Page 5 of Queen of Ever (Curse of Fate and Fae #2)

Chapter 5

Tarian

A run’s advice couldn’t keep me at grounded for long. The Whisper Wastes were a long, long way from Dreadhold. A stretch of wasteland beyond the Brass Mountains, outside the border of the kingdom, we’d been flying for the better part of two days to reach them. I’d never had cause to cross into them before—few fae would, since they were all but uninhabitable. They were a stretch of grey, cracked land, rutted with deep canyons and stretching all the way to the horizon. It was a miserable, lifeless place, ruined by the magic of a long-ago war, the one that drove Oberon to seek a path to forced peace. There were few beings that could live there. When we touched down, Melaie was all quivering attention, head raised and eyes alert, snapping her beak back and forth and sniffing the wind. I dismounted with a hand on her neck.

‘Steady,’ I murmured as she shifted, making uneasy trilling noises in the back of her throat. I surveyed the cavernous mouth of the cave before me, feeling that same uneasiness in my blood that was causing her to dance, settling at the base of my spine and crawling its way up. There was a sense of wrong about the place, about the way the dark cave entrance gaped out of the ground like a yawning mouth. Melaie nudged her beak against my chest, pushing me into stumbling, before glancing to the sky with wild eyes, as though she was saying why are we here? Let’s leave before it’s too late.

‘I’ll be right back,’ I said, running a hand down the smooth curve of her beak. She watched me with a single, narrowed yellow eye, like she didn’t believe me. A chill breeze swept through the canyon, reaching beneath my shirt and skating over my skin, and I suppressed a shudder as I eyed the dark path I was about to tread. ‘Don’t stray.’

She rumbled in the back of her throat, gaze fixed on the cave mouth as I left her and walked towards it, magic already buzzing at my fingertips in anticipation. Ethan had sourced directions to this particular canyon, one marked by scorched ground and shaped like a crescent moon, and he’d been shifty in revealing how he’d attained the information. I knew it was as rash as Arun had warned to come here on such shady intelligence, so rash I hadn’t told him I was going. It would only worry him, and I’d made up my mind to go no matter what he said.

The ground dropped steeply away, descending into a dusty dark that felt like it would swallow me. But walking into it was still better than doing nothing, still better than waiting around reading reports and dreaming of Imogen. Shafts of daylight cut through the shadows ahead, like pinpricks of reality reaching into the depths of possibility, and I sought them out, bound in the oppressive sense of unwelcome that weighed down on me, as present as the humidity. Leave, the walls seemed to whisper. You don’t belong here. And as a High Fae prince, I didn’t. But I went anyway.

The path levelled out, still muddled with shafts of filtered daylight, opening into a wide cavern that echoed with my footsteps. The air was thick, dormant, and it settled over me like something sticky. As I picked my way into the cavern, I began to catch sight of shards of bone in the sand. Ribs and knuckles and skulls. Animal, mostly, but not all. When my gaze caught on something glinting up at me from beneath what looked like a pelvis, I bent, plucked it up and twisted it this way and that in a beam of light. A green gemstone the size of a grape. I rolled it between my fingers.

‘H ow fortunate,’ a voice hissed, wrapping around me, shivering across my skin and raising the hairs on the back of my neck. ‘ It has been long since a High Fae has been foolish enough to wander into my lair.’

I dropped the gemstone and dusted my fingers off on my shirt. ‘Ruisin?’ I called. In the depths of the cavern, something was moving in the dark, unfurling with a crunching of sand and clinking of stones. A luminous eye blinked open, reflecting the light like a cat’s. A deep, rumbling growl shook the ground as the eye began to move, drawing closer, and a head began emerging around it. I couldn’t help the thrill of fear that sent me jolting back a step and turned my fingertips cold with magic waiting to be unleashed. A long, scaled snout baring teeth as long as my forearm, two enormous curling horns. A burst of hot air pummelled into me as he growled again, and it reeked of smoke and decay. I began to see vivid flashes of those teeth sinking into my flesh, those huge, clawed feet gripping me, as the fear became a frantic, high-pitched demand to run .

