Page 50 of The Crown of the Last Fae Queen (The Heartless and the Wicked #4)

TWENTY-FIVE – KOLFINNA

Like last time, they had to search for the starting point of the vision.

It didn’t take them long to search through the halls until they came across Aesileif again.

She was older this time, by a few years, and dressed in a thin white night gown.

Her hair was loose and flowing down her back, and she was curled into a tight ball on her bed, sobbing.

Bookshelves lined the walls, the shelves buckling under the weight of the heavy books, and the room was just as fancy as the other rooms—gold-veined marble floors, silk drapes, vibrant rugs, heavy gilded furniture.

Blár watched Aesileif cry and a flash of pity passed over his face, but it quickly disappeared as he examined the rest of the room. Kolfinna could only stare at her mother.

“She doesn’t seem …” Blár sighed, giving Kolfinna a neutral expression. “She doesn’t seem stable, does she? Is Vidar …?”

“Pulling her strings?” She lifted her shoulders. She truly didn’t know. But her father’s words echoed in her mind.

“ You and many people who know nothing about Aesileif think that she was the monster, but it was I who carried her blade .”

She shivered.

Her thoughts halted abruptly when the door burst open and Vidar rushed inside.

He looked closer to his present day self; dressed in ominous, dark leathers, his wings deadly and his expression hidden away by his helmet.

He ripped the helmet off the instant he was in the room, dropping it on the floor and coming to the side of the bed.

“Aesileif? What’s wrong? What happened?” The bed creaked beneath his weight.

Aesileif crawled onto his lap, burying her face against his chest. He placed a hand on her lower back, brushing her hair absentmindedly.

His expression was shuttered. The time between the last vision and this one seemed to have tempered his disposition, or maybe he had learned to hide his emotions better.

But the lethal, feral look in his eyes softened.

“What has made you this upset, my love?” he whispered so softly that Kolfinna almost missed it.

He brushed Aesileif’s pale gold hair gently, trying to ease her off his chest so he could stare at her, but she clung to him tightly, her tears making her hair stick to her wet cheeks.

For a moment, she remained there, sobbing against him, holding onto him like he was the only person holding her together. And maybe he was.

Kolfinna’s gaze strayed to a golden crown sitting atop the vanity table; it gleamed in the sliver of sunlight that peeked through the part in the curtains.

Blár shifted on his feet and followed her attention.

At this point in time, Aesileif was definitely the queen of the fae.

Was she considered evil yet? They had no way of knowing presently.

“I—” Aesileif’s shoulders shook, and her eyes were bloodshot when she braved to stare up at him. The heartbreak and grief were clear on her face; devastation leaked through her weary, soft tone. “I am sorry, Vidar. I lost—I lost another one.”

His shoulders grew taut, pain shuddering through his eyes, but he quickly masked it. A tenderness sparked through the obvious sorrow as he whispered, “Do not apologize.”

“How many more will I lose?” Her voice cracked and she squeezed her eyes shut. When she snapped them open, a flash of fury shone in the sapphire depths. “Why is my body so useless?”

“ Don’t say that, ” he growled.

“How many more babies will I have to bury?”

Kolfinna turned away as Aesileif cried against his chest once more.

He reassured her with sweet words, but she could hear the grief in his voice as well.

It made everything all the harder. It made more sense, too, why Aesileif had been pregnant too early in the prior vision—she had likely lost that baby. How many years had passed since then?

Suddenly, Kolfinna’s hands grew clammy and nausea rolled in the pit of her stomach. She didn’t want to be here, witnessing this. It was too private a moment.

Somehow, she could see Aesileif lose her entire family, and although it had shaken her to her core, it hadn’t bothered her more than witnessing this. Because this made her birth, and her subsequent betrayal of her parents’ values, all the more bitter.

They had truly longed for Kolfinna.

Did it break Vidar’s heart to see her align with the humans who had taken everything from them?

The thought shattered something in her heart more than the idea of her parents using her as a tool for the war, because this wasn’t a scene of a brutal, wicked woman trying to create an heir for her own purposes. This was the broken moment of a woman desperately wanting her baby.

“Kolfinna?” Blár tentatively touched her elbow and she flinched from the contact.

“I’m fine,” she bit out. She felt like she was saying that a lot lately.

“Are you really?” He didn’t sound convinced, and when he waved toward Aesileif and Vidar, something on his face told her that he understood what she was feeling. “Does this change anything for you? Because this might be what they want. Do we have any proof that any of this is real?”

