My mind raced.No fear.I couldn’t give in to panic when my life was at stake like this. I could lie. They couldn’t.
They couldn’t.
“If I tell you what you want to know, will you let me live?” I asked.
“Not likely,” Sword Fae said. “But if you don’t start talking, I can make the process much more painful.” He squeezed my arm hard to make his point, and I cried out. My screams didn’t matter—we were in such an isolated wing of the castle that nobody would hear me if they weren’t looking for us.
“What?” The fae who wasn’t pinning me with a sword to my throat moved closer. He lifted up a lock of hair, uncovering my ear. “A human.” He pulled on my ear. I couldn’t move because of the sword at my neck, but it hurt. I tried not to scream again, but a groan escaped me. “Are you Bylur’swife?”
“Yes,” I breathed, hoping that giving them an answer would work in my favor.
The second fae let go of my ear and nodded at the sword. “Kill her fast and let’s go. If Bylur sent her, we’re—”
The wall with the door in it collapsed at the same time a massive bear stepped over the debris. Not a bear. He had a horn. A dyrakongur.Mydyrakongur.
Bylur roared and smacked the fae who had suggested killing me so hard that he flew across the corridor and hit the wall with a sickening crunch. At the same time, a flood of shadows rushed toward me, spiraling around me and the fae attacking me. One swirled around the sword, ripping it away from my neck and dropping it on the stone floor with an echoing clatter.
The fae who held me lost his grip, made a few gagging sounds, and then fell silent. I ran to Bylur before turning back to face my attacker. But in the place where I expected to see him, only a silent, frothing pile of shadows remained.
I took a shaky breath and threw myself against Bylur’s leg in a tight hug.
Bylur shifted his weight, pulling me toward the shadowed edge of the hall. “Let’s get you away from this mess,” he said slowly.
Not yet. I lifted my face away from his fur. “Wait! You need to heal Ivodar! Before it’s too late!”
Bylur shook his great fur-covered head. “He is fine, only unconscious. I already checked him with my shadows.”
“Oh, good.” I sank against his arm. My hand trembled, and I folded my arms across myself. “The fae who attacked me?”
“They will never attack anyone again,” Bylur said. He stopped and looked back at them. “Perhaps I should have kept them alive so they could tell me what possessed them to attack you.”
“Oh, well, I have a pretty good idea of that,” I muttered. “Though I do have some questions I would have liked to ask.”
“I regret not getting your answers,” he grumbled, “but I will not apologize for protecting you.”
Perhaps I should have been more distraught by the fact that my husband had just killed two fae to protect me, but I’d seen death when I lived on the streets. And these two deaths meant that I was alive. And I really liked being alive.
Chapter 24: Bylur
Itook Auria back to our room through shadows. I sat down—carefully—in the middle of the floor, and she snuggled against me in the fold of my arm. She told me about her attackers’ conversation and how she’d stumbled onto them.
She paused, yawning, when her story reached the sword at her throat. “I don’t know why I’m tired. It’s still morning.”
“It was a traumatic morning,” I said in the bear’s low tones. “You will feel better after a nap.”
She leaned her head against my arm and curled into me. “Maybe. But I still want to know what they tricked Ephaltes into buying. And why a queen thinks he needs it. And how that medallion threw Ivodar across the hall.”
I wanted to stroke her hair, but I could not when my paws were bigger than her head. Maybe tonight. If the ball ended with any evening left. At least I could answer one of her questions. “The medallion is probably an artifact. Powerful fae—royalty and nobility—can pour their magic into objects, allowing their magic to be used by other people. Some artifacts are centuries old, created with a fae’s final breaths of life for their children. Others are tools made when a fae wants someoneelse to do something for them, often shared as part of a bargain to get a job done.”
Her hand fluttered to her chest. “Is the key you gave me an artifact like that?”
“It could be considered an artifact because it contains my magic, but it is not the same.”
She rolled over and faced me, her green eyes bright with her addictive curiosity. “How is it different?”
I met her sincere eyes and offered her the truth. “I put some of my deepest magic in it, enough that you could reach through it and touch my soul. As such, it will only work for you because I gave it to you willingly and with no restraint, and you accepted it with the same openness with which I gifted it. It is a conduit directly to my magic.”
Her eyes widened. “Can you touch my soul with it?”
