by Young, S.
When we finally were led into the palace, we were directed to the throne room where Queen Aine held court. Andraste and her sisters sat near and my eyes connected with my mate’s. Everything around me disappeared but her. The sparkling marble floors, walls, the magnificent paintings that graced those walls, the balls of lights that glowed around the room with no aid of fire. Just pure magic.
Nothing was as magical as Andraste.
I could almost feel her love warming through me.
My brother would be sick if he heard my thoughts. He thought love was a disease.
I disagreed.
Vehemently.
Fae, humans, werewolves, and vampires crowded into the throne room. It was here on Faerie I first heard the unusual music that often played in my mind whenever I returned to our world. We did not have such beauty of music. It reminded me of the sounds made by the lyre, but on a celestial level of bliss the lyre could never achieve.
Fae musicians played in the corner. We were forbidden from taking anything from the fae world back into ours, but I often contemplated ignoring the rule just to steal one of those instruments made of wood and string. The humans needed this music more than the fae did.
“Fionn looks as delighted as ever to be here.” Eirik smirked.
My eyes moved to the queen’s human consort who stood by her side. Six years ago, Fionn had been one of the youngest kings of Éireann. The fiercest warrior. He stood at a great height, taller than even many of the fae, and powerfully built. The male had the most startling green eyes. So vivid, he could almost pass for fae. His people thought him a god. And he and his tribes hunted fae, determined to wipe them out of existence. I had wanted to kill him.
Eirik applauded him.
My ungrateful brother.
Aine could not let the murders go unpunished and so she ventured into our world herself to mete out his punishment. It is said Aine was so taken with Fionn, she offered him a bargain. If he stayed with her on Faerie as his consort, she would spare his beautiful wife and two young children.
At the display of unearthly power Aine rained down about his village, Fionn accepted the bargain.
The mighty warrior had been her whore ever since.
“I fear he will try to kill her someday,” I murmured.
Eirik’s hungry eyes studied Fionn. My brother could not hide his desire for the warrior. I was inclined to think it was his obvious passion for the warrior that had Aine so taken with Eirik. She had something he wanted. Aine did so delight in bargains.
Yet I think my brother and I both knew she would only push Fionn so far, and the warrior was not interested in taking any male to his bed.
Much to Eirik’s disappointment.
“He will never attempt to kill her,” Eirik replied. “She will kill his wife, and if she is no longer alive, his children, and if they are no longer alive, then his grandchildren. He is stuck with her. Until his mortal life ends. Such a waste.”
“I doubt Aine sees it as such.”
My brother scowled. Aine had a penchant for men, human or supernatural, who were not under her thrall. She seemed to delight in the novelty of it.
Ignoring Eirik’s foul mood, I moved through the crowds to bow at Aine’s throne. My eyes flicked to Andraste who watched me with impatient hunger. Soon, my expression said.
Eirik reluctantly bowed beside me.
“The Mortensen brothers. You do add a rough sort of beauty to any room.” Aine smiled down at us. Her own beauty was almost too much. The golden hair, the golden eyes, the golden skin. She was like a fallen sun. In comparison, my Andraste had silver-blond hair, pale moonlight skin, and silver eyes. Like a single fallen star.
The sun burned.
A star was something to place a wish upon.
All my wishes were bound up in my star.
I adamantly did not look at Andraste again. A mating between a fae and a vampire was unheard of, and Andraste was terrified of Aine’s reaction. So far, we’d been lucky. No one had detected the mingling of our scents. Except for my brother and her sisters. But not one of them would put our lives in jeopardy by sharing our secret.
“No beauty could eclipse yours,” I answered.
She gave me an amused smile and turned to Eirik.
He stared stonily up at her.
“What say you, Eirik Mortensen?”
“Your captain is torturing a human female out in the Royal Square while his men fuck another against her will. An interesting way to announce that the queen is in residence.”
I could feel the disapproval of the queen’s subjects at my brother’s lack of deference.
