The King of Faerie (Stariel Book 4)

by AJ Lancaster

  Marius winced away from the thought of just how foolish he’d been in his own choices. As if attempting to blackmail his family hadn’t been sufficient, John had then shacked up with the Earl of Wolver and spun him a pretty tale of tragedy in which Wyn, Marius, and Hetta had wronged him, prompting the earl to avenge his lover.

  “Em?” Greg prompted.

  “I think,” he said carefully, “that I’m glad we have Wyn on our side, given that things with Faerie seem likely to get more rather than less complicated. And he does love Hetta.” He didn’t doubt that, though he could wish the pair were a little more careful.

  Greg made a disgusted noise at this saccharine comment. “Well, I wish they’d hurry up and actually marry. It doesn’t look good, drawing it out. People will say she’s—you know, a light-skirt.” He blushed.

  I’m fairly sure she is a light-skirt, by standard definition, and has been for some time, Marius considered telling him. He was the only one of the family who’d seen Hetta during her six-year absence, when he’d occasionally visited her in Meridon. She’d drawn a sharp wall around her life there, but he could read between lines. He didn’t want to read between lines, not when they involved his sister, but, still, he wasn’t completely naïve.

  “Anyone who insults a woman with that sort of judgement isn’t worth your time,” he said firmly instead. Hypocrite, his inner critic whispered. Hadn’t he railed at Hetta about the very same thing more than once?

  That was different, though. He was her brother; it was his job to worry.

  They walked in silence for several minutes. The colleges of Knoxbridge were sprinkled throughout the township, with the one Greg belonged to on the outskirts. Marius deposited his thoughtful and semi-penitent brother at Maudlin College and began the walk back to his own accommodations. His headache was starting to ease—thank Mighty Pyrania and all the little gods. Maybe it was a sign that he was finally recovering from whatever Aroset had done to him. What if she permanently damaged me? Fingers clutching at his throat…

  He shoved his hands into his pockets and began to walk more briskly. He walked for a long time, until dawn broke through the mist in a wash of grey light and a small trickle of people joined him on the river path, giving him no more than passing nods. There were swans on the river as well, real or lowfae he wasn’t sure, and he squinted at them to no effect, trying to tell. Would the herb mixture work without the quizzing glass, he wondered? He ought to try that next, just to rule it out as a variable.

  What was he doing? He had a tutorial to teach this morning, and doing that on no sleep was guaranteed to bring on a migraine.

  He forced his feet back in the direction of Shakif College, which was a small postgraduate college named after an Ekaran benefactor. It was located on the opposite side of the Botanic Gardens from Greg’s college, so the trip would’ve been a ten-minute one if not for Marius’s meanderings.

  The porter was just distributing the early morning delivery into the pigeonholes when Marius came in.

  “Two for you, Mr Valstar,” he said, handing him the envelopes. “Got a sweetheart, have you?”

  He meant it kindly, but Marius still flushed. “Thank you, Mr Singh.” He took them from him and tromped tiredly up to his room. It looked out over the four-sided courtyard and faced west, which was a blessing today, since it meant with the curtains closed it would still be dark enough to sleep.

  He threw the two envelopes on his desk and frowned. One was a thick, cream-coloured piece with a rather official-looking seal and his name and address written in tight, elegant black ink. The other was unlabelled, and he recognised the envelope as the sort you could buy ten-for-a-penny.

  He should sleep, but he’d never been very good at denying curiosity, so he picked up the rougher of the two, fished about for a letter-opener, and tore it open.

  A pamphlet stared up at him. A horrible urge to laugh rose up in his throat as he unfolded it and found an illustration that, in a poor light, might’ve been of Wyn, if Wyn had abandoned his usual neat suit and instead taken up some kind of druid’s robes instead. In poorly set type, the pamphlet informed him: “WINGED GODS ARE AMONG US!!! Have You feLt THEIr inflUENCE????”

