“Fuck.” I should have been stronger.
The dreams changed nothing. Meant nothing. They were just dreams. The only power Eledan had was that which I gave him.
Dreams aren’t real.
I’d agreed to find his heart and body, to free him, and in exchange, he would free Arran. But more than that, I’d traded my life for the lives of all saru, and I’d bargained to stop the war. Kellee would have called me a fool, if he knew. He would have raged at me for being Eledan’s tool. But behind all that vakaru anger, he would have understood, just like he always had. He wouldn’t have hesitated to give his life for his people either.
Now all I had to do was convince Sirius to help me make the pieces fall into place.
I sat up, pushing the guardian’s cloak back. Warm, autumnal spices summoned the scandalous dreams, swilring them in front of me. His fury at wanting me, the hatred even as his body had betrayed his need.
All fantasy.
To dwell on it would make it worse. I had work to do.
I looked up into the chamber, expecting to find him propped against the wall beneath the window, but his favorite spot was vacant.
That couldn’t be right. He would never shirk his guardian duty. The window was still locked, its handle bent over. Outside, Faerie’s mauve sky churned, turning the light a strange shade of hot pink. Nightfall was almost here. But Sirius wasn’t.
I had to find him and fast.
Stumbling from the bed, I opened the chamber door and came face to face with another Royal Guardian. Niamh. She had other less friendly names. Rumor was the Hunt had once tried to take her, but she had fought it off. I could believe that. Ribbons of red ran through her braided black hair like blood in oil. Pale ears pricked the air on either side of a narrow, poised face. She had eyes as red as her ribbons. That same red accent was threaded through her black leathers. A silver short sword sat snug in its sheath at her hip. There was no mistaking her for anything other than Faerie’s most-feared protector/assassin/advisor—whatever the king needed her to be.
“Niamh…” I acknowledged, fighting the instinct to kneel. “Where’s Sirius?”
“Oberon’s orders are to keep you contained within this chamber.” Her ember-red eyes flicked over my shoulder. She twisted her lips at what she saw behind me. I didn’t look, but I could guess. The cloak on the bed. She might even smell the scents of sex Eledan’s dream had soaked me in.
“You tainted him,” she said.
Was that what Oberon thought too? “Sirius has done nothing wrong.”
“You mutilated a Royal Guardian and infected his mind with treasonous thoughts. He is being dealt with. While that happens, you will not be leaving this chamber, Wraithmaker.”
Treasonous thoughts? Being dealt with? What had happened while I’d been locked in Eledan’s dream?
Sirius’s outburst in the gardens.
He had called the king insane, and while I’d slept, those words had reached Oberon. The king’s pride wouldn’t permit him to let the slight go. He would make an example of Sirius, a display so others would know not to challenge Oberon’s command. “Take me to the king.”
She ignored me.
I moved to step around her. She instantly stepped into my path and blocked me. I’d never been this close to her before, just seen a few glimpses of her at court. She smelled like warm leather and winter spices. Although sidhe, like Sirius, she was so old her magic was rumored to be part shadow. Looking up at her now, I could believe that. She had a dark fae look about her, but also enough light and beauty to have kept her on the right side of Oberon’s cleansing.
“Lower your gaze, saru.” Her teeth flashed.
I dipped my gaze and backed up. This would require some finesse. I could not win by attacking her head-on. Aeon had always taught me to distract them and attack from an angle they would least expect. I’d used drones at the Game of Lies. Before then, all I’d had were lies.
I had to get Sirius back. There wasn’t time for another obnoxious guardian getting in my way. Collecting Sirius’s cloak from the bed, I rubbed the soft leather between my fingers, releasing his warm, spicy scent. Niamh observed from the doorway, silent and alert.
“You serve Faerie first. Sirius told me that,” I said.
She didn’t reply. I hadn’t expected her to.
“What if I told you I do too?”
“You are saru. Of course you serve.”
“You have served kings and queens, but Faerie must always come first. Or have you forgotten?”
“I haven’t forgotten anything.”
“Then you must see how Faerie is dying.”
