Page 9 of Queen of Ever (Curse of Fate and Fae #2)

Chapter 9

Tarian

P ain struck with consciousness. I gasped at the sharp burst of it, radiating along my right arm and back. Then I was coughing violently on the cloud of dirt I’d inhaled, blindly pushing myself up, feeling debris fall away. I broke free, blinked into the dim, dust-choked space around me, where silhouettes of others were stumbling around, or staggering to their feet. An acrid tang of magic lingered, the kind that made my stomach churn and my skin crawl. The pain in my back and shoulder retreated to searing points, spattered like paint. The gnawing ache of them and the dizzy swoop of my head told me they were shards of something lethal, something that would need to be removed if my body was to heal. Probably iron. If it was iron, it’d slowly poison me, and anyone else who’d been hit. My gaze dropped to the floor, catching sight of a shiny brass button separated from its coat as I tried to wade through the fog of shock. I’d been at court. In the palace. With Briyala and…

Arun.

I fell to my knees again, clawing at the wreckage, fingers raw against jagged rock, my heart pounding as I uncovered a flash of blue fabric, a lapel missing its button.

I think I was speaking, but I didn’t know what I was saying as I cleared the rubble away from that coat and found it riddled with holes, the blue stained dark around them. I might have just been repeating the word ‘no’ over and over.

The world narrowed down to a rushing sound in my ears and the slick feel of blood on my fingers and the grey pallor of Arun’s skin as I uncovered his face.

There was no expression on it. No kind, long-suffering smile. No words of calm reason to soothe the hungry, black despair writhing in my chest, holding my breath hostage. I wanted to turn his face to me, but I couldn’t touch him. I was afraid to put my fingers to his skin when they were so cold with magic. Already, the pieces of rubble I tried to clear were crumbling, eroding with it.

‘Help. Someone help me get him up,’ I called to no one, my voice hoarse and strange.

His eyes stared straight ahead, fixed on the ceiling. Glassy and unfocused. No one home. Gone far away, where I could no longer reach.

Leaving me behind.

‘Tarian.’

I didn’t look up, just held my vigil over him, my hands clenched tight in my lap, my knees throbbing from kneeling. Maybe I’d been there a while. My body was shaking.

‘Come away, Tarian.’

For a moment, the queen’s hand on my arm didn’t revolt me. For a moment, I forgot who she was and what she’d done to me. She was just my mother, and I let her draw me to my feet. She was dusty, her hair ruffled, but looking otherwise unharmed, and there was a strange, unfamiliar gentleness to her eyes. She brushed away a track of tears I didn’t know I’d cried.

‘Don’t mourn him,’ she said softly. ‘It was his job to die for you.’

The words jolted me from my trance in a burning wave of fury.

‘Get off me,’ I snarled, wrenching my arm away and stumbling backwards, wanting to put as much distance between us as I could.

‘You are a prince,’ she said. She seemed too calm, standing in the wreckage of her court with a body at her feet. ‘You don’t have time to fall to pieces now. They’ll all be looking to see how you handle this.’

I couldn’t look at her. I staggered away, coughing again, holding onto that rage with a slither of relief for the way it blotted out the despair. Fuck her. Fuck the court. Fuck the stars for letting her live while Arun…

I couldn’t even think the word.

All around me, others were pulling themselves from the wreckage. Everywhere was the smell of iron. Fae blood didn’t smell of iron. It was sweet, slightly sickly. I could smell that, too. The pain in my back and shoulder became a sparkling, piercing burn that I preferred to the despairing pit in my chest, so I focused on it, relished in it, almost welcomed the way it began to claw its way through me for the distraction until I found myself on my knees in the rubble again, head spinning, coughing up bile as shards of glass cut into my palms.

Footsteps picking through the rubble. A pair of winged black boots were before me. Stupidly bright with polish.

