Cost.
All magic has a cost.
I thought my heart had been broken before. The pain of Arthur’s death. The threat of Arran’s. But this was worse.Ihad done this.
My eyes traced his body again, checking the outline of every muscle. He was whole, but not. My mate stood before me, healed. But he did not know he was my mate.What if he did not want to be?
I reached his face. None of the devastation tearing apart my soul showed there. Only mild curiosity. Arran did not know what he’d lost, so he could not be hurt by it. I wanted to hurl something at him, to rage at the fact that I was suffering while hewas not. Even as another part of me was thankful, so thankful, that my mate was spared this pain.
My eyes burned, sharper. I was running out of time. The façade I’d managed was crumbling.
“My name is Veyka,” I said softly.
Arran’s chin dipped slightly, but no recognition lit his black eyes.
“Veyka.” He tried it out— the syllables that should have been familiar but were painfully foreign on his tongue.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
This was so much worse.
“Arran.” A prayer. A plea. To the Ancestors, who I’d vowed never to ask for anything again. To the gods the humans worshipped. To anyone, in any realm, who would listen to the desperate begging of a female in love.
His eyes widened slightly, like he noted the desperation and intensity of that plea. But he did not move.
“Oh, Arran,” I sobbed into the void as I disappeared.
I didn’t aim or plan. I moved on instinct, but even those failed me. I crashed into the stupid ornate chair where Elayne had sat days before. I cried out, a reaction to the pain I could not hold back. But physical pain was nothing.
Cyara would come soon. I vaguely heard her footsteps through the shared sitting room. But I could not wait for her or explain. Just drawing a breath was more painful that it had ever been. Even after the water gardens. Even after Arthur.
I threw myself into the plush bed, burrowing into the pile of pillows and thick quilts. I stuffed my face down into the soft mattress, until I could hardly breathe. Only then did I let myself cry and scream. I sobbed into the mattress and did not bother to pray that it would muffle the sounds of my agony.
40
ARRAN
“High King of Annwyn?” I shook my head, refusing to believe it.
I hadn’t decided who I was going to strangle first. That white-skinned faerie who had followed me all the way here, but would not tell me anything beyond her name and a few vague details about the Faeries of the Fen being more than a bedtime story. Or maybe the glowing, moon-haired elemental who looked at me like she fucking owned me.
My beast was clawing to get out. It had guided my journey here, through the lake lands to the rift in the foothills of the mountains. The rockslide was nothing to my bounding paws. How the faerie got through, I did not pause to see. Once I emerged on the other side, I could practically smell the misty waters of Eilean Gayl.
“Indeed,” my mother nodded sharply. It had been too long since I’d seen her. Decades since I’d been to my ancestral home. She looked exactly the same—dark hair, graceful bearing. But she was being utterly ridiculous.
I crossed my arms over my body. “No.”
“Yes,” she said simply.
As if any of this was fucking simple. My father sat in the chair beside the fire, his fingers tapping an irritating rhythm on the book in his lap, which he had no intention of opening. He just needed something to hold. He’d always been so damn fidgety.
Whereas my mother stared at me with unwavering stillness.
“How?” One word. A command. Never had I needed to use such a tone with the female who’d given birth to me. But the veneer of control that slipping into the battle commander’s form gave me was the only thing keeping my head from spinning right off my neck and onto the floor.
My mother glanced at the other chair before the fire.
I remained standing, arms over my chest, every muscle at attention. Every muscle aching from the unrelenting sprint to reach Eilean Gayl.
