The Court of Mortals (Stariel Book 3)

by AJ Lancaster

  “I’m sorry,” he said, brokenly, because he could think of nothing else to say. He ran his hands through his hair, trying to flatten it, trying to rein in his magic. It fought him, and feathers itched under his skin, straining for release. Another reason Hetta’s better off without you, he thought, viciously. You can’t even control your damned magic!

  “Don’t be sorry,” she said. “It’s not your fault. It’s unfair, and neither of our faults, but it doesn’t change anything.” She took a deep, shuddering breath, her composure cracking. “Gods, I thought it would be you that did this, that decided we were better apart.”

  Oh, he couldn’t bear it, the desolation in her eyes. He moved to wrap his arms around her without conscious thought, but she shook her head sharply and stepped back, out of reach.

  “No.” She swallowed. “I’m not going to get over you if I keep letting you comfort me, am I?” It was like her, to act decisively once she’d made up her mind, but it didn’t make it hurt any less. “I’ll tell Queen Matilda she’s not announcing any engagement.” She fished below her neck and pulled out the ring he’d made, holding it out to him.

  He stared down at the metal, finding it oddly hard to draw a full breath. “Ah—I appreciate the symbolic gesture, but I don’t want you to lose the practical aspect of it, when you travel outside the estate again.”

  A heaviness crept into her posture. “Oh. Oh, yes, you’re right.” She tucked it into a pocket, and a tiny bit of him eased. At least he could give her that. “Shall we go, then?”

  “I was actually going to suggest we wait until tomorrow morning,” he said sheepishly. “It’s growing dark, and while I hope my sister hasn’t set guards on the point of resonance, if she has, I’d rather not encounter them at night.” He paused and waved at his desk. “Also, I wanted to tidy my affairs up a little more.” And to see how Marius does. Hetta and Stariel’s healing had helped, enormously, but it still worried him.

  Hetta stared at him and then she began to laugh. “You!” she spluttered in between giggles. They tinged towards hysteria, and he suppressed the urge to go to her again. “You can’t just let me heroically decide to give you up and then announce that you have to do some paperwork first! How can you even think of paperwork at a time like this?!”

  “Because this is something I can control, and I cannot bear to think of all the things I can’t!” He tamped down the anger and sagged. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I’m being foolish. What difference, after all, can a day make, in the context of a decade’s service?”

  “Well, probably quite a lot, knowing you,” she said, the hysteria fading, leaving something old and sad in its wake. “I doubt it’ll make much difference to the Spires if you arrive there tonight versus tomorrow morning. And since you’ve already spoiled my attempt at a dramatic clean break, we may as well bring practicality into the equation.”

  He smiled. It felt brittle as dry leaves. “Are we taking turns being reasonable?”

  “What am I going to do without you?” she whispered.

  “You’ll carry on,” he told her. “You’ve always been strong, and you do not need me to make you so.”

  “I just…” He felt her teeter on the precipice, but then she waved at his desk, beginning to back out of the room. “I’ll tell your siblings. Do what you need to do.”

  51

  To The Spires

  The next morning, he stood beside Hetta at the Standing Stones. All around the hilltop, it was raining, a grey drizzle obscuring the wider landscape, though the Stones themselves stood in a bubble of dry space, thanks to Hetta. The soft background hiss was the only sound as Rakken made the portal between ThousandSpire and Stariel. It was as easy as Wyn had feared, and within moments, Stariel’s rain-blurred mountains shimmered into the towering rock formations of Aerest. Dust, metal and storms rolled out, clashing with the damp greenness of springtime.

  He recognised the location on the other side of the portal as the top of the prison spire where Hetta had been held last year. Probably not an accident that the portal resonated between these two points. No guards were visible, which meant Aroset hadn’t been aware of the potential resonance point. That was promising. Now he just needed to make his feet move.

  More than ten years, he’d been flying away from ThousandSpire, in one way or another, hoping that if he flew far and fiercely enough, he could escape who and what he was. And now here he was, about to return, and in such a way that would make escape truly impossible hereafter.

