by AJ Lancaster
It was a lucky thing that the monk-druid pronounced them married and instructed them to kiss at that moment, because Hetta wasn’t sure she could’ve refrained from doing so.
She hadn’t actually expected anything to feel different once they were married, but to her surprise, it did. There was something extra there, a resonance that hadn’t previously existed. She felt that thread of connection thrum tight with emotion between her and Wyn as they kissed.
“Yes,” he gasped as they broke apart and before she could ask. “I feel it too. It’s the bond. More…official, as I said.”
“I have some very interesting ideas about how we might make use of that,” Hetta murmured, and desire flared in his eyes, but that would have to wait. People were cheering, and they cheered louder as Hetta and Wyn turned towards the crowd and raised their joined hands in acknowledgement. Wyn flared out his wings to their fullest extent, as if to challenge those assembled to accept him exactly as he was.
Music swelled suddenly, a soaring aria, even as her land-sense pinged. The song was piercingly beautiful, the two singers’ voices pure and perfect complements to each other. Hetta couldn’t make out the words, and it took her a moment to realise this was because they weren’t in a language she understood.
She searched for the source of the music and found it in the sky: four sets of wings hovering in mid-air, and Rakken and Catsmere were singing as if they’d practised such a duet a thousand times before. Maybe they had. The sound was amplified by air magic. Rakken raised an eyebrow when he caught Hetta’s glance, as if to say, “and what of it?”
She’d told them they weren’t invited, explaining DuskRose’s agreement, but here they were anyway—a fae technicality if ever she’d seen one. The song finished, and they flew down and settled amongst the back of the crowd.
“I can throw them out if you want,” Hetta said, craning to find Princess Sunnika. The princess was determinedly pretending she hadn’t seen the stormdancers, but her expression was resigned rather than angry. Fae technicality accepted, Hetta supposed.
Wyn shook his head, eyes bright with emotion. “Don’t throw them out.”
Good enough for her.
She’d expected a mixed reaction to her marriage from her people, but there was more joy here than anger. There was the cook, smiling broadly, and she was far from the only one. Wyn had lived as one of the staff for a long time, and she knew his recent elevation in the eyes of the world had shaken them, but almost all of them looked genuinely happy. The villagers were less enthusiastic but, she judged, still cautiously in favour. Wyn might be a fae, the sentiment seemed to go, but he was their fae.
A good few of Hetta’s old company had come, to her delight. They seemed generally bemused by the entire business, but Bradfield beamed and waved when he caught her eye across the crowd, lifting his drink in silent toast.
Hetta’s family showed a surprising degree of sentimentality. Lady Phoebe was sniffing and wiping tears away, and Alexandra was smiling so hard her whole face glowed. Grandmamma looked as self-satisfied as if she’d been responsible for the whole business.
Irokoi beamed and waved at them from where they had landed past the seated audience, and Cat’s lips curved subtly, but the other stormdancers were harder to read. Torquil gave a rough nod of acknowledgement, and Hetta wondered if he’d been bullied into attending, probably by Irokoi. Rakken looked entirely neutral about the whole affair—but he’d sung at her wedding, after all; she decided to take that as endorsement.
Wyn stilled beside her, a wolf catching a scent. She followed his gaze somewhere to the back of the crowd.
“Hetta,” he said quietly, “is there another greater fae here?”
Even distracted as she’d been, she would hardly have missed such an arrival, but she reached obediently for Stariel. To her surprise, Stariel’s answer was affirmative though strange. The faeland didn’t seem at all worried about an unannounced visitor; rather the opposite. Stariel was practically purring with happiness about it.
The High King, Hetta thought, not sure how to feel about that. “He was here,” she confirmed.
Wyn took a deep breath, and she watched him decide not to let his complicated feelings about that overshadow this day. He smiled down at her. “So, my dear wife,” he said, pausing to relish the taste of the new word. “Shall we go let your people congratulate us?”
“Very well, dearest husband.” She couldn’t help a laugh; the word sounded so strange, too staid for the man beside her, and yet the most perfect word in the world. She saw her own emotions reflected in Wyn’s expression.
“Undoubtedly the label will grow more familiar with time,” he murmured.
They went to celebrate. Of course, Wyn wouldn’t be Wyn if he didn’t keep trying to manage the ongoing wedding celebrations, but Hetta took it as her wifely duty to distract him whenever he appeared in danger of doing so. Other people could be in charge of making things run smoothly for one day.
He didn’t seem to mind.
