She smiled at Cara. “I raised such a forgiving son, did I not?”
“Yes, your majesty.” Cara’s voice rasped just slightly.
“Tell me why you deserve his forgiveness. Why should I not have you cast into prison for trying to harm him?”
Cara’s chin rose. She didn’t look to me to save her, though we could all feel the trap rising around us. The queen had brought us here for a reason.
Cara said nothing. The silence stretched one beat, two…I was about to respond for her when she spoke, sudden and sharp. “I don’t deserve his forgiveness.”
The queen smiled slightly, her brows arching, the way she did when someone surprised her.
“I made my choice. I protected my family.” Cara’s words were each short and blunt as a dropped plate. “Fieran understands that some day, that same loyalty will be his. But it takes time to grow from the strange beginning of our love.”
I’d claimed once I did not expect her loyalty yet, but that some day she would give me that same fierce loyalty alongside her love. Apparently, the words had clung to her.
Her fingers brushed the backs of mine. Her gaze was still on the queen, so it was strange how her fingers found mine so surely. I caught her hand in mine, the two of us facing the queen together.
“I chose her knowing who she is,” I said. “I knew what choice she would make when backed into a corner. It’s my responsibility as Bismyth’s leader to make sure no one ever backs her into a corner again. It’s my responsibility, as her husband, that she never has any reason to feel she cannot trust me.”
Cara’s fingers tensed against mine, but I didn’t dare look at her to see if she had reacted to those words. I was saying what the queen needed to hear.
“It was entirely my failure.” Sometimes when I heard the earnestness in my own voice, I believed myself in that moment. Was it all my fault?
When I told her that I did not expect her loyalty, had I been lying to us both?
Lying to myself was the one deceit in which I did not indulge.
“How devoted.” The queen’s words were laden with mockery. She looked at our joined hands, then she turned back toward the window, which meant we had stopped being pleasing.
“You’ve been busy,” she said. Conversational. Almost fond. “You must have truly bewitched my son, Cara, because here was the blade barely missing his back, and then he ran to steal for you.”
“She’s my wife.” That was enough.
Cara’s cold fingers tightened on mine. Protective or needy, or both. She didn’t realize she was doing it, and she certainly didn’t realize what it did to me.
“And yet, you hope she’s far more than your wife, or you wouldn’t do all of this,” the queen reminded me gently.
“I would.”
The queen was building toward something; that earlier look of dismissal as if we were boring her had been a lie.
She knew I was using Cara to rally the mortals to our side. Shifters alone could not fight all the Fae, high and low, and the Nightwalkers. It was perhaps to our advantage that Lightbringer had not yet flown, in a way; it trapped us in the Trials but made it appear as if we were weak. When we were trapped before the queen, that perception might be a blessing.
She was going to release us from the Trials and send us on a mission. In the barracks, now that the Trials were over, we were safe from both monsters and the mortal gaze.
If we had to protect Cara because she did not shift, Bismyth would be in danger. Worse, the mortals would be waiting to see their hero fly.
“Take your prize with you.” Her voice carried the warmth of someone giving a gift they’ve been waiting to give. “And take your clan as well. Bismyth is dismissed from the Trials.”
“Thank you, Mother. How generous of you.”
“You’ve given us quite enough spectacle. I think we’ve all seen what we needed to see. Dragon bonds.” A smile ghosted over her lips. “Mortal hopes.”
She had the look of a woman with centuries behind her and no concerns about the centuries to come. “I have found that patience is its own kind of power. Unlike mortals, I have a great deal of it.”
She turned, and now, we were truly dismissed. “Take your miracle and go.”
The corridor was quiet.
