Reardon
Josie looked human.
Normal.
Just like her portrait.
The curse was broken!
“It’s only at night!” Josie cried, sitting up fully while holding the sheets to her chest. She was radiant—blue eyes like her brother, wavy locks of soft brown hair, and youthful glowing skin. “The curse still stands, but what we hadn’t yet told you, Reardon, is that we get reprieve when the sun sets.
“I’m sorry. We’re vulnerable after dark, so we always wait a full two weeks to reveal that secret to newcomers, ever since… we were betrayed.”
Josie’s sorrow made Reardon sag and hug Pillars of Virtue more closely against him. “The thief,” he whispered. She clearly meant the statue in the garden of the thief who’d tried to run after killing one of their own. They couldn’t risk someone untrustworthy discovering that the court could be killed too if the time was right.
No wonder they were still sane and able to rule well if, after dark, they existed as they once were and could touch those they held dear. Barclay hadn’t fallen in love with someone out of his reach. He already had her.
Which meant all the other members of the court were human now too!
“Reardon!” Barclay called, as Reardon turned and fled back into the tunnels.
He ran anyway, returning to the entrance into Barclay’s room but moving past it, certain in his use of the tunnels lately that he knew how to reach each of the court members’ chambers. Or at least how to get close enough to find their wake trails, like Josie’s tunnel was covered in gold.
He had to know. He had to see for himself if the same was true for all of them.
First was Liam in the alchemist tower. He and Branwen both left scorch marks, but Liam’s were finely focused like jagged lines of lightning. The closer Reardon got to the tower, the more concentrated the scorches became until they suddenly stopped.
Pushing on the wall where they disappeared, Reardon revealed another doorway, leading into another bedroom, this one filled with alchemist tools overflowed from the laboratory.
And another pair of moving bodies on a bed, hidden by covers.
Reardon hadn’t hoped to find the same type of interlude, but given the circumstances, he couldn’t say he was surprised.
“It is true!” he cried, hearing a feminine yelp and rustle of sheets before Shayla appeared with her usually pinned hair wild and curly about her head.
“Reardon! How—?”
“What are you doing here?” Liam shouted.
Shayla sat atop his hips, keeping the sheets around them, but Reardon could see Liam’s face. He never would have known it was Liam if not for his voice, but that was indeed the wizard. He could have been a brother to the fletcher, really, if not for his elven ears. He and Oliver shared the same blond hair and blue eyes.
These eyes didn’t give Reardon pause, however, or wonder at Barclay’s vision, since he knew this man was another one spoken for.
“You were all so obvious, yet I didn’t see it,” Reardon said, unable to keep the smile from his face, even if he was being terribly intruding, because the court was not made of the lonely creatures he’d thought. “Nigel…,” he said in realization and turned once more to dash back into the tunnels.
“Where are you going?” Shayla yelled after him.
“Wait!” Barclay cried, not far behind, as he and Josie gave chase.
Still, Reardon ran, elation fluttering in his chest, finally understanding what Barclay’s friends had in common.
He didn’t know where Zephyr’s chambers were, but he knew Nigel’s. It only dawned on him now that he had seen evidence of a wind elemental in those tunnels and in Nigel’s room more than anywhere else—grooves in the stone like decades of erosion.
There wasn’t a tunnel exit directly into Nigel’s room, but there was one outside it. As Reardon burst into the room through the main door, Nigel spun around wide-eyed, in the process of changing for bed .
“What is that rack—ah!” Zephyr appeared— naked —from the wash area and clutched a robe he’d been carrying between his legs. “Don’t you knock?”
He had blue eyes too, though Reardon had dismissed Zephyr long ago, fair though his face may be, and clearly, he was also taken.
With color filling his usually translucent form, his cheeks held a warm glow, dark hair messy and damp from bathing, with the otherwise same slender form Reardon had seen floating.
“You were fighting about me,” Reardon said, “because Zephyr kept saying lewd things to me!”
“Nigel forgave me for that!” Zephyr defended.
“Reardon….” Nigel dragged a hand down his face. “We—”
Reardon spun on his heels to continue his journey, pushing past Josie in a silken robe and Barclay in a barely held up pair of trousers.