  Stariel quivered. He’d never before been so conscious of Hetta as Stariel’s lord, her presence magnifying the faeland’s. That heightened sense of connection still stretched between them, despite her words last night. Did she feel it too? Her expression didn’t show it—pale but steady, though her eyes were shadowed. Stariel was, ironically, much less composed than its lord, nosing at him with nearly tangible frustration.

  Rakken glared at him. “What are you waiting for, brother?”

  Catsmere’s expression was similarly unsympathetic.

  What was important here? What did he want? What was right? Hetta took his hand and squeezed it, briefly. “Go, Wyn,” she said. Her mouth curved. “And don’t forget about the favourable sheep-trading terms.”

  His heart thumped painfully. “I won’t.” I love you, he wanted to say, but he pressed his teeth together and held the words in. It would only hurt Hetta more, he knew.

  It is for the best, he told himself. It will be better this way; everyone will be safer. Taking a deep breath, he stepped through the portal, Catsmere and Rakken following. He slipped a little on the smooth shell-rock as they emerged on top of the roof of the prison spire.

  He’d expected the portal to snap shut behind them, but it continued to shimmer in the air. Perhaps Stariel didn’t want to let the connection close. Or perhaps he was being unhelpfully sentimental. Focus!

  The city would’ve been beautiful, in other circumstances. The sun was rising, painting the towers in shades of marigold and coral, the gemstones embedded into many of the walls dancing in ten thousand tiny, multihued flames—though there were actually somewhat less than ten thousand spires in the city. He had asked one of his tutors once, but the exact total escaped him now.

  But any beauty in the view was outweighed by the sorrow coating his feathers like icicles. ThousandSpire’s grief was palpable through his connection with it, causing the leylines to tremble and rearrange with every breath. Dark flecks circled the city—draken—their piercing cries making the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. In the distance, above the salt plains, the Maelstrom churned, as violent as he’d ever seen it, bolts of lightning flashing through the deep, bruised purple of the permanent storm, a physical manifestation of the faeland’s unrest.

  Heart of the Maelstrom, how were the inhabitants of the Spires surviving under such an onslaught? Wyn had only been here for half a minute, but already he could feel his teeth aching from the wildness of the magic in the air. Stariel, for all that it was smaller and less powerful, was used to changing rulers, used to the short lifespans of mortals. The Spires had been bonded to King Aeros for a long, long time.

  He wasn’t surprised that the Spires didn’t notice him immediately amidst such immense magical confusion. Steeling himself, he reached out along the bond.

  That got its attention, and it fell on him with a roar, overwhelming his senses with metal and dust and the cold, clean taste of ozone. He didn’t blame the faeland for his upbringing here, but its magic was so bound up with memories of his father that it was hard not to recoil from the assault. But I won’t be like my father. If kingship was his fate, he would make the Court of Ten Thousand Spires into something new, find a way to weave Mortal and Faerie together. He held the thought close, a comforting talisman.

  ThousandSpire, for all its power, was hesitant as it wound its way around him, like a feral cat unsure of its welcome. But he could feel its desperation, its incompleteness without a lord; faelands couldn�
��t sustain themselves for long without a bond to a living soul. So it would take him, ambivalent as he was, rather than be alone.

  He needed to relax. He knew, instinctively, that this was going to hurt if he didn’t, if he resisted. I should have asked Hetta for advice. Her bonding with Stariel had knocked her temporarily unconscious, but he didn’t think it had hurt. Probably because deep down she’d embraced it, he thought wryly. He needed to embrace this.

  Closing his eyes, he tried to think of all the good he could do as King of Ten Thousand Spires. He thought of the way sunset painted Aerest gold, of the cool shade of the eucalypts to the south, where he’d spent some of his happiest days as a child at the summer palace, before his mother had left. He thought of the lazy thermals above the plains and how Irokoi had patiently taught him the exhilarating flight path through the narrow canyons, before he’d been blinded.

