Faerie Queen: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Vampire's Bane Book 3 : Part I)

by Marian Maxwell

  Suri now took his stillness not as a menacing feature but rather as a sign that the ancient warlock was barely holding himself together—that he was sick and could collapse at any moment. The outcome of that would be massive bloodshed. Suri did not want to imagine the terrors the nobles would inflict as they fought amongst each other to claim the royal palace.

  He could be dead right now and his armor would still keep him propped up. All that matters is that he survives long enough for this ceremony to be completed.

  He was so powerful that none dared to question him, the vampire lords only sparingly glancing in his direction, knowing that he was their rightful ruler, knowing that although he could not kill them completely, he could wound them and take everything that they had, their entire estates and inheritance, leaving them destitute. That was the only reason they sat peaceful at the table, and were not feasting on Lord Korka’s remains, instead of the poor victims who had been chopped up and served for their supper.

  Suri whispered the beginning phrases of the black magic spell so softly, barely giving air to the syllables so that, she hoped, no one present would notice what she was doing. She looked around nervously, quickly taking in all the faces at the table, then the nearest people in the crowd. None of their expression let on that they thought something was amiss with Suri, or anything with the ceremony. They all looked thoroughly pleased with themselves—exactly what Lord Korka had planned.

  It was that, or they did not think it odd that black magic was being casted in their midst. Such was the state of Faerie that no one would think it a bad thing to act with the dark arts. Then there was the fact that she was about to become Queen—that she was Lord Korka’s bride sitting next to him at the head of the feast table, in the center of Lodum, in the center of Faerie. Who would dare to question what she did? If the Queen of Faerie wished to practice her black magic on the day of her wedding, who would dare to say otherwise?

  But Lord Korka knew, even if none of the others did. He shifted his gauntleted hand and tapped it on the top of the table in the same way that he had done in the yard outside of the royal palace. A small signal, subtle. Suri felt certain that it meant he had read the sign. A moment later he rose to his feet. A hush fell over the crowd and the vampire lords arranged at the feast table on the platform. The musicians trailed off their music, the notes of their song coming to a sudden stop.

  The sky was clear and the petals from the passing dragon had mostly been swept off of the feast tables, and from where they had landed in people’s hair. The commoners were still eating, but it was more picking at their food, clearing the last bits of morsels from their plates with small forkfuls, and draining the dredges from their goblets for the first time, before the servants came for another round to refill them.

  It was the right time to give a speech. Everyone was full and mostly satiated, their attention no longer directly on the food in front of them. They were ready to listen.

  Lord Korka took on the tone and choice of words that he had performed at his first meeting with Suri, on the giant tree bough outside the city. It was much unlike the other personality that he had shown more recently. It was all a persona, a strongman act, just as he had said, in order to keep control.

  “Lodum!” he called in greeting, his boomed voice coming out from his helmet strong and crisp and clear across the market square, and over the rooftops where many more waited with eager ears.

  The crowd cheering back at him, their combined voices like thunder aimed at the wooden platform.

  “Lodum!” he called again, this time louder. “Jewel of Faerie, jewel of the World!”

  The crowd cheered at this raucously, matching his increase in volume. He was building them up to a fervor, his booming voice so different from the dry rasp, either the result of the confines of his black metal helm or due to an enchantment to make his voice stronger than was normal, and dripping with masculine energy.

  “It pleases me that you have come to celebrate this day of my wedding. You have known now, for a few days, that you have a new King. Now, I present you with your Queen.”

  18

  Suri

  Lord Korka gestured with his hand and held it out, the signal for Suri to rise and join him. She took the cue, clenching her stomach muscles against her stage fright—rose onto her golden shoes to stand next to him. She rose her hand for a moment to touch her tiara and make sure that it was straight on her brow, and realized that adjusting it was the wrong move. It would show weakness, uncertainty, to the thousands of fae eyes fixed on her, and to the vampire lords behind whose eyes burned into her back. She imagined their fangs lengthening, the urge in them growing to leap and sink the tips into her flesh and suck her dry.

  She shivered, but kept her face calm and stood next to Korka with her chin high and her left hand resting comfortably on the hilt of her jewelled short sword. The dress, the tiara, the shoes, her styled hair, the golden belt and sheathe encrusted with gems must have had the desired effect, because as she looked at the crowd, all of their faces were directed on her, not Lord Korka. Their eyes were wide, lips slightly parted as they looked at her with awe and longing, as if she was a divine being.

