Claiming the Prince: Book One

by Cora Avery

  “To become Radiant and then take the Crown and then destroy the Elf King,” he said as if it were all so simple and obvious.

  “Why don’t you kill the King?” she asked through her teeth.

  “The gods have chosen the Elves to rule Alfheim. This cannot be changed. Your strength is our strength. That is what Froenz and so many others in the Resistance choose to forget. If we wiped out all of the Elves, Alfheim would die, we would all die. But if he”—he nodded down to Kaelan—“is the Prince foretold, then you and he can change this world for the better. So all those displaced and exiled can return to their rightful homes. I will do what I can to show the Resistance that Ljósálfar are different from the dark elves that rule here. They will not believe at first. They have been hounded, hunted, persecuted, and tortured.”

  The semargl whined and nosed Python’s hip. He stroked her head again. “This must be done, Magdalena.”

  “You want me to start a war,” she said.

  “War has already started,” he said, gold eyes flashing. “Too long your kind has turned your backs on the plight of the other races, ignored the crimes of the King. That has to change. And it will. Yet, my visions . . . they are so dark now. I cannot see what is to come, but I know that you are crucial to this—”

  “Then why did you allow Lavana to find me? To nearly kill me?”

  “I sent Kirk to rescue you, didn’t I?” he said. “You survived. Your warrior survived. But the Crown must not know about the Resistance. If I had not helped Lavana, she would’ve brought the Crown’s warriors. She would’ve brought attention to those in hiding on the other side. If the Crown finds out that you are colluding with the Resistance, she will kill you. She and the King are already in conference. The King wants her to turn over all the refugees, and to turn back any others who attempt to enter her Lands.”

  “You expect me to believe that the Crown is in collusion with the Throne? That’s insane. Why would she—?”

  “To prevent war,” he said, “and . . . I am told . . . to save her own life.”

  “But—”

  “We need this war, Magda,” Python cut in. “Any deal made with the King will result in more of the same. There cannot be peace. The Throne must yield to the Crown and your kind—you—must seize control of the Realms and return it to those of us to whom it rightfully belongs.”

  The semargl’s wings shot up, buffeting the air, her fangs snapped together. Her growl filled the room. Python stumbled back.

  Knives out, Magda spun.

  Endreas smiled. “What interesting company you keep, magpie.”

  “DON’T LISTEN TO HIM, Magdalena,” Python said from behind her. “He will say whatever he must to meet his ends.”

  As Python spoke, Endreas’s gaze hunted over her shoulders—to the semargl and Python—and then down to Kaelan.

  He drew one of his swords.

  His eyes returned to her. “Step aside.”

  “Is it true?” she asked, moving between him and Kaelan. “Is he your brother?”

  A dark tremor passed over his eyes. “Step. Aside.”

  Hero scrambled down her leg.

  “He will attempt to seduce you,” Python hissed from behind her, “to fulfill the older prophecy, to bring the Crown under the yoke of the King. But that is all he wants—”

  She saw it happening, shadows sweeping around from the edges of Endreas’s body. He was about to move through the Shadow Realms.

  She leapt, locking her arm around his neck, and was pulled into the Shadow Realms with him.

  When they reemerged, she stumbled back from him. His face was all hard edges, his eyes quaking. They were still in the cave, but on the opposite end, near the opening and the vast darkness stretching beyond.

  Python fell as she bumped into his back. The semargl snarled and flapped, skittering aside. Magda regained her balance in time to throw her forearm up against Endreas’s, stopping his sword, which had been arcing towards the semargl.

  Her foot struck his chest, pushing him back. As he fell, he slammed his hand into her knee. She yelped, twisting and crashing face-first to the ground. Near Kaelan’s feet, Python was struggling to stand.

  Though her knee burned, she pushed up and intercepted Endreas again. They traded blows. But she didn’t use her knives and he never drew his second sword.

  His fist struck her kidney and her vision cut out momentarily. He flung her against the wall, knocking the air from her lungs.