Only he couldn’t reach the tunnels this time, because Shayla and Liam were coming out of them, equally half-dressed, and Liam looked far less understanding than everyone else. His physique matched the fletcher’s too, but Reardon didn’t have time to admire it.
Sprinting the other way, he mapped out in his mind which tunnels would best lead him to the basement. He vaguely remembered from his drinking with Branwen that the master of arms said his chambers were down there, close to the wine and ale. Now Reardon knew why: he had been waiting for nightfall so he could drink when the sun dipped below the horizon.
“ Stop !” Barclay tried again, but Reardon knew his stamina would win.
He had three couples chasing him as he worked his way to the lower levels of the castle, finding larger scorch marks with smears of blackened soot along the walls. When at last the scorches stopped, he found the expected door.
“Reardon!” Caitlin yelped—from a desk , thankfully, with a large, imposing man standing over her shoulder, both fully clothed.
This room was more utilitarian but covered in parchment and scattered tomes, which surprised Reardon, as it seemed Branwen was dictating to Caitlin.
“She’s my scribe,” he growled, like some hasty defense.
Branwen was as broad and burly as Reardon would have imagined, with mild scruff, a mostly shaven head, and pale eyes that also looked blue. Every single member of the court had blue eyes, but none of them were the eyes that mattered to Reardon.
“If you’re with Bran, then…. He doesn’t have anyone, does he?” Reardon asked Caitlin, turning equally imploring eyes to Branwen. Hearing the others pour into the room behind him, he turned to them as well. “He doesn’t, does he? I know he doesn’t. He can’t.”
“Reardon,” Barclay said with a sigh, reaching out to touch him—only to gasp.
A vision , Reardon thought as he surged forward, realizing then that he still clung to the king’s book, and Barclay’s slack expression made him clutch it tighter, like salvation. “It’s him, isn’t it? It has to be him.”
“I… I don’t know.” The strange expression on Barclay’s face didn’t change, but he blinked the vision away and gave Reardon’s arm a firm squeeze. “I didn’t see the same thing just now. I’m not sure what I saw…. There was a woman with dark skin in brilliant finery, and… and someone in armor of the Emerald Kingdom, bookending you like a prize between them. You guarded someone from them that I couldn’t see.”
“The king ,” Reardon said without falter. “It’s him, Barclay. It has to be, and I stand before my love, between my kingdom and the past.”
“Your love?” Josie repeated, stepping from the others—Liam and Zephyr, who looked annoyed, and Shayla and Nigel, smiling in delight. Josie’s robe was neatly tied now, black silk trimmed in gold.
“Just as all of you found someone,” Reardon said, “I am meant for him. That’s why I’m here. My purpose here. I’m sure of it.”
“Hang on,” Branwen said, no change to his gruff voice even when lacking flames. He held a goblet, finally enjoying his wine. “Don’t get any ideas that we’re together like that.” The faintest color filled his cheeks as he said it, and he wouldn’t meet Reardon’s eyes, something mirrored in Caitlin which told Reardon that, despite their protests, they clearly wanted what they hadn’t yet had. “She helps get my ideas down, that’s all. Nothing like these rutting maniacs.”
“Rutting?” Liam threw back. “Shayla ignored me for a week because of this princely brat. Who is useful,” he amended when Shayla glared at him, “and not all bad most days, but I’m allowed my ire!”
“Maybe sometimes you take for granted what you have,” Shayla shot back. “You don’t need Reardon’s presence to require occasional reminders.”
“Sounds familiar,” Nigel muttered .
“You forgave me!” Zephyr cried again, looking rumpled in just the robe he’d been clutching earlier.
Nigel pulled Zephyr against him, quieting him in such a sweet, reflexive manner that Reardon had kept his smile. He was right. He had to be right. They’d all had lessons to learn, but they’d needed someone to melt their hearts as well, someone who had nothing to do with this place in the beginning—a sacrifice freely given.
Wasn’t true love always the epic end to a curse?
“I only found Barclay a year ago,” Josie said, taking his hand to pull him close too. “They’ve all had each other for decades. I’ll rut as I like.”
Barclay blushed far darker than Branwen or Caitlin, a beautiful hue, because Reardon had never seen his friend so happy.
“Four days left, and we have to do this in my room?” Branwen grumbled, taking a gulp of wine.
