by Ryan Graudin
Fortunately all of the other Fae’s attentions are focused on me. She doesn’t see Anabelle frown. She doesn’t hear Richard’s feeble explanation as to why the princess should stay in the confines of the city.
“There’s something I should tell you. . . .” I begin, thinking of the best way to keep Breena’s attention on me. “There was an attack last evening. Just after the press saw him.”
My friend’s face freezes at the news. Her expression tells me this incident was something I should have reported hours ago. “An attack? By whom?”
“It was a Green Woman. She had some sort of protection over her. I was barely able to break it. She almost finished me.” And Richard. I glance over Breena’s shoulder to see that the prince is out of bed now, throwing on a navy V-neck.
“But you unmade her? Why didn’t you report it right away?”
“There was too much to deal with. I had to track down the press and wipe their memories. Then I had to handle the prince. The incident was rather traumatic, he didn’t forget it that easily.” I breathe in and out solely through my nose. The exercise keeps my voice and aura steady—makes it easier to lie.
The only thing it doesn’t ease is my conscience. I didn’t know what I expected when I first showed myself to the prince, but it certainly wasn’t this. Not lying to my closest friend and jeopardizing all of our lives for the sake of secrecy.
But maybe, just maybe, the truth doesn’t have to stay hidden.
This is bigger than me now. Bigger than my rank or Breena’s worries. If I mess up again, if I keep letting these feelings get in the way, then Richard will be six feet beneath the earth, in a wooden box just like his father’s.
My fingers fidget over the many different fabrics of my skirts. If I don’t tell Breena now, I don’t think I’ll find the courage for it later.
“There’s something else I want to talk to you about.”
One of Breena’s flawless eyebrows disappears under her fringe of tangled curls. A question. “What’s wrong?”
“Remember the night we walked to the Tower of London? The night of the ravens?”
“Of course.”
“Do you remember what we discussed?” I ask.
Breena blinks, her eyes rolling back as she tries to remember.
“The emotions. They’re not stopping, Bree. I tried to push past them like you said, but they’ve just gotten worse.” My throat begins to swell under the pressure of my confession.
The other Fae’s lips pull paper thin. “What exactly are you saying?”
“It’s—” I take a deep breath. “It’s not frustration or anger. I think . . . I think it’s something else.”
My friend stares, her blue eyes becoming hard, glacial. It’s in moments like these I can feel the years that lie between us.
“I feel drawn to him. It’s hard to explain. . . .” I falter. Breena’s glare hasn’t flinched. I know, just from this one look, that telling her the truth won’t bring me freedom.
“You’re playing with fire, Emrys,” she says so softly even I have trouble hearing. “You know how this will end if you keep going. You know the sacrifice that must be made if you choose him. . . .”
I fail the courage to go on. I swallow Breena’s words and steal another look at Richard. He’s raking absent fingers through his hair as he talks to his sister. There’s something about the way he looks when he first awakes—disheveled and wild—that makes my chest throb.
None of the other Frithemaeg can guard him any better. In the end, Richard is better off with me.
Isn’t he?
“You’re going to have to report this to Queen Mab.”
“What?” My throat collapses into a choke.
“Mab needs to know about the attack,” Breena says. “Perhaps she can spare more scouts to see if they can trace how the Old One is directing the assassins.”
Relief tingles over me when I realize what Breena’s referring to. “I’ll send a sparrow this afternoon.”
“Make it sooner.” Breena glances back over her shoulder at the royals. “We might not have much time left.”
We sit alone in the yard. Richard rolls up his sleeves and works beneath the harsh energy of the sun. There’s a new speech in his hands—one thrust upon him as soon as he approached the prime minister and the regent with a half-mumbled apology. I stretch out in the grass as he memorizes his chance at redemption, savoring the time outdoors, yet never taking my eyes off Richard. It’s not so bad, having a constant excuse to watch him.