  She bit back against the pain, pushing off of the wall in a spin and kicked him in the face, breaking his nose.

  Blood poured over his mouth. He wove back.

  The semargl snapped at him, but Endreas was faster, even when injured. He swept around and sliced the semargl’s front leg. The creature yipped and whined.

  “No!” Python howled, charging forward on his own hobbled legs, raising his cane as if to strike Endreas.

  Magda, panting, sweat-slick, pain throbbing through her, rushed forward and knocked Python aside into the opposite wall next to the semargl.

  The tip of Endreas’s sword, meant for Python, grazed the top of her thigh.

  Endreas roared as if he’d been the one wounded and seized her arm, holding her upright as her leg buckled, blood seeping into her jeans.

  “Stop protecting them,” he said through his blood-stained teeth.

  “Magda?” Kaelan groaned.

  She glanced back. Kaelan pushed upright, blinking rapidly.

  Tearing away from Endreas, shoving him back for good measure, she unsheathed her knives and took up position between him and Kaelan.

  “Leave, Endreas,” she commanded. “Now.”

  “I see it,” Python said from where he was leaning against the wall, looking between Kaelan and Endreas. “It is true.”

  Endreas swiped the blood from his lips, his nose swelling at the bridge. He glowered at her.

  And then he drew his second sword.

  “Magda, what’s happening?” Kaelan breathed from close behind her.

  “You must kill him,” Python ordered her, inching away from Endreas towards the back of the room and a small, dimly lit door.

  From some place deep down, a tremble worked through her as she held Endreas’s gaze.

  Kaelan’s tone was perplexed. “Magda—?”

  “I’ll tell you what’s happening, brother,” Endreas said without looking away from Magda. “You’re supposed to be dead.”

  Endreas surged forward.

  She sprang to meet him, slicing into his upper arm under the scale of his pauldron. His forward sword clattered to the ground. He didn’t move to attack her. Her wolf blade slashed down through the leather bracers and into his right wrist. His second sword fell too.

  Before she could pin him fully, he slammed his shoulder down into her and flipped her up and over.

  So that’s why he’d let her get so close.

  She expected to land on her back, but instead she landed on her butt . . . on the ledge, her legs dangling, her shoulders tipping forward . . .

  “Magda!”

  . . . and over.

  Her daggers scraped the cliff face as she tumbled out and down.

  A glimpse of white water, of jagged stone, of brilliant stars, head over heels, cold sea air biting at her skin, stealing the breath from her lungs, she plummeted.

  The roar of the wind in her ears was matched only by the ocean waves crashing against the cliff below.

  She squeezed her eyes shut.

  Someone slammed into her, spinning her into a whirlwind of shadow.

  She blacked out.

  SHE SHOT UP, gasping, shredding the sheets with her daggers.

  “It’s all right, magpie,” Endreas said from the other side of the room where he stood before a mirror. He leaned over a bowl and washed the blood from his face.

  Icy starlight poured into the room through arching glass panels, so bright that none of the wall scones had been lit. Towering rectangular alcoves built into the walls were filled with
books, armor and weapons, paintings and sculptures. Double doors lurked in the shadows to her left. The dressing table, a huge halved tree trunk, cradled an asymmetrical mirror in its gnarled branches. The stone floors shone like black ice. Across from the bed, the fireplace was a corkscrewing column of smooth river stones that appeared frozen in the midst of a tornado ripping them from their streambed. A small pond trickled at the far end of the room, running under the glass wall that overlooked a vast expanse of darkness.

  At the sight of the emptiness beyond the windows, memories of her fall rose up and seized her.

  Her knives dug deeper into the bedding. She lowered her head between her knees, lungs grasping for breath.

  A moment later, Endreas’s cool hand skimmed her neck.

  A calming wave washed through her. She shuddered as the panic loosened its paralytic hold.

  Too soon, Endreas’s fingers slid away from her as he stepped back.

  “Where are we?” Her breathing resumed something near normal, but her pulse kicked, still frantic.

