by AJ Lancaster
“I hope I am subtler than that.” He placed the stunted pot plant on the table with a kind of grim care, as if it were an explosive and not a rather unassuming botanical specimen.
She frowned at the plant. Stariel’s awareness sharpened, information flowing between heartbeats. The land didn’t much care for the plant, sniffing around it with deep suspicion. A hint of candles and cherries, the taste magical rather than literal.
“It smells like Princess Sunnika’s magic,” she observed after processing the signature. “What is it?”
“A dusken rose.” Rakken’s voice cut through the fog. Wyn’s brother emerged out of the whiteness and stalked up the terrace steps in a blaze of fury. “Get out of the way and I’ll destroy it.”
“Honestly, Rakken, I’m not going to let you electrocute a houseplant before I even know what it is or why it’s here, so you can stop boiling over with storm magic.”
Rakken bared his teeth. The gold threads in his dark hair trembled free despite the fact that there was no breeze, and his bronze-and-green wings furled out to their full breadth—which would’ve been more impressive if his wings weren’t clipped as neatly as a hen’s. He was using glamour to disguise that fact, but glamour didn’t work on her anymore, not since she’d become Stariel’s lord and gained the Sight. Why did Rakken bother with the charade, knowing that? Maybe it was simply to needle Wyn.
Rakken’s glare shifted to Wyn, who’d half-risen at his entrance. “And you, brother? Will you let this thing live? Have you not betrayed the Spires sufficiently yet? Are you now actively helping our enemies?”
Stariel curled around Rakken, responding to her anger.
“I’m not thrilled this is here either,” Wyn said. “But you cannot ignore the message it would send if we destroyed DuskRose’s gift.”
“And what if that’s exactly the message I wish to send?” Rakken said silkily, folding his wings with a snap. The anger in him was vast and terrible, and somehow even more alarming when he smoothed it under a veneer of civility.
“If you’ve quite finished?” she asked, pouring herself more coffee. “Could one of you please explain what, exactly, a dusken rose is?” She clinked the pot softly with her cup. Both brothers winced.
“A dusken rose is a rare magical flower native to Princess Sunnika’s court,” Wyn said, slowly settling in his seat again, all the time eyeing his brother as if he thought he might need to leap up at any second. “And one closely associated with DuskRose’s royal bloodline.”
Hetta considered the stunted black stick. It didn’t look like it would be flowering any time soon. “I’m assuming this ‘gift’ has more than just symbolic meaning?” She put down her cup and reached out a finger towards the plant. Both Rakken and Wyn froze, but neither moved to stop her. That, and Stariel’s lack of reaction, made her continue.
The texture was smooth and slightly waxy, and it almost hummed against her skin, the sense of foreign magic intensifying. Stariel gave an unimpressed huff.
“I can feel the magic in the stem, but Stariel doesn’t seem to think it’s dangerous.” She was confident of that, even if she and Stariel’s communication remained imperfect; like Wyn, the land tended to err on the side of caution.
“DuskRose wants you to plant it,” Wyn said, extremely neutral. “To build a Gate between Stariel and the Court of Dusken Roses.”
She frowned and hazarded a guess based on what she knew of fae magic. “I’m assuming a Gate is some kind of portal, and that this dusken rose is to give us a resonance point?”
“Yes,” Wyn said. “A Gate is a type of permanent portal in a fixed location. They require substantial energies to build as well as an anchor to act as a resonance point, but once they’re constructed, they are more stable than portals and require little magic to activate and use. They also bypass wards against translocation.”
“And if I use this, er, anchor to build a Gate between Stariel and DuskRose…?”
Rakken bristled. “An insult.”
“An insult to ThousandSpire,” Wyn clarified. “A Gate between two faelands…is symbolic.”