But every time I watch him—take in his movement, smile, and sun-salting of freckles—I fight. Those feelings that started that night in Hyde Park as a slight powder of snow keep falling, sliding. A never-stopping avalanche. There’s nothing between us except my rapidly fading common sense.
“Three weeks,” Richard says, and lets the sheets of paper he’s poring over drift into the grass.
“Hm?”
“In twenty-one days, I turn eighteen. I’ll become king.” The prince bites his lip and stares down at the scattered papers. He hasn’t had them for more than four hours, but they’re already worn through with numerous creases and folds.
“Yes. You will.”
“I used to do my homework out here when I was in primary school. My tutors hated it. Too much sunburn and grass stains.”
Try as I might, I can’t imagine ever hating the sun. “And you still made them come out?”
He shrugs. “I was . . . strong willed as a child.”
“Some things never change.”
“I did my multiplication tables under that tree over there.” He points, his finger arrow straight, to a distant sprawling Indian chestnut. “French conjugations I saved for the pond. I liked to shout them and scare the swans.”
“Sounds like you were positively rotten.” I say this with a smile, thinking of the pair of swans I’d startled so many weeks ago. How their feathers fanned, all cream and knifelike through the mist.
“It’s funny, how cyclical life can be,” he muses. “Though I much prefer you to any of those stuffy old tutors.”
He flops back into the grass, arms and legs spread-eagled like he’s about to create a snow angel in the lawn clippings. The flail of his limbs sends his right hand far. Tips of fingers, blunted and tough with callous, brush just against my arm.
Even after so many days apart, his touch, the barest pressure of his fingers, still sends a thrill across my skin. The desire, the lure to draw even closer to him, builds, rattling me. I try to shove it into the back of my thoughts. This time with Richard, lazing under noonday sun and clouds spread like lacework, should be enough. It has to be.
His hand doesn’t move. I don’t pull away. The place where our flesh meets feels frantically alive, like the glint and thrum of jeweled hummingbird wings.
He’s looking at me. Really looking. Like a man who’s stood in front of the same painting for hours, memorizing every hue and brushstroke. Richard is doing this with my face, my eyes . . . and what lies beneath it all.
“Emrys?” My name rolls off his lips with the syrupy grace of a foreign language. I barely recognize it.
I’m too scattered, too paralyzed by the war swirling black and white inside me, to answer.
“Why do you let me see you?”
“I—It makes my job easier if you’re aware.” There’s a staleness to my words. They’re translucent. I know Richard can see through them.
“I was wondering if there might be another reason,” he says, careful and deliberate.
Was there another reason? Besides the failed magic and fear of Mab’s retribution? Besides it being the only way out?
I open my mouth to speak when I feel it. Another immortal presence in the air, rapidly approaching. I know, just from the briefest taste, that this aura belongs to another Frithemaeg.
“Don’t talk to me,” I hiss in Richard’s direction, a fast jerk severing the connection between us. I throw up the veiling spell, vanish from his eyes.
Bre
ena appears in the yard: a burst of golden curls and flight. The hasty flare of her magic tells me she rushed here.
“Emrys, you’ve been summoned to Mab’s court. She wants you to leave immediately.”
I frown and pick at some longer blades of grass, rubbing their fleshy lengths between my fingers.
“But I sent the sparrow. . . .” I begin weakly.
The older Fae shrugs. “The message she sent me seemed urgent—she’s granted you a three-day leave from your duties. You should go now. I’ll watch Richard until some younglings can relieve me.”
A sudden fear digs its long ice claws into my shoulder blades. If Breena mentioned anything . . . If Mab has found out about my lenience with Richard—or worse, my emotions for him . . . I squirm in the plush layer of lawn, tossing the shredded grass away. It drifts to the earth like confetti.
There’s no choice left to me. I can’t drop the veiling spell; I can’t explain to Richard why I’ve vanished. I can only leave things like this. . . . Unsettled.
I allow myself one last glance at the prince. His eyebrows are drawn together in a concerned V as he pretends to study the strewn papers. I can only hope he won’t call for me. That he won’t betray our secret to Breena or the younglings guarding him.