Reardon turned to him, to all of them, understanding that he had broken the rules, however unintentional at first. “I’m sorry I made you all run, but I had to be sure. I understand now why you said fourteen days. Any shorter could allow a swindler to betray you as that thief once did.”
A solemn expression touched each of the court members as it had Josie, but she was the one who spoke. “We told her the truth after six days, so certain she posed no threat, just another one of us welcomed into our company. But then she knew, you see, that we were vulnerable at night.”
“But… the king did freeze her,” Reardon said, confused, as the implication was that she had betrayed them while they were flesh and blood.
“She planned her theft for early morning, just before the sun rose, but she should have given herself more time. Before she reached the gate, the sun was up, and Jack caught her. Before then, she still got to one of us.” Slowly, Josie pulled aside the edge of her robe to reveal a scar beneath her collarbone.
“The king said she killed an elf.” Reardon scrunched his brow in further strain. “Someone with beautiful magic.”
“It was beautiful,” Josie said softly. “The most powerful healing magic of anyone here. The thief got to me first, knowing my chambers held the most gold. I gave chase, even with my injury, and he saw us in the halls. He tried to stop her, but she was too swift .
“I was already weak, but I struggled to help him, and sweet thing that he was, he still tried to heal me, even as I was trying to stop his bleeding, flowing so much more freely than my own. I… I was still touching him when the sun came up….” Her delicate hands clenched into fists, and Reardon didn’t have to ask what her touch had done.
Barclay slipped an arm around her waist, and she leaned gratefully against him.
“I understand why Jack wanted to wait with you, Reardon,” Josie said, “as we have with everyone else since then, but I also don’t want to let the past haunt me. None of us do.”
As Barclay held her, the others all vigilantly silent, Reardon recognized why the princess had only found love so recently, despite two hundred years having passed. It was too difficult for her after causing someone such awful harm. Though Reardon also believed she had needed to wait for the right person.
He had not seen any statues made of gold in the king’s ice garden, but now he wondered what had become of the… accidents.
“I swear to you that I am not your enemy,” Reardon said. “I never will be. I don’t only want to understand your curse and change my kingdom. I want to break the curse and save everyone.”
“And you think loving Jack will do that?” Branwen asked skeptically.
“Could have skipped the interrupting-us part,” Liam muttered, and Shayla smacked his chest.
“I don’t even know his real face, yet I feel….” Reardon stroked the cover of the book, holding it out in front of him to look at the carved leather. “I know the days have been few, but as each one passes, I find myself more amazed by him. With our audiences, I always want them to last longer.”
“You love the king while he looks like that ?” Zephyr sneered.
Reardon couldn’t truly say he loved the king, but the draw he’d felt for only a scant few, it was the same for Jack as for anyone he’d ever lusted after. “If not yet, then I think I could. I need to see this through, to know his feelings in return. To truly know mine. Only then can I be certain if it’s enough to break the curse.”
“What do you intend to do now?” Josie asked.
“I intend to see him. Would any of you stop me?” Reardon hugged the book once more .
There was a shift of glances between them all.
“That’s the book the king had me scouring for in the library,” Zephyr said.
“Yes, and place on my bed.”
“I didn’t place it on your bed.”
Reardon’s eyes snapped up from looking at the cover again.
“The sun was already setting,” Zephyr explained. “He ordered me out of the library after I found it. If it ended up on your bed, Emerald Prince, then he’s the one who put it there.”
The resolve in Reardon strengthened, knowing the king had been in his room, risking getting caught after nightfall.
“You are a wily one,” Liam said, trying to pull Shayla against him like the others, which she allowed after a weak show at struggling. “You might even be right.”
“He means mad ,” Zephyr said, and then when Nigel elbowed him, added, “but we’re certainly not going to stop you.”
Branwen and Caitlin were different—quiet, stubborn creatures, maybe only commiserating, though Reardon did wonder what the master of arms had Caitlin writing for him. Still, they were hopeful sentries, with Caitlin rising from the desk to stand beside Branwen, both offering encouraging nods.
Lastly, Reardon looked to Josie and Barclay, his first friend among the court and his oldest friend of all. Whatever Barclay saw when he touched Josie, it filled his face with peace and fondness that Reardon hoped to one day know for himself.
“Wish me luck,” Reardon said and turned, one last time, for the tunnels.