Yet I was not surprised when Aine scowled. “How vulgar of him.”
The queen of the fae was an odd, complex being. She could be benevolent and kind and then wicked and cruel within the space of a mere thought.
Suddenly, Captain Lir appeared at my side. Outside his shirt had been unbuttoned, sweat dotted his brow, and his hair had been askew. Blood had flecked his face. There was not a trace of that in his immaculate appearance. He bowed low. “My queen.”
Aine dragged her eyes down his body and back up again. “We do not visit Réalta only to make a spectacle of ourselves in their marketplace, do we, Captain?”
He inclined his head, a flick of a dangerous look at Eirik.
“Do you have a reason for your attentions upon the human females?”
Lir shrugged. “They refused to pleasure me and my men. So we took our pleasure from them.”
“They are not slaves to your every whim,” Eirik bit out.
Lir raised an eyebrow. “Are they not?”
“No,” Aine answered.
The room hushed.
Lir straightened, his expression flattening. “My queen?”
She stood. The golden dress she wore clung to her beautiful body, but the train flowed around her feet like golden water and as she moved down the dais, the sound of it was like a gentle stream.
Aine drew to a stop before Lir. “Humans are not slaves to your every whim, Captain. They are my guests in this world and therefore friends who bow to my every whim. I did not give you leave to take your pleasure from them.”
He bowed his head deferentially. “My queen.”
“You have embarrassed me, Lir. To be scolded by a vampire for your behavior is not at all how I envisioned my visit to the lands of eternal night. What say you?”
“My apologies, My queen.” His gaze flicked to Eirik again. “Do you wish me to cut down the vampire who would scold you?”
“No,” she answered immediately. She smiled at Eirik, devious and wicked, beautiful and sparkling. “He amuses me greatly.” She turned her golden eyes to the watching crowd and pouted prettily. “Pity he does not want me.”
The room gasped at the idea, outraged on behalf of their queen.
“I know.” Aine gave a dramatic little sigh. “I must take comfort in the fact that it is merely a case I am not equipped”—her eyes dropped deliberately to Eirik’s groin—“to satisfy him.”
The court laughed at her joke as she moved back up the dais. Instead of sitting on the throne, she halted beside Fionn, staring up at the large warrior king. He stared straight ahead, ignoring her. Aine placed her hand on his bare chest. Whatever she whispered to him, it caused the muscle in his jaw to tick before he turned to offer his hand.
The surrounding air shimmered, and then they were gone.
We all knew why and where.
Eirik stared at the space they had stood with envy tightening his features.
I finally looked at Andraste.
There were no words for how much I needed her. Sometimes I feared the extent of my feelings because they were infinite, never ending, like the stars themselves. Too much feeling. Too much love. It hurt as much as it pleasured. I feared I would die without her. The hunger, the need for her, did not seem to abate. It was stronger than my need for blood. No matter how many times I found bliss between her pale thighs, it was never enough.
&n
bsp; I wanted more.
It felt like hours before I could be with her. Eirik disappeared as I spoke with friends we had made among the supernaturals and fae. The human guests were treated much better within the court than those who wandered outside of its protection, like the human girls Lir had tormented.
At last Andraste and I made it out of the room without detection, no words passing between us, so eager were we to be alone. She led us to a set of stairs used only by the servants. We hurried up the coruscate marble, the servants we passed turning a blind eye to our appearance. Andraste scolded me for watching a fair maid hurry past us, but I assured her, I was as ever merely caught up in my wonder. The fae, whether aristocrat or servant, were lustrous in their attractions.
“There is not a crow among you,” I once teased Andraste.
“Oh, there are,” she assured me. “However, they dwell in parts of our world that no one ventures. Nasty, horrible creatures.”
“Are they kept separated because they lack beauty?” The thought had troubled me.
“No. Because they despise beauty and once upon a time sought to destroy it.”
“There was a war?”