“Right. I’ll be back soon,” I say, more for Richard’s unhearing ears than for Breena.
“You know Mab,” she chides. “I wouldn’t promise anything.”
Fourteen
Mab sits alone in the throne room. Her hair, dream-white, like the dust of moth wings, spirals tight into a bun. This makes her profile calculated, clean like the edges of a shadow. Highlights the fierceness of her.
The first time I saw her, I remember, her hair was down. It streamed over her shoulders, colorless lengths catching the sun like a crystal. Iridescent. The beauty of it was overwhelming—light-dazzled mist at the base of a roaring falls—painting both power and peace. It was enough to make me, in all my spin and zephyr, stop and listen. To hear what she wanted to offer.
It had been simple enough. My loyalty for so many things. Protection. Order. Spells. A body like hers to anchor to the earth. To contain everything that was me.
I don’t remember why I said yes. It’s hard to remember what I was before this. There are times, out here, on the edge of stony-shored lochs, that I remember. The feralness stretches inside me, pinpricks of claws scratch against recollections of unbridled magic. The stench and tang of it. Wilderness and wildness, all at once within me.
Mab waves me forward; the many rings on her fingers click together, calling me back with their strange music. I look down to the ring on my own thumb. It’s a silver, curling thing—a prize from a duchess’s open jewelry box. So solid on my finger, it reminds me of the realness of this body. How much I’ve both given and gained.
“You’ve guarded Richard for several weeks now,” Mab says when the last echo of my steps soaks into the chamber’s moss-coated floors. “I’ve called you here to give a full report.”
A report on Richard. I swallow. It’s one thing to test Breena’s tolerance of my emotions. But Mab . . . My memories drag me back to the Camelot days, when Guinevere, a Fae, declared her love for Arthur and relinquished her magic. Became mortal. The rage of our queen was unparalleled. Half of the court feared for their lives.
Time to be objective.
“Well, let’s have it then. How’s the prince coping? Drowning in the neck of a liquor bottle?”
“Actually he hasn’t touched a drop since the funeral. He wasn’t eating either, but he’s started taking care of himself in the past few days.” I keep my face steady, an amazing feat considering the anger that flares out of nowhere. I’ve never felt such emotions toward the queen before. Not even when she ordered me back to London.
This mortal is ruining me.
Mab is very still. Her hands rest flat against the throne’s gnarled, earthy wood. The gauzy sleeves of her gown, woven of web and fog, fall over them, hiding nothing. “He’ll be back to the bottle soon. Give him a few weeks. If there’s one thing I’ve learned through the years of our treaty, it’s that mortals rarely change so simply. You have to stay objective. It’s never good to let your charges get too . . . close. It never ends well.”
Something about her final words sets me on edge. My scalp needles under the unflinching, ever-changing colors of Mab’s stare. While the queen appears empty, unreadable, I know she’s probing me with millennias’ worth of magic. No matter how rigid I keep my face, how steady I thread my aura through the hoops of acceptable emotion . . . there’s no way my guard will keep up under her scrutiny.
Sooner or later, she will know.
But if she suspects anything, catches a whiff of longing under my piecemeal armor, she shows no signs of it. “And what of the Green Woman’s attack? I understand you were the only one to witness it.”
“Yes, Your Majesty. She attacked from the bushes. There was some kind of shield over her, made from someone else’s magic. From its strength and style, I’d say an Old One made it.”
“But you broke it?” Her bleached comma eyebrows twitch, the first sign of emotion since I curtsied my way through the door. Doubt.
“Barely,” I offer. “It took everything I had. A strong spirit cast it, much stronger than any of the Guard.”
Mab’s fingers dance over the breathless lace of her dress, pausing against the empty spaces. “I’ve always known you had something special, some talent—but to break an Old One’s shield is quite impressive indeed. Thank the Greater Spirit you managed it.”