  But over these memories, newer, stronger ones kept intruding. Hetta’s tear-filled eyes at seeing him whole and unharmed. The high-pitched shrieking of Valstar children as they scampered down hallways, giggling and trying to hide from their parents. The rich sweet-sour of sloe gin, and a sixteen-year-old Hetta laughing as he balanced atop a fence post to get to the hardest-to-reach berries on the hedgerows. Discussing thatching with cottagers and bridge repairs with stone masons. The solemn stillness of snow high on the Indigoes and the distant baa of sheep. Bare skin and honeysuckle-scented sheets. He pushed the images away, but they kept bubbling up. Focus!

  He’d been right; his resistance hurt. Knives of charge sliced through to his bones, a hundred times worse than the recoil of the dismae, as the faeland tried to force its magic to merge with his.

  Abruptly it wasn’t just ThousandSpire clawing at him as another presence surged, foreign but familiar, flowing through the still-open portal. He hung suspended between the vying magics as the faelands clashed, the seam along which two great seas met, trying to keep his feet as the two faelands roared at each other. He flung out his wings, excess magic sparking off them like sea spray from colliding waves.

  Stariel shouldn’t have been able to reach here, not on the soil of a foreign faeland, but it was using Hetta as a magnifier, somehow finding the strengthened connection between them that he’d sensed earlier. The faeland flung out a thread towards him through the chaos of ThousandSpire, like a rope dropped to the bottom of a well.

  A choice, he realised, in the sudden stillness at the eye of the storm. A person couldn’t be tied to two faelands. But it changed nothing; he’d already made his choice, and his own selfish wants had no place in it. He would accept ThousandSpire’s claim, let the threads of the Spires weave their way into his soul.

  But rising up from his soul was a truth he could not extinguish, a denial as hard and unassailable as iron:

  This is not my home.

  Something inside him snapped loose and, oh, it hurt, hurt worse than anything had ever hurt before. He screamed. Pain and ecstasy tore through him, piercing down to his bones, and he lost all sense of who and what he was. The taste of Stariel flooded his senses, rolled over every shadow in his soul. He was unmade and reformed, new and shaking and vulnerable.

  Smugness quivered through him, but it wasn’t his own emotion, and he realised with a start that where his connection to ThousandSpire had been now lay…something else entirely.

  Stariel.

  He stood on ThousandSpire’s lands and couldn’t feel the faeland. It should’ve been disorienting, that loss of sensation, but replacing it was something that felt far more like home than his own court ever had. Stariel thrummed, very pleased with itself, its emotion intimate in a way he’d never before experienced. ThousandSpire, however, was not pleased. He didn’t need a connection to it to taste the increased chaos in the air, the pressure of magic against his eardrums.

  “What are you doing?” Rakken demanded while Wyn wobbled. “What have you done?”

  Lightning flashed, and thunder rolled out, deafening.

  “Look!” Catsmere directed. The churning mass of the Maelstrom was expanding. The Maelstrom wasn’t a static entity, of course. That was part of what made it so terrifying. But Wyn had never seen it behave as it was doing now, its lightning clouds unfurling across the sky like a thousand fingers stretching towards the city. The rumble of thunder shook the world like a rockslide, and Wyn stumbled. It wasn’t merely magical shaking; the ground had become suddenly unstable.

  Rakken was pleading with the faeland to stop, but his words made no discernible impact. Eerie cold and magic flowed thick as water out from those clutching storm fingers. What would happen when they reached the city? Aerest was home to many fae, and the merest touch of the Maelstrom had nearly killed him, a royal stormdancer. Most of the populace would not be so lucky.

  “We have to stop it,” he said, sick with horror. This was his fault, his moment of selfishness rippling outwards with catastrophic results.

  “What did you do, Hallowyn? If it doesn’t want you either, then who else is left?” Rakken stared at the oncoming storm, and Wyn saw something flicker in his expression he’d never seen there before: fear. The scent of his magic spooled out, and Wyn knew he was trying to reach the Spires, but he might as well have been shouting at the moon.

  Catsmere looked from Wyn to Rakken and then back to the vast oncoming wrath of the Maelstrom. She sagged for a moment, her green eyes old and weary, before her shoulders lifted in sudden decision.

