by Ryan Graudin
Julian Forsythe stands in the doorway, sour-faced. I can only wonder how he arrived so swiftly and dressed as well. Despite the hour he’s wearing a fine-cut suit, silver cufflinks glinting from the hall’s light. They glow almost as bright as his eyes—teal ice picks which chip through every bit of his ransacked office: the avalanche of books, the dismantled box tower, the wide-eyed princess standing in the middle of all these things.
“Your Majesty!” The ice of Julian’s stare breaks at the sight of the shivering blonde girl. “I wasn’t expecting to find you here. . . .”
The princess’s face has shifted too. Instead of fierce and steely she looks close to tears. Her lower lip trembles along with her shoulders. “Thank goodness you came! They heard your footsteps and ran. They didn’t have time to take me with them!”
“Who?” Julian Forsythe takes another step into his office. His eyes do another long sweep, investigating every nook and cranny.
“The Faery, of course. The one my brother was so smitten with.” Anabelle breaks apart her syllables with just the right amount of breathless fear. “She and her friend have kept me hostage for days. They thought they could use me as leverage if they ever got caught.”
Blue eyes—jagged and electric. So sharp that for a moment I believe they’re slicing straight through Kieran’s veiling spell.
Does he know we’re here? Despite Anabelle’s lies? Despite Kieran’s magic?
I edge closer to the Ad-hene—as if that will actually make a difference in his veiling spell. I feel Kieran’s breath pulsing against his ribs, the flutter of his once stony heart.
The princess grasps Julian’s arm. An actual tear gleams down her cheek. “I tried to escape. But they kept using magic. They took me everywhere with them. . . .”
Slowly, slowly Julian looks away, back to the girl in front of him. “Why were they here? What were they looking for?”
“They wouldn’t tell me.” Anabelle sniffs. “Look I—I know you and Richard haven’t exactly been allies since the integration, but you have to help me get my brother back! Rescue him from these monsters.”
The princess says the final word with such venom that my stomach clenches. Even Kieran goes stiff beside me, every muscle in his body winches.
Julian Forsythe just smiles.
“Don’t worry, Princess. You’re safe now.” He guides her to the door. “I’ll get you back to the palace.”
Anabelle leaves with false tears still streaming down her cheeks. Julian Forsythe follows. His eyes cut once more through the room, focus on our corner like a sniper’s rifle.
He shuts the door.
Twenty-One
We follow them at a distance. Kieran moves like silk and night down the hall, eyes never leaving Anabelle. The politician’s arm stays braced around the princess’s shoulder, guiding her through the building.
I keep waiting for the strike. For Julian’s blue eyes to go feral with a surge of rune magic. For him to grip the princess’s arm, use her as bait to lure us out of hiding.
But it never comes.
One phone call from Julian summons a small army of shiny black Jaguars. Red-eyed Protection Command officers swarm the lobby. Prodding charged stun guns into every available corner, hoping to root out hidden foes. Some of them even have the weapon wrapped around their knuckles like brass rings. A new design. Meant for a quick punch and jab. A serious fight.
Jensen is here. Eric too. Julian Forsythe ushers Anabelle into their arms like a parcel. Kieran watches the exchange with sharkskin eyes, letting nothing go. All of his powers are gathered, ready to break apart the lobby’s marble floor.
“We need to stay hidden.” I place my hand over his mark. He doesn’t even notice. All of his focus is poured on to the herd of men, Anabelle ringed inside them like a baby calf.
“Take the princess back to Kensington Palace,” I hear the politician saying. “Have men search my office. See if they left anything else behind. And make sure the press is given access. I want to be certain they cover this incident properly.”
Eric nods—head bobbing like a circus seal offered a bucket of fresh fish. Jensen looks less enthused, but this doesn’t stop him from sending several stun gun-wielding men upstairs.
Since when did Protection Command take orders from a member of Parliament?
But he isn’t just a mere Parliament member, is he? My eyes flicker to Julian Forsythe’s wrist. The tattoo is still there, barely visible against the stark white of his shirt cuffs. I haven’t felt any magic rolling from the mark yet, but Julian doesn’t need spells to control these men. Kieran’s right. The mortals drink his words like mead.