‘ Who is this boy who speaks my name as though he has a right to know it?’

I shuddered at the words spoken directly into my mind, disgusted with the oily feeling they left behind, like I’d been invaded by a foreign presence in my own damn head.

‘Someone who has brought you a gift,’ I said, trying to rein in that bodily fear and keep my voice forceful, full of the authority I had to try to wield. Slowly, I bent low, rolled the fat, glistening orb of black opal across the floor, flashing seams of red and blue and green as it caught in a beam of sunlight. Plucked from among my grandmother’s treasures. There was nothing like consulting the tastes of one old dragon to appease another. Ruisin lowered his snout to it, gave a huffing sniff that stirred the dust, sending particles spiralling through the beams of sunlight. ‘And someone who knows you were present when Oberon split the lands of the Seelie and Unseelie.’

He drew back, turning his head until he fixed me with his other eye. ‘ You seem to know many things you ought not to, faeling. I’ve long been written from Oberon’s story and left to rot in my exile.’

‘If you help me, I could end your exile.’

Ruisin’s head stopped swaying, stilling as his eye narrowed. With another buffet of hot, stinking breath, he opened his maw, displaying all those pointed teeth, and roared. I cringed down as the sound shook the cave, sending streams of dust trickling from the ceiling. He kept his teeth bared as he drew closer to me again, pacing forward and revealing the rolling, muscled body at the end of his neck, easily big enough to swallow me whole and still be hungry for more. A pair of wings were folded into his sides, their ends dragging on the floor.

‘Do not toy with me by offering that which you cannot give. There is little to hunt in these lands. I will be glad to make a meal of you.’

‘I don’t make idle promises. I’m the heir to the Unseelie throne. If I don’t have the power to end your exile now, one day I will.’

He snapped his jaw shut. ‘ A prince, is it?’ His head drew closer, tilting to better see me. ‘ Moriana’s boy.’ The words resonated in my head with more weight than the others he’d spoken, making me grit my teeth against the sensation, leaving me with the conviction that he knew my mother personally. And that it would only make him more likely to eat me. ‘Then the royal line only grows stupider as the eons pass. You’ve no power while you are only heir to a throne, and I am not so isolated that I don’t know of your prophecy, prince.’

‘A temporary barrier. I’ll wear that crown one day. I might not be able to repay a favour until then, but if you’ve been around since the days of Oberon, what’s a bit more time?’

‘ And what sort of help are you seeking?’

‘A halfling friend of mine told me your history and where to find you. I mean no disrespect in coming here. I’m only looking for information.’

He considered me for a long, tense moment, raking me over with that unblinking eye. Then he huffed and withdrew his head, turning on his great haunches as his body began to warp, shift, scales rippling as his legs shortened, his tail and his wings rescinding, his entire being shrinking down, down, down, until I was no longer raising my eyebrows in disbelief at a dragon, but at a naked man poking around a mound of what looked like rags mingled with gemstones, tarnished silverware and jewellery that had been hidden beneath his massive bulk a few moments ago. He was huge, broad-backed and taller than me by at least a head, and I wasn’t exactly diminutive. He fished what looked like a tattered old towel out of the pile and shook some of the dust and sand free, before tying it around himself and turning back to me. His skin was weathered to an almost leather-like appearance and covered in old wounds that stood out in pale scar tissue. There was one across his chest that looked like he’d just about been split from collar to sternum at some point, and I wondered who would be bold enough to take a blade to a dragon like that. Wondered with even more interest what sort of blade they’d had that could cut through dragon hide, which was supposed to be almost impenetrable. The only vestiges of his dragon form that remained were the pair of curling horns poking out of his matted hair, and those unnerving eyes that he fixed back on me.