  “Sleep is not death,” she murmured, meeting Wyn’s eyes. “Get to the portal. Make sure he goes too.” And then she moved.

  Catsmere had long been one of the most feared warriors of the Spires, but Wyn had forgotten the swift deadliness of her at full attack speed. Even if Rakken had been prepared, he would’ve been hard pressed to evade the strike—and he wasn’t prepared. Not when it came from his twin.

  Catsmere’s sword struck with a thin whine of silk, and Rakken’s primaries sheared away. Bronze and green fluttered to the ground as Rakken spun towards his sister, shock slowing him, but Cat was already aloft.

  “Get to the portal, all of you. Now, Hallowyn!” she snarled at Wyn before winging away, her magic so potent that he could taste cinnamon even amidst the riot of ThousandSpire’s turmoil. And he understood, as Rakken let out a roar of denial, that she’d grounded her twin deliberately, to prevent him from following her—because Rakken would never have let Catsmere fly into the heart of that nightmare storm alone.

  For a moment she was brilliantly visible, a halo of lightning flashing around her, but then the wind whipped her away into the depths of the Maelstrom. The storm roared towards the city with renewed speed, and the ground shaking increased in intensity, cold and magic whipping around them in vicious snakes.

  “Foolish godchild! You need to leave now!” a familiar but completely unexpected voice said from behind them.

  They both whirled to confront Lamorkin, Wyn’s godparent, who smiled brightly, showing teeth.

  “You really ought not to let people sneak up on you unawares,” they chided. They had wings at present—and they flexed them in a shooing motion. “Out! Out! Or you will be caught in it.”

  “Caught in what?” Wyn asked.

  “We cannot leave our people to face the Maelstrom,” Rakken said flatly, magic still pouring off him, thought it was barely noticeable against the background roar. “And I’m not leaving Cat.”

  To Wyn’s surprise, Lamorkin straightened and said coldly: “Perhaps I wasn’t clear, Prince Rakken Tempestren of the Court of Ten Thousand Spires. The High King accepts the bargain. The Spires will enter stasis, until the faeland bonds with its new ruler. Do you wish to sleep for a hundred years or more?”

  Stasis. There was an old, old legend in Faerie about a faeland that the High King had put to sleep until a princess of the right bloodline had found the key to wake it. But it was a legend; something out of tales that no one could verify from having been there. Wyn had never considered that such a thing could happen in his lifetime, to his home court.r />
  “Sleep is not death.” Rakken growled Catsmere’s words, glaring at the sky. “What did you do, Cat?”

  Whatever Catsmere had done, she hadn’t shared it with Rakken, that much was clear.

  “She’s not dead,” Wyn tried to reassure him. “We’d know if she was.”

  Rakken’s gaze fixed on him, blazing with fury, and he launched himself at Wyn. “You!” But he was hampered by his crippled wings, and Wyn dodged, making a grab for him. Lamorkin took hold of Rakken’s other arm, transforming into a bear-like creature to better manage the task.

  “We have to leave, Rake,” Wyn said, as his brother struggled. “We can’t fight the High King himself.” Together he and Lamorkin dragged Rakken back through the portal. Wyn could feel Stariel’s anxiety. It wanted him back, and under his shock, something in him burned bright at the thought.

  The portal snapped closed an instant after they were all through. Stariel vibrated with satisfaction, and Wyn lost his grip on Rakken, distracted by the overwhelming sensation of homecoming. He’d always been aware of Stariel, but it wasn’t the same as being blood-bound to the faeland.

  Rakken tore his way free of Lamorkin as well and snarled. “This is your fault!” But before he could reach Wyn, the earth sank beneath his feet, liquefying and re-solidifying in a heartbeat. Rakken swore and batted his wings, wrenching at his legs, but he was stuck fast in the earth up to his knees.

  “Now, I know we’re all having a very trying day, but I’m not letting you strangle Wyn,” Hetta said firmly, folding her arms and looking down at Rakken. “What is—” But she broke off, staring at Wyn. He felt her pluck at the new connection between him and Stariel. All the colour drained from her face.