Hidden Crown

by Emma L. Adams

  The Grey Vale.

  “No.” I gasped. “Mum—”

  A knife pressed to my throat from behind. A low, melodic male voice said, “Don’t move, human, or I will kill you where you stand. You traitorous humans have allowed the outcasts into our Court.”

  Shit. “It’s a setup,” I said. “Someone opened a way into the Vale beside the gate to frame my family.”

  “Can anyone prove it?” asked the Sidhe behind me.

  “Someone has been moving my family’s gate around without my permission,” I said, between breaths. “I haven’t used it since this morning. It’s the truth.”

  “You’re not the only person who has control over that gate,” said the Sidhe. “And the other Gatekeeper has been seen entering the Court without an invitation.”

  Mum. No. “She’s not responsible. She can’t open a way into the Vale. None of us can. Only the Sidhe—"

  His knife moved against my neck, and warm blood trickled onto my collarbone. “There she is.”

  Mum stepped through the gate, accompanied by Darrow of all people. Shit.

  “Let my daughter go,” Mum said, her voice quiet, dangerous.

  The Sidhe’s hand twitched on the knife at the warning note in her tone. “Do you deny that you used the gate to enter our Court without your daughter’s knowledge?”

  “No,” said Mum. “But you’re making a mistake. I am not the killer, nor did I open that doorway into the Vale.”

  The question was, who had? Only Sidhe who held a talisman could open doors between realms. It’d bet it was the same person who’d opened the other doorway in the Erlking’s territory, trying to throw the Sidhe off the trace. Perhaps they’d intended me to take the blame, but I’d screwed things up for them when I’d gone to the Erlking’s territory instead of coming back here. But Mum hadn’t denied his accusation. Had she really been using the gate to get into the Court without telling me?

  “The former Gatekeeper will be taken into the jail to await trial,” said the Sidhe. I twisted around to give him a glare and recognised him as the same Sidhe who’d tried to threaten my family before. Fucker. “If she is found guilty, she will be executed.”

  “Damn you,” I spat. “There’s another doorway into the Vale open on the Erlking’s territory, and a swarm of sluagh coming this way. If you don’t believe me, they’ll be here soon enough.”

  “Why were you on the Erlking’s territory?” His tone dripped with disbelief, as though I was hardly worth bothering with.

  “Because the Erlking himself sent me a note after his death asking me to investigate his murder.” There was no point in concealing the truth now. “He wouldn’t have done that if he’d believed any members of my family were guilty. Darrow can confirm it—”

  “Why should I trust the word of three mortals?” said the Sidhe. “Darrow, see to it that she doesn’t intervene.”

  Darrow took my arm. In the same instant, the Sidhe spoke an inaudible word, and the doorway into the Vale closed, winking out of existence. A heartbeat later, he and Mum vanished in a flash of green light.

  I twisted in Darrow’s grip. “Let go of me.”

  Small wonder he hadn’t jumped to my defence, after what I’d said to him in the forest, but it was just one more failure to add to the heap. On top of that, I’d left the Erlking’s note at the Lynn house, and the Sidhe were more likely to give me the crown than let me go home and retrieve it.

  The gates opened, and Ilsa hurried over to meet me. “Hazel!”

  I yanked my arm away from Darrow and ran to embrace my sister. “I’m sorry. The killer opened a way to the Vale near the gate—they took Mum.”

  “I know,” said Ilsa. “River is here, and he can help us.”

  River walked to her side. While his short blond hair and green eyes painted him as a Summer half-Sidhe, he still wore his necromancer uniform, indicating he’d run here straight from Edinburgh. “I promise to try, but I can’t work miracles, and neither can my father. Normally, the decision would go to the higher Sidhe, but without the Erlking—”

  “Please.” My voice cracked. “They won’t listen to me. I don’t know who moved the gate here and opened the doorway to the Vale, but as soon as I mentioned finding another doorway in the Erlking’s territory, they fixated on that and not the swarm of sluagh coming this way. They wouldn’t believe the Erlking asked me to investigate, and I left the note at home.”

