Page 67 of The Forbidden Fae King

Perhaps I was not fair in my test of her. Even the thought of it, of what she had been willing to do with me, is enough to heat my blood and make my head explode. The frustration makes me mad.

I turn that energy back to Cyprien instead. “Tell me again about how you were wrong. How you made yet another fast assumption and turned your forces against me over it, without talking to mefirst. Without asking a single question. You should have known me better.”

“I don’t know you at all anymore, Aldrin!” Cyprien erupts, standing from the throne. “What were you doing at the border of winter, killing the twisted creations that they sent into our lands? Destroying the evidence of it. Can you not see the land grab into spring the Winter King is making? There is snow everywhere here. The Frozen River once had ice in it the size of my fist. There are platforms of ice now, the size of a barge. The dam above is almost completely crusted with ice. The Winter King is using his love of technology to force the season in our lands.”

A deep fury builds within me until fire runs through my veins and I cannot contain it any longer. My every muscle is taut, twitching with pained restraint, because all I want to do is hit the man in his face.

“This is the kind of narrow-sightedness that got my sister killed.” I growl at him.

“Don’t you dare bring Lorrella into this! Don’t. You. DARE. Do you think losing my wife and our unborn child did not kill me also? We had never heard of a woman dying in childbirth before. How was I to know? I did the best I could.” Cyprien’s face turns red and tears build at the corners of his eyes.

I run a hand through my hair as grief threatens to overwhelm me. It shivers through every extremity of my body, but I cannot turn into a howling, crying mess here. Not in front of this man. “You should have taken her to the druids. The humans would have known what to do. Their women sometimes die in childbirth.”

“Like you said. Their women die in childbirth. They can’t always prevent it.” Cyprien’s eyes are cold. Dead. “I lost my wife. My child. And the friend who had been my brother since before I married his sister.”

A silence extends as we glare at each other, all the anger and pain at Lorrella’s death thrown between us instead of unpacking the grief behind it.

“Every day I wake up and still look for her in my bed, as though my sleep-ridden brain cannot understand that she is gone. Even afterall these years,” Cyprien murmurs, and the gods help me, his voice cracks.

I shake my head in an attempt to violently remove the emotions I cannot handle. Otherwise, that darkness will swallow me whole.

Before I know what I am doing, my treacherous legs take me up the steps to the dais. I grab Cyprien and crush him in a bear hug and hold him there for a long time, like I can’t let him go. His entire body goes completely rigid within my grasp and he holds his arms out, away from me, before awkwardly patting me on the back.

“I am sorry,” I say hoarsely. “That I blamed you. That we have hardly talked since.”

“As am I,” he utters. “I should have listened to you, then and many times over the years since.”

I let him go, then pull away. “Listen to me now, Cyprien. The Winter King isnotmaking a land grab, despite what the high chancellor is claiming.Shedoes not even believe it. Would this fortress be empty if we were about to go to war with winter? Claims of an old enemy at our gates and the fear-mongering that goes with it is the best way to unify a people. The best sleight of hand so they cannot see the truth.”

Cyprien gives me his classic thin-lipped frown. “And what truth is that?”

I have to get through to this man. To resist the urge to shake him. “You saw the spriggans my soldiers put down. The creatures were in suffering, many hardly able to function. Their bodies were rotting away and turning to ash, dissipating on the breeze while they still lived. Why would the Winter King do such a thing?”

“The official word is that he has unleashed a disease that attacks our low fae.” Cyprien’s voice is chipped with ice.

“The spriggan are of both winter and spring courts, why disease his own subjects?” I whip back.

“Maybe something went wrong. Maybe he doesn’t care about his own subjects.”

I raise an eyebrow at him. “You have met Erik. A man doesn’t change that much, Winter King or no. He is not his father. Do notforget the war ended between our courts because he worked hard for the peace treaty.”

Cyprien taps his temple with a long finger while thinking, but that frown is gone.

I pounce. “The lowest fae, those with the smallest drops of magic, they’re falling apart. Fading away, because there is not enough power left in these lands to sustain them. The lands are dying where the courts border and the magic is at its thinnest.

“What you see here isn’t a winter land grab, it is a spread of the desolation at the borders. There is now an icy wasteland where our court meets winter, not their usual snowy plains, but a place devout of life, with immense cracks of darkness running through it. These are voids where all matter has been sucked away, as though the rifts are gates to another realm that is absolute nothingness. Like the night sky without the stars. The earth around them disappears to ash drifting on the breeze, just like those spriggan. The magic is fading away from our realm and our entire world will die when it is gone.”

I need Cyprien on my side. For him to listen to me. He still has influence in this court. “Come to the Dividing Cliffs, Cyprien. See the evidence for yourself.”

He shifts uncomfortably. “If there is evidence, then why does the high chancellor and the entire council believe as they do? Why is no one looking at it?” The fight has gone out of him.

“Because no one cares to see. They are too stupid or too afraid,” I counter. “It is easier to deny what is right in front of our faces, than to acknowledge this threat that none of us know how to deal with. To admit that this was our doing, and that we don’t want to change our comfortable lifestyles to fix it. War with winter is easy in comparison. It is our oldest dance. We all understand it.”

Cyprien rolls his neck. “I will think on it.” He turns to Lilly. “We have a lot to discuss.”

“Yes. It seems that we do.” Lilly tips her head to me ever so slightly again. “It was ever so nice to see you again, Aldrin, and witness your unique perceptions. I hope you will stay at this fortress while we deliberate.” She says without a hint of mockery, and her motherly tonemakes me feel like a boy running around the palace again, when she used to give me treats.

Both turn away from me, to slip out the back door beside the dais, but I block them with my body. “Why did you come here, Cyprien? Surely it wasn’t to monitor me. If the high chancellor wanted to know if I were a threat, she could have sent anyone.”

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