  He did laugh, a choking sound. It looked like Ms Orpington-Davies had been right about the wing worshippers. Gods, imagine what Rakken would make of this sort of nonsense. It didn’t bear thinking about, though it was at least better than yet another thinly veiled snipe at his family. Wasn’t it? Rubbing at his temples, he crumpled the pamphlet up and dropped it into the wastepaper bin, that seeming the best place to file it.

  He eyed the second envelope. “Well, you can hardly be worse than your friend,” he told it, picking it up.

  It was.

  11

  Illustrious Ancestors

  The next morning before breakfast, Hetta once again tried asking Stariel if it knew how to fix the cause of the static shocks, and the land once again returned only worried incomprehension, so she got up, got dressed, and made her way to the library. Surely if she kept digging, somewhere in the library’s disorder, one or other of her ancestors must’ve recorded at least one useful fact relating either to her land-sense, fae-human hybrids, or the fae High King? What was the point of storing all this wretched family history, otherwise!

  She walked along the length of the main floor—the library was a two-storeyed room that had been a ballroom in a past life—and drew up in surprise: Ivy, not usually an early riser, was already here, snugged at a desk in the far corner, surrounded by stacks of old books. Her dark head was bent over her work as she scribbled furiously.

  “Ivy?”

  Ivy gave a start and knocked over one of the stacks, which went cascading to the floor in a paper avalanche. Hetta bent to retrieve it with an apology and saw that the pile consisted mostly of hand-written journals.

  “Drat,” Ivy said, frowning at the pile. “I’d already sorted that one into date order.” She yawned, covering her mouth with a hand, and blinked around owlishly. “Gosh—what time is it?”

  “Please tell me you haven’t been here all night,” Hetta said in dismay. Ivy’s eyes were blood-shot, suggesting that this was, in fact, the case.

  Ivy wrinkled her nose. “Well, I didn’t intend to be,” she said, stifling another yawn. “But I got Daff to help me locate all of these yesterday, and then the cross-referencing got very involved…” She gestured around at the books in a ‘you-know-how-it-is’ sort of way. Daff was Daffodil, one of Ivy’s younger brothers. Aunt Maude had a penchant for botanically themed names.

  “Family journals?” Hetta guessed. The open spreads of several of the books showed various styles of handwriting.

  “Lords’ journals,” Ivy said proudly. “We found a whole cache of them buried in a shelf otherwise devoted to cataloguing beetles. No wonder no one knew they were there.”

  “I don’t suppose any of them are from—”

  But Ivy was already shaking her head. “None are from the first Lord Fallstar, but these ones”—she poked a small stack of battered leather journals triumphantly—“are from Great Great Great Great Great Grandfather, Lord Marius Valstar the first. You know,” she said impatiently in the face of Hetta’s blank look. “The Lord of Stariel during unification.”

  “Oh, when the Northern Treaty was signed with the Crown.” Hetta did know some history. That had been a little over three centuries ago, though sometimes the North acted as if it had been only yesterday. “And around when the Iron Law came into being.”

  “Well, yes, I wondered if they were linked too,” Ivy said kindly, picking up one of the journals. “Though I don’t think they did happen at the same time; I think your fairy Iron Law happened the year after unification.” She huffed down at the journal. “I have to say, though, that Lord Marius’s approach to record-keeping leaves much to be desired. This is the entry nearest in time to when I think the Northern Treaty must’ve been signed: ‘A lot of paperwork. Extra houseguests due to leave by the 20th.’” She made a disgust
ed sound. “The next entry is for the 25th of the same month: ‘Bagged two rabbits, one pheasant’. Honestly!”

  A strange feeling rose in Hetta’s chest, hearing the words of her ancestor who’d occupied the same role she did now, even if they weren’t particularly illuminating words. She wanted to reach across the centuries and ask Lord Marius I whether he’d expected to be lord or if—like her—it had been thrust upon him. How he’d reconciled lordship with personal concerns. Whether he’d doubted himself too.

  “Does he say anything about Stariel’s magic?”

  Ivy shook her head. “Only by inference. Things like ‘Stariel is quiet tonight’. Once he worried about ‘going too deep’, but he didn’t elaborate on what that meant.”

