War of thrones, p.2
War of Thrones, page 2
part #5 of Half-Blood Huntress Chronicles Series
“He speaks from the friendship you once shared, nothing more.”
With Tryst, it was never ‘nothing more’. The formerly exiled power broker always had an angle, even when you were the one sharing his bed. That I knew from personal experience.
I smiled at Xtol gently, as though chiding a toddler. “Are we no longer friends, then? Such a declaration might be seen as a call to war.”
“See it as you will, Princess. It was my duty to deliver the message and leave you unharmed, nothing more.” Her eyes glinted evilly, as though the ‘something more’ she was thinking included tearing my heart out of my chest.
I held my ground, staring at her evenly until she glanced away. “It pains me to lose such a valuable friend, and my people wish the Unseelie Fae no harm.”
“You may have meant no harm, but it is what you have brought to us, by placing a murderous tyrant on the Unseelie throne. I will see you on the battlefield, Princess.”
The hunters unsheathed their blades and banged them against their leathery bracers in a dull rhythm, as my pack closed in behind me.
I raised my hand for them to stop, and called a wind, focusing it to a laser point that separated the water behind the hunters, opening the way to the portal that had been hidden by the water.
The Ufasach Bas were unable to cross large bodies of water, and if they hadn’t just threatened me with war, my gesture would have been one of friendship and trust. Now, they stared at the opening and the portal with suspicion.
"I have never given you a reason to mistrust me, Xtol. All my actions have been in good faith and under Fae law. Go in peace, though our next meeting may be on the battlefield."
Xtol nodded and started to turn away, glancing back as though there was something else she wanted to say. Instead, she pursed her thin lips around the tusks jutting from her mouth. She turned her back on us, a sign of either trust or disregard, depending on how she felt about me.
I assumed the second, but I held the water at bay until the Ufasach Bas had disappeared through the portal, then sent the water crashing down on it, crushing the stone doorway I hadn’t realized was there.
For an eternity after I watched the water, moonlight reflecting peacefully off it, waiting for something, an enemy, a sign of things to come, but nothing manifested. The ocean had reclaimed its power and calmly lapped the shore as if it hadn't just delivered dire news and the next threat against my family and me.
Two
"Why are you talking to me like I should've prevented the Fae from coming? I know you don't have active magic, but by now you should know what a herculean task it would be to guard against any and every eventuality possible in the magical world." I was almost shouting at Gray as the pack gathered beneath the apartments in the one place I knew was safeguarded against enemies.
Penelope stepped up to my back. "Especially since guarding against the Fae would just as likely keep Morgan and me, and any shifters like us, from being part of the pack too. Unless that's what you want."
“Maybe that’s the way it should be,” Noah suggested. I’d seen his face after the Ufasach Bas had disappeared. He was new to the pack, any pack for that matter. He’d never seen any Fae beyond Pippi, my brownie (who hid from everyone but my core group anyway) and the underground kids who came around mooching for food and pool time on occasion.
I felt Pen stiffen. “Maybe you should remember you haven’t been part of the pack long enough to open your mouth, wolf.”
“Enough!” I raised my voice loud enough to be heard all the way to the back of the cavern even if the audience didn’t all have preternatural hearing. “We are not guarding against our shifter packmates, of which your queen is one, Noah, since you’ve forgotten your place.” I lowered my volume to a more manageable decibel level. “And we are not in danger here. For goddess’ sake, no one was attacked tonight, and if they had been, we would’ve dealt with it. what the hell is the problem?”
“Can they find us anywhere we go?” Rachelle tucked herself into my side for comfort, resting her head on my shoulder. She was the only member of the pack short enough to make me feel tall, but she was anything but weak. I knew she’d come to me not just to feel better, but to remind the pack that I was their protector.
“The portal was probably placed there after we escaped them by crossing the bay before,” I reminded her and everyone within hearing. “I’m sorry there’s no diving rod to suss out inactive portals. When they’re not there, they’re just not there.”
