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This bastard would shit himself if he realized he had the Saeris Fane in his grasp.
“Something? Or someone?” “A man,” I whispered. But Everlayne shook her head. “A male. He came because the sword called to him…” She
“Ahh. Saeris. A pretty name. A Fae name.
“Believe me. He needs it more than she does right now,” Renfis said darkly. Suddenly, the chain felt like a noose around my neck. What the hell was it? And why had the male who had carried me away from Madra’s palace put it on me?
My people can be ruthless and cruel at times. There are those of us who endeavor to be different, but… occasionally there’s simply no other option. We’ve been waiting to retrieve that sword you drew for a very long time. But to have found you along with it…” She shook her head. “You have no idea how important you are, Saeris. I’m afraid my father isn’t liable to give you up any time soon. And he wants to see you in an hour, so unfortunately, the bath isn’t up for debate.”
“It’s inhuman behavior. But we aren’t human, Saeris. We’re Fae. We don’t behave like you. Don’t think like you. We don’t operate by the same moral guidelines that some of your kind do, either. The faster you remember that, the easier this will be,”
“He is Belikon De Barra,” Everlayne said evenly. “King of the Yvelian Fae.”
“I wear pants. Shirts. Things I can move easily in. So I can run, and climb, and—” Kill people. “You’re not wearing a shirt and pants to meet the king, Saeris. He’ll see it as a slight. If you’re not well turned out, he’ll have you thrown into the cells.”
told my guards that you were the one who reopened the portal. It seems highly unlikely that a human woke the quicksilver.” He grunted, displeased. “But after a thousand years of waiting, we can’t afford to dismiss this as heresy without checking first. Believe me when I say that we’re all praying such a holy position hasn’t fallen to such unholy blood.” He inhaled sharply. “But the fates are strange. And one way or another, I will have the portals restored.”
Dressed all in black, his shoulders were drawn up around his pointed ears. His chest rose and fell with the sawing of his breath. Tattoos writhed and shifted like smoke across every patch of visible skin, creeping up the back of his neck and swirling over the backs of his hands. It was Death.
The name Kingfisher echoed throughout the hall, spoken with a mix of reverence and fear. “He lives!” “He’s returned!”
“Careful, human. We Fae have an excellent sense of smell. You’d be amazed what we can scent floating on the air.”
“That your body is betraying you in other ways. That I can smell you, Little Osha, and I’m thinking about drinking the sweet nectar you’re making for me straight from the fucking cup.”
“There’s every way,” Fisher rumbled, his eyes darkening. “I’d know the smell of you anywhere. On anyone. I’d know it blind and in the dark. Across a fucking sea. I’d be able to scent you—”
“I’d order you to part your legs for me. I’d order you to suck and fuck me until you passed out from exhaustion. Is that what you want, Little Osha?”
“About my fingers slipping inside the wet folds of you. Working against your swollen clit, rubbing you until you’re panting and whimpering, begging for me to sink my cock into your—”
“That is Ammontraíeth,” Ren said, emerging from the shadow gate, leading his horse behind him. “The seat of the enemy.”
“I watched you for a while back there. You fight well,” he murmured.
“Power isn’t something I’ve ever thirsted after, Little Osha,” he said quietly. “And I am nothing like the king.”
His scent, and the way I knew that he’d entered a room before I saw him, and the melancholy tug at the root of my soul
but it wasn’t the shock of the pain that ripped the air from my lungs. It was Fisher’s mouth. His lips crashed down onto mine. For a brief moment, I didn’t react. I’d slipped into a daydream. This was a fantasy. It wasn’t… it wasn’t real.
“We have a fucking Alchemist?” “She’s mine,” Fisher said.
Malcolm missed Fisher? It had only been a couple of weeks since they’d spoken? The implication was clear. This Malcolm, king of the vampires, wanted everyone amongst the Fae to know that their precious leader, returned to them at long last, was in league with him in some way. Guerilla warfare at its finest.