“Millennia ago. Yes. They wielded weapons that could kill us but Aine was too powerful for them. We won the war, Aine destroyed any trace of the weapons and was benevolent enough to let most of the challengers live. There is another continent on Faerie, across vast, dangerous waters. We have not seen or heard from them in centuries. Thank goodness.”
My curiosity on the subject had grown, and Andraste had allowed me use of the royal library to read of the war. There I read that during the war, Aine discovered what she called the cauldron. It had the power to strip a fae of their memories so they could be reborn, something the fae required now that they were truly immortal. In their newly eternal evolution, fae children became rarer and rarer until only one or two fae children were born every century.
Now, however, was not the time to be thinking of such things when my glimmering mate was leading me toward her chamber.
It was as we moved from one floor to the next that we heard a harsh male grunt and a cry of pleasure. Both our gazes flew to an open doorway, a servant’s bedroom, where I flinched to see my brother and Lir naked. Lir was on his hands and knees as my brother powered into him from behind. And I knew him well enough to know he’d deliberately left the door open.
I curled my lip in distaste.
It was a sight I’d have liked to have gone an eternity without ever seeing.
As Andraste and I hurried away, she giggled.
I glowered at her.
She shrugged. “Your brother is so contrary.”
“He’s a dominating bastard.” He would just love that. Taking pleasure from Lir, making him vulnerable to him. It was his own way of punishing the fae for hurting the humans. To make him want him so much, to have power over him.
Eirik was good at that.
“I need you to spell the image from my head,” I grunted, pulling Andraste into her bedchamber. “Love me until there is nothing but you.”
And so she did.
The queen left the following day. Andraste and I stayed in bed for four nights to celebrate our privacy.
Thea glanced up from the entry to find Conall out for the count. If Jerrik’s journal of his time in Faerie was a lie, then the guy had an amazing imagination.
Staring at Conall, however, Thea believed Jerrik had once had a mate. The way he described his love for Andraste was the way Thea felt about Conall. The mating. It was intense.
She fought the urge to lean over and kiss Conall’s scarred cheek and instead turned the page to the next entry. Jerrik filled the pages with tales from the court, and as Vik had mentioned, he spoke of the queen’s fury over the fae who turned to werewolf and the fae who died trying to do so. The revelation had worried Andraste as she feared the queen discovering their secret, but Jerrik had refused to leave her side.
Finally, Thea skimmed through his entries until she got to the one that interested her most: the closing of the gate and the supposed spell upon the human world that Thea was a consequence of.
(Roman Calendar Year 128 BC)
It cannot be. I sit here in my cold stone home, no windows to guard against the sun, and I cannot fathom that Andraste is lost to me. Hours ago, she’d been in my arms. Hours ago, another world had made my existence worthwhile.
It is now lost to me too.
“Are you going to mourn forever?” Eirik had asked upon our arrival home. “Because that will grow tedious.”
“Do you not care she is forever lost to me?”
“No. She was beneath you. As they all are.”
“They made us, you ungrateful heathen.”
“Yes, but rather like a man whose mother pushed him out as a babe only to leave him to starve in the woods, I bear no loyalty to my creators.”
I’d attacked him.
Viciously.
Both of us were bloodied and broken but healing physically.
I did not know if my heart would ever heal.
Listen to me. My mind is so overwhelmed by the happenings. I need to find order in the chaos. I’ve started at the end. I must go back to this morning. To explain.
The queen’s seer had a vision.
I had been living on Faerie for months. Eirik would visit occasionally. “To make sure you are still alive.”
For me, however, even separated from my twin who had once been my other half, my life was here. With Andraste.
The fae celebrated each country throughout the year and it was time to pay homage to Samhradh, the lands of eternal summer. Samhradh Palace stood in the heart of Solas, the royal city of the Day Lands. If I thought the palace at Réalta astounding, there were no words for the queen’s home. It differed from the other palaces. Where they were long and rectangular, a building wrapped around a huge inner courtyard, the palace at Solas was tall and enchanting. A castle. Towering turrets of different sizes, spires, and a magnificent gated entrance created from gold. It appeared to be crafted entirely of shattered pieces of the opaque glimmering utilized for windows. Those shattered pieces, placed together, miniscule bit by miniscule bit, gave the castle the appearance of a building made entirely of diamonds.