  So they accept me as their Queen, for now, Suri thought. Another step in Lord Korka’s plan complete.

  The traditions of the fae were far different from what was done on Earth. Suri was caught off guard as Lord Korka turned to her, and their marriage took place then and there on the wooden platform for everyone in Lodum to see.

  Lord Korka simply proclaimed, in his booming voice, “By the Sun and Stars, I take you as my wife.” And there the great warlock knelt, the most powerful person in all of civilized Faerie. He was still so tall that the top of his great helm reached the top of Suri’s head. But still he looked up at her, and took her hand, and instead of a ring slipped a golden bracelet around the wrist of her right hand.

  Suri felt that she should do something to, give him a bracelet, say some words, but that was not Lord Korka’s way, or the way of any fae nobility. She really just stood there like an object to be desired, like the Stepford wife she has always loathed, and had told herself she would never become.

  But no, I’m wrong. They do expect me to do something.

  Suri froze. Her palms started sweating again as Lord Korka stayed in his kneeling position, watching her with waiting expectation. The crowd watched her in the same way, a silence falling over the market square. Thousands of people waiting in anticipation for her to speak words she did not know.

  Why did he not tell me what to day? Was that Traxan’s task? Did he deliberately not tell me to mess me up? The whole ceremony could be ruined if I don’t get this right!

  Suri wetted her lips with the tip of her tongue, wiping the last of the blood off of them from the goblet, hating the bitter taste in her mouth—hating the hidden truth of Lodum, and what she must do. At the same time, she felt true purpose for the first time in her life; she had been born to rid the two worlds, Faerie and Earth, of the vampire pestilence. It was a fate written in her blood. She would not fail, she would not stumble before the task had even truly begun.

  “By the Sun and Stars,” she said, with the strength of conviction. She paused for a moment, not long enough to make it awkward but just long enough to see if anyone gave a negative reaction. When there was no such response she completed the line that Lord Korka had first said to her. “I take you as my husband.”

  She let calmness enter her body and assumed the role of a Queen, doing what she felt to be natural because she had no other option, no idea of what to do next.

  She gripped one of Lord Korka’s massive gauntlets with both hands and pulled. Not pulling him to his feet, but applying the pressure to tell him that was what she wished. He rose to stand again, and the two of them stood side by side before all of Lodum as husband and wife, hand in hand.

  The crowd roared in approval, their largest noise yet, and on instinct and a little bit of improvisation, Suri let go of Lord Korka’s
hand and drew her short sword in a flash. The blade came out blazing under the sun. She held it high at an angle over her head, pointing out at the sky over the crowd. The roar continued and she stood still like a statue of Athena, letting their adulation wash over her. It was then, as she held the pose for a minute, then two then three, the crowd cheers growing only wilder, Lord Korka waiting in silence next to her, that she saw a familiar face in the crowd.

  Raja! He’s here!

  Suri’s hand wavered. The tip of the sword shook for all to see, or at least those standing near enough to be able to make it out. Before she made a fool of herself, Suri lowered the blade and re-sheathed it, then raised a hand and waved to the crowd, buying time to look at Raja and meet his gaze.

  He had two scars: one across his nose, the other running next to his jawline and ending next to his chin. A chunk of his right ear was missing. His blonde hair was shorter, cut into a military-style haircut. He did not glare at Suri, but he watched her very intently.

  They held each other’s gazes. Suri’s breath caught in her chest. Raja was the first to look away, slowly turning his eyes, then his whole head, looking through the crowd and holding his gaze in that direction.

  Suri followed his line of sight, scanning the crowd towards where he could be looking. There were so many people, all cheering, some jumping up and down and waving their arms to get her attention, made all the more confusing by the mix of bright colors from flowers worn atop their heads in beautiful wreathes, in imitation of Suri’s golden tiara. Then she found her, Amber, alone in the crowd wearing a high-collared shirt and a hood, not pulled all the way over her head but only halfway up, to hide her ears. And then Suri was really scared. Her palms began to sweat even more, so much that she wiped one absent-mindedly on the skirt of her white dress.

  She did her best not to show her nervousness and continued waving at the crowd. Lord Korka joined her, also raising a hand, perhaps wondering how much longer Suri was going to go on with this.