He’s their Beowulf. Their savior. Their monster slayer.
And he’s ready to lead them straight into battle.
My heart is not ready for Kensington. A palace of firsts. The bedroom with its frescoed ceiling of angels, where I first laid eyes on Richard, when the magic of our soul-tie first anchored itself in my chest. The garden of gravel and marigolds where my veiling spell first slipped and I couldn’t make myself bring it back. The moment Richard first became mine.
The marigolds are gone now, withered by frost and rooted out by dutiful gardeners. But the angels are still here, painted in a slant of forever-gold light. Their smiles unchanged. I stare up at them, curled tight in the elegant chair I once sat in every night and watched over Richard as he slept.
We’re locked in Richard’s old room, which Anabelle promptly took over when her brother made the move to Buckingham (“more walk-in wardrobe space” was her reason at the time). Kieran and I are still coated thick in his follee-shiu. We speak in whispers regardless, all too aware of the human security standing guard on the other side of the bedroom door.
“What now?” I keep staring at the angels, imploring the heavens. “I thought getting caught by Protection Command was what we were trying to avoid.”
“We’re exactly where we want to be,” Anabelle assures me. She’s pacing: back and forth, back and forth. Over the Persian rug I used to study during the hours Richard slept. “Now that we know Julian is . . . someone else . . . the only way we’re going to find Richard and expose Julian is if we take him by surprise. He believed my story. He doesn’t see me as a threat.”
“That’s because you aren’t.” My spine goes rigid in the chair as I sit up to look at her. “That was an awfully big gamble you took in the office! If he’d discovered you were lying, he could have killed you!”
“If I hadn’t thrown him off the trail, we would all be just as dead,” Anabelle answers, “or locked up in a dungeon somewhere. Or wherever it is ex-Camelot sorcerers stuff their prisoners.”
“Julian’s just as good as made you a prisoner. Have you seen the guards outside your door?” I nod to the white-paneled wood. “I don’t think they’re going to be letting you out of Kensington by yourself any time soon.”
“Then it’s a good thing I plan on staying.” The princess is going in circles. Stamping over and over on the same visages of woven horseback warriors in her anxious track. “Julian may be a sorcerer, but he’s a politician too. There aren’t many politicians who would turn down a personal invitation to dine at a royal residence. Especially if it’s a banquet held in their honor for rescuing the princess from the hands of some villainous Fae. It’s good press for him.”
“You want to invite Julian Forsythe to a dinner party? This evening?” I can barely believe what I’m saying. “Are you mad? What are you planning on doing? Feeding him some bad eggs? This is a sorcerer, Belle! Not some schoolgirl frenemy.”
Anabelle pauses and taps her fingers together. “Eggs isn’t a terrible idea. Though I was thinking more along the lines of spiking his drink.”
“You don’t want to use magic at all. You mean to trick him.” Kieran shifts. He’s crouched in the window ledge like a cat, an equal distance between the princess, myself and the night outside.
I’m trying my best not to notice him—here in this room where Richard and I shared so ma
ny intimate moments. But Kieran’s veiling spell is a stiff cocktail—oozing into my every pore, blurring even those memories.
“You want to drug him?” I ask. “To what end? As soon as he wakes up we’ll be outmatched again.”
“We won’t be there when he wakes up. You said Titania won’t aid us without proof. What better proof than the sorcerer himself? I’ll give him a heavy dose; you and Kieran can take him to Titania before he even knows what hit him. Once the Faery queen realizes we’re right, she’ll question him. Find Richard.”
It’s not a terrible plan, but it’s not foolproof either. I run it through my head like a marathon show, with dozens of alternate scenarios. Most of them don’t end well.
“How are you going to explain his disappearance? To the staff? His wife?”
“You can teach me memory alteration,” she says, as if stealing someone’s memories and replacing them is the simplest thing in the world. For her, it probably will be. “I’ll make them think he was called away to an emergency meeting. That the abduction happened outside the palace grounds.”