The wariness between the fae and humans eased a bit as the merrymaking reached full swing. The addition of liberal amounts of food and alcohol probably also helped. Hetta spied two village children petting a starcorn, having escaped adult supervision. Jack was even brave enough to ask Princess Sunnika to dance, to his mother’s horror.
Even Rakken and Marius appeared to have reached a truce for the day—or maybe more than that, Simulsen help her, Hetta thought after taking in how close they stood together under the trees. Did she want to know what was going on there? She decided that right now she didn’t; she could always bury Rakken up to his knees again if it became necessary later.
She looked away and found Cat had been watching her watch their respective brothers. Cat gave a sharp smile before pulling a slightly terrified Gregory into a dance.
They feasted, and danced, and laughed, and suddenly it was dusk and finally they were farewelling the crowds, who catcalled good-naturedly as Wyn swept Hetta off her feet in a move of sheer theatricality.
“What are you doing?” she said, clinging to his shirt, feeling his heart thudding under her palms.
“It’s mortal tradition, isn’t it, for a husband to carry his new wife across the threshold of their house?” he said mildly.
“Wyn, we’re miles from the house!” she laughed and then let out a breath of surprise as he took off in a swirl of storm magic. Exhilaration shot through her as the wind whipped against her cheeks, and she stared down at the land below as he bore them upwards and towards the house. She could feel Stariel around them just as strongly as if she stood on solid ground; the air above belonged to the faeland too.
They landed on the balcony of their new joint quarters with a thud, and Wyn wobbled before he righted himself. “I could still use more practice,” he admitted, making her laugh. He set Hetta on her feet and raised an eyebrow at her. She kissed him, and the world narrowed to the two of them, to the hot thrill of flesh on flesh, and the primal stir of desire.
Later they lay facing each other on the old-fashioned four-poster. The sun’s dying rays painted the room in shades of gold, lighting up all the colours of Wyn’s wings and glinting off his horns.
Wyn drew small circles on her shoulder, almost absent-mindedly. “I wonder what he thinks of Aroset, frozen down in the basement?” They’d put her there after it became clear the stasis wasn’t going to lift any time soon. Hetta didn’t have to ask who ‘he’ was.
“I think he should be very grateful that I’ve managed to find a way to de-fang your most psychopathic sibling without resorting to murder,” she said baldly. “In my opinion, Aroset can only be improved by having time to think about her life choices for as long as possible.” Maybe they’d convince Rakken to try de-compelling Aroset eventually and see if that changed her at all. So far Rakken had been flat in his refusal.
Wyn chuckled, and his touch grew more purposeful. “Perhaps you’re right.” He traced his knuckles down over the curve of her waist. “But I find I’d prefer
to think of something other than my family right now.”
Later still, Hetta rested her head on Wyn’s chest and gave a deep sigh of contentment. Outside, the sky was ink, stars twinkling through the open balcony doors. Inside, the smallest of flutterings. So she hadn’t imagined that earlier. It felt peculiar and also wonderful, making things real rather than abstract.
Wyn looked at her curiously but didn’t resist as she took his hand in hers and drew it to the curve of her belly.
The fluttering came again, so subtle she wondered if he’d feel it, but his face went slack with wonder.
“Oh,” he said. “Hello, little one.”
“Little ones. Stariel told me earlier today that there are two of them. I think it was too early to tell, before, or maybe I just didn’t know what to look for.” She sighed. “That probably explains why Lamorkin’s charm didn’t last as long as we thought it would.”
Through that new connection between them came a jumble of competing emotions: pride, joy, excitement, fear. Love. A degree of panic Hetta shared, thinking that there was twice as much to deal with as expected. Wyn stared at his hand against her stomach as if too overwhelmed to do anything else.
She grinned at him. “Maybe I should’ve asked your mother for tips on dealing with twins.”
He gave a strangled choke, wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close. “Hetta,” he said, his voice vibrating on an edge between alarm and joy. “I love you. And we are not asking my mother any such thing!”
“I love you too. And you’ll be fine,” she reassured his throat where she was tucked under his chin.
“It’s not me I’m fretting about,” he said wryly, but she could hear the softness in his voice. “It’s—stormcrows—all three of you. My hair will be white.”
She had to laugh at that, but, “We’ll be fine then, all four of our little family. After all, this is our home.”
“Ours,” he echoed, his voice thick. She felt him pluck at his land-sense, and Stariel swirled idly around them in response.
She reached out too, feeling equally sentimental in the moment. Ours, Stariel agreed. Home. The word had mountain bones in it.