It shimmered, flashing and winking in the blazing sun. It was a wonder to even walk beneath a sun that could not kill me, but to enjoy the beauty of Samhradh at the same time was a marvel. It was a joy to escort Andraste to the Solas Festival.
That morning, Andraste woke me, frantic. “The palace is abuzz,” she said, hauling me out of bed. “The queen’s seer has had a vision and now the queen has demanded we all attend the Reckoning.”
I groaned, as I had already decided I did not want to attend the Reckoning. It was the fae version of a justice system. Any supernatural, human, or fae caught breaking the laws of Faerie were kept in confinement at a prison near the gate between worlds on the coast of Samhradh. They were brought out of confinement every quarter during a festival to be judged by Aine.
“Hurry, it has already begun.”
“What has the seer prophesied?”
“No one knows. But rumor is rife that the queen found the news disturbing.”
“The queen is never disturbed.”
“Hence my current disquietude.”
So we stood beside Eirik, who had to come to Faerie to enjoy the festival, as prisoner after prisoner was brought into the throne room to be judged by the queen.
As I neared almost unconsciousness with boredom, they brought the final prisoner forth.
She was human.
A beauty at that.
Since discovering Faerie, I’d found little attraction in humans so it was rare that one could catch my eye. The girl was dressed rather vulgar in leather leg coverings, as a man would wear. Leather strips, pieced together, made a vest that molded to her torso in a strangely becoming way. Her dark hair was held back from her face in long braids. There was an appealing boldness to her beauty. I soon not
ed I was not the only one to think so.
“We just caught this one, Your Highness.” A fae guard threw the girl forward, and she glared at him. He ignored her, holding up a sword. “She came through the gates armed and we caught her stealing from our fruit trees.”
The crowd gasped at the effrontery. It was common law among fae and human: you stole nothing from the fae to take back to our world. Unless it was freely given.
Aine eyed the young woman. “Name?”
The girl lifted her chin in defiance. “Catha.”
A rumble of displeasure moved around the room. I heard Andraste hiss, along with a few other fae females.
The guard pushed Catha. “You will address the queen with the proper respect.”
“She is not my queen,” Catha said recklessly.
The hissing grew in sound, restless feet moving closer to the girl.
Aine lifted a hand to silence the crowd. Her golden eyes peered intently into Catha’s. “Why did you venture into Faerie to steal from us?”
Catha shrugged off the guard’s touch and faced the queen with apparently no fear. “My family is starving. I hunt but the prey is dwindling. I heard the food of the fae lasts longer than mortal food, and I had hoped the fruit would see us through winter.”
“There are no men in your family to hunt?”
Catha shook her head. “My father died three winters ago. I am responsible for my mother and four sisters now.”
“You are the eldest?”
“No. The youngest.”
Aine dragged her gaze up and down the girl. “And a beauty. Are your sisters beautiful like you?”
“More so. But they are too poor to interest men with more wealth than our own.”
The queen scowled at that. “Humans and their lack of fealty to women is tedious. In my world, young Catha, you would be a warrior for you have a warrior’s heart.” She lifted a graceful hand to point toward the girl’s heart. “I sense it.”
The girl lost some of her defiance and she bowed her head slightly in thanks.
Aine lifted her eyes to the room. “I have called you all here for a reason. Before I make my announcement, I grant one last token to a race that often consternates but always amuses.” Her golden eyes drifted back to Catha. “You shall return to your world unharmed, young Catha, and when you do, you will find yourself the keeper of riches beyond your imagining. Your family will never suffer from poverty again. Your sisters shall marry well and you, if you wish it, will be a queen.”