  “My home.” His jaw tightened as he unfastened the buckles of his breast plate.

  Slowly, she retracted her daggers. The dark silken sheets lay torn. Downy feathers and tufts of cotton poked through the holes.

  He moved back across the room, buckles clinking as he freed their clasps. His bracers thunked as they hit the floor. Leaning heavily against his dressing table, he unwound the blood-soaked leather from his wrist.

  Her stomach knotted. She ran her own finger under the rip in her jeans where his sword had cut her. The wound was tender, but healed. Touching her forehead, she found the abrasion from the dwarf’s manhandling also mended.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” she said.

  The last of his wrappings fell away. His sleeve slid back, exposing a thick red gash across the inside of his forearm.

  “Save you, you mean?” He smirked, picking up the bloody rag from the bowl again. “I didn’t intend for you to fall. I misjudged the distance to the ledge.” He scowled as if angry with himself, and then shot her an equally furious look. “Not that you should have fought me in the first place.”

  “Why did you bring me here? Are you holding me prisoner?”

  His smirk returned. He shook his head as he ran the rag over his arm and then squeezed the blood into the bowl. His voice fell to a low, dark register. “You should’ve told me . . . about the Prince.”

  “Don’t you mean your brother?” She put her feet on the ground, testing her legs. Leaning a hand against the overlarge bed, her legs, though sore and weak, held as she stood.

  One handed, he lifted the pauldrons from his shoulders, up and over his head, grimacing. She resisted the urge to help him.

  “Don’t you have someone to assist you?” she asked.

  The shoulder armor fell to the floor with a whoomp. “I couldn’t risk them seeing you and alerting my father to your presence. I’ve already had to shut out my counselors.” His eye twitched as if he felt the telepathic connection pushing against his brain. “But they won’t stand for it for too long.”

  He lifted his other arm, where she’d cut him along the bicep. The fabric of his shirt clung to his skin. With strained concentration, he began unwrapping his other forearm.

  “Why did you protect him?” His tone was so wounded her chest convulsed with guilt.

  “Kaelan is innocent,” she managed finally.

  “Kaelan.” His gaze held hers captive. “Is that what he’s called?” More leather massed in a coiled bundle at his feet. “And where did you find him?”

  “Lavana’s dungeon. You didn’t know? He was the Prince she had locked up there.”

  The blank look in his eyes told her that he hadn’t known, but then he chuckled. “Of course. He traveled the Shadow Realms once you were free of the dungeon. That’s how you moved so far so quickly.”

  He checked the wound on his bicep again, gripping the edge of his breastplate, a furrow on his brow.

  Teeth grinding, swearing at herself inwardly, she shuffled across the room and grasped the shoulders of the breastplate and backplate, lifting the scaled armor over his head. It was not nearly as heavy as it looked.

  “I would kiss you, but my face hurts,” he said once the armor was off.

  She smiled thinly at the swollen and bruised state of his nose. “It’s an improvement. Gives you character.”

  Her thumbs ran over the black scales. She gazed at her warped reflection in the shining plates.

  “What kind of scale is this?” she asked, placing the armor on the form by the dressing table.

  With more pained expressions, he peeled off his shirt. “Dragon,” he said. “Kura sheds them. She allows us to collect and use them.”

  “Kura? The dragon you set upon Froenz?”

  Bruises and welts spoiled the length of his lean torso, but it was the tattoo on his back that captured her attention—a mighty tree rendered in clean, black lines, a dragon wound about the trunk, shooting fire up over Endreas’s shoulder, spilling it down his chest and arm.

  “The dwarf lord made his choice.” His head turned away.

  As he tended his wound, she studied his tattoo, the muscles of his broad shoulders, the curve of his back, the jutting edge of his hipbone . . . the hollow inside of it.

  Her throat went dry. She tore her gaze away.

  But the bed filled the space beside her, and that was no good. The emptiness beyond the glass wall didn’t help either. She couldn’t think about how high up they were. When she looked back, he was watching her in the mirror again.