  A chill went down Hetta’s spine; she knew what he’d meant. Had that been what she’d done on the stairwell before Grandmama had snapped her out of it? If so, how did one avoid going too deep again?

  Ivy didn’t notice her reaction, continuing to flick through the journal whilst making small grumbling sounds. “He had a sad life, I think. Look at this, his last two entries.”

  Hetta craned over her shoulder and read: Ewan is dead. There were no other details, but the unadorned words carried grief across three centuries. That entry was followed a week later by a second one: The cursed queen gave her word. It won’t bring Ewan back, but mayhap it will keep the others safe for a time.

  There were no more entries after that.

  “Who was Ewan?” Hetta asked, wrapping her arms around herself.

  “His youngest son—he’s on the wall, look.” Ivy got up, stiff and groaning as she fished about for her cane.

  “You need to go to bed,” Hetta said severely. “You shouldn’t have stayed up on my account.”

  “It wasn’t exactly on your account; I’m not that noble. I just lost track of the time. Anyway, the wall!” Ivy found her cane and began to make her way back along the length of the library, to one of the staircases leading up to the mezzanine. Hetta followed her.

  The wall she referred to was on the upper floor. On it hung an old heirloom tapestry of their family tree, with the line of lords picked out in gold thread.

  Ivy craned her neck to look to the very top, where Lord Fallstar was stitched in faded thread. “That’s about all we have of our most illustrious ancestor,” she said, pointing at it. “I wish I knew more about him.”

  Hetta realised she already knew something more than Ivy did about the first Lord of Stariel. “Wyn said he married a fae woman.”

  Ivy’s eyes widened. “Why didn’t you tell me that sooner! What was her name? Does he know anything else about her?”

  “Er…I don’t know. I didn’t ask any of that.” And now she felt somewhat sheepish for not doing so. It also hadn’t occurred to her that the information might be of interest to anyone else in the family.

  Ivy deflated and then brightened. “Well, I can ask him myself, I suppose. Where is he?”

  “Stewarding.”

  Ivy sighed and turned back to the wall, saying philosophically, “Well, it’s waited a thousand years. I suppose it can wait a while longer.”

  “I haven’t looked at this in years,” Hetta said, touching the name of her great-grandfather, Sydney Valstar. A small gold star indicated he’d been chosen to rule. “Grandfather Marius never got his star.” Lord Marius II’s name was present only as one of Lord Sydney’s offspring, his own lordship not yet stitched. None of the family after him were present, as the tapestry hadn’t been updated in several generations.

  “We’re looking for Marius the first.”

  They traced their way upwards. “Here’s Ewan. Goodness, However-many-Great-Grandfather Marius was prolific. Fourteen children!” Hetta resisted—once again—the urge to put a hand to her abdomen.

  “His poor wife,” Ivy remarked. “See, there—Ewan was his youngest son.” She pointed at a tiny name above Hetta’s head. “Died young, looking at the death date—only eighteen. Never married or had children.” A sad dead-end in the Valstar family tree.

  “The cursed queen,” Hetta murmured, turning the words of Lord Marius’s last journal entries over thoughtfully. “But there wasn’t a queen in Prydein then, was there, in North or South? You think he was referring to a fae queen?”

  Ivy’s eyes brightened. “Exactly.”

  Hetta knew the High King would’ve been the High Queen then and said as much to Ivy. The gender-changing nature of Wyn’s liege had been a strange thing to get her head around, though she supposed less strange than the fact that the fae had turned out to be real at all. After all, the idea wasn’t wholly without precedent, even here in the human world. It wasn’t quite the same thing, but back in Meridon, Hetta had known some amongst the theatre crowd who went by names and attires other than the ones they’d been born to.

  An unsettling shape began to form as Hetta tried to fit everything she knew together. The first Lord Fallstar bargaining with the High King in a past so distant there were no real records left of how Stariel began. Lord Marius I, many generations later, making another bargain with the High Queen at a time that coincided a little too neatly with the beginning of the Iron Law. Stariel’s magic ebbing over the last three centuries since Faerie and Mortal had separated.