“Princess Sunnika spoke of an alliance,” she mused, wrestling with an instinctive rejection of the idea. The princess had helped her on more than one occasion. But Hetta kept remembering the cold fear of nearly losing Wyn in Meridon, thanks to a member of DuskRose’s court. That hadn’t strictly been Princess Sunnika’s fault, but on the other hand, it wouldn’t have happened if Princess Sunnika hadn’t sent her handmaiden Gwendelfear to spy on them in the first place.
It didn’t help that Wyn had once been engaged to Princess Sunnika, nor that he still owed her a favour. Hetta wrestled with the urge to set the plant alight, and Stariel perked up its ears.
“Are Gates permanent once you’ve made them?” she asked.
“In theory, one can destroy a Gate. But to do so would be an act of war.”
“Do not trust the Court of Dusken Roses, Lord Valstar,” Rakken warned. “It’s no coincidence that they’ve sent you this while the Spires are under a curse. They wish to take advantage of the power vacuum. They’re trying to secure their place as the most powerful court of Faerie.” Something dark flickered in his expression.
He truly hates the Court of Dusken Roses, she realised, faintly surprised. She knew DuskRose and ThousandSpire had been at war, but the emotion still seemed uncharacteristic for Rakken, who’d planned—and technically, succeeded in—a coup against his own father with a cold-blooded lack of sentimentality.
“What happens if I don’t plant it?” she asked Wyn, who was still looking at the plant as if he could bore his way through it.
“It will insult DuskRose,” he said heavily. “Dusken roses aren’t given lightly, and Gate anchors even less so. A great deal of magic went into making this.”
“I note that you fail to mention your debt to DuskRose, brother,” Rakken said, snapping his wings irritably. “Is this what they asked of you, that you play their advocate?”
An infinitesimal pause. “Yes,” Wyn admitted.
Hetta stared hard at him. “And are you going to?”
There were a lot of things glinting in the deep russet of his eyes, too many and too complicated to name. He sighed and pulled a stiff blood-red rectangle from his pocket. The florid gold ink of the handwriting was familiar; Princess Sunnika had used the same ink in her last note to him as well. Why did the princess have to send him so many notes, anyway?
Rakken’s tone was mocking. “Oh, little Hollow, still keeping secrets. Still letting everyone else pay the price of your mistakes.”
“The debt is mine to pay, and so I intend to tell Sunnika,” Wyn told Hetta, ignoring his brother. His words tended to become more precise in direct proportion to how agitated he was. They could have sliced stone now.
Rakken laughed. “She’s your lord now, Hallowyn. It’s entirely within her rights to discharge oath-debts on your behalf. Oh, didn’t you know that? Didn’t he tell you?” he said innocently as Hetta narrowed her eyes at him. He flashed a dagger-sharp grin. “Are you still both pretending nothing has changed and that this play-acting will become real if you try hard enough?” He waved viciously at Hetta’s engagement ring.
“Go away, Rakken,” she said quietly.
He dropped his mocking act. “He will never be human, Lord Valstar, for all he hides his feathers from you.”
“Go,” she repeated, and there were hints of Stariel in her voice.
Rakken shrugged. “I have spellwork to be doing anyway.” He gave Wyn a passing
glare. “Someone has to think of freeing the Spires.”
The fog quickly enveloped Rakken, but she could still feel the blaze of his presence through her land-sense as he walked away—heading back towards the Standing Stones. He’d haunted the Stones these past weeks, trying to find a way back into ThousandSpire, but the curse that had locked the Spires into stasis had blocked any and all of his attempts.
“Sometimes I want to strangle your brother.”
“Entirely understandable,” Wyn said lightly. He nodded at the blood-red card in her hand. “It’s an invitation to Kurayanni at the Court of Dusken Roses, one of the more significant seasonal celebrations in their calendar. In one week’s time. The dusken rose is to give us a way to get there. Sunnika has asked for your attendance in payment of my debt.” His expression was fierce, the gold motes in the russet of his eyes glittering. “It is my debt, Hetta.”
Hetta considered him. “Our debt.”
“Are you trying to claim this from me?” His voice was dangerously soft, and he’d gone all icy fae prince despite not actually changing forms.