“Because she is moonlight. The mist that shrouds the mountains. The bite of electricity in the air before a storm. The smoke that rolls across a battlefield before the killing starts. You have no idea what she is. What she could be. You should call her Majesty.”
“Don’t you dare die on my watch, Saeris Fane! Fisher will never forgive me if his sole reason for living is torn to pieces on her first fucking battlefield.”
“Is he handsome?” Carrion arched his eyebrow suggestively. “I do love a husband-and-wife team. Maybe he’ll let me join you both if he…”
“Once upon a time, that was the case. Back when true mating bonds existed. Unions between true mates were blessed with marks from the Fates. That’s where the tradition of inking our hands originated from. But there’s no such thing as true mates anymore.
“Oh, no. Definitely not. You only see that kind of thing in storybooks,” Te Léna scoffed. “They called it a God Binding. A blessing from the gods themselves. They weren’t real, of course. The most important couples in Yvelian history were said to have had them, but it was all romantic rubbish.
“All right, fine. Have it your way. At first, I didn’t say it because I fucking hated you,” he said. “Hated what you represented.”
“Not you! Me!” He thumped himself in his chest, suddenly furious. “My weakness! My vulnerability! I’ve known for centuries that you were coming. That you were just going to show up one day and change everything. You’re the chink in my armor, Saeris.
And I couldn’t say it because I was scared. Of what it would do to me when I did. It would be like acknowledging you were here after all this time. So I called you Osha instead. But it meant more, Saeris. To me, it meant more.”
“Nobody will ever fuck you the way I’m about to fuck you, Saeris Fane. I’m about to introduce you to all seven gods. When you meet them, don’t forget to tell them I’m the one you worship on your knees.”
“I’ll be grateful for every second that I can say that I belong to you, Saeris Fane. Eighty years or eighteen hours. It doesn’t matter to me. It’ll still be the highest honor of my life. But don’t—Are you about to have a heart attack? Your pulse is flying.”
Tal smiled softly, going back to staring at his coin. The fact that he could touch it meant that it wasn’t the coin I was looking for. The coin I was looking for contained silver, which meant he shouldn’t have been able to tolerate being near any of these coins, and yet here he sat.
chagrined, apologetic look he sent my way. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to leave you to consider that one on your own,” he said. “It seems I’ve said as much as I can on the matter.”
“Zovena’s stirring up all kinds of trouble back at Ammontraíeth.
Zovena was the reason why Tal found himself amongst the ranks of the Black Palace’s High Blood population in the first place. In a roundabout way, she was the reason things were always so tense between me and Tal, too. There were other reasons, of course. Too many to count, really. But Zovena was prime amongst them.
But hurting him had stopped making sense after a while. He had to hurt me. I didn’t have to hurt him. I didn’t want to hurt him . . .
Something I hadn’t felt in over a hundred years: the will of a god sword tugging at my soul. Nimerelle was here with me. She was propped up against the wall ten feet away, where I’d left her after the drills I’d run a few hours back. The pull at my chest wasn’t from her. She had no access to her magic here, just as I didn’t. This was a dead place. Not even the faintest trace of living magic flowed here, which meant I couldn’t draw it to me. Neither could the sword. But still, I felt . . .
“It leads wherever I want it to lead,” I said. “But something is calling to me from the other side of that portal right now, Tal, and I’m going to find out what it is.”
I might have been escaping my prison cell, but I was leaving Tal to his. In another life, we’d find the words we needed to say to each other and maybe even stumble across a way to forgive each other, too.
What in all five hells was I seeing? She was holding a sword, and not just any sword. She was holding Solace.
I realized with no small amount of horror that I knew her face. I had seen it a hundred times, sketched into the pages of my mother’s notebooks. I knew who she was supposed to be to me—the one my mother had told me would come. My counterweight. The female I would love and scourge the worlds for. And she was beautiful. Breathtakingly so. The way she stubbornly clung onto life, refusing to die even as her body failed her, was remarkable.
