Some of the bolder Dokkalfar asked for the chance to travel to other fae kingdoms as healers. We hardly cared to grant permission on where they desired to live. It was enough of a step for elven folk to leave the shores of Natthaven.
If they wished to find contentment among all the kingdoms, we would never deny them.
Peace was the intent when I vowed with my nightmare. Our goals had not changed, though so much more had.
Suspicions remained about elvish intentions, but I had hope that soon elven folk would simply be another part of the fae and alver kingdoms.
Kase led me through the crowd. Faces who’d come to matter more than I imagined watched each step.
Aleksi, Sander, and Von offered gentle smiles for me, but tried to get the king to misstep with a few low taunts under their breath. Kase flicked his fingers by his side, and in the next breath Von let out a cry of fright and Aleksi stumbled over the leg of the bench when a burst of shadowy weavers and their hairy legs crawled across their laps.
Mira and Livia snickered in the benches just ahead of them. Livia sat with her king and the sea folk. Tait on one end of the bench, Mira on the other, intentionally lifting her nose away from the king’s cousin.
After we’d returned from the battle from Ljosalfar, Bloodsinger reminded his cousin he was still the official escort whenever the fae princess needed to sail.
They’d slipped into tense indifference since.
A little girl with flower-lined braids waved from her family’s bench. Teodor and Annetta were healed from the elven poison, and had reunited with their three littles only a week before.
I flashed the littles a smile, reveling in the elven silver they still wore from the night near their longhouse.
Queen Malin sat amongst the Kryv and her fellow royals from the other kingdoms. The expansive households of every royal house took up nearly half one side of the gardens.
Malin wore a gown and even topped her head with her dark circlet for the occasion. She beamed at me, then offered her husband an encouraging smile, as though she could sense he would rather do this without all the crowds.
Seated in a small cluster in the edges was a pale woman with golden hair—the Ljosalfar queen, Gerard’s widow.
Valdis was not Arion’s mother, who’d gone to the gods at his birth, but when we first met, I didn’t know how much affection the woman had carried for the prince.
My senior in age, but not by much. Valdis was a young queen, overwhelmed by being handed a crown.
Only after we sent a missive declaring in blood that we did not seek her crown did Valdis emerge from her lands. Ljosalfar were elven. We wanted peace. We wanted her people to see her as their queen as much as they saw Gerard as their king.
It wasn’t long before we learned she hardly knew her husband and stepson, and was often left to solitude in a manor in the upper knolls on Grynstad, living a solitary life as a wealthy woman without a voice and a husband who only visited her once each month.
She did not even know battles had been fought on Natthaven.
Trusted Dokkalfar warriors were assigned to travel to Grynstad with the queen in the coming nights, a way to ensure any noble houses did not attempt to overrule her voice. To the stun of many, Raum offered to keep watch on Ljosalfar lands until the queen found her footing.
Already, the Kryv and queen had been caught in conversation in the courtyards. She was intrigued by his mesmer and seemed more comfortable around Raum than even me. In truth, I couldn’t figure if the man volunteered because he wanted to scope the wealth of Grynstad, or he found the queen interesting.
Either way, it was another move toward trust and alliances now that shadow elven and alvers would be friendly with the light elven.
For so long, I’d lived lonely, now I was surrounded by countless brutal, loving people who’d already proved they’d go to war should anyone dare try to bring me harm.
But through them all, I could not peel my eyes from the man standing beneath a vine covered arch. Totems made of bone and runes hung over Jonas’s head when he lifted his gaze, the devious smile on his face.
Like his father, he’d been tucked into a fine tunic with crossed blades stitched on the front, and he’d lined his eyes in a touch of kohl as a mark of warriors and strength in the kingdom. Jonas kept shifting in place. He had one palm clasped around his other wrist, but his fingers twitched like he could hardly stand not reaching out and snatching me away.
When I was two paces away, he did it anyway.
He didn’t look away from me when his father handed over my palm to his son, and sat beside the queen.
“Fire.” My nightmare’s eyes combed down my body. “Is all that for me?”
The heart glass blazed over my gown. “Always.”
He pressed a gentle kiss to my knuckles. There were no speakers here to lead the ceremony. This was meant to be intimate between a pair.