“And what about the press? They’ll make it look like a silencing attempt. Paint Forsythe as a martyr.”
“He won’t go missing for long. As soon as you rescue Richard we can set the record straight. Expose Julian for what he truly is. We’ll use the power of the press to turn things around.”
“What if the drug doesn’t work? It’s likely he’s warded against such things. Poison was as common as daylight in Arthur’s day.” I think of the birdsfoot trefoil on the table at the banquet. How Julian stared at it with such intent. How had I missed so many signs?
“This is the way it must be done, Emrys,” Anabelle says firmly. “If we can’t face Julian head-on, then we come at him from the side. Take him blind. It’s this or groveling at Titania’s feet. And I don’t think we can wait for her much longer.”
I stare across the room at Richard’s sister. She’s standing so straight, so sure. Just like that iron statue of the warrior queen Boudica on the Thames’s shore.
Gone is the party planner who smashed a vase in her panic attack over the coronation ball. Gone is the girl who strangled my arm like a lifeline in the black Jaguar.
She’s her own version of warrior royalty. The stress of Richard’s disappearance has only compressed her into a tighter, tougher version of herself. While I’ve been falling apart, she’s been pulling together. It’s as if all the seams ripped out of me have been rewoven into her.
I have no doubt she can do this.
The bottle-green velvet of the chair and the lulling sounds of Anabelle’s last-minute party planning are the perfect recipe for sleep. It doesn’t take me long to reach Richard. I feel his presence along the edges of the dream. Guiding me through layers of sleep, like a boat to safe harbor.
The world is chaos around us. Still. Always. But my eyes find his and refuse to let go.
Richard’s boots and cape twist deep into the mud. His hair is matted, eyes edged with weary red. His jaw bristles with shaveless days. I’ve never seen him so raw, so worn. Yet just knowing he’s here and real fills me to the point of bursting.
I reach him, slide straight into his outstretched arms. He pulls me tight into himself. Arms strong and steady: my anchor in these treacherous waters. I bury my face into his chest, fill myself with his nearness. His touch which sparkles and swells like a spell in my chest. And for a moment, even in the folds and depths of a dream, I feel whole.
But I can’t feel this way forever. I can’t always be sleeping.
I look up, straight into his fire-gold eyes. “Richard, this dream, it’s real. We’re actually here.”
“I know.” His whisper is hoarse, as if his throat is lined with dust and he’s just now brushing it off. “I’ve been waiting for you all night. Hoping.”
My heart is a thousand shards inside my chest: grinding, wanting, and so close to having. I want to kiss him again, but our time is short. Mordred is coming for us. Just as he has in every other dream. His footsteps are thunder through the earth. He leaps and lunges across the battlefield like a tiger. Honing in on the king, his prey.
“Where are you?” I gasp out the words. “In the real world?”
His arms stay tight around me. Unyielding. “I don’t know. The last thing I remember was the carriage, and then I woke up here. They’ve brought me food, but I never see any of them. It’s all dark.”
I hear the creaks and groans of Mordred’s armor. So close. Soon the dream will end and I’ll have nothing. Nothing but more pieces of Richard lodged everywhere, stinging, reminding me of how I still haven’t found him.
Time. I need more time.
The fierce of Richard’s kiss still burns on my lips, within my chest. I hold on to this as I step out and around Richard, plant my feet in the mud. Wait for Mordred’s always-fatal blow.
He lunges toward us, the same way he does in every dream. But this time something catches my attention. It’s not the sword which makes me pause, but his armor. The steel is black as Kelpie skin, glaring against Camelot’s distant firelight. Fine writing wraps around the knight’s limbs and face, so small and neat it could just be random scratchings in the metal.
But these scratchings are far from random. They’re small, precise, and complex. Rune magic at its finest.
The jagged letters are everywhere, swarming across Mordred’s armor, protecting him with all manner of spells. Armor over armor. Shield over shield.
It’s little wonder Arthur couldn’t defeat Mordred in the state he was in. So ravaged and hamstrung by grief.