  Ivy had turned away from the wall and was eying her speculatively. “You know, if Lord Fallstar married a fae woman, technically that means Wyn will be the second fae marrying into this family, assuming you actually are going to make an honest man of him. Who would’ve thought you’d turn out to be the most traditional of us?”

  Hetta laughed, though the thought sat oddly. So much of her life since returning to Stariel had been dictated by tradition—from the Choosing ceremony itself to seeking the queen’s permission to marry. Had the original Lord Fallstar faced the same kind of opposition she was dealing with now? Though the fae wouldn’t have been a secret back then, centuries before the Iron Law came into being. “Two fae marrying into the family in a thousand years can hardly be considered a tradition,” she felt bound to point out.

  “Two fae that we know of.” Ivy shrugged. “We’ve started traditions on the basis of less.” Her tone grew teasing. “Are you sure you don’t want to formally adopt this one, betroth your future children to fae royalty, lock them in tower rooms awaiting enchanted rescue and so on? After all, we have all these appropriately picturesque towers—it seems a shame not to use them.”

  Hetta carefully didn’t put a hand to her stomach.

  Ivy continued her thought experiment, oblivious. “Though I suppose technically any children you have would be fae royalty, on their father’s side. Which does raise the question of whether their land-sense would be tied to Stariel or to Wyn’s court. Do you know much about how fairy inheritance works? Would the wings be passed down the line as well? There’s no record of that in our own histories, which suggests Lord Fallstar’s wife either wasn’t winged, or it’s not an inherited trait with mixed bloodlines.”

  “Ivy,” Hetta said plaintively, for her cousin had given her an entire raft of new concerns. Images bloomed in her mind’s eye: a small boy with bright russet eyes and the long Valstar nose; a girl with flowing, silvery-white hair. The images flickered at the edges, uncertainly forming the outlines of wings and horns.

  She pushed them away. The images were only her own imaginings, not realities—even Stariel couldn’t give her any details yet. The land was only connected to the child through its effect on her; it was too early for it to know anything more. Early enough that she shouldn’t have really known it even existed yet.

  Ivy gave a start, a faint flush rising on her cheekbones. “Oh. Sorry. You know I get caught up.”

  Hetta wavered, considered confessing that the topic wasn’t only of academic interest to her, but in the end only said, “Getting back to the matter in hand, did Lord Marius write anything more about what happened with the fae queen?”

  Ivy shook her head. “I suppose he was too busy grieving his son.”

  Frustrati
on burned in her. They ought not to lose so much institutional knowledge each time the lordship changed hands. There ought to be properly organised records made of this stuff, an instruction manual for Stariel’s magic passed down.

  “He was still the lord; he should’ve recorded something this important. Even if—Oh.” Hetta’s fingers stilled on the tapestry, her focus on the death date of Marius I. “He died too, the same year as his son.” But the cold-hearted anger still lurked at her ancestor’s failure of duty. She certainly wouldn’t leave Stariel’s next lord so adrift.

  “As I said, he seems to have led a rather sad life.” Ivy rubbed at her eyes. “I don’t suppose our Marius is due back any time soon? Organising family journals would go a lot quicker with another pair of hands. And legs. Even if he does prefer a wrongheaded system of categorisation.” She stifled another yawn.

  “Not until end of term, I don’t think.” Hetta sighed. She both wanted and didn’t want Marius here.

  Ivy slid her a sideways look. “What does Marius think about”—she made a vague gesture—“all this?”

  “What do you mean?” Hetta asked frostily.

  Ivy didn’t take the hint; she’d never been good at reading tone. “You know—you and Wyn. Fairy royalty. Queen Matilda summoning you for whatever that was about. The Dower House.”

  “What about the Dower House?”

  Ivy blinked. “Er, well, it is a bit different, isn’t it? Renting it out to strangers?”

  Hetta wrestled with the urge to snap at her cousin; it would be unfair to lash out at Ivy for repeating sentiments that hadn’t originated with her. She knew Ivy was only passing on what their wider family was discussing behind Hetta’s back. Besides, hadn’t Ivy just spent the whole night researching on Hetta’s behalf?