“Yes, I am,” she said, adding quickly, “but not because of what Rakken said. This is our debt because we’re in this together. Of course I’m not going to decide a course of action without you; but similarly, you’re not going to settle this without regard to me.”
She could see him fighting that, the stiff lines of his body saying just how little he liked the idea. She waited.
Eventually he closed his eyes and gave a short, tight nod.
She put a hand over his. “Thank you.”
He breathed out, the line of his shoulders loosening. “I am not sure delivering this unlovely botanical specimen deserves thanks.”
“That’s not what I was thanking you for.”
He gave her fingers a gentle squeeze. “I know.”
Giving him a moment, she read the card and then propped it up against the dusken rose’s pot. “Is the invitation simply an excuse to pressure us into planting the rose or do they actually want us to attend this Kurayanni event?”
“Both. I imagine Queen Tayarenn would like to take your measure.”
Hetta didn’t much relish the idea of a fae queen sizing her up, or of planting foreign magic within Stariel’s borders. She thought of her letter to the Conclave’s chair. Was DuskRose’s queen more or less likely to approve of her than Lord Arran? Queen Tayarenn wouldn’t care about the things humans found scandalous, but she might still see Hetta as lacking. Presumably DuskRose’s queen didn’t have difficulty controlling her own faeland.
Hetta reached out to Stariel.
Stariel sent her its standard response when it didn’t quite understand but was nevertheless attempting to be generically reassuring: the stone roots of the Indigoes.
Wyn was gazing unseeing into the fog in the direction his brother had taken. “Rakken isn’t wrong that the timing of this takes advantage of the Spires’ curse.” His voice was soft, worried. “I thought Lamorkin would return before now. I thought…I didn’t think it would take them this long.”
They’d asked Wyn’s godparent if they knew how to contact the High King, or if they knew his brother Irokoi’s location, since Irokoi had hinted he knew more about the Spires’ curse. Lamorkin, who liked being cryptic far more than necessary, had stated they’d return with answers by the full moon, and then disappeared without further comment. That had been weeks ago now.
“Full moon is on Thursday night. Not so very much longer to wait,” she said, though it wasn’t much comfort. She’d hoped to know more by now too.
Perhaps she ought to make another effort to hunt through Stariel’s library for information. For all she knew, there were entire shelves of notes detailing everything from the colour of the High King’s eyebrows to his dietary preferences hidden somewhere in the disorder. We really must get the library contents properly catalogued at some point.
She sighed, knowing already how long the estate’s to-do list was. If only Marius hadn’t been so determined to return to Knoxbridge so quickly; he’d always been much better at searching through the mess than she was. Perhaps she should enlist some of her cousins to help? Aunt Maude had arrived with several of her brood yesterday, and cousin Ivy was bookish. Hetta made a mental note to ask. Ivy didn’t need to know exactly why she needed the information.
Her gaze fell once more on the blood-red invitation. “What happens if you don’t pay Princess Sunnika back the favour as she’s asked?”
Wyn didn’t meet her eyes, but she could tell his fae nature was still lurking close to the surface by the way the shadows of his features deepened, becoming subtly more angular. “I can live with a broken oath.”
She huffed. “Yes, well, perhaps we can at least consider if there might be some alternative before you immediately leap to sacrifice yourself?”
He gave a soft laugh, the hard edges of him softening. “Perhaps.” The warmth in his eyes woke an answering warmth in her, fond and gooey as caramel. His attention grew sharper, more assessing, but he managed to bite off the query before it could form.
She couldn’t help smiling, even though she’d put a limit on the daily number of times he could ask after her welfare for exactly this reason. “I’m fine. And you’re up to three already today.”
“Technically, I didn’t ask; it does not count.”
“It does if I can see you thinking it that hard.”
He diplomatically took a sip of tea instead of responding, and Hetta decided on the spot that complications of all varieties could wait. She rose—intending to kiss him—but a wave of dizziness rose with her. Pinpricks of sweat broke out behind her knees, of all places, and the world swam in a nauseating way. Grabbing the table for balance, she sagged back into her seat and laid her head on her arms.
