The Castle of Earth and Embers

by Steffanie Holmes

  That’s why I intended to make myself the worthiest of all.

  “You were wise to be rid of him,” I murmured in my father’s ear as I reached for a platter of grapes and handed one to him.

  “I am disappointed,” he said, allowing me to place the grape on his tongue, while he held up the blade to inspect the edge. “Kalen was one of our finest warriors.”

  “A warrior is no good if he cannot follow instructions.”

  “True.” Daigh slid the sword back into his scabbard, and patted my knee. “He was so unlike you, Blake. I always expected you to be a great disappointment. It would not have been your fault, given your lineage. But you have borne your time here with great strength and loyalty. I noticed that Kalen tried to pull you in to defend him.”

  “A foolish move on his part. What he did was moronic.” And you’re just as moronic, if you believe this flattery imbues my loyalty. It may work on your fae, but I am not fae. I kept those thoughts to myself, and pressed my advantage. “So how will we proceed, now that the witches know of our advantage?”

  Daigh gave a shrug, as if it were neither here nor there. “We will follow in Kalen’s example, send more warriors to bother them near the castle. Meanwhile, while their attentions are elsewhere, we will continue with the plan as conceived.”

  “Excellent idea, my King.” I bowed my head, hoping my platitudes had been enough. “And with Kalen now without his head, who will you send to lead the first mission?”

  “I was thinking of sending you, Blake.”

  Yes. I tried to keep my grin solemn, so he wouldn’t realize just how much I’d been counting on obtaining command. “Thank you, Dear Father.”

  “That is, if you feel you can handle it. This will be the first time you return to the human realm since you came to live with us. There will be many temptations. It may be hard for you to return to us, especially if your mission takes you past a curry shop.”

  It was a joke, but a pointed one. I bowed my head again. “You have shown me great favor, Dear Father. To have been allowed to live in the fae realm, to have been given the value of your centuries of knowledge… it is worth more to me than a hundred curries. Even though the portal now allows me egress, I will not betray you.”

  Not yet, at any rate.

  “You do yourself great honor, Blake.” My father’s emerald eyes bore into mine. “Do your duty well and you will be rewarded handsomely in the new fae world.”

  “Thank you, Father. I will make you proud.” I bowed and slunk away, fading into the press of fae bodies gyrating in their revels. I pushed my way through the crowd, stepping over the mangled body of Kalen’s canine corpse, and pressed my back against the dirt wall of the sidhe. I took a moment to assess my situation.

  Kalen’s stupidity had given me a couple of key advantages. It would have alerted the witches that the fae were increasing their power and could now send more warriors into their realm, so when it came time to reveal myself, I’d be more likely to gain their trust. Most importantly, his place had opened up for the expeditionary force to the human realm. After Kalen’s fuck up, Daigh wasn’t going to trust just anyone, and I’d proved myself more than trustworthy.

  This could work. If everything went according to my plan, I would draw the witches in, and my chance to get to Maeve would come, all while fulfilling Daigh’s plan and remaining in his good books. It was a win win win, and all the wins belonged to me.

  12

  ROWAN

  Even downstairs, we all felt the shudder in our bodies as Arthur kissed Maeve. My whole body tingled with electricity and I shoved my hands under my thighs to stop myself lashing out when Arthur came back. Flynn looked as murderous as I felt, his pale skin reddening as his hand trembled around his glass. Corbin’s expression fell. He looked completely defeated. Of course – he expected Maeve to choose him. We all did.

  It wasn’t fair. All three of them had a fair shot with Maeve. They talked her ear off at the pub, took over the tour of the house. I’d managed about four-and-a-half sentences in the kitchen before Flynn whisked her away. They knew that I couldn’t talk to her when they were around, that she’d never look at me with them joking and being larger than life. And then Arthur went swinging his sword around and being the chivalrous knight. And now she’d chosen and it didn’t matter how I felt.

  I barely even had a chance.