There were murmurs from the pack, small arguments breaking out in pockets as they came to terms with the idea that the Fae could appear almost anywhere, literally out of thin air.
I didn’t bother to tell them that we had such a doorway in our bedroom, courtesy of a full-length mirror that my mother had left to me when she died. Gray, Niall, and only our top advisors were aware of my travels to and from Fairy using that doorway. I’d taken the time to ensure it was guarded against anyone coming through to us from elsewhere, and I’d already talked to Grayson about increasing the wards when we’d calmed the pack.
Gray had been silent since I shouted him down, his face unreadable as he sat on the alpha throne.
“Your queen has been threatened, and the throne she stands to inherit. When you are all done pissing yourselves in fear over a few dark Fae, perhaps we can move on to more important points of business?” He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t have to.
The room silenced at his first uttered syllable, and by the end of the first sentence, everyone but the members of our guard was seated and awaiting instruction.
“Is that an alpha trick, or just you?” I glared balefully at him.
He returned my look with a grim smile. “When you finally accept the mantle of your power in its entirety, you will know.”
I stifled the urge to stick out my tongue. I’d avoided the joining, a rite that granted me the last bit of power only a queen could hold, until I knew what the Fae-cat inside me meant to all my other parts.
He patted the throne next to him and Rachelle moved away so I could sit. The night had drained what little energy I had, and Gray’s invitation allowed me to sit without looking weak or giving away any ground.
I glanced over my shoulder at three dozen pairs of eyes looking back at me, then dropped to my seat, barely registering the sudden dizziness that overtook me before the room tipped, spun slowly, and turned black.
“Hey there, Mo,” Gray’s voice was soft, his breath warm on my ear. “Take it slow, you don’t have to sit up until you feel ready.”
I groaned and squinted at him. “Just let me die. With me out of the way, the Fae will forget the pack even exists.”
“You’re just learning to cope with your new power. I can’t even imagine what it must be like in your head right now.”
“Crowded.”
He laughed and kissed my forehead. “I believe you.”
As if I’d summoned her with my comment, Caorach chirruped in my head. You left and I was all alone. I did not like that at all.
Sorry, demon-blade. I don’t much like how I’m feeling either. I rubbed my temples and sat up against the broad back of the queen’s throne. “Well, that sucked. How long was I out?”
“Just long enough for me to worry,” Gray smiled wanly at me. “I’m sorry you have so much to work through with this new power.”
I pushed him back and forced myself into a sitting position. “I’m okay. I’m not even dizzy, I guess I just overdid it using my Fae magic tonight. I’ll have to figure out how to balance my power.”
Rachelle looked at me with narrowed eyes, but Penelope pushed her and Gray aside to envelope me in a tight mesh and leather squeeze. "Goddamnit, Mo, why do you complicate everything you do?"
I spat out platinum hair from her long ponytail and laughed. “When have I ever not complicated things, Pen?” She gave me another squeeze and let go.
There was no lore about powers like mine being joined, and each sect had gone to great lengths to segregate themselves from the others so that someone like me would never exist.
Yet, here I was, a fae-cat pacing inside me, rubbing against my Fae and human powers as though they were all jostling for superiority inside me, whether I willed it or not.
“Okay, back off everyone. I need to think.” I waved Grayson and Pen off and took my seat, looking out over the pack. “Where do we find the answer to the message from Tryst, without giving him the satisfaction of asking him, since obviously he wants us to come begging him for answers.”
Gray scoffed. “I guess some things never change.”
“Yeah, he’s still a shit, but now he’s a really powerful shit with a whole army at his back, and I’ll be hobbled by courtly niceties, which I doubt very much he’ll bother to follow.” I stood and paced, watched by the members of the pack who had been permitted to stay when I fainted. “Who can we go to who won’t make us jump through hoops or give up our souls to do it?”