“I don’t know.” Her lower lip wobbled. “I don’t know, Blár. It could be fake—all of this. But what if it isn’t? What if?—”

“If it is real, does it change anything for you?” There was a challenge in his voice. An intonation that told her it didn’t change anything for him. And why should it? Even villains had their moments of weakness.

But these weren’t just any people—these were her parents .

She couldn’t ignore all of this and pretend that she didn’t see it all, didn’t feel the grief, the horror, the devastation that this war had caused for them.

Aesileif had been such a simple, sweet girl who hadn’t wanted power, but had silly girlish dreams of falling in love with a handsome prince and attending fancy balls.

But the brutal murder of her family had forced her to wear the heavy crown of the fae.

Had Aesileif even wanted any of this? Something told her no .

If any of this was even real, did it really change how Kolfinna felt about the war?

She didn’t know anymore. Because on one hand, she wanted to free her people from oppression, and she had thought that dream would grow through working harmoniously with the humans and showing them that there was a future with both peoples together.

But what if that wasn’t the case? What if the fae could achieve what the humans hadn’t been able to do in centuries?

Aesileif wasn’t evil. She could see that much. And Vidar … he wasn’t entirely villainous either.

Kolfinna’s head began to pound and when the image of Aesileif and Vidar faded and they were left alone in the room, she was more than eager to search for the arched doorway that would lead them out of here. Hopefully, for good.

“Kolfinna.” Blár grabbed her hand when they were in the middle of the hallway, searching for a way out. “We need to talk.”

“I’m not in the mood?—”

“Are you serious?”

She turned to him sharply. “Yes?—”

“That’s your defense mechanism. Run, hide, and avoid .

” He folded his muscular arms over his chest, and she hated how smug he sounded—like he could read her completely.

“This is why you couldn’t tell me who you were from the beginning, because you still can’t trust me completely.

You want to keep everything to yourself to protect yourself.

You don’t want to rely on me, or anyone else. ”

Her creeping headache only grew worse. She gritted her teeth together until her jaw hurt. “I can trust you, Blár, but I’m just not in the mood to talk about any of this.”

“You don’t have to talk to me if you’re not ready, but I don’t want you to hide your emotions until you finally explode. You grow anxious easily, and it eats away at you. Do you think I wouldn’t notice?”

“Then give me space.” She didn’t even know what she wanted, but talking would only make everything worse. She didn’t want to think of her parents, being the heir, and all of this. She didn’t want to navigate her warring emotions, her conflicting thoughts. The way her view was swaying.

“I’ll give it to you,” he said, eyeing her as if she would crumble at any second.

“But we’re finally alone, here, Kolfinna.

We have this entire …” He looked around himself, eyebrows drawn.

“… whatever this place is, to ourselves. We don’t have to worry about the half-elf coming here and listening, or the others. We can talk without restraint.”

Silence filled the space between them as they rounded a corner, then another.

She snapped open doors, looked inside the darkness, then snapped them shut.

Over and over, her mind becoming numb and her thoughts becoming restless.

Finally, when she couldn’t hold it in anymore, she whispered, “I don’t know what to think about any of this. ”

Blár glanced down at her; his blue eyes appeared sharper than usual. “It must be difficult to see all of this.”

“It was easier to fight them when they were monsters in my mind,” she said thickly.

“When they didn’t have emotions, or when they were just an idea.

And I’m not just talking about Vidar and Aesileif.

I mean the fae army in general. They’re all fighting for a place in this land. A place where the fae can live freely.”

“And where do humans stand in it?”

“I don’t know, but what I do know is that the fae don’t belong in the human’s ideal world,” she said with barely concealed fury. “No matter how hard I fight, I know that the humans … will never truly accept me. People like Hilda will always exist, and she will always try to erase me and my people.”

“And now that you can sympathize with the fae, with your parents, you think that they might be a better option than the humans?” His voice was completely neutral, and she had a hard time reading his shuttered expression, but her chest clenched together at his words.

At the way he was digging at her own thinking.

She didn’t want to face what he would think of her.

She stared down at her feet. “I … I really don’t know, Blár.”

It would have been so much easier to just follow the fae. To go along with Vidar. To free Aesileif.

But then she thought of all the humans she was friends with.

All the humans she didn’t want to let down.

Blár, the man she loved. Eyfura, who had been her first friend in a long, long time.

Magni, Nollar, Herja, Inkeri, Ivar—all the people who had unexpectedly grown close to her. Eluf, Gunnar, even Fenris.

She didn’t want to think of them dying, or being imprisoned, or becoming slaves to the fae.

Her head throbbed painfully.

What was the right decision?