In the Kingdom of Storms and Sylvanwild alike, nothing was more powerful than a god.
CHAPTER TWELVE
In her quarters,Rhiannon reclined in a high-backed wicker armchair, wrapped in a long gray fox-fur robe and nothing else. Her room was dressed in the earthen colors I’d come to associate with this place: light-green drapes hung over her four-poster bed, spread with a bark-colored animal skin; burnt-orange curtains over doorways to other rooms; a wall tapestry of forest and sky. Her bare feet were hardly visible through the sumptuous brown fur of the bearskin covering the floor.
Purple-blossomed vines seemed to grow over every surface, draping over the bed and all four walls and the chair she sat in. This space had the expansiveness of what I imagined were royal chambers—it even smelled richer here, as though the air were regularly sprayed with a floral mist.
It would be lulling if I weren’t in the presence of a queen.
The biggest difference between her room and the one I’d slept in was the presence of the outdoors. Rhiannon had a wide balcony, and since we were so high up in the citadel’s spire I imagined she could see over the canopy to whatever lay beyond.
I wanted desperately to look out over that balcony. Wanted it like I’d always itched to climb my kingdom’s wall at night.
Rhiannon’s burgundy hair hung in a fat braid over one shoulder, her slender fingers toying with the end of it as she observed me. The swell of one of her large breasts, nearly visible beneath the robe, drew my eyes. When she noticed, a smile touched her lips.
She gestured. The young woman at her side, black-haired and slender, dropped to her knees before her. The queen uncovered her own breast—pert, the nipple pink and small—and at her nod, the woman leaned in, set her fingers delicately on the arm of Rhiannon’s chair, and began to lave her tongue over Rhiannon’s nipple. She licked, sucked, swirled, all with her eyes pressed tight shut.
Rhiannon sighed, eyes on me.
“The spiritstag spoke to you,” she said. “A human girl.” One of her eyebrows rose, and her gaze shifted to Dorian. Something unspoken passed between them.
Since we’d entered, he had been near silent, practically monosyllabic, his eyes unfocused, shoulders tense, and I didn’t know what that meant. Clearly he hadn’t wanted me here. But he hadn’t received the spiritstag’s decision—I had.
Perhaps Rhiannon would tell me what Dorian would not. “What are these trials?”
Surprise flitted across her gaze. “Dorian has not told you?”
“He told me we’re dead. He told me they’re tests of strength.”
Beside me, Dorian shifted but did not speak.
Rhiannon’s lips twitched. Her fingers smoothed up and down her braid as the young woman at her breast went on licking and sucking. “What do you know of Feyreign, child?”
I forced my eyes away from Rhiannon’s chest and onto her own. “It’s the realm we stand in. The one I was brought to after my kingdom was attacked, my people were killed, my mother’s house was destroyed with her in it.”
Her blue eyes gleamed with something like approval or amusement. Not sorrow, not regret. “So you face truth. And do you know which court you’ve been kidnapped to?”
Not a modicum of guilt. No shame.
Maybe she hid it well. More likely, she didn’t give a fuck. Perhaps she was even pleased.
I pushed down the rising anger. “Sylvanwild,” I said without feeling. I recognized her tone, the look in her eyes—she saw me as a child, a simple creature. What she perhaps could not have expected was that I’d been treated this way by humans, too, all my life.
Around absolute power, I felt most comfortable being underestimated; it was safer. At least until I knew where I stood.
“Well done.” Rhiannon sat forward, and her fingers touched the bramble diadem set upon her head. The licking abruptly stopped; Rhiannon’s breast glistened, the nipple peaked and dark pink. “Perhaps, then, you’ve deduced who I am.”
“The queen.”
She gave that impish half-smile I had begun to realize was common to her. “I lead of this court, yes. But each court has a monarch, she who has shown the traits most valued by her people.”
She. Her.
No mention of a king.
What traits did she speak of—and how could a woman possibly be the one in greatest possession of them? In my kingdom a man had always sat the throne, and a queen wasn’t even a feather-on-the-wind possibility.
“You’re surprised,” Rhiannon said. “I seem to you less capable, perhaps. Less powerful than the males you’ve seen around me.”