  “What, this note?” Ilsa stuck her hand in her pocket and pulled out a scrap of paper etched with the Erlking’s seal. “Thought you might need it.”

  I hugged her again, taking the note. “You’re a lifesaver.”

  Not that I could make heads or tails of the Erlking’s words, but nobody would be able to deny his seal was genuine. Releasing Ilsa, I turned to Darrow, but he wasn’t there. A knot twisted in my chest to know I’d fucked up majorly, but Ilsa and River would help me fix this, and I’d mend things with Darrow later. If we all survived.

  “I’ll talk to the Sidhe,” River said. “I haven’t been here in weeks, so they can’t pin the blame on me for any of the recent events.”

  “Whereas I have a reputation.” I gave a humourless smile. “We need to make sure the Sidhe sent someone to close the Vale entrance on the Erlking’s territory, too.”

  “You were on the Erlking’s territory again?” asked Ilsa.

  “Yes, I was. I think if I hadn’t been, I’d have arrived here right in time to be framed for opening the doorway into the Vale. That, or been slaughtered by whatever’s waiting on the other side.” As it was, Mum was the one who’d taken the fall. “Are the other Sidhe in the palace?”

  “Some of them are,” said Ilsa. “Do you want to talk to them, or…?”

  “I think I’ll pay a visit to Lord Raivan. I have a favour to ask him.”

  The only way to get the truth was to go back to the source. In other words, the Summer Court’s jail. I’d ask to visit my mother… and pay a little detour to find the Seelie Queen.

  18

  I hope I’m not too late.

  At this point, I’d trust River and Ilsa to handle the situation a damn sight more than anyone else here—including Darrow. I hardly believed he’d let Mum take the fall for someone else’s crime. Even if I’d been a bitch to him, my mother was innocent, and he knew it.

  I needed to clear her name and figure out who’d really opened that doorway, but I remained as far from catching the culprit as ever. Which left me to use the last tool at my disposal: annoying the shit out of the Sidhe.

  I came to a halt at the meadow, where a carpet of vibrant yellow flowers swayed in the warm breeze. Lord Raivan paced through the grass, a bored expression on his face, waiting for any humans who might come here with requests. Considering I could count the number of humans who had dealings with Faerie on one hand, it must be a dull job, despite the pleasant scenery.

  When he spotted me, his boredom shifted to annoyance. “What do you want, human?”

  I pulled the Erlking’s note from my pocket. “I have a note from the Erlking he sent me after his death, implying he wanted me to investigate his murder. The other Sidhe have arrested my mother for a crime she didn’t commit and are refusing to listen to me.” So it’s your lucky day.

  “A note from the Erlking?” he repeated. “What nonsense is this?”

  “Read it.” I thrust the note under his nose. “That’s his seal.”

  “It is.” His bright green eyes rounded. “The Erlking asked you to investigate his death? Why did you wait until now to show me this?”

  “Because the note implies the killer is still in the Court,” I said. “And because whoever the killer is, they just opened a doorway into the Vale and framed my family for it.”

  “If the Sidhe call for your family’s blood, you took a great risk in coming to me,” he said.

  “Perhaps, but you know the Seelie Queen has good reason to want my family locked up or worse.” I also had it on good authority that he’d set foot in the land of the ou
tcasts once before and immediately fled in terror. “I should also tell you there’s another passage into the Vale open over on the Erlking’s territory, and even if the Sidhe have closed it, the sluagh have probably spread all over the Court now.”

  The blond Sidhe’s angular features paled. “What?”

  “Yep.” I let my gaze pan across the meadow as though checking for ghostly fae lurking in the corners. “The sluagh love to prey on the living. I bet they can’t resist a wide-open space like this meadow. If you ask me, my mother is probably safer in prison.”

  Lord Raivan’s mouth pressed together. “I will take you to the jail, but I cannot promise the guards will let you in.”

  “If the Erlking’s seal doesn’t do it, nothing will.”

  The field warped around us, turning into a path leading up to a large, grim building which appeared to have grown out of the surrounding trees. Branches and roots met in the middle to form walls, while a Sidhe guarded each side of the entrance. As we strode up to them, two pairs of green eyes raked me up and down.