They lay entangled for long moments before she eventually wriggled back a bit of space. “Now, tell me about dragons,” she said. “Do they actually make good godparents?”
Author’s Note
So, here we are at the end of the Stariel Quartet!
Well…only mostly, as it turns out. I found while writing The King of Faerie that there was one character whose story needed a bit more telling than I could fit between its pages. Which is to say, yes, Marius will be getting his own book.
The King of Faerie wraps up Hetta and Wyn’s storyline, but Of Plants & Princes will be a one-book spinoff that begins shortly after the events of The King of Faerie, featuring a certain telepathic botanist, an arrogant fae prince, magic—and murder. Look out for it in early 2022.
It feels ironically appropriate to end the Stariel Quartet by announcing the impending existence of, very technically, Book 5, because everything about this series snuck up on me. When I began the first draft of The Lord of Stariel, it was supposed to be a single standalone ‘practice’ novel to help me figure out this whole writing gig. I never planned to let it see the light of day, let alone kick off a series, but it wouldn’t let me go once I began, and the story grew and grew.
It’s been a wild journey. I started this series in my 20s whilst living on the other side of the world; I finished it in my 30s back in New Zealand, with our international borders closed for the first time in history.
It’s a lovely, bittersweet thing to put The King of Faerie out into the world, the end* of my very first published series. Thank you so much for coming on this journey with me!
If you want to follow along with my next projects (including Of Plants & Princes news), you can join my newsletter at: https://www.subscribepage.com/p9g5y9 . I include writing updates, snippets of what I’m working on, discounted book sales, and pictures of my cats. I tend to send out a newsletter every month or so, and you can unsubscribe at any time.
If you enjoyed The King of Faerie, please consider leaving a review. Reviews help get the word out to new readers, and as an indie author without the support of a publishing house, I rely hugely on word of mouth.
*Let us not quibble over the very technical existence of Book 5 here.
Acknowledgments
This final book was a particular struggle. I loved it. I hated it. The world had a pandemic. I rewrote multiple scenes countless times and the entire manuscript twice. There were lengthy times when I despaired of ever finishing. I owe a debt to all the people who kept me sane and helped me drag The King of Faerie over the finish line.
Thank you to all my beta readers who read this book at various stages of drafting. The book is better for your feedback, and your enthusiasm kept me going when I had exhausted my own. Priscilla, you’ve read more versions of my books than any human should have to. Erin, thank you for talking to me about my characters as if they were real (and for suggesting there could always be more kidnapping). Kirsten, you are endlessly enthusiastic even when my action scene choreography makes absolutely no sense. Rem, your live commentary and commitment to cracktastic ship pairings gives me life. Toni, I can’t believe you managed to somehow both read and give insightful feedback on the draft of this with a newborn draped over you, but I’m incredibly grateful that you did. Mel, kudos for finding those pesky typos that made it through all the previous rounds.
I have never been pregnant, but I come from the sort of large extended family where someone is always pregnant. Thank you to all my relatives and friends who generously shared your own experiences. Any faults in portrayal are my own (or, I’ll admit, creative liberties for the sake of the narrative). Particularly thank you to my cousin Toni and my friend Marie, for answering my questions whilst being pregnant with your respective firsts.
Thanks to my writing group, the Wellington Speculative Collective (with special shout-out to Mel for herding all the cats). You are my people. I’m sorry I keep posting so many pictures of pretty wings in the Slack (or rather, not sorry at all, but thank you for tolerating my quirks).
Carla, thank you for the book cakes and patience for my rambles. You are the best sister anyone could ask for.
Steph, E, and Marie, thank you for all our crafter-zoom / crafter-noon teas during and after lockdown and for listening to my anxieties and moments of triumph both.
And last but by no means least, thank you, readers. Thank you for your reviews, your recommendations, your fan art, your enthusiasm. I never anticipated how much other people would love this series. I thought it might just be me, and I’m so, so glad it’s not.
About the Author
Growing up on a farm in rural Aotearoa New Zealand, AJ Lancaster avoided chores by hiding up a tree with a book. She wrote in the same way she breathed—constantly and without thinking much of it—so it took many years and accumulating a pile of manuscripts for her to realise that she might want to be a writer and, in fact, already was. On the way to this realisation she collected a degree in science, worked in environmental planning, and became an editor.
Now she lives in the windy coastal city of Wellington and writes romantic, whimsical fantasy books about fae, magic, and complicated families.
Also by AJ Lancaster
The Lord of Stariel
The Prince of Secrets
The Court of Mortals
-share-buttons">share
