Page 59 of Heir to His Court

He spoke calmly, his voice dry and detached, taking on a lecturer’s cadence. A cadence of history.

“My father will bring you to Avallonne once he is certain of your loyalty, and he will place on your wrists the Cuffs, and bid you enter the Lake and emerge with the Trident as only Psion’s priestess may do. After which he will march on Ninephe. The ancient clan Temthrennes-Gravvanne will finally war with their youngest son, Threnvanne Sanyelle. If the blood spilled repays the debt owed, if the clan survives the war, then finally we will turn our face to Juhainah.”

I stared at the professor. He didn't seem troubled by any of this. “This is. . .this is all one big family squabble, you know that, right?”

“Welcome,” Embriel smiled, the expression a little cruel, “to the family, little sister.”

ChapterSeventeen

As the dreamscape hazed, a tall female with long hair in strands of ash, cream, and gold approached Embriel.

She wore a skirt made of black panels over greaves, and a bustier that left her toned shoulders and arms bare except for vambraces. Blades hung around her waist and though I only glimpsed her aquiline profile, it appeared she was some kind of city or palace guard. The half-armor tugged at my memory. . .nothing I'd seen in a book, but perhaps. . .hmm.

I'd had to pull rank on the Dean and my guard in order to get out of the University without explanations. The secret of the Book I didn't want to share even with Lavendre. Not until I understood it better. Its price, its power. Its agenda. The history of the Fae realm was rife with artifacts which corrupted their users.

“I will return, Dean,” I’d assured him. “The price the Book extracted has left me disoriented. I’ll answer your questions, just not today.”

At home, sitting cross-legged on my bed, I released one of my talons and drew it along the soft skin of my arm. I would have to take care with how often I used the Book and where I cut myself, so my family didn't think I was developing a new psychosis. I wouldn't scar, but even scratches took a day or two to heal.

Predictably, the Book had not come with instructions. That would be too painless. As my blood dripped onto an empty page, I contemplated, then said, “Tell me about the Vow.”

That wasn't a question, of course. I was unsurprised when nothing happened.

“How do I fulfill my Vow to kill Prince Renaud without killing Prince Renaud?”

There. Better. An actual question, and specific enough to hopefully not be inundated with useless information.

Nothing happened.

I scowled. “This is so typical. The damn Book tested me but didn't bother to tell me how to use it.”

I slid off my bed and rummaged through my desk drawer for one of the quills I used for formal palace correspondence. I dipped the tip in my blood once I was back on the bed, then wrote the question onto the page.

Inconclusive. No such Vow exists.

Progress. I picked the Book up, thumbed through the pages, examining it, shaking it a little. “Wonderful. It's broken.”

I dipped the quill back into my blood, making a resigned mental note that I needed to be smarter about this—and simply collect a vial of my blood in an ink pot so I didn't have to keep cutting myself—and wrote,

What is the Vow I made regarding Prince Renaud?

Words scrawled against the paper, and I stared at them, raising my eyebrow a little.

“If you don't kill me now, I Vow your state will be death.”

. . .interesting.Thosehad been my exact exact words? Granted, I had been in a highly charged emotional state at the time, but I still should have been capable of a competently worded Vow. No wonder that bastard hadn't been concerned.

The problem with such a shoddy Vow were the two keywords. State, and death. I had been speaking Everennesse at the time, a dialect of the Avallonnian language, which was a dialect of the original Ninephene tongue. Old Fae, we called it colloquially. Or the Old Tongue.

Words existed in the past, in the present, in the future. Shades of meaning differed depending on the context of the sentence, and the intonation of the speaker. If I had been speaking in English, perhaps the Vow would have been concrete.

But I had not been speaking in English. I inhaled sharply, recalling Embry's words from the dreamscape.“What is dead?”

He'd asked it with the infuriating air of a teacher wanting a slightly dim student to come to their own conclusion, but also with the amused condescension of an older Fae regarding someone younger, and much less experienced.

Was Embry alive?

I couldn't see how he could be. I'd slit his throat. I'd watched his body still and his eyes close and then my cousins had come and dragged me away. We'd returned later and recovered his body, then buried it. Properly, with honor—but nothing could take away the crime of withholding his resting place from his kin. I pushed aside those thoughts and refocused. I could ruminate on that later.

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