Baach sighed, his shoulders slumping. “I’m working on it, okay? I just—I don’t want to lose what we have now.”
“Ilta’s crazy about you, Baach. You’re not going to lose your friendship with her just because you’re together.” Eryx rolled his eyes. “I wish Delia was half as crazy about me as Ilta is about you.
“She is.” I assured him, smiling slightly, “She’s just in denial.”
Eryx shook his head, “Enough about us. You and Asteria need to figure this out. People are talking.”
That was a significant statement coming from my spymaster.
“Talking about what?” I sat up straighter, leaning toward him with my arms resting on my knees.
“Your people want to meet her. They’ve heard rumors that the girl you brought back is your mate. But they’ve seen too little of her. They want to know about her. Have the chance to see their future queen.” Eryx explained, raising a brow at me as I winced.
“It’s too early for that,” I insisted, shaking my head. I didn’t want to overwhelm Asteria with this right now. Not when she was about to meet her mother. Not when she hadn’t fully accepted the bond.
“No, it’s not,” Baach added, rolling his eyes. “We should be organizing an introduction of Asteria to her future subjects. Let me plan it. I’ll have them come to the throne room, and you can introduce her and let them see her. We’ll have a ball where she can mingle with the people, and they can see what we all see, that she’s the queen we need.”
“Baach’s right.” Eryx nodded. “We need to be getting ahead of this.”
I winced again, and Eryx looked at me critically. I ran my fingers around the tattoos on my forearms, tracing the runes glowing silver against my pale skin.
“Calix,” Eryx said, ducking his head to meet my eyes. “Please tell me you’ve told Asteria.”
I shut my eyes, but Baach’s laughter made me open them back up to glare at him. Eryx’s mouth was hanging open in shock.
“You haven’t told her about the prophecy?” Baach laughed, throwing his head back. I rolled my eyes, shushing him when his volume got too high.
The pool area was loud, and I was fairly confident our voices weren’t carrying over to the girls with so many conversations happening right now, but I didn’t want to risk it.
“Calix—” Eryx started, his voice slipping into that tone he used when he was working.
“I will tell her. I promise you that,” I insisted, meeting his eyes as he ran a hand through his short hair. “But she’s overwhelmed enough right now. Let her get through meeting her family. We’ll have plenty of time when we go on our diplomatic trip up North to talk. I’ll bring it up then.”
I eyed Asteria across the pool as she laughed, the sparkle in her eyes, her cheeks flushed with health… so much more life in her than when she first came here.
She deserved so much better than the darkened past she had, but I would assure her future would be so light, it would be sung about for millennia.
* * *
“Calix!”Eryx rushed into my solar, looking harried with his hair a mess, the way it always was after he’d been flying in his hawk form.
Ilta blinked at him in shock from where she’d been working at her desk across the office. I stood up quickly. “What’s wrong?”
“There’s…” He trailed off, swallowing. “There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of humans making their way to our border from Day Kingdom.”
“What?” I demanded, walking towards where he lingered in the doorway. He was in his armor, and I knew he’d been flying back from scoping out the fortress on the Etheralta Mountains before we were due to leave today to meet Aurelia there.
“They were escorted by Bellin, Arien’s second. Apparently, they were rescued from Aelius’s plots, and Arien sent them here for refuge,” Eryx explained, a complicated look in his eyes that I understood well.
It was wonderful that more humans were being rescued and that Arien was helping in such an endeavor. But if he’d had to rescue them…
What the fuck were Aelius and Cyrus doing? Cyrus couldn’t possibly be using them all for his blood magic, could he? We knew he was using some humans in Dusk Kingdom for that purpose, but if potentially hundreds were heading there from Day…
Then, this was beyond bad.
The iron weapons the blood magic could help forge would be disastrous to us. We hadn’t had to deal with iron as long as I’d been alive, only the accounts I’d read from kings long past and the stories passed down like fables told us really anything about how iron could be used on Fae. Since it had been made forbidden across the realms, all knowledge of it had almost entirely faded out of existence.
And yet, I knew Asteria’s human father had somehow come upon an iron knife. One he’d passed on to her. It was now kept locked up, deep beneath the palace where no one but me could reach it. Asteria had gladly handed it off, not literally—she kept her hand wrapped in a shirt to avoid contact, and I made sure it was somewhere no one would stumble upon it.