‘No funny business, prince. I could eat you in this form just as well as I could in the other,’ he said, beckoning me over with a wave of his hand. ‘Let’s not stand here in the entrance way like a couple of idiots.’

Warily, I followed him deeper into the cave system, keeping magic prickling at my fingertips the whole time. The cavern narrowed, becoming a cramped doorway which I had no idea how Ruisin even fit through. I had to turn my shoulders sideways and squeeze through in a half crouch before I finally emerged on the other side in a cozy little burrow that looked like it may have been hewn out of the rock with claws and teeth. It contained a couple of chairs, a shabby little bed, and it was lined with shelves displaying what must have been the dragon’s most prized treasures. Fat gemstones of every colour, a gold chalice, a dagger with a rough wooden hilt but a blade that gleamed strangely, like it had been dipped in moonlight.

‘You’ll not hold your magic half-cocked throughout our whole conversation, will you?’ Ruisin’s words interrupted my thoughts, and I returned my attention to him to see he’d sunk into one of the chairs. ‘It gives me a headache to feel it humming away.’

It made me feel a little dizzy to keep it at the ready, so I wasn’t much keen for that either. ‘No tricks?’

‘I’m the one who has been exiled and reviled by your kind, boy. I should be the wary one and yet here I am, inviting you into my trove. You could stand to have a little more courage.’

Flexing my fingers, I let the magic settle, drawing away from my hands until it was just a sleeping fizzle in my blood one again.

‘So, a halfling friend sent you to me. Have relations between high and lesser fae improved so much that you can call one another friend now?’

I didn’t know how to respond to that comment, and remembering what Ethan had told me about Ruisin, I thought it better not to get into talking politics with him. ‘He told me you were the one who brought the different factions of lesser fae together to accept Oberon as High King.’

‘A fat lot of good it did me. Look at the squabbling that has broken out since then. Wars and hierarchies and a split kingdom. Oberon’s dream was of a united land, not of what this realm has become.’

‘Were you there when the treaty between Seelie and Unseelie was written, too?’

‘I was.’ His expression grew shadowed. ‘A treaty that would never have been necessary if Oberon hadn’t been so blinded by the love of his sons that he decided to split the land across the Sunder in the first place. I warned him it would only lead to ruin, but he had seen too much success by then. It drove all the realism out of his head. Made him forget why we worked to unite the land in the first place.’

I knew this story. Fae children were rare, so when Oberon’s queen had given birth to twin boys, he’d been euphoric and seen the birth as a sign from the gods. He’d divided the land, and the magic of the High Fae throne along with it, splitting summer and winter, light and dark, and gifting one side of the Sunder to one son and one side to the other.

‘But what interest do you have in this history?’ Ruisin continued. ‘I doubt you’ve come all the way to the Whisper Wastes just out of idle curiosity.’

‘I’m trying to find a way to cross into the Seelie lands without provoking a war.’

He ran his hand down his shaggy beard ‘Hmm. Then you’d better sit down and tell me why. I’ve always a hankering for a good story to add to my collection.’

I considered him, tapping a finger against my thigh. I didn’t like the idea of my story being just a little entertainment to light his long years of exile. I wanted his help, but I wasn’t going to weave together some enchanting tale to get it. He could have the straight facts. ‘My mate is trapped in the Seelie Court.’

A flicker of something passed over his expression, something too quick to catch. His jaw slackened a little, eyes widening. Then it was gone, and he was laughing. ‘Your mate , you say? How fitting. How very fitting.’

I just glared at him, waiting for him to elaborate, but he just continued to chuckle to himself, sitting deep in his chair and shaking his head at the ground.

‘I don’t know why that’s so amusing,’ I finally said.

‘You would if only you knew. Fate is ever weaving her webs.’ The humour slipped out of him and he cast a speculative eye over his shelves. ‘Well, I’d better aid and abet, help the cycle find the end it should have met before.’

‘I’ve been told you have a portal that doesn’t use the waypoint system.’

