Page 1 of Crowned By the Fae King

Beginning of the End

The BOOM of a lightning strike tore me out of dreams of dying in the dark. I sat up so hard I smacked my forehead on the bunk above me and ricocheted back down, groaning. My bunkmate mumbled something incomprehensible in reply.

All around me in the bunkhouse, I could hear other people having similar reactions. Someone near the door was praying. The girl to my left started crying softly, curled up in a little ball. She'd been in the bunkhouse that had burned two months ago, from some idiot who'd been smoking wild tobacco in the connected storage shed. The blaze before that had been lightning, but at least it had only burned one of the mine lifts.

Outside, someone shouted the word none of us wanted to hear: fire. The wail of a hand-crank siren stuttered into life.

I was out of bed as soon as the siren cut through the air, narrowly evading Gina's feet as she scrambled out of the upper bunk. The shacks the fae kept us housed in were made of trash wood and doused in tar to keep the water out, and they burned hot. The only chance of surviving if your bunkhouse caught on fire was to be outside of it. We'd lost eleven people last time.

We had a pathetic number of belongings, and I always kept mine packed up and under my pillow to dissuade sticky fingers. It took seconds to throw on my clothing and sling my canvas pack over my shoulder, and then I was careening out with the rest of the people in the bunkhouse, my boots unlaced and my head throbbing from the impact on the upper bunk.

Rain sheeted down in heavy waves. Another fork of lightning cut across the sky, illuminating the chaos as people threw themselves out of their deathtrap houses and into the shantytown the humans at the opal mine were kept in. The rawboned log wall cut off most of the visibility, but it wasn't hard to spot the fire. The outpost itself was burning, flames licking up the tar-coated side of the building and smoke rising in a plume. Even the rain wouldn't slow a fire like that.

They kept the opals in the outpost. The money.

I was running towards the fire before I'd made a conscious decision to do so. After seven months in this shithole, all that mattered was getting home—and that took money, to buy my freedom from the fae who'd blood-bonded me as his slave, to bribe someone to bring me back across the Veil to the mortal world, and to survive long enough to do both. I knew where they kept everything locked up, but I was one of the people blood-bonded to an individual overseer instead of to the owner of the mine. I could act against the mine, so I wasn't trustworthy enough to be allowed to work in the outpost itself. Small, agile Quyen spent her days in the twisting tunnels of the opal mines, clawing at rock and praying that the earth didn't keep her.

The gate to the shantytown wall hung ajar, the guards abandoning their posts to help get people out of the outpost. Where were we going to go, after all? The forest, to get eaten by wargs? We were in the middle of fucking nowhere.

I darted into the outpost, shoving past a staggering, coughing form. Smoke hung in the air, stinging my eyes and my lungs. I yanked my rain-soaked shirt up, holding it over my mouth to keep the smoke at bay, and took the stairs two at a time.

The smoke got thicker on the upper floors. I touched one handle and had to yank my hand away, the metal so hot it burned. I could barely see through the haze, squinting and holding my breath as long as I could before sucking another gasp through my wet shirt. The log building groaned to my right. I heard something collapse, and the roar of the fire as it redoubled with the new burst of air.

The steward's office was locked, but the whole fucking place had been thrown together in a hurry. The wood was green, the locks were poorly-fitted, and no one was here to see. I braced myself against the wall and started grimly kicking the door in, hitting it with the flat of my foot next to the lock, putting every bit of the strength I'd built hauling carts of stone through tunnels too small to stand in.

Once. Twice. Again, the wood starting to splinter, and again, ignoring the pain radiating up my foot.

Someone coughed. I froze, willing myself to be wrong, and heard the sound of a woman crying.

The door was almost open. Freedom was past that door, everything I needed to get out and get back to my family. I'd only been gone for seven months. I knew my cousins would take care of Bà, but who would take care of them? Auntie worked three jobs, and didn't have time to keep an eye on the boys. I'd seen Tuân hanging out with some of the local gangbangers after work, and I knew Cadeo was dealing pot at his high school. If I wasn't there to take care of them—

The woman coughed again, then begged, "Please."

Fuck.

Gritting my teeth, tears streaming down my face and my lungs rasping from the smoke, I turned and dashed down the hall towards the voice. The air was so hot my clothing started steaming, all my skin feeling too tight, like when you stand too close to a campfire.

The woman was trapped under a burning beam. Flames licked along the walls and roared just beyond, reaching for the sky. Only the downpour was stopping her from being burned alive.

She was fae. An overseer—the enemy.

I snarled, but didn't hesitate. I ran over and got my shoulder under the beam. Embers rained down on me, stinging my skin. The wood was so hot it burned my shoulder, the agony of it making my chest wrench, but I stood, lifting the thing enough that the woman could crawl out.

She did, sobbing, dragging herself out from under it. Her leg was broken, the skin burned and torn.

As soon as she was out from under it, I dropped the beam, the pain of my own burns screaming at me. There was no way she was walking on her own, so I hauled her up, getting my other shoulder under her, and started half-carrying, half dragging her to the stairs.

The groans of the building and the roar of the flames only got worse. I could see orange glowing from beneath doorways and flames crawling deeper into the building. The smoke billowed along the ceiling and hazed the air, deadlier than the flames.

I got her down the flights of stairs, into cleaner air, and shoved her into the arms of a guard before sucking in a deep breath of only moderately-smoky air and booking it back upstairs. My whole body screamed at me, eyes burning, lungs aching, burns hot.

It didn't matter. This was my one chance; the only time I could imagine being able to do anything like this. I wasn't going to live the rest of my life as a slave crawling through mine tunnels. We lost people almost every week, to bad air, to rock lung, to cave-ins. This place wasn't built for safety. It was quick-and-dirty. Get in, claw out the riches of the earth, get out before the dying fae King realizes there's people stealing his opals.

I had to crawl the last twenty feet, keeping my mouth almost on the floor so I could suck up air. Flames lit the hall; danced across the ceiling. You can do this, I told myself, my arms shaking and wracking coughs clawing at my lungs. You have to do this.

I got to my feet. Fought off the desperate need to hack the smoke out of my lungs. Kicked the door—kicked it again.

The wood splintered. I put everything into it, slammed my foot into the wood with every ounce of my willpower, and smashed it in.

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