  It’s too dangerous for Amber to be out in the open!

  Her eyes were not human, at least. A minor glamour had been casted on them to give the cat-like appearance of belonging to fae.

  Amber touched her nose with one finger, and odd gesture.

  She’s trying to signal something to me, but what?

  A moment later, Amber was gone, moving through the crowd, lost in the jostling, densely packed bodies, toward a goal that Suri did not know.

  How many others are out there? How many of my friends and former Black Gauntlet members escaped, and how?

  Lord Korka has said they would remain hostages. Something must have gone wrong in his absence. He doesn’t know—perhaps nobody knows yet that they escaped.

  Chaotic as everything had been since the beginning, the intensity of the situation was dialled up a notch. Now there were even more moving pieces that Suri did not know about, but felt that she had to keep track of—new concerns and worries. Funnily enough, it had been simpler when all she had to do was murder the heads of Lodum’s noble families and usurp the hierarchy of power. That much hadn’t changed. She would still go through with it. The contents of the wedding meals had been meant for Suri to see the noble’s inner nature. The fact that Amber and Raja, and maybe the other humans, had been freed did not change that at all. But it did make Suri wonder about what was going on.

  Lord Korka began to speak again. “Friends, fellow fae, and countrymen. I announce to you on this day, the most important day in Lodum’s history, on the day of my wedding when you have a new King and Queen, that a new order has come to this fair city.”

  The cheering that Suri had enjoyed came to a halt. This was not expected, it was not part of the festivities. It was wholly serious. There were some cheers but not many. It was mostly confusion and a pregnant silence. “Lord Korka is pushing his luck,” the crowd seemed to say. They had accepted him as their next King—not that they had much of a choice, but many of them seemed to be at least happy about the matter. And now he was threatening more change. After the invasion and the disappearance of Jansilian, the fae commoners could only suffer so much of it over the course of a few days.

  “There is no better way,” Lord Korka continued, “to start the occasion than to honor those brave civilians who aided the effort to liberate this fair city from Jansilian’s tyranny.”

  All pompous nonsense and propaganda. Much to Suri’s surprise, the crowd ate it up.

  Had the Faerie King really been so disliked?

  It made her go back to her original theory, that the people in the crowd were not representative of the general population, but had rather been chosen to be present, allowed to be in the public square, because they had first been vetted and were known to be loyal to Lord Korka’s rule.

  In all likelihood, the crowd was made up of many of the same people who had taken part in the human district’s destruction, or at least supported it, formed mobs like the one that had chased Suri to hunt down the survivors, and make Faerie pure again.

  Suri had never asked Lord Korka about his involvement in that, but she thought she could understand his reasoning. The end justifies the means. It had been necessary to build a popular movement within the city walls that would be ready for his return—an underground movement, xenophobic, that went directly against Jansilian’s treaty with the councillors, and asserted Korka as a fae loyalist, who, in turn allowed them a false sense of superiority that Suri had unfortunately seen many times on Earth. Racism was, after all, not unique to Faerie.

  Four fae walked onto the stage—No, that’s not quite right. Three fae and one human: a girl with short black hair. The one who had casted the kame spell at Turndour Keep, and been on the side of the forces who had been fighting Black Gauntlet.

  Suri’s eyes widened. So did the girl’s. They stared at each other for a moment, then the girl frowned, clenched her jaw. She glanced away, at one of the fae lords sitting at the feast table, then back at Suri. Her expression suddenly changed to be haughty. She sniffed, lifted her nose and turned her attention to Lord Korka.

  Traxan reappeared on the platform. He held a small lacquered box, which held four medals to be worn around the neck. As if it were the end of the Olympics, he held out one medal to Lord Korka, who took it and placed it over the first fae’s head.

  Traxan spoke again in the lilting fae dialect that Suri could not comprehend, and as he reached out to pass another medal to Lord Korka an explosion blasted apart one of the buildings at the edge of the square, sending up a spiral of smoke, a cloud of dust and rock debris flying into the crowd. Screams followed. The hell spawn shuffled, already moving as a unit to cut off the area around the building and investigate the disturbance.

  Suri heard a muttered chanting. Traxan had set down his box. Two black orbs hovered over each of his palms, spinning in orbit around each other. He spied someone in the crowd, levitated up off the wooden platform, hawkish eyes fixed on his target.

  THE END of PART I

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