Brimstone (Fae & Alchemy, #2)

by Callie Hart

“Why do you have all of these books here, anyway?” I muttered. “You can read in the library.” “Not naked, I can’t.”

Valid

White flowers bloomed all over it, tiny and shaped like little flutes, their petals curling up at the ends.

“As you wish. I have come to provide aid to you, child queen.”

Child Queen, King Killer, Lady Cahlish, Alchemist, Queen of the Blood Court

“I’m yours to command, Queen Saeris,”

The way she looked at me made me want to do better. To be better. Every day of my life, I was going to have to work my absolute fucking hardest to deserve her love and respect. I wasn’t afraid of the challenge.

“My name is Carrion,” he said. “Nice to meet you all. I really like your horns.” There were historians among the crowd. Someone would record this moment—the day the satyr community received the Daianthus heir—and when they documented the first thing their Forgotten King had said to them, it would be this: I really like your horns.

For the first time in Yvelian history, a god sword had entrusted itself into the hands of someone it wasn’t bonded to. Because Kingfisher loved me. I had come here to save him… and that was good enough for his sword.

“Kingfisher of the Ajun Gate, I hereby call you by your true name. I declare all oaths you have sworn null and void. Rise, Khydan Graystar Finvarra, in honor of the name you were given at birth! Rise up and fight!”

“What does it feel like… to lose something that you love so dearly?” The strangest question. Had it never known loss before? Had it been so sheltered its entire existence that it had never lost anyone that it cared about? The odds seemed impossible, especially when you considered how old the creature was. I was well equipped to answer it, though. I’d experienced more than my fair share of loss in my lifetime. My mother. My father. The few friends I’d been stupid enough to make when I was younger, back in the Third. There were bodies piled high in the mausoleum of my memory. “It feels like trying to make sand flow backward in an hourglass. It feels like being surrounded by people and being the only one who can’t find the air in the room. It’s drowning on dry land. It’s the hollow ache of something that you know, from that moment on, will always be missing. It is a pain so acute and incurable that poets, pirates, and politicians alike die from it. And it never ends.”

I cried

“Speak to her, Child of Shadow. Make her see sense. She’ll kill herself before she revives the animal.”

THE OBVIOUS… KHYDAN GRAYSTAR FINVARRA I FUCKING HATE dragons.