‘Well, I’ve seen you in better condition. But possibly in worse too. Don’t know what that says about you.’ Despite the words, Vesryn’s voice was unsteady. Nothing like his usual drawl. He scooped his hands beneath my arms. ‘Come on, now, can’t stay here, the place is falling down. On three. One… two…’

I grit my teeth, hissing a breath as he forced me to stand and the pain flared bright again, sinking deeper into my flesh, like the iron shards in my body were burrowing their way down to my bones. Ves yanked me away as another piece of rubble crashed to the ground where I’d been kneeling.

‘Briyala?’ I managed as we staggered forwards.

‘What about her?’

‘Is…she still… buried?’ I could hardly get my tongue to form words. It took most of my focus to stay conscious.

‘How the fuck am I supposed to know? It was pure luck I tripped over you.’

‘Find her... we can’t…’

‘What a bright idea, princeling. While I’m at it, I’ll go fetch the queen and Arun and half the High Council and you can bleed over all of them at once. How about you let me do the ideas and you save your idiot hero act for when you aren’t dying.’

The sound of Arun’s name killed any reply with the reminder that I didn’t save people, I got them hurt. I got them killed.

A moment later, we were out of the blast site and limping down a hall full of those fae who’d been lucky enough to get out, bent over and coughing, tending to bleeding wounds, or sitting on the floor in a daze. Ves leaned me against a wall, and I slid down it, grateful to release the determination to stay upright. He bobbed down next to me, his sharp-featured face looking drawn, quick dark eyes darting over me as he twisted his mouth.

‘Iron?’ he asked, though from the look on his face he already knew that.

‘In my back… down my arm…’ I winced as I twisted my shoulder to show him, provoking the pain so much my vision danced with spots.

He sighed, as though this greatly inconvenienced him. ‘That’s got to come out, then.’

‘Depends on… what outcome you’re hoping for,’ I said dryly.

‘That’d be right. You force me to pick a side and then immediately exit the fight.’ He rose to his feet, dusting his hands against his pants. ‘I’m going to find someone to help you so I don’t have to bloody do it myself. Stay here. Don’t die while I’m gone. Not after I’ve so greatly inconvenienced myself by getting you out here.’

‘Sure,’ I mumbled, my eyes already slipping closed against the drunken sway of my surroundings. I briefly considered trying to start digging the iron out myself. It’d poison me if it remained. Already was. But I couldn’t seem to force my eyes to open again, couldn’t make my body move. I could try to dissolve it, but my magic felt wispy and far away now, sunken so deep inside me and so diminished that I couldn’t grasp it. I thought of the healing springs beneath Dreadhold, the soothing relief of the water against the sting of pixie venom and bites.

‘At least I don’t want to lick a wall,’ I mumbled to myself, smiling slightly at the memory of Imogen’s wide-eyed alarm as I’d shucked off my shirt and told her to get in. That hurt to think of, in a pain more disturbing than what was eating up my body. But it was better than thinking of Arun’s grey skin and staring eyes. I got lost in dark of my mind for a while, spinning somewhere between the realm of memory and dream, to a place where I’d taken her hand instead of goading her, lead her to the water and gently washed the bites myself instead of standing across the other side of the room and watching her do it, frozen and repelled by how badly I’d wanted to touch her. I watched my fingers glide over her skin, following trails of water down her arms, the violet glow turning her shimmering and pale, watched the bite marks and scratches heal over like it was my touch that cured her.

‘You could have lived it this way,’ she said, looking up at me with luminous green eyes. ‘Everything might have been different if you had.’

‘I wish I’d been braver.’

She smiled. ‘But you’re obsessed with doom.’

I reached out to cup her face. ‘Would you still have left with Solas?’

She regarded me steadily for a long moment but didn’t answer the question. ‘Your turn,’ she whispered instead, slipping out of my grasp to step around me. She touched my shoulder, my back, her hands gentle as she seemed to examine the wounds. ‘Do they hurt?’