She glowered. “Stop talking.”
She would have to make me. I swept Sirius’s cloak around my shoulders and magic sizzled across my skin as the garment shortened, fitting itself to my smaller stature. Scents of warm wood and cinnamon soothed my mind. The cloak looked silly over my plain saru clothes, looked silly on me. For me to wear such a garment was deeply wrong.
“Take it off,” Niamh ordered.
I captured the edges in my hands and twirled on the spot, fanning it out. “What if I told you I have the key to saving Faerie?”
“Your lies are legendary. Remove the guardian’s cloak or I will tear it from you.”
I gathered up the cloak and cupped it against my face. It crackled with Sirius’s residue magic. “I suppose there are rumors of how I cut off his arm?”
She exploded into the room like a banshee, eyes ablaze, shadows reaching, and her scream was something worthy of the Hunt. It almost stunned me into submission, but at the last second, I brought Sirius’s cloak up and darted to the side, skipping lightly around her. Her silver blade struck, slicing my forearm. I ducked down through the doorway. A hot precision blast slashed across the back of my thigh, almost slowing me, but I was out of the room and running. I couldn’t outrun her, but I didn’t need to. I’d lose her in the saru servants’ tunnels. Tunnels I knew better than she did.
After racing down the spiral tower staircase, I’d almost reached the first section of servants’ tunnels when she flew in, all shadows and reds. Her scream hit like a physical blast. I jolted to the side. Her blade twanged off the wall. I darted down steps and through corridors, bouncing off walls quicker than should have been possible, and I only slowed when a pair of saru noticed me. There was no hiding who I was, not with Sirius’s crackling cloak and my marks on display. Their neutral saru gazes took me in, careful to remain unreadable.
“Have you seen Sirius?”
Silence. They either had orders not to speak with me or they were afraid to.
Breathless, I demanded, “There’s no one here to witness this. Have you seen the guardian?” My arm and leg burned and sizzled as they healed, but they still ached enough to shorten my patience with the anxious saru. “Where’s the king?”
They averted their eyes and turned their backs to me.
“Faerie be damned, what’s wrong with you?! I’m trying to help!”
They saw only the Wraithmaker. I started to walk away—A curse on their saru love of the fae!—and then stopped and turned on my heel. They recoiled like I was the monster here. “If Niamh finds me here with you, she will punish you. Help me. Tell me where the king is. Nobody needs to know you told me anything.”
One of them made a sweeping sign with her fingers at her side, a gesture meant to ward off dark creatures. I had made the same sign often enough while lying bleeding and broken in my cell, praying to Faerie to let me rest, to keep Dagnu away, that the pain would stop. To see the same sign directed toward me, as though I were the source of their suffering, cut deeper than the saru could imagine. My wounds throbbed hotter, and the little spark within stuttered.
“The nightmares stopped, didn’t they?” I asked. “And who stopped them? Who told the Dreamweaver to stop haunting you? I did. I have another name, one whispered to you as you sleep. I’m not just the Wraithmaker. Outside these walls, outside Faerie, I’m something else, something bette
r, and I’m trying to shine that light here too. Do you understand? Tell me where Oberon is. Let me help you.”
Something in my voice warned her not to push me further, or perhaps it was my trembling. She saw it all and finally relented. “They are at the Seat of Fortune.”
I touched my forehead with my fingertips as thanks, saw her eyes widen in surprise, and broke into a jog. It wasn’t their fault. Just like with Arran’s betrayal, none of this was their fault, but that didn’t dull the sting of their rebuttal.
The Seat was an old part of the palace. More of a theater than anything else, it resembled a huge bowl carved out of rock with a glass dome ceiling. It had once been an arena before the entertainment became too large for the Seat to host it.
The tunnels angled downward, twisting and turning at odd points as they hugged the outside of the palace’s formal public rooms. Saru were kept behind the scenes. I jogged past grim-faced saru, all of whom looked anywhere but at me. Word of where I was heading would soon reach Niamh. I hoped to reach Oberon before then.