Niall raised his hand with a wry look on his face. “I can only think of one person he trusts explicitly, either because of who she is, or because of her trauma.”
“The lady Geallta,” I nodded. “I don’t like going to her, it feels like I’m using her to get to her brother. That’s his game, not mine.”
He shrugged and shook his head. “There’s no harm in asking, Mo. Geallta’s a member of this family, in her mind. She wants to help us and keep you safe. She’s always talking about the great war in her head and how she wants to prevent it, and you figure into that pretty damned prominently.”
I'd heard her ramble on about the war in her head too. The trauma to her mind at being trapped in the darkness. Her magic slowly draining from her, killing her by minute fractions, had created a warped reality of violence in her imagination that kept her perpetually terrified. It was only recently, when Tryst left and she came to stay with us, that I'd begun to see improvement in her. I wasn't happy about the idea of threatening her new peace.
“All right. I don’t like the feeling that we’re pitting her against her brother, but he left her here, and I don’t think he’s given us much choice. Gray, send the pack back to their business, I guess. Geallta will need as small an audience as possible.”
The guard dispersed to their usual duties, half of the dozen shifters who had stayed to start their rounds outside, the rest to eat and wait the shift change. Tryst’s threat couldn’t have come at a worse time. The human intervention in pack business had gotten bad enough that we were forced to expend pack resources guarding the building as Gray and I negotiated with other alpha’s and the Fae for a new home.
Worse, many of the pack had jobs and families they didn’t want to uproot, which meant we either got them on board, or risked them becoming violent as they tried to protect the lives they’d built.
The corridors were uncommonly quiet as we stepped off the elevator just outside my old apartment. Geallta, Pippi, and occasionally the underground kids stayed there since I’d moved in with Grayson, and soon we’d need Fae magic to make the inside of the building larger than the outside, with most of the pack moving on site for their own security.
The apartment door glowed softly with the wards I’d placed to prevent the Fae within from accidentally attracting unwanted attention from the new king of the Dark Court or my father.
I knocked, even though as the queen of the pack and the Princess of the Light Court I could go wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted, within both worlds. I’d been raised among humans, and privacy was one of the things I missed most about the human world.
Pippi threw open the door and hugged me, but unlike Pen, it was her usual greeting, and I suffered through it with my usual grumbling about handsy Fae, which made her giggle.
“You always say that.”
“You’d wonder what was wrong if I didn’t, Pip. What’s happening in the den of iniquity tonight?”
Pippi giggled again, hiding her thin-lipped mouth behind a, long-fingered hand. Pippi is a brownie, so named for their walnut-colored skin, brown and wrinkled and soft like a withering apple. But despite her grandmotherly appearance, Pippi was young, for a Fae, and a perfectly attractive young brownie, if you knew what you were looking at.
Her roommate, on the other hand, was every bit high Fae, from her tall, willowy figure, to her pale skin and her long, silver locks. In another time, I might have been jealous of Geallta’s purely Seelie Sidhe beauty.
Instead, my shorter height, the natural violet color of my hair, my Curves, all reminded people that I was more than just another fairy princess. Only my eyes, almost too large and almond shaped, were my father’s. My eyes that turned silver like his when I called a storm were all High Court, and so was my magic.
Geallta was tucked into Niall’s arms at the moment, and I waited for him to comfort her before asking my questions. It was hard to stifle my smile at the fiercely protective look he shot me, but Gray seemed oblivious to his best friend’s change in mood, and if Niall wasn’t ready to talk about his feelings for our timorous Fae friend, I wasn’t going to push.
Finally, she pushed away from him with a sigh and turned to Gray and I. "Please sit, this is your home after all. You should not be standing in the doorway like you're selling something."
I finally did smile, hearing her attempt contractions as she worked to fit in among the shifters and humans who now made up her world. “You’ve been hanging out with the Fae kids haven’t you?’
She nodded. “They come here and teach me new words, some of them I am not permitted to say in front of you.”