I don’t bask long in the compliment. “The Old One has united them, Your Majesty. The Banshees and the Green Women. They’re working together in this.”
“The soul feeders?” She frowns. “Together?”
“I don’t know how she did it. But whatever’s going to happen . . . it’s big enough for the Green Women and the Banshees to form a truce. They’re allies now. I think . . . I think they mean to take the blood magic and wipe out the mortals with it.”
Mab rises from the throne’s ever-knotted roots and drifts toward the edge of the room, where a single rosebush bursts into flower—stark white in a chamber of dusk-light lavenders and blues. She takes a half-open bud between her fingers, studying the frosty tendrils. For a moment it seems my queen will snap the flower from its stem. Instead she strokes a velvet petal and leaves the bush be.
“She’s everywhere then. The Old One. Arms like snakes. Crawling through everything . . . getting it tangled . . .” Mab is muttering to herself, half the words whispered, unrestorable.
I fold my hands together. Even my own touch is startling in a place like this. Against every wish it makes me think of Richard.
“I believe we’ve been compromised.” She turns to me. “I had my suspicions when Muriel disappeared after Edward’s death. But now this new attack . . . It was too targeted. Too specific. The Old One’s been informed by someone on the inside.”
Betrayal beyond Muriel. It’s . . . possible. I feel flighty, a complete fool for not thinking of it until now. Have I left Richard in a den of wolves? “Milady, it could all be simply coincidence.”
“And how is it they didn’t even begin to pick up traces of the magic until well after you should have been dead? Hyde Park isn’t far from Buckingham. The perimeter guards should have sensed such a disturbance. Someone delayed it. Someone on the inside.” Mab’s sigh is wither and crumble, a strength diminished. She glides close; her hand rests against the tendons of my shoulder. I have to stop myself from gaping at the power behind her colorless, translucent skin. She’s old—far older than I’m ever likely to become, with how swiftly technology is spreading.
“I hate to put this on you because you’re so young, but you’re the only one I trust. You had a chance to save the prince and you took it. I know where your loyalties lie. The rest . . .” My queen’s words become gravelly before they fall into stillness.
“What about Breena? I know she’s loyal.”
; “Whoever blocked your spells from reaching the other Fae had to use strong magic, more powerful than anything most of the, ahem, younglings, could have conjured. It’s Breena who worries me the most.”
Her words sink in. Breena? A traitor? There’s no way on this earth my friend would betray the royals.
“Breena was nowhere near the attack!” I reason.
“That doesn’t clear her.” Mab’s words aren’t gentle. She has no room for it. “I’ve heard even in London magic can work at a distance.”
I have no argument for this. I keep my mouth shut, waiting for my queen to continue.
“I want you to look into the matter—the Guard must be clean and loyal. Root out anyone you deem isn’t. That includes Breena,” she says. “I grant you permission to ignore her orders if you think that they will in any way endanger the prince.”
“But, Majesty, what about Richard? I’m supposed to be guarding him. . . .”
“Leave two or three Frithemaeg with him if you’re gone. I doubt a traitor would try anything with another Fae in the room. You have my permission to relieve your detail as often as you need. Just make sure you don’t leave him with the younger ones for too long. I’ll call you back in another month for a report, but if you uncover anything sooner, don’t hesitate to message.”
“Of course, Your Majesty.”
Under her opal eyes I feel like quartz: brittle and translucent. “You reek of modernity. The city has been hard on you, I take it?”
“Not easy,” I answer, honest.
“Stay here for an evening. It will do your spirit some good. Give you some luster.” The way she says this is an order. Not an offer.
“Thank you, my queen.”
“One more thing.” The queen holds up her finger and digs through her hushed layers of gown and petticoats until she pulls out a slim caramel envelope labeled with curling letters. “I’d like you to deliver this message to Herne first thing in the morning.”
The spells woven into the envelope’s seal call out to me as I brush my finger over it. Mab will know when it’s opened and who tore the paper. The queen’s giving me this message means only one thing: it’s too secret to send by sparrow.