Saru tunnels branched off ahead, running the outside of the circular Seat walls. Unseen by the fae inside, I climbed the steps to a high point above the terraces and tucked myself out of sight behind a section of wall. The high angle afforded me a view over the terraced seating onto the staging area, where a male fae had been stripped to the waist and fixed to an oak cross. It couldn’t be Sirius. He was too proud, too untouchable for this male to be him. But his mop of red hair didn’t lie, and neither did the polished tek arm. Iron nails punctured each hand, pinning him to the cross.
My racing breaths slowed. This was too much.
The collective murmuring from the glittering crowd of fae faded beneath my outraged thoughts until I only heard my heart beating like a wardrum.
Oberon had heard Sirius’s treasonous words.
So had the crowd. Several hundred courtly fae watched the scene on the stage with the same gory fascination as when they watched their saru gladiators in the arenas. Bloodlust and violence shone in their pretty eyes and tugged at their mouths, turning their smiles wicked.
Oberon, on stage, wore black and red from head to toe. Even his hands were gloved in warrior leathers, like Niamh’s, making it clear that here, in this arena, he was a warrior and a king.
I couldn’t see Sirius’s eyes beneath his sweat-soaked bangs. I just saw his mouth, twisted in denial and restraint. Perspiration glistened on his heaving chest. I didn’t need to see his face to know he was in agony. Crackling sparks twitched across his skin, magic trying to lash out.
How long had he been like this? Hours? And all the while I’d slept and dreamed with Eledan.
He wasn’t the only one who was suffering Oberon’s wrath. A line of saru knelt at the front of the stage, their heads bowed to the king. They didn’t moan or weep. They knew better.
Oberon, can you not see how this is wrong…
Seeing Sirius there, so proud a thing reduced to Oberon’s toy, it broke open that hard part of me that wanted to protect all those wronged by the fae. He had only tried to manage me and keep me safe, exactly as Oberon had ordered. He did not deserve this. And those saru, whatever they had done, their punishment would not fit their crimes. This pantomime was a disgrace.
“I am reminded of my mother’s wise words,” Oberon said, lifting his voice above the crowd’s murmuring. “The mightiest of oaks are hollow. She meant for Faerie’s ruler to be firm and unyielding but without feeling.” His voice rang out, filling the bowl-shaped theater, stirring his elite audience into murmurs. “Mab was a wise queen. But in this she was wrong. She allowed too much to go unnoticed and unpunished.” He scooped up a saru by the neck at random and lifted him as though he were nothing but a paper doll. “Slights against the crown will not be ignored.”
The saru didn’t complain or cry out. Oberon maneuvered the male against another cross and lifted the saru’s hand to the crossbeam. He pulled an iron nail from his pocket and stabbed it into the saru’s hand. The man’s legs gave out and he whimpered. Oberon caught him around the waist, and they shared a silent moment, one I knew well. The saru, scarlet blood running down his arm, looked at Oberon with tears of admiration in his eyes. Even now, as he fixed that man to a cross, Oberon was loved. The saru would die with that smile on his face, for his mighty king had noticed him.
What crime had he committed? It didn’t matter. The king would kill him because he could, because saru were worthless and easily replaced.
I rested a trembling hand against the wall.
The king drove a second nail home, pinning the weeping saru with his arms open wide. I felt that strike and winced away.
This was barbaric.
The crowd observed their king with reserved fascination. Some smiled, others kept their expressions guarded, but all were so sure of their immunity. They were protofae. Worlds belonged to them. Saru belonged to them. Humans too. Everything was theirs to use and toss aside as they pleased. Most of them here thought nothing of this brutality against lesser creatures.
Oberon took another saru off her knees. I recognized her from the cell beside Arran’s. Arran wasn’t among them, but he could have been.
“Please…” she begged, eyes wide.
Oberon lifted her off her feet and regarded her in that same cool, calculating way he did with me.
“Not my son,” she begged. “Please, my king.”
It had been the wrong thing to do. Silence was the only option here. Silence and grateful acceptance.