  Arthur returned a few minutes later. He wasn’t smiling nearly as much as I would’ve been. “Go on,” he said, slumping down on the couch. “Ask me about it.”

  “Let’s go to the library,” Corbin said. “We have a lot to discuss.”

  We filed down the hall to the library. I stopped at the door, as I always did, unable to step foot in the room until I had counted the spines of all the books on the cabinet on the right. As earlier, when we’d taken Maeve on a tour, there were 194.

  I exhaled the breath I’d been holding.

  I was grateful that the others hadn’t pointed out what I’d been doing to Maeve during the tour, but I guess it didn’t matter now.

  They waited for me to finish and take a seat next to Flynn on the leather chesterfield. Corbin sat behind his desk, leaning forward on his muscled arms. With his stern face, he reminded me of a school principal. I’d seen a few of them in my life – when I was forced to attend school – all stern-faced and furrowed brows as they tried to get me to talk, to explain why I did the things I did, to find out why I didn’t have shoes or a lunch box or where a bruise on my arm had come from or why I wouldn’t give a home address. They usually had bookshelves in their offices, and I just counted the books until they stopped asking questions. But that wasn't going to work here.

  “So tell us all about it, you lucky bastard,” Flynn said, breaking the tense silence between us.

  “She didn’t choose me,” Arthur sighed. “She kissed me, but she hasn’t chosen me yet.”

  “Why not? You bite her or something?”

  Arthur frowned. “It wasn’t about me and her. I don’t think it mattered to her who kissed her. I just happened to be the one who carried her upstairs. Come on, she’s still reeling from the deaths of her parents. She started to cry, and I realized I needed to get out before I tried to take things further.”

  “How do you know she didn’t choose you?”

  “I know because we can all still feel the pull of her,” Arthur glanced at each of us in turn, his eyes lingering on mine. “If she’d truly chosen me, surely the tension would have gone away?”

  I rubbed my arm, my fingers grazing over the raised scars on my wrist. Fire burned under my skin. Arthur was right. The spell hadn’t been broken. We were all bound to her until she chose one of us.

  My other hand slipped into my pocket, fingering the condom I kept there. Corbin had given us each a huge stack when he first heard Maeve would be visiting Briarwood. We all knew what her presence would do to us. Even with the coven’s magic working on me, I knew I’d never be using any of mine. But I kept it in my pocket because… I didn’t know why.

  “I think you’re right. So, we have a problem,” Corbin said, leaning forward, his eyes gliding over all of us. When they met mine, I looked away.

  “I’ll say we have a problem,” Flynn piped up. “I’m randy as a goat with Maeve around, and you three are totally cramping my moves. I don’t do crossed swords, so—”

  “Mate, you’re crazy,” Arthur said. He’d taken his usual spot in the enormous wing-backed chair beside the globe – the only chair in the room that comfortably sat his enormous frame. He leaned forward and lifted the lid off the globe beside him, revealing several alcohol bottles and glasses inside. He grabbed a whiskey and poured himself a glass. “She barely looked at you all evening. And she may have kissed me, but she’s definitely got eyes for Mr. Saved-me-from-the-runaway-Ferris-wheel over there.”

  “And Rowan, Mr. Give-a-lady-a-twig-and-she’ll-be-yours-forever,” Flynn clapped me on the shoulder. “Smooth move with the stick there, mate. I couldn’t have done better mys
elf.”

  “I was just trying to keep her safe,” I mumbled into my chest, my cheeks flaring with heat.

  “This spell is making it bloody hard to remain a gentleman,” Arthur added. “But as the only one who’s kissed her, let me say right now that it was worth it.”

  “If we could be serious for just one moment,” Corbin snapped. “We’re already painfully aware of the situation with Maeve. She will choose when she’s ready. In the meantime, we just have to—”

  “—walk around with permanent tent poles?” Flynn adjusted his pants. I glanced away. I didn’t really want to think about my friends and their stiff cocks. Thinking about my own was bad enough.

