way to make her forgive you.’

‘She is unharmed,’ Arun added evenly. ‘Every time we do this, you see evidence of that. If these reports are going to keep provoking you, I’m going to stop making them.’

‘That isn’t your decision to make,’ I snarled, but he only raised his eyebrows. After a few seething moments of holding his challenge, I finally submitted, stalking back to my chair and slumping into it. I seized another of the reports and stared at it, taking in the information in snatches. This one looked like it came from a servant and listed the different tutors Solas had engaged for her. Magic and etiquette and dancing . Like he was grooming her to be—I severed the end of the thought. I was supposed to be settling my rage, not winding it back up.

‘And don’t forget that she hates you right now,’ Ethan continued, flicking the scroll back onto the table and brushing his white-blond hair out of his eyes. ‘Embarrassing her by rolling up at the Seelie Palace and demanding she be returned to you like a piece of property is much less endearing than you think it is. If you intend to beg, on the other hand...’

I only glared at him, not quite having the composure to admit he was right when my instincts were gnawing at me with serrated teeth. My temper was so close to the surface these days, enflamed by this constant, nagging sense that I should be somewhere else, somewhere across the thin ribbon of the Sunder River. Some nights it was so bad that I walked in my sleep, treading the corridors and stairwells and balconies like a ghost, constantly seeking, grasping, following the pull of instinct that I could barely suppress while I was awake.

‘I have to do something,’ I said finally.

‘You are doing something.’ Arun clearly didn’t think it safe enough to vacate the doorway yet, continuing to contribute from his position as a barrier. ‘You’re monitoring the situation.’

‘ You are doing the monitoring. And Imogen isn’t a situation.’

‘No, she’s a person. Which is why you need to think carefully and act with restraint. You’re keeping tabs on what’s happening to her, and nothing has given us any reason to suspect she isn’t being treated with respect and consideration by the Seelie Court. If it were otherwise, there might be cause to do something drastic, but for now she is safe while we find a diplomatic way to get to her.’

‘And how long is that going to take exactly?’ Ethan added, leaning forward in his seat now, hands clasped together on his knees.

Arun shot him a frown shadowed in warning. ‘These things take time.’

‘It’s already taken too much,’ Ethan replied, clearly ignoring the fact that Arun wanted him to shut his mouth. ‘You can’t keep waving scrolls under my nose and expecting me to believe that means she’s happy. I want to talk to her and know for sure.’

‘I thought you just said going to the Seelie Court was a bad idea,’ I said. I watched him, reading his face, the worry carved around his eyes. This was the only thing that had stopped us from being at each other’s throats; the fact that we both cared for Imogen. A good thing too, because he’d been staying at Dreadhold since I’d fished him out of the Shadowmire, and he got on my nerves almost as much as Ves did, with his scorn and his sarcasm and his tendency to leave glitter everywhere he went.

‘I said it’s a bad idea for you ,’ he replied. ‘ I have only refrained from going to her because James Bond over here has made me promise to let him try this his way first.’

‘Who is James Bond?’ Arun asked, his frown deepening.

‘Ugh, I can’t believe I’m making decisions based on your information. Who is James Bond? What kind of spy master are you?’ Ethan flung himself back in his seat, closed his eyes and massaged his temples. ‘If Imogen winds up in trouble because we left her there for so long, I’m going to blame you personally.’

The idea that Imogen might be in trouble and I might not know it sent me to my feet again. ‘I’ve had enough.’

Arun took a subtle step backwards, effectively wedging himself in that doorway. ‘I don’t—’

‘I’m not going to the Seelie Court. Ethan’s right,’ I cut in, shooting the halfling a look. ‘It won’t help her if I go barging in there uninvited. But I’m not sitting around here combing through reports for another afternoon.’ I’d already scoured them all, anyway. ‘I’m going to see Dhrigada.’

Arun’s stance softened a little. ‘Alright. What for?’

‘Because she reads the damn stars. As far as I’m concerned, she’s fate’s accomplice. Maybe she can use her sight to see a way forwards or tell me what I’m supposed to do.’ Because if Imogen and I were fated, then surely fate’s plan wasn’t for me to sit around here, playing nice and obeying the rules and leaving Imogen to the mercy of the Seelie Court.

He eyed me sceptically. ‘I’m not sure she’ll give you the answers you want, and you’d have to use the waypoint system to reach her anyway. You don’t want a visit to Dhrigada reported to the queen.’

‘You’d be better off going to Ruisin,’ Ethan chimed in airily, flinging his legs over the armrest of the chair. A strange comment that attracted my interest even more when Arun shot him a look that was meant to silence and sever.

‘Who?’ I asked immediately.

‘Ruisin,’ Ethan continued, holding Arun’s stare. ‘What? I don’t have your hang-ups. I think he should know.’

‘We had an agreement,’ Arun said, his voice low.

Ethan waved a hand through the air. ‘Until now. I’m sick of waiting.’

‘One of you needs to fill me in.’ My tone reflected my growing frustration as I realised they’d been having conversations about this behind my back and had kept something from me that might be important.

‘Look, you can’t cross into Seelie lands because you don’t want to violate the terms of the treaty and it’ll wind up being a disaster of pomp and bluster if you do, but what if there was a loophole in the way the treaty was written that would make it possible to go without starting a war?’ Ethan said, now looking determinedly away from Arun.

‘Why are you phrasing it as a question when it seems like you already have the answer?’

Ethan rolled his eyes. ‘Don’t get grouchy with me. He’s the one who didn’t want me talking about this with you, so he’s the one you can take up your temper with. Look, I’m a halfling. We have different ideas about the way the realm works that aren’t so high and mighty as you royals. The Seelie and Unseelie divide doesn’t matter the same when we’re persecuted on either side of the Sunder.’