I saw the young boy kneeling. Oberon would leave him until the end. Eight years old at the most. But only one cross remained on the other side of Sirius. Would he crucify the mother or her child? Make her watch as he killed her son? Make her beg some more?
“Mercy, my king?” the mother sobbed.
Mercy.
Kellee’s people had begged for the same. Oberon’s mercy had been vicious and swift.
This family would die here, as so many had before them. Oberon had killed thousands, hundreds of thousands—humans, saru, namu, vakaru, and others we likely didn’t know of. The fae thought me—the Wraithmaker—their monster, but he was the monster. They were all monsters.
A scuffle behind me and I knew Niamh was near. If she caught me, she’d drag me back into the tower, and nothing would change. Here, now, I could show them their ugliness and take a stand.
Along the outside of the amphitheater, out of sight behind walls like mine, saru were watching all of this unfold.
I clenched my hand and drew in a breath.
Kellee would hate what I was about to do… but he and I did things differently. And it was time the saru learned there was another way, that change was coming and they weren’t alone.
I emerged from behind the wall, heart thudding in my ears and fear clawing at my resolve. Swallowing, I called, “My king.”
Gasps rippled through the fae. The collective weight of the fae crowd’s power and magic scented the air, making it thick and sweet.
Oberon looked up at me, his expression masterfully frozen in mild intrigue, but I knew what to look for and had caught the surprise before he could mask it.
Whispers traveled on the breeze, filling the domed ceiling. Wraithmaker, they hissed. Murderer, assassin, lover. It was worse than I’d imagined. And my presence undermined everything Oberon was trying to do with this spectacle. He should have punished me for all my crimes, should have put me in restraints the moment I’d returned and executed me days after. But here I was, free and in their midst. If the king did not punish me, all the whispers would come true.
I descended the steps. Fae recoiled. A flutter of excitement tightened my breaths. I’d gladly be their monster if that’s what it took to change them.
I unclipped Sirius’s cloak and let it drop. Rolling up my sleeves and unlacing my shirt near my collarbone, I revealed black markings and the lack of a restraining collar. They saw a saru woman, gifted with proud warfae ink, walking freely among them. An assassin, a butcher, a
mass murderer. The unmistakable Wraithmaker. I tasted their rage mixed with their magic in the air.
Oberon didn’t need to say a word. Molten fury blazed in his eyes. With the saru mother in his grip, he pinned my approach under a glare that warned I was playing a dangerous game with Faerie’s king. I welcomed his attention, welcomed all their hatred-filled gazes. I soaked it into me like it was air I needed to breathe. I had always entertained them, and this moment was no different. This singular moment would set into motion the change the Messenger heralded.
I stepped up onto the raised staging area and kneeled. “Sire, I offer myself in the place of these saru.”
The crowd’s murmurs turned to rumbles then to jeers at the thought of seeing me nailed to an oak beam. Oberon could not refuse this. The crowd was against him. All of Faerie was against him.
I lifted my head. The king looked me in the eye, and although he appeared unreadable, something sharp and deadly, old and ruthless, glinted in that ageless gaze. There would be repercussions for this, the likes of which I could not imagine. He blinked slowly and looked out at the hundreds waiting for him to speak.
He didn’t have a choice.
Time stretched on while all of Faerie held its breath.
He tossed the mother aside and snatched me by the neck, jerking me off my feet.
“Foolish,” he sneered beneath a growl, words meant only for me.
The nearby saru sobbed louder. I would heal. I would survive. They would not. It was the only gift I could give them, and if they hated me for this too, so be it, but some would see the truth.
“Kill the Wraithmaker!” someone yelled in a singsong fae voice. Other fae echoed the same shout until it became a chant upon the lips of hundreds, filling the bowl-like Seat of Fortune with cries for my death.
“Kill the Wraithmaker—Kill the Wraithmaker!” The air trembled.
They had once chanted for me to kill for them. I smiled at the irony. Oberon’s fingers tightened around my neck.
Prince of Dreams (Messenger Chronicles Book 4) Page 12