  “Gatekeeper,” said the Sidhe on the left, a female dressed in dark armour who wielded a long spear. “What do you want?”

  I held up the note. “The Erlking sent me this before his death. It implies there are two traitors in the Court who were responsible for his assassination. My mother doesn’t fit either description.”

  “The human is not to be released. We have our orders.”

  “Then I’d like to pay her a visit.” I lowered the note with another pointed flash of the Erlking’s seal. “The Erlking would never have wanted you to execute the former Gatekeeper without proof of her guilt.”

  She jerked her head towards her companion, a male guard with blue-black hair and the same armour as his partner. “Take her in. Don’t let her out of your sight.”

  The second guard beckoned me to the door, formed from branches fused together. As he tapped it with his spear, the branches retracted into the door frame, allowing us into a dimly lit hallway. He used the spear to open another door on the right, which led into a corridor lined with cells formed of similar interlocking branches.

  “Is this the human section?” I asked. “Or do you just imprison people wherever you feel like it?”

  “We don’t typically imprison humans.”

  I bet they didn’t. If a human crossed a Sidhe, they didn’t survive to see the inside of a cell. With one exception. I scanned the corridor, eyeing the dimly lit cells. “Doesn’t look very secure.”

  “It is,” he said. “Prisoners either have their magic bound or are otherwise incapacitated before imprisonment. The high-security area elsewhere in the prison allows no magic to enter aside from our own talismans.”

  “I should hope so.”

  The cells had no windows or doors, just thin gaps between the interlocking branches to allow in a minimum of natural light, which made it impossible to see their inhabitants. I opened my mouth to ask how the guards knew who was in each cell, then spotted a row of symbols carved into the branches above each door. Must be some kind of numbering system.

  The guard halted in the middle of a corridor lined with cells. “Talk to her from here.”

  I leaned where he indicated, but the thick branches of the cell grew so closely together that I couldn’t make out Mum’s features on the other side. I edged closer on the pretext of speaking to her in a whisper.

  Then, I spun on the spot, blasting the Sidhe with magic. Thorny stems shot from my hands, turning to ropes that wrapped tightly around him. He opened his mouth to shout, and I directed the ropes to cover his face, too, leaving an inch for him to breathe. The spear, which had fallen from his limp hand, rolled to a halt at my feet.

  “Hazel.” Mum’s voice was faint. “What are you doing?”

  I picked up the discarded spear. “Looking for the real murderer. Where are they keeping her, do you know?”

  “Third corridor, behind the magic-proof barrier. I heard them talking.” She knew precisely who I meant.

  “Thanks. I'll come back for you later, I promise.”

  The Seelie Queen would be under the tightest possible security, so I threw on a glamour to make myself look like the female guard I’d seen at the entrance and followed Mum’s directions.

  I went through four doors before I reached the magic-proofed high-security area. The instant I passed through the entrance, pressure pinned me on all sides, as though a strong wind buffeted me from four directions at once. The spell on the cells must suppress the magic of anyone in here, which was the closest substitute in Faerie to building everything out of iron. I looked down to find my glamour had melted away when I’d entered. Damn. I’d need to move fast.

  I walked swiftly through the corridors, checking each cell for any signs of the former monarch of Summer. At the sound of footsteps behind me, I darted into an alcove, pulling out the note from the Erlking in case I needed to flash the seal at anyone.

  Then my gaze fell on the last line of text. The meaningless string of symbols.

  When the footsteps faded, I stuck my head out and read the code on the nearest cell door. It matched the arrangement of symbols on the Erlking’s note exactly.

  I walked down the line of cells, checking them against the note. Two corridors down and I found the cell that corresponded to the symbols, tucked away into a corner and concealed behind a web of branches.

  “I wondered if I’d ever see you again, Hazel Lynn,” said the Seelie Queen’s voice from behind the wall of branches. “Or should I call you Gatekeeper now?”

  “Feel free,” I said. “I don’t think we’ve ever spoken a word to one another.” I might have asked how she knew I was here, but she’d have heard them bring in my mother and figured that I wouldn’t be far behind.