  “Did you know?” he asked.

  She found it hard to get her voice working through the heat gushing up her neck, into her cheeks.

  “About Kaelan?” he clarified.

  Her heart slowed. “That he was your brother? That your father tried to murder him? No. Not until I was dragged before Froenz. Kaelan doesn’t even know—”

  She tensed. What had happened to Kaelan? Was he still on that ledge? Did he think her dead? Had Python helped him escape? If so, to where? Or had they both become dragon-dinner?

  In the frantic flurry of her thoughts, her hand flew to her pocket. The Enneahedron was still there. Her fingers closed around it.

  Endreas watched her closely, causing the heat to spread through her. “It’s good you’ve found the Enneahedron. You’ll need it.”

  “You’re going to let me go?”

  “No.” He picked up a silver pitcher, pouring water into a simple silver cup. “I’m going to take you back to your Lands, so you can finish this.”

  He set the pitcher down, picked up the cup, and held it out to her.

  She took it, careful not to touch him—because she wanted to so very badly. The metal pressed cool against her palms and clacked against her sheaths. She drank.

  Clear and clean, the water slaked her thirst and refreshed her almost as much as a Prince’s touch.

  “But you will have to challenge Lavana without a Prince,” he said.

  She set the cup down harder than she’d meant to. “He’s your brother.”

  “He is no one to me,” he said. “Except a threat to the peace that we might make.”

  She moved away from him towards the dark planes of glass, though she kept her eyes unfocused in an attempt to forget about the heights . . . about falling, about that recent moment of near certain death.

  “What does peace mean to you, Endreas?” she asked, turning back to face him once she’d put a greater distance between them. “If you had jurisdiction over all of Alfheim, what would you do to those who have fled your Realms into Pixie Lands?”

  His gaze darkened. “Those who are criminals will be punished.”

  “They’re not criminals in the Lands, not by Pixie laws.”

  His chest rose and fell visibly as he heaved a deep breath. His jaw hardened as he glared at her.

  “And those in exile?” she asked. “Would you pursue them too?” Her skin started to burn again, but not because
of her desire for him. “Does your peace come by exterminating everyone who defied your family in the past, who broke your laws? How is killing the oracles, the semargl, driving brownies and imps and fairies from their homes, any less of a crime than killing dragons?”

  “The oracles trained the wolf breed of the semargl to hunt dragon eggs,” he growled. “They stole the eggs and raised the young in captivity, cutting off their wings so they could not escape. They chained their mouths so they could not breathe fire. The oracles had to do so, in order to sustain themselves, but they could not force the dragons to breed.” He took another deep breath and poured himself a cup of water. “There are races of small folk who believe they are above others and feel it is their duty to hunt and kill those races they do not like. My family did nothing but cease the slaughter. At least the oracles had a reason for killing dragons. What reason did the dwarfs have for hunting the chimera, or the lion-breed of semargl? None but vanity and pride.”

  Her voice was tight in throat. “I hear your reasoning, Endreas. But I don’t think you hear mine. Your laws aren’t ours. Pixies will not simply stand by and allow you to hunt down the small folk, even if they were willing to accept you as a ruler, which they won’t be. I’m beginning to think that your peace only comes by a great deal of slaughter and oppression. Tell me I’m wrong.”

  He didn’t though. He just gazed levelly at her. And then, he strode past her. Her frame wavered when he moved by, as if she were a dingy rocking in the wake of his ship.

  Pushing open one of the glass doors, he let out a pitched series of whistles. The air outside was cold. It slipped in and brought goose bumps out all over her. She chafed her arms to warm them.

  A moment later, a giant tawny-hued lion with gold-edged wings alit on the squat balustrade and then leapt gracefully down onto the wide balcony.

  “Good evening, Gur,” Endreas said, leaning against the glass door, holding it open.

  Magda shivered as she moved closer, in spite of her dread, and peered around the threshold.

  The lion shook out the thick ruff of his mane and let out a low rumble.