‘Not right now. I think that might be a bad thing.’

‘Yeah, it probably is.’ The sound of the waterfall trickling into the spring seemed to grow louder, like it was no longer imaginary. Like it was all real. ‘Are you dying?’

‘Maybe. I’m not sure.’

‘Will I feel it if you do?’

My chest tightened. ‘I hope not.’

One of her hands settled on my arm, her grip tightening like she was holding me firm. ‘Then you’d better hold still.’ Pain screamed through me as with her other hand, she dug her fingers into my back.

‘Shouldn’t we stun him first? Someone around here must have some giddy dust.’ It was no longer Imogen’s voice but Vesryn’s, wavering with uncharacteristic uneasiness as I groaned through pain so vivid it had pulled me out of unconsciousness instead of into it.

‘No time. Hold him still if you want him to live.’

Ves muttered a string of profanities as he took hold of my other shoulder in a vice-like grip. I struggled against him as someone dug something sharp into my back again, tearing at me like they were trying to separate my soul from my flesh.

‘Come on, Tarian, don’t you want to live?’ He shook me a little. ‘You know you’d be leaving your title to me if you died.’

‘I’m not going to die,’ I snarled through gritted teeth. I could barely see him through the black spots bursting before my eyes. I wasn’t going to die when I didn’t know what it would do to Imogen. I wasn’t going to die after Arun had lost his life saving mine.

‘Good. Then stop fighting me and let the nice hobgoblin get the iron out of you.’

I summoned every shred of discipline I’d ever cultivated, a lifetime of trying to keep my magic under control by caging my emotions, stilled my body and tried to breathe . It was only pain. Only physical pain. Something familiar, surmountable, something I could detach from as I did when I was being tortured. Predictable. Monotonous. Unremarkable. I left it there and went back to the spring. But Imogen was no longer within my reach. Now she was the one on the other side of the room, watching me warily, her expression guarded, saying nothing. I wanted to dip beneath the water line, but I looked down to find the spring dry, nothing but rock beneath my feet. There was no relief for me as I sank to the ground and wrapped my arms around myself, teeth chattering through the muted sense of throbbing agony that reached me even here. I couldn’t even summon the will to imagine her coming over to comfort me. Just endured it.

The pain began to recede, like the tide slowly leaving a beach, giving me space to settle back into my body. My eyes flickered open to see Ves talking to a bent, long-snouted hobgoblin with wickedly long, sharp claws. Drops of blood were dripping from them and falling to the floor, where it pooled in a small puddle. I had the sneaking suspicion that it was my blood.

I was on the floor, still leaning against the wall, the cold of the stone soothing against what remained of the ache in my back. Experimentally, I lifted my left arm, rotating the shoulder and feeling the dozen needles of pain burst to life but quickly settle again. The iron was out. I would heal. I staggered to my feet, prompting Ves to turn and eye me up and down.

‘Good, you’re conscious. We’re moving,’ he said, dismissing the hobgoblin with a nod. ‘Evacuating. There’s iron and old magic spilling all over the place, and the thorns that thing cast off have all taken root and started growing. The court is going to be temporarily relocated.’

‘How many dead?’ I asked.

Ves shrugged. ‘Why does it matter? Let’s just get out of here before something else happens and we join the tally.’

I rubbed at my shoulder, casting my eyes down the hallway, where I had stumbled over other injured and dying on my way out of the explosion site. There were fewer of them than there had been before, and many were in the process of hobbling down the hall in the company of palace servants and attendants. The stone floor was smeared with blood.

‘Where is everyone being moved to?’ I asked.

‘Dreadhold.’

‘ Dreadhold ?’ I repeated, snapping my gaze back to him. He was rubbing a hand through his hair.

‘What did you expect?’ he asked, spinning on his heels and throwing the words over his shoulder. ‘You’re the only one who lives there. It’s not like you don’t have the room.’