Page 34
“It will be such a thrill, beloved. It has been so long since we were able to hold a true ball. Will you dress in your house colors?” My betrothed wound her pinky from my grip and stealthily began stroking the inside of my thigh. The tip of my ear twitched in annoyance, straining to pay attention to the response Daróg gave, but my attention was pulled away.
“I will most likely be commissioned to arrange the security for the event, my lady. I will wear the livery of your brother’s soldiers.” The urge to slam her head into the stone wall behind me and keep slamming until it split like a waterlogged melon crept through my muscles and pulled against the bridle of my restraint.
“You’re lucky, great Ard Rí. That one gave me trouble as well. I had a little premonition that she’d be vexsome here in the palace and bought some insurance.” Rictus leaned in when he said this, easier for me to hear him over the whine of the Fae beside me.
“I’ll be sure to ask him to give you leave to abandon your post,” she purred, as if this was the only possible obstacle to her question. “I would know what you wear so that I might have my dressmaker match it.”
“Insurance?” Daróg’s interest was piqued, as was my own. If she was alive as Silver speculated, then this could be an opportunity to find her. Was I mad enough to chase it though, was the question. And if I was, what would I do when Rictus’ schemes once again evaporated?
“I carved a bone breaker on her, carved it deep. Where the hellcat couldn’t slice it off and the bitch couldn’t find it. Carved it so deep you’d have to peel her open like an orange to get to it. I could arrange your access to it.” Rictus hooked his claw into the strings of a well-worked and embroidered leather pocket that hung at his belt.
“Sneaky, Rictus. You sell my poor Raven an unbroken and untried daoire with a bone breaker curse on her, hidden from his view, tell him nothing of this, and only mention it when that daoire has disappeared? Why, a Fae could almost suspect you had something to do with the disappearance.” The crossfire of conversation sizzled between my eyes in cold fury. I could neither show too much interest in Daróg and Rictus’ conversation nor just agree to whatever the lamprey at my shoulder was saying. “You will wrap the leash of this curse around a charm and leave it with my Lady Sapphire Speaker before you leave this evening. If, and I do stress that if, it is successful, I will consider paying you for it. If it is not, your skin will be harvested for a new saddle.”
Rictus and Daróg fell away from my attention as the seeking hand grew bold and nearly crested the top of my thigh to the slumbering cock it found there, uninterested in its earnest ministrations.
I would deal with Rictus before the night was through. His ship would be easy to access, and he would not leave before the morning anyway.
“I assure you, my lady, that I have neither considered my attire for the ball nor would I spend more than a moment on it if I had been given the time to do so.” I turned jagged, green eyes on her, wishing I could drive my dagger through her throat and be done with this charade. “I regret to say that your intended is neither a Fae of the galas nor a very fine dancer as I am sure you are accustomed. You will have to indulge for the two of us.”
She laughed, a practiced and controlled sound that had no mirth in it at all. “My dear sweet love, I will have to be the one who decides our social calendar, our gala garb, and reteach you to dance?” Her fake laugh petered off into a hollow grin. “Suffer me this night, my Raven. I know you do not wish to dance and make merry like the old days. Do this for me. And I will do something for you when it is time to make you happy.”
My gaze slid away from the Ard Rí as he arranged the ghoulish details of the Grand Market Ball which would be a mix of hedonistic orgy, flesh market, and slaughterhouse. I could do nothing to stop it from happening. That was a battle I would blunt my blade upon and still come away the loser.
So I turned my attention to a battle I could potentially win. “Suddenly so amenable, my lady?”
“Is this not the way of our people?” She tilted her head, drawing me into her rich blue eyes. “Arrangements like ours are as old as the Fae themselves. We two could spend the rest of eternity fighting against each other, chip away layer after layer until there is nothing left of either of us. Or we could find happiness in the cracks between us. And perhaps, somewhere down the line, more could grow. I am a patient Fae. You are as well. We already have something in common.”
I watched her face, hunting for any sign of deception, but there was nothing there but sincerity. “I will never love you, you know this, my Lady Oaken Rose. Right?”
A twist of her lips and a shift of her palm on my thigh. “Perhaps. There are more nights like last between now and never.”
“You deserve someone who will love you, my lady. Wholly. You deserve your anam cara.” I did not like her as a partner, but that did not mean I wished her eternal ill. Not truly.
“And perhaps one day I will find them. And you and I will agree that separate manors are ideal. We will meet for court appearances. We will perhaps meet for ceremony and to bless our lands but at the end you will kiss my forehead and wish me a safe journey back to my manor. You will return to yours, and I to mine. And when you find your own anam cara I will smile upon her and call her sister.” There was something in the way she tacked on that last part. As if she could see right through me to the aching shreds left within. She couldn’t possibly know though, and even if she had known, she was not cruel enough to twist the knife on me. She was a malignant manipulator like the rest of the court, but in this I did not think her capable of that magnitude of cruelty.
“A beautiful dream, my lady,” I murmured, trying to hide the anguish behind the sentiment.
“A stable one. One that does not draw war down around our heads again. A dream that is as common as the daffodils painting the forest floors of Scéal an Móinéar.”
She wasn’t wrong. Though the Tale of Meadows manor lands were better known for their meadowsweet and foxglove adorning their crests, the daffodils were the true gem of their rich, green, rolling hills. And marriages like the one she spoke of were the norm among the peers of the realm.
“Perhaps, my lady.” I gave her a watery smile and patted her hand. “Give me time is all I ask. Your brother did you a great disservice and has shackled you to a Fae who’s not your match in social graces. I will be . . . slow to accommodate.”
“There was a time when finding you anywhere but at the heart of the party was more shocking than your antics.”
I tilted my head and sipped my nearly forgotten wine. “That, like many things my lady, was a very long time ago. A different Fae.”
“Gloomy Raven,” she chided. “I will be patient. For now. But I will endeavor to brighten you again.”
I excused myself from the party before the two Far Darrig could leave and found my way up the inner stairs lining the bailey walls before snapping four beads of stable magic. Power, cold and lifeless, rushed through me. It was nothing like reaching out and taking hold of the true magic within me. This was the sanitized and stripped taste of nothingness, whereas my own magic tasted of loamy forests and dawn, dew-kissed evergreen spikes. My own magic could not be counted on for something so precise though.
I pushed the magic through me to the center of my essence and bid my body to change. An act that, before last night, would have been forbidden to me, the beheaded falcon tattooed into my skin a magically enforced lock preventing me from touching the gifts my crown as the Ard Tiarna of Árus Láigh afforded me.
Once, a great while ago, before the fall of the House of Magic, transforming into the great falcon of Árus Láigh would have been as easy as breathing. Just a simple exhale and nothing more. Now, with magic unbridled and a slave to its own whims, even with the stable magic to stand as a firmament beneath me, it was laborious. I felt every twist, every snap and contortion that would have taken a simple blink to perform. It was agony.
But my beams of light could only carry me so far, and the Far Darrig were smart enough to dock their ships high above the palace, preferring to use ropes that were drawn up by their shipmates, to get down.
I soared through the crisp night sky on wings that had nearly forgotten the kiss of freedom afforded to them, abandoning the trappings of the sullen courtier shackled to the prison of his own making. I would have nothing but my skin when I made it to the floating ships decks, just my skin and hundreds of years of rage forged into skill.