‘A system that I myself created.’ The eccentricity fell away as anger warped his expression, scales rippling down his arms, like he was about to change form. ‘Imagine the shame of it. I had power the likes of which you have never known, abilities to compress time and space, to break the barriers between realms. And now here I am, trapped in the wasteland created by the war I helped to end, my magic depleted, hunting for scraps.’

I eyed him warily, ready to run if he looked like he was edging closer to shifting. There wasn’t room in this hovel for the enormous bulk of his dragon form, let alone for me as well. ‘If you have a portal that can open up anywhere, you wouldn’t need the waypoint system.’

He seemed to settle, his skin smoothing, the sharp gleam leaving his eyes. ‘If it’s my portal you want, there’s a symmetry in that which I think the stars will like.’ He cast his gaze to the ceiling, as though he was looking for the stars in the stone, and I began to wonder if his exile had made him a little mad.

But still, hope lightened me, lifting my irritation at his mercurial nature. I could slip right into the Seelie Court and speak to Imogen without causing a political explosion, and I could find out if she really was being treated well. If she was there of her own free will or not. But nothing was ever free, especially not when it came to dragons. ‘What would it cost me?’

‘A favour.’

I waited for him to elaborate but he didn’t. And I realised what he was asking. ‘An open favour?’

‘A bound open favour.’ His mouth widened, exposing those yellow teeth, still as pointed as they were in dragon form.

‘I’d prefer something named.’

‘But that is not the price.’

Of course not. An open favour meant he could ask practically anything of me, and if bound in magic, I would be forced to comply. It was a reckless deal to make. A stupid deal.

‘Too high a price? I knew you wouldn’t pay it. Not for something as insignificant as the one bound to you by fate.’

‘She’s not insignificant,’ I snarled. ‘I’ll pay your price. Let me see the portal.’

He rose to his feet, crossed the room to rifle about on the shelves holding his collection of treasures. When he returned, he was holding a mirror and a pitcher of water. Its surface was strangely dark, faded, imitating shadowed outlines of the room, like it saw only a muted version of the world reflected in its surface.

‘That’s not a portal,’ I said, eying it.

‘Not the like you’re used to. It was gifted to me long ago, so I could watch the world I was exiled from.’ He smiled bitterly as he placed it on the table.

‘So I can’t pass through it?’

‘No.’ He dipped his fingers in the water and dripped it across the surface of the mirror. The shadowed world within swirled. ‘The waypoint system suddenly seems more worthwhile, doesn’t it?’

‘I wanted to cross into the Seelie Court.’

‘And I wanted you to end my exile. It seems we are both collared by the other’s limits. You’ll be able to see if your mate is well or not, though perhaps you were more interested in the gratification of touching .’

I gritted my teeth, bit back a hot retort, because maybe there was more truth to that than I’d like to admit. Would it be enough just to see her? If I’d really come just to make sure she was alright, then it would be. But to be honest meant admitting I’d wanted a hell of a lot more than that. I’d wanted to talk to her. To bring her back with me. Alright, I’d wanted to touch her too. A lot. All over.

‘I see you’re conflicted,’ Ruisin added. ‘Maybe it’s not so worth it now.’

‘Don’t put words in my mouth. What do you want, a blood oath?’

With a flick of his wrist, one of his fingers shifted, elongating, growing a long, hooked talon that belonged to his dragon form. ‘Would you like me to do the honours?’

I extended my arm. He struck with a blur of speed. I yanked back, hissing between my teeth, as blood immediately welled and wept to the floor from a long, deep gash in the palm of my hand. ‘That was unnecessary.’

‘Do you want to make the deal or not?’

Warier now, I offered my arm again, and with quick precision he drew a rune in the blood of my palm.

‘One favour,’ I swore, clenching my hands together to staunch the bleeding and ignoring the sense of apprehension sinking through me.

‘I look forward to collecting it.’