Gray scoffed and Niall groaned, smacking his hand to his forehead. “They’re teaching you to swear?”
Geallta’s face brightened. “They taught me the worst of human Curses, but it’s a secret.”
I cleared my throat, making a mental note to smack some teenaged foreheads together when I saw the kids next. “They taught you to say, fuck?”
“Oh no, that wasn’t it.”
“Shit?” Gray offered, his hidden grin coming out in his voice.
“No. I have heard you say that countless times.”
I shook my head. “We have work to do, and this is not a distraction we need right now. What Curse did they teach you?”
“I cannot say, my Lady.”
Gray shrugged and sat on the big leather sofa with Akane, the littlest member of our family in his lap. The Fae fox Curled up with her red bushy tail over her nose and promptly fell asleep. She wasn’t quite a baby anymore, yet not quite full grown, and Curled up like a cinnamon roll at his hip. We’d nicknamed her ‘Littlebit’ and it looked like she was never going to outgrow it.
I sat with Gray and ran my fingers over her soft, musky coat. “Geallta, what did Tryst tell you about a prophecy that he would kill my father?”
She twisted her slender fingers together, knotting and unknotting them nervously. “I know of no prophecy to kill your father, Princess. But before I went into the pit, when I was still a member of the court, I had a prophetic dream that my brother would kill the king of the Light Court, wielding the weapon of darkness.”
“But that would have made no sense, back then.”
“No, it did not. But Tryst was exiled for his love, and I was sentenced to the pit for…for I know not what.”
“When my grandfather was king.”
She nodded, her face crumpling like she was about to cry. “I thought the danger was past, Princess. I never would have thought my brother capable of such treachery to the only woman he truly cares for.”
My stomach clenched and I took a measured breath to prevent the wave of nausea from overtaking me. “A, we’re friends, Geallta, you need not remind me of my title. B, Tryst does not love me, or anyone other than you.”
The threatening tears finally spilled over her sooty lashes. “As much as he is capable of, he does love you, Morgan. He is broken, and so full of hate, I don’t know why he bothered to warn you.”
“Because he wants me to stop him.”
Gray sighed and pulled me into his side. “No. He wants you to kill him.”
Great, suicide by Morgan. Am I really such a monster that he’d do that? I didn’t expect an answer to my thoughts, but Caorach hummed in my mind, her song comforting me.
Perhaps he knows that you can end his suffering, one way or another. But the girl is right. I know his thoughts as I know yours, from our millennia together. He is using the prophecy to force your hand, because he needs to face you and is too cowardly to simply challenge you.
Now that was Tryst, ever looking for an angle, never facing anything, or anyone, head on. It was why he and I could never have been together, even if he’d managed to forgive the Fae for turning their backs on him. But for him, I was a means to an end, and that apparently would never change.
“Whatever his reason for telling us of the prophecy now, before he can complete it, it’s up to us to stop him.”
Geallta stood silent and unsure, reminding me of the almost skeletal slip of a girl I’d first seen when I snuck down into the oubliette to find the lost magic of Fairy. She’d come a long way since the pack helped Tryst and I free her, yet it all slipped away as she waited for us to pass judgment on her for her brother’s betrayal.
“You’re not in trouble, Gee,” Niall was the first to step up and reassure her. “You’re one of us, now.”
Pippi wrapped her long arms around her and Niall enfolded them both in his, shifting just his upper body to accommodate the group hug. It was a ridiculous picture that normally would’ve made me laugh aloud, but my heart hurt for my wounded friend, forced to choose sides between the only family she’d known for centuries, and the fledgling one she’d built for herself.
It was a familiar pang, and the choice was not so far behind me that I couldn’t remember how much it had ached, and sometimes still did.
“Niall’s right, Sweetie. You’re family, and we love you whether you stay or if you ask to go to the Dark Court to be with your brother. You don’t owe us anything.” I reminded them all.