  I’d been hard since Maeve first walked into Briarwood. Part of that was the magic that bound us to the castle and the coven. Because we were still so young, the magic did weird things to our hormones. It couldn’t make us want something we didn’t already desire, but it enhanced our feelings tenfold. A hundredfold. For me – who struggled to talk to girls on a good day – this was going to make some kind of connection with Maeve practically impossible.

  But I was the one who saved her in the field. We worked magic together to disarm Kalen. We had a connection… didn’t we?

  I jumped as Corbin slammed an enormous volume down on his desk and started flipping through it. “Maeve’s choice is the least of our concerns right now.”

  “We destroyed those fae, no worries,” Flynn said. “Old Aragorn over here managed to get two with that dagger of his. I don’t see what the big deal is.”

  I wanted to smirk at Flynn’s adoption of Maeve’s nickname for Arthur, but there were serious things to deal with.

  “The big deal is that there were three of them. Can anyone ever remember three fae at once before?”

  I shook my head. The others did the same thing.

  “I can’t either, and I don’t think it’s been written in the histories since the Middle Ages.” Corbin turned the page. “When you combine that fact with Kalen’s appearance at the fair the other week, and what he managed to do to Maeve’s parents, what we get is a very dangerous pattern emerging. The amount of power the pouka must’ve drawn from killing all those people might be what gave him the power he needed to bring two fae with him tonight—”

  “—but the question is, can he do it again?” Arthur finished.

  “Exactly. Now, I think our first step should be—”

  “We should tell Maeve the truth,” I whispered.

  The others whipped their heads toward me. I jerked my head down to my chest, unable to meet Corbin’s angry gaze. I stared at the ground, counting the threads of the fringe along the border of the carpet. One… two… three…

  “We already discussed that, Rowan,” Corbin’s voice rasped with barely concealed annoyance. He hated that I was questioning him because I’d never done it before. I didn’t particularly want to be questioning him now. Corbin was everything to me – the person who’d given me a real, wonderful life. I usually deferred to him for everything. But when I thought of Maeve’s stormy, beautiful face as she’d demanded a rational answer to all her questions, I knew I was right. Lying to her now would only endanger her.

  … ten… eleven… twelve…

  “That was before there were fae coming after her,” I mumbled, still staring at the floor. “Daigh knows exactly who she is. He’s already tried to kill her once.”

  “Walk the scenario through, mate. You’ve met Maeve now, so you can see what she’s like. Analytical. Scientific. She’s having a hard time believing what she encountered tonight were actually fae, and she saw and touched them. If we tell her she’s a powerful witch who will lead our coven in a great battle against the fae, what do you think she’ll do?” When I didn’t answer, Corbin filled in for me. “Because I think she’ll jump on the first plane back to Arizona and command us to never speak to her again. And that means she’s dead meat, and so are the rest of us.”

  “I don’t like lying to her,” I murmured. Twenty-two… twenty-three… twenty-four…

  “Neither do I, but it’s best for now. Are we in agreement?”

  … twenty-seven… twenty-eight…

  “I think it’s best, for now,” Arthur said.

  “I agree with Aragorn,” Flynn added. Of course he did.

  “Stop calling me that,” Arthur growled.

  … thirty-two… thirty-three…

  “Right, that’s settled. Again.” Corbin took my silence as agreement. Or perhaps he didn’t, because this wasn’t a democracy. A coven always had a leader, and for now – until Maeve knew who she was – he was ours. “Now, let’s move on to the fact that, for whatever reason, the fae have suddenly got a fuckton more powerful, and what we’re going to do about it.”

  “We need to protect Maeve, at all costs,” Arthur said.

  “Agreed. Flynn, we need more swords and daggers and iron objects. You should start with a charm to protect Maeve. Rowan, since that twig of yours worked pretty well, you could work up some more earth-based charms and spells. We should expect more of these attacks. And maybe we find a way to keep Maeve in the castle as much as possible. I don’t think she should go into the village without at least two of us with her at all times.”

  “I’m teaching her to fight,” Arthur said, a hint of pride in his voice.