A quiet knock interrupted us, and Arun stepped out of the doorway to reveal Sarah—one of the housemaids at Dreadhold—standing in it, knuckles still raised against the open door. Already diminutive in stature, she shrank a little at the weight of our combined attention, her dark hair hiding her face from us as she stared down at her feet. The sight of her made me uncomfortable. It always did, now. If I wanted to put a name to the feeling, I would have called it guilt . Yet another remnant of Imogen’s time here; I’d never felt guilty about the lives of human changelings before.

‘I’m just here to stoke the fire,’ she said timidly.

‘I can do it,’ I immediately replied.

She shifted her weight, pinning her stare to the ground. ‘If it please you, sir.’

When she vanished from the doorway, Arun shook his head. ‘You know it only confuses her when you do that.’

‘Yes, I know. I’m damned no matter what I do,’ I muttered, taking wood from the box nearby and loading it onto the fire. I was caught in a miserable loop. Guilty when Sarah did anything to serve me, guilty when I refused her service and baffled her. I wished I could send her away, send all the changelings away, but where would they go? Service was all they’d ever known. I couldn’t send them back to the human world where they’d never had a life and wouldn’t know how to make one, couldn’t just set them loose in the Unseelie Kingdom where they would be prey or sport for any number of beings who saw humans as fair game, couldn’t send them to another household where they might be treated cruelly. So instead, I confused them. Gave them extra holidays they didn’t ask for. Offended Madam Hetia when I made suggestions about how much work they were expected to do, how much time they should have to themselves, how they were cared for. It felt clumsy and inadequate.

Imogen would have teased me for it. And would probably have had some practical solution that seemed perfectly obvious to her.

When I sat back down across from Ethan, I found him looking at me with a funny half smile twisting his mouth. ‘What?’

‘Oh, nothing,’ he replied, a thread of laughter in his tone.

‘Ruisin,’ I repeated, hearing Arun’s heavy sigh from halfway across the room.

‘Your High Fae history likes to harp on about Oberon, but he wasn’t the one who brought the lesser fae into the fold when the realm was united,’ Ethan began, kicking his legs, still strung out over the armrest. ‘Ruisin is the one who managed that. But he was written out of your history when he was exiled to the Whisper Wastes.’

‘That sounds a bit far-fetched.’

‘Why? Because you’ve never heard of him? Wouldn’t be the first time High Fae have scorned the stories of the lessers.’

‘Arun, do you know of this?’

Arun drew closer to us, standing with his arms folded, expression pensive. ‘There are… rumours. Stories that support it.’

‘Alright, say it is true that there was some lesser fae from Oberon’s time living in the Whisper Wastes. How does this help me?’

‘Well, Ruisin is a dragon.’

‘A dragon ? I thought they were long gone.’ Dragons had died out long before my time. From what I understood of them, they had vast, complex magical abilities, but when they’d begun breeding with other species, they’d wound up with difficulties bearing viable young. So, they died out. Or so I’d thought.

‘All but one.’ Ethan swung his legs back to the floor. ‘Rumour has it he was given a portal when he was exiled, one that can reach anywhere in the realm, just to torment him since he can never set foot in either Seelie or Unseelie kingdom again.’

It was an interesting idea. There were no portals between the Seelie and Unseelie Kingdoms. Those lines had been severed long ago. ‘But why was he exiled?’

Ethan shrugged. ‘Don’t know. Doesn’t really matter though, does it? The important part is that you might not be able to cross the border, but you could pop in and out through an unmonitored portal without anyone being the wiser.’

‘Assuming he wouldn’t kill you on sight,’ Arun muttered. ‘Or once he realises who you are.’

I ignored Arun’s comment, tapping my fingers against the arm of the chair as I thought. Dragon treasure hoards had been legendary. Perhaps I could buy my way into the creature’s tolerance.

‘Tarian, you need to think this through,’ Arun continued, his voice growing in force as he seemed to realise I was considering my options. ‘Please don’t go charging off into the Whisper Wastes to visit a dragon. It isn’t safe for you, and even if you get out of it alive and he shows you a way into the Seelie lands, it won’t be what’s best for her. You do want what’s best for her, don’t you?’

I clenched my jaw against the throb of guilt and shame that surfaced. It was something I always carried now, so ready to reignite and remind me that it was my fault Imogen was in the Seelie Court in the first place. ‘Yes.’

‘Then you won’t go. Going after her would be about you, not her.’

‘Fine,’ I said, rising to my feet again.

‘Then where are you going?’

‘Out. I can’t breathe in here.’

Arun didn’t try to stop me this time and he stepped out of my way. Perhaps he realised he’d done enough arguing for the day. In the end, I had to make my own decisions.

I didn’t find it any easier to breathe from the North Tower, where I sat with my feet slung over the edge, tempting the wind to dislodge me and send me plunging down. The gloom of an overcast afternoon was giving way to dusk, and beyond the walls of Dreadhold the fires of the nearby town were being lit and the Shadowmire was waking. In the distance, I could spot Melaie diving through the sky, probably having spotted something to hunt. I’d never felt so caged here before, never so restless.

When the queen had first consented to my taking up residence at Dreadhold, the place had seemed like an implausible haven, an escape. She’d always wanted to keep me close so she could keep a tight grip on my strings. But as I’d matured and the reality of the terrible magic running through me became clearer, she must have realised her days of tormenting me without consequence were numbered.

And that number was rapidly growing smaller. I was going to make her pay for taking Imogen’s name from me.