“Hetta? What’s wrong?” The alarm in Wyn’s tone was a sharp contrast to the gentle hands on her shoulders. He’d moved faster than humanly possible.
She lifted her head warily. “Nothing, I think,” she said after a pause to check the world had indeed steadied, the dizziness ebbing as soon as it had come.
“That was not nothing.”
“Nothing inexplicable, I mean. I remember Cousin Cecily had dizzy spells early on, before she had her girls. I think I just stood up too quickly.”
Cecily’s little girls were six years old now. Hetta had been in Meridon studying illusion by the time they’d been born, but she remembered some of Cecily’s pregnancy. This was normal, then. It was fine that her body was doing alarming things without her say-so. She swallowed.
Maybe she should ask Cecily for advice. Or her stepmother. Or, in fact, any of the other innumerable women among her relatives who’d gone through this.
Of course, that would also mean telling them that she was pregnant.
At some point I’ll no longer need to tell them because it’ll be obvious. How long, exactly? She was fuzzy on the finer points of such things, but at least several months, surely? Another thought swam up guiltily. It might not stick, though. Many women didn’t widely share their news until the babe had quickened, for that reason. And if I’m one of them, I don’t want to bear my entire family’s condemnation for nothing.
Wyn frowned worriedly down at her. “You should eat something.”
“I will, shortly,” she agreed.
He still looked worried, but his gaze had unfocused, and she suspected he was running through his own memories of her various relatives’ past pregnancies. I wonder if he paid more attention than I did?
“You’re going to be very tiresome once you’ve read those books, aren’t you?” she reflected.
The corner of his mouth curved up guiltily. “I…yes, probably.”
She ought not to encourage that sort of behaviour, but since she hadn’t actually gotten the kiss she’d wanted earlier, she tugged him down. The fog created a small bubble o
f privacy with just the two of them inside.
“Bloody hells, Hetta, do you have to paw at each other in public?” Her cousin Jack strode along the terrace, his face screwed up in disgust.
She sighed and extricated herself. Not just the two of them, then. “Would you prefer we pawed at each privately?”
Jack’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t take the bait. “I’d prefer you kept your appointments. Are we going to try this business at the Heathcote before the estate agent turns up or not? Is that one of Marius’s?” He frowned at the table, and she remembered the dusken rose.
“That’s a problem I haven’t yet decided how to deal with. I’m inclined to procrastinate, at least for today.” She threw a questioning glance at Wyn. “Unless it’s going to start sprouting the second we leave it alone?”
“I will put it in the greenhouse under wards,” he said, and then grew stern. “While you eat breakfast—before you experiment.”
3
River Experiments
Having woken at an ungodly hour, there were any number of things Marius ought to have used the extra time for: prepping for the tutorials he was taking later today; re-working his thesis proposal for the eleven-thousandth time; catching up on the latest journal articles.
Instead, he was doing none of these things. Instead, he was doing something monumentally ill-advised, standing on the banks of the river in the early dawn light, about to spend precious sleep time on experiments—and not the sort of experiments he could put in his thesis proposal.
Though it’s not as if I would’ve slept much anyway, he thought. So, really, what am I losing out on? Sleep had become an elusive creature of late, his nights torn into fragments by strange dreams. They weren’t always nightmares, but they were almost always unsettling, full of people he didn’t recognise and impulses he didn’t understand. Last night he’d been a linguistics student who’d somehow become trapped in the Professor of Modern Languages’ office—a location he’d never actually set foot in during his waking life—whilst lists of nouns and verbs sprouted teeth and menaced him. Marius hadn’t realised he knew that much about declensions in the first place, or that they were preoccupying his subconscious so. The night before, he’d dreamed of a pretty tavern wench in a pub he didn’t recognise and felt a desire for the girl that confused him utterly upon waking. Maybe I’m going mad.