He returned his attention to the mirror, tracing his fingers along its surface in a swirl, smearing blood and water across the glass. The image within blurred and spun until threads of colour and light began to bleed into the whirl of grey. The colours sequenced themselves, collecting, until they formed shapes, until the shadows withdrew, and we were left staring at a crowded room.

And there she was. The sight of Imogen swept me up in a whirl of emotions that I didn’t know how to grapple with. Some of it was like a sigh of relief, because she was alive. Healthy. Unharmed, as far as I could see, just as Arun had promised. She was in a glittering ball room, dressed in yards of gold. I should have expected it, but the sight of her in Seelie colours made my fingers twitch possessively. And then the yearning hit me like a blow to the chest, because she was there , not here , and I couldn’t reach out and touch her, couldn’t take her hand, look into her eyes and ask her why she’d left without so much as a goodbye.

‘Surely she’s not this one,’ Ruisin muttered. ‘Just let me—’

‘No!’

The vision blinked out just as I swiped my hand at the mirror, like I could snatch it out of the glass and hold it close. But my fingers came away empty.

Ruisin was cocking his head at me, eyebrows drawn up close to his hairline. ‘Oh, you’re in trouble.’

‘I thought we’d already established that.’

‘You told me you had a mate trapped in the Seelie Court. That woman looks like she belongs to the Seelie Court.’

I pressed my teeth tightly together at the idea, staring down into my empty, bloodied palms as that yearning gave way to a dark, gnawing misery. Because he was right. She had been glowing. Happy, even. And suddenly I had to acknowledge what the fog of possession and instinct and anger had been hiding from me: that if she was happy in the Seelie Court, then she was much better off there than with me. She was safe from the queen in the Seelie Court. With me, she wouldn’t be, and as much as I wanted to pretend there would be a way to change that, right now I didn’t have one.

‘You look like you’ve been kicked right in the solar plexus,’ Ruisin mused, and when I looked back up at him he was considering me with a gleam of calculation in his eyes. ‘Not what you were expecting to see?’

‘No. But I should have been expecting it,’ I muttered. If only I could talk to her, ask her if she really was alright, if she was happy. If only I could ask her to explain what her relationship with Solas was so I could stop spinning my own explanations. There was too much that had been left unresolved between us when she’d disappeared, vanishing over the Sunder with my greatest rival.

‘Mate bonds aren’t always convenient, are they?’ He smoothed his hand over the surface of the mirror, caressing it. ‘They can cause such joy. Or such pain. If she is the one you seek, you can take a better look.’ Again, the surface of the mirror whirled, clearing on the same scene. I stared so hard at the image of Imogen that my eyes blurred. She was speaking with someone. Some Seelie lord. She smiled. I wished I could hear what she was saying.

‘Touch the glass,’ Ruisin said, ‘and you can get a little closer.’

Hesitantly, I touched my fingers to the mirror. A wisp of portal magic shivered through me, dragging me from my body, through the mirror, not quite unmaking me but untethering me in that distinct way I was used to feeling. And suddenly I was standing in the ballroom, the sound of music and voices crashing down on me after the quiet of the cave. A trio of women approached, and I inhaled sharply as they passed right through me, like I was just a ghost. It made me shudder, but I shrugged off the discomfort of being so insubstantial. I was here for a reason, and I didn’t know how long I’d have. I crept towards Imogen, instinctively expecting her to look my way, to react, to see me, even though I knew she wouldn’t.

I hissed as someone else walked through me, this one a male dressed all in whites and golds, glittering with gems. I knew only one person who dressed like that.

‘You two were looking very serious over here,’ Solas said, threading Imogen’s arm through his, leaning in to speak the words.