  “Yes, you are.” Corbin’s tone said what he thought of that. “And I will hunt through every book in this library and try to figure out how the fae might be using the deaths from the fairground accident in order to break through the protective spells. If they can get that many fae into this realm, then it might not be long until they can get into Briarwood.”

  We broke up. No one really wanted to talk. Even Flynn had nothing to say. We each went our separate ways. My room was at the end of the hall, directly beneath Maeve’s. I lay in bed staring at the ceiling, counting the crossbeams and the stones around the window, as I always did, and imagining her up there, laying across the bed, her pixie hair splayed out around her face, that shot of pink bright against the pillow. My whole body buzzed with want of her.

  She hasn’t chosen. She kissed Arthur but she didn’t choose.

  Usually I was content to sit back and let the other guys make the decisions. On movie nights, no one asked me what I wanted to watch. When we ordered Indian food, I just got what the other guys chose. I was so happy to have an actual family – guys who looked out for me and tolerated my quirks – that I didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize it.

  But Maeve… I wanted her to choose me. And that meant I was going to have to step on some toes. I knew I barely had a chance, but for once in my life, I had to try. Arthur had his intensity, Flynn would make her laugh, Corbin would protect her the way he protected all of us, but maybe there was something I could offer… something the other guys couldn’t give her. Something she desperately needed.

  If only I had a bloody clue what it was.

  13

  MAEVE

  Even after I eventually stopped crying, sleep didn’t come as easily as I hoped. Chalk it up to jet lag (my body thought it was eight in the morning), grief, and all the excitement and mystery of last night. Plus, my new bedroom was bigger than the Crawford’s entire house, and it echoed in weird ways and a cold draft blew in from the window and my parents weren’t sleeping at the end of the hall and my body hummed with need after Arthur’s kiss and…

  nothing was the way it should be.

  I tossed and turned in my huge bed, mulling over everything the guys had told me. The memory of that guy – Kalen – licking my face made my skin crawl. I remembered his sharp claws raking for Rowan’s head, and how he’d moved so fast he’d appeared to be in two places at once.

  Fairies. What nonsense. Fairies were from storybooks. The trashy fantasy novels Kelly loved to read (she had dozens of them stuffed under her mattress – the Crawfords would have a heart attack if they knew she read books containing both witchcraft and premarital sex) were filled with stories of alluring and tric
ksy fae. They were just some made up mythology – a way for farmers to explain away ruined crops or mothers to assuage their grief over babies that died of disease.

  And yet… the claws… the teeth… the weird green blood… the way they moved and spoke. Corbin was right with his question – if they weren’t fairies, then what the hell had I seen in the field last night?

  It could be an undiscovered, undocumented species. That did pop up every now and then. What about that article in last month’s New Scientist about a new hominid species that supposedly interbred with homo sapiens during their migration to Australasia? I wondered what DNA testing on Kalen would reveal.

  Last semester I completed a paper on theoretical physics that was absolutely fascinating. One of the tenants of theoretical physics was the idea of a multiverse – that everything within our cosmic horizon of 46-billion light years could just be one universe among many others. And in these different universes, the physical properties could be completely wackadoodle. There might not be any electrons. Gravity might work differently. Fairies might exist. All things were possible in the multiverse.

  I’d written my essay about the controversy around theoretical science and observation. We can’t observe the multiverse, so any theories made about it can’t be tested. There were scientists out there who believed we should totally rethink the whole scientific method to account for this.

  “Should the success or failure of an idea come down to the fact it helps us account for the data?” I’d asked in the closing paragraph of my essay, indirectly quoting the cosmologist Sean Carroll. I got an A+ on that essay.

  Maybe I just needed to apply a little theoretical physics to this fairy situation.

  Perhaps when the guys talk about this gateway to the “fairy realm,” what they’re actually talking about is a wormhole that moves between the multiverse? That theory has been postulated many times, although it raises so many questions about Hawking radiation and the information paradox, but—