Runes. Everywhere runes. Just like the signature of Blæc’s death. Only this time the symbols are a sick silver white—bursting my vision like ill-strung stars. Constellations writing down doom and maligned fortunes. Spelling out the ever-exact ending of this dream.
Blades and burning. Always.
I can still see the letters, swarming and confused behind my lids—like lamp-lit moths. But I’m awake. I know this because the armchair brushes soft velvet against my cheek. Because the voices murmuring like soft streams beside me belong to Anabelle and Kieran. Because my arm aches with fresh blood the way it does after every dream. Because the glow and song of Richard just under my breastbone has vanished.
Mordred.
That’s who’s been watching from behind those eyes of blue. The brutish invader from the north who found the weakness in Arthur’s armor. Who plunged his sword straight down and watched the Pendragon’s blood mix deep with mud.
All these years I thought he was dead—reduced to ash and vulture feast by Mab’s enraged magic. (Once I gave Mab the news, she returned to fallen Camelot faster than I could fly, even then. By the time I reached the battlefield again, the Pendragon and the sorcerer were gone.) But the Faery queen never unmade Mordred, like I’d thought. She had different plans for him: long years of agony in the earth’s deepest shadows. She must have looped his life like Guinevere’s. Cursed him to lifetimes of darkness. A fate worse than death.
He told me himself, that night at Windsor: Faery queens are the cruelest creatures alive.
And now Julian-Mordred has returned. To undo another king. To take back the kingdom Mab wrenched so brutally from his grasp. To get revenge on the Fae and the crown in one fell swoop.
A crack in my eyelid shows me Anabelle cross-legged on Richard’s old bed. Her party planning tools fan out in front of her: a series of notes, a laptop, a half-empty cup of tea. The whole setup—the shimmering light of electronics on her face, the focused scrunch of her nose, how she types a few words and then chews her lip—reminds me of the way her brother used to work.
Kieran has moved from the window to the edge of the bed. The computer’s presence doesn’t seem to bother him the way it would sicken a Frithemaeg. Instead its glow shifts and melds with his scar. This too lights up the princess’s face. Her laptop keys tap, tap, tap away: making lists and menus and specifications for flower arrangements. The Ad-hene watches the flight of he
r fingers with open awe.
Anabelle pauses, looks up at him. “What do you feed your prisoners? I want to make sure it’s not on the menu I’m putting together. Don’t want to let him catch on that I suspect anything.”
“We never fed our prisoners,” Kieran tells her. “Most immortals never acquire a taste for food.”
“But—what about Guinevere? And fake-Julian? You never gave them anything to eat? That whole time they were there?” Anabelle’s eyes get wider with every question—glimmering horror and Word documents. “They must have been so hungry. . . .”
Kieran tilts his head, all of his curls spilling to one side. “What does hunger feel like?”
“It’s like wanting something, except worse.” Anabelle studies those curls—spiraling in and out of the electric light. Her hand is tight by her leg, as if she’s pushing back the urge to reach out and touch them. “If you ignore it, it starts to hurt. And if you keep ignoring it, it becomes all you can think about. Until you get what you need. Or you die.”
“Like love,” Kieran suggests.
The princess’s breath goes sharp. I wonder if Kieran notices: how she’s watching him, how his words must be spearing her heart like a hunted whale.
“I—I wouldn’t know.” This time her denial is quiet, a whispered thing. She shifts gears, driving their conversation into a whole new direction with a louder voice. “I can’t imagine being hungry and vitamin D–deprived for so long. . . . No wonder fake-Julian is so angry. That literally sounds like hell.”
The Ad-hene says nothing. His face goes back to its hard, stony stare. The one which was once so constant—the one that’s been crumbling under jars of beetroot and sunlight as gold as the princess’s hair.
“Sorry,” Anabelle says quickly. “I know it’s your home. I don’t mean to criticize it so much.”
“It’s where I came from, yes. But it hasn’t felt like home in a long, long time.” Kieran’s words are slow and careful. Handpicked. “It’s not a nice place. Not anymore. Especially compared to all of this.” He nods up to the sky-born angels, their white feathers splaying over us like a canopy.