‘Yes, Niall was helping me to understand the court a little better,’ she replied, but I could barely hear her because blood was rushing in my ears, heat rising, possessive rage churning through me as they exchanged a few more lines with the lords they’d been talking to. I tried to breathe, to focus , as I drew closer to her, reached out to hover my hand over the smooth skin of her arm, imagining I could feel the warmth rolling off of her, pretending for a moment that I really could touch her if I just moved my fingers a little closer. But when I gave in and tried it, my hand passed right through her arm without even raising the hairs on her skin, without garnering any reaction at all. Then she turned, and for a moment hope caught me off guard, made me believe she was turning towards me. But she was talking to Solas. He was leading her somewhere. She couldn’t feel that I was here.

They began to walk. I followed.

‘You have an awfully serious look on your face, rabbit,’ Solas said, and that little pet name, rabbit , made me want to wrap my hands around his throat and squeeze very tightly. ‘Did Niall say something to upset you?’

‘Do you think we could take a break?’ Imogen replied. ‘I’m a little tired.’

‘Yes, of course. Let me get you a drink, I won’t be long.’ And then he brought her hand to his fucking lips, kissed her fingers like she was his to kiss, and it didn’t matter if I wasn’t really in the room with them, because I was going to rip whatever magic bound the portal, step through and kill him. Slowly. Languidly.

But the scene was yanked away just as suddenly as it had appeared, and I was falling.

I crashed back through the portal, sprawling across the floor and kicking up a spray of dirt. Coughing dust out of my lungs, I blinked the dimly-lit cave back into focus until I could make out Ruisin still sitting in his chair, staring at me.

‘Not a graceful traveller, are you?’ he said as I staggered to my feet. I didn’t respond to that. I was no longer in the mood to pander to dragons.

‘Thank you,’ was all I said as I made for the door. I wanted to hit something. My fingernails dug into my palms as I tried to fight the urge, tried to fight back the magic hankering to spill out of me.

‘Terrible manners for a prince. Appear out of the blue, invade my home, use my portal and then off you go again,’ Ruisin said, but I could feel him watching me closely as I braced myself against that narrow entrance to the cave, yanking my hand back a moment later as the stone began to crumble and erode where I’d touched it, eaten by the magic I couldn’t contain. Destruction. Always destruction. Everything I touched crumbled. Why had I ever thought it would be any different with her?

‘You’ll have your favour when you ask it,’ I replied.

‘Why the hurry to be off? See something you didn’t like?’ Ruisin’s tone was sly.

I didn’t even look back at him, just pushed on through the entryway and climbed back up the cavern.

I was done talking.

I couldn’t fucking breathe down there. Not when my hands were still curling against an emptiness that grated against every truth I knew. I should have found a way to take her with me. I should have dragged her back.

When I reached the surface, Melaie landed before me almost immediately, shaking her head and prancing uneasily, picking up on my mood. I didn’t have words of calm to spare her, just swung up onto her back and took off into the skies.

A thundering roar shook the world below us, and Melaie shrieked as she powered away from the threat, feathers bristling and legs drawn close against her body. I gripped her tightly as I glanced behind us to see the huge bulk of Ruisin beneath us, in rippling dragon form again, scales glinting dully in the low light.

Don’t forget your promise to me, prince. The words cut through my mind as we tore through the sky, higher and higher until we were soaring through the cloud cover and emerging into the clear, bright sunlight of the ether above. We circled for a few moments as I scanned the cloud below for a sign that the dragon was chasing us. I wouldn’t put it past him to have a change of heart and try to eat us, favour or no. But all was still and calm.

We turned for home, sinking back through the clouds when the cold and the thin air became too difficult to endure any longer, and as the land below came back into sight, I contemplated whether the price I’d paid had been worth it after all. What had I wanted to see, really? Had I wanted to see Imogen miserable? No. But maybe I hadn’t wanted her to look quite so shining and happy either. We were bonded . The whole point of my initial resistance to it was the irrefutability of that, the permeance. Was I the only one tormented by it? Was I the only one who spent my days and nights consumed by the sense that I was missing something?

And now that I knew she was alright, did I have an obligation to just endure all that and leave her alone?

I wasn’t sure I could do that. There was only so long I could fight my own nature.