  “No, but your mother and I had quite the interesting rapport,” she said. “It’s a shame she won’t be in here for long.”

  “How do you keep updated on what’s going on outside?” Even the most powerful woman in the Summer Court wasn’t a mind-reader, and she had no access to her magic in here.

  “Sprites. Hobs. Messengers. There are always those willing to do my bidding in exchange for the continuation of their miserable lives.”

  Ugh. “You’re the reason my mum’s facing execution for a murder she didn’t commit.”

  “I’m afraid I cannot claim responsibility for that, Hazel,” she said. “It sounds like she is the one who implicated herself in my ex-husband’s death.”

  “Like we don’t both know you did it.” She wasn’t lying, of course, but that didn’t prove anything. “And my family and I wrecked your last scheme.”

  “Yes, you did,” she said. “Quite thoroughly. The Gatekeepers… I had to admit, I never thought of you as a potential threat. Until my husband had the nerve to send your mother into the Grey Vale in search of a way to strip me of my powers. I had to put a stop to that.”

  “Because you want his power for your own,” I said. “You want his talisman.”

  “The talisman?” She gave a low laugh that raised the hairs on my arms. “You think that’s what this is about? The crown is all I desire.”

  “You'll never wear it.” My hands clenched. “And I will see to it that you’ll never see the outside of this cell again. I want you to tell me who your conspirators are.”

  “There's no need.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “They should be arriving soon.”

  Crap. She means it. Backing away from her cell, I broke into a fast walk, retracing my steps. I was glamour-free, but the Sidhe had bigger problems than a rogue Gatekeeper, and I had bigger problems than being caught. Mum was trapped behind bars, with no weapons or any other way of defending herself.

  Turning right, I ran smack into Darrow. “Hazel, you have to leave.”

  I swore. “The Seelie Queen told me her conspirators are on their way here right now. What the hell are you doing? Come to gloat?”

  “No,” he said. “You should know, I warned your mother not to come through the gate
, but she insisted on making sure you were safe. As for me, I came here to ask the Sidhe to reconsider her sentence, but more beasts broke through the Vale opening in the Erlking’s territory before the Sidhe were able to close it.”

  A tremendous roar rattled the whole building. Vale beasts. They’d come here to help their Queen break out.

  Not on my watch.

  I ran past Darrow and towards the doors, which lay open. Further down the path, the Sidhe guards did battle with a huge troll. Its knuckles and feet were covered in crudely stitched gloves tipped with metal spikes. Iron. While it was big and stupid like most trolls, even a graze from iron would severely incapacitate any Sidhe. Including Darrow.

  A Sidhe warrior ducked under the troll’s arm, spear twirling and piercing its fleshy upper arm. Blood sprayed from its grey skin, but the blade remained stuck. Iron punched the Sidhe’s armoured chest, sending him flying back a good ten metres. Two more Sidhe lay crumpled in pools of blood, their armour crushed and their silky hair matted with gore.

  “Stay back!” I warned. “I’m gonna take it out.”

  I ran closer to the troll, my weapon at the ready. One swift thrust snagged its wrist but didn't break the skin. Its arms were thick as tree trunks, its skin tougher even than the illusion Darrow has conjured. The Vale had honed it into a vicious killing machine—bigger, sharper, and equipped with lethal iron.

  Darrow ran to my side to help, his blade in his hand.

  “I meant you, too,” I said. “That’s iron, in case you haven’t noticed.”

  “It can crush your skull as easily as mine.” He moved in a blur, slicing at the beast’s thighs. The troll bellowed in pain. The iron must be hurting it, but trolls were low-magic and could still fight while impaired. If anything, the agony had only made this one more pissed off.

  Thrusting upwards, I skidded underneath the troll’s outstretched arm and caught the metal braces on the edge of my blade. Then I grabbed the underside of its wrist and propelled myself onto its arm. The beast tried to shake me off, but the chains prevented it from moving its arms high enough to grab me. Under the iron, layers of skin peeled off, flecked with blood.