Page 74 of Fae Champion

I wanted to speak to him, though I couldn’t guess at what I’d tell him now, but a collective dozen eyes, ears, and even a pair of mouths—a set of masculine lips and the other feminine—darted here and there around us, as if the queen were unwilling to leave a single aspect of our match to chance. But Rush would already have his orders. No matter how many times I’d heard the queen herself tell Rush his job was to protect me, it had been for show.

Everything about the Gladius Probatio and her fancy arena was about appearances. I’d grown up among ferocious dragon shifters who’d sworn to defend the dragons with their dying breaths. As beastly, crass, and violent as some of them were, none of them killed for glory, or worse, for entertainment.

But the queen offered her subjects barbaric, bloodthirsty sport under the thinly veiled artifice of pomp and ritual.

She probably occupied the grandest of the viewing balconies now, my father likely sitting in her shadow as he always did. I refused to look their way. The power to decide whether or not I participated in such a brutal contest had been stripped from me. I wouldn’t give them my attention or energy. At least for now, that was mine alone.

Azariah walked over to us, stopping halfwaybetween Rush and me, his twisted horn spearing the veins hanging from a floating, spying eyeball—red closer to the eye, blackened where they dangled. The eye had been facing me, recording my every move, and startled when Azariah’s horn nudged it, jerking out of the way—a reaction much like that of a person. Oblivious to the severed organ directly next to him, the unisus tossed his head, knocking the eye to the ground, where it bounced and stopped … a moment before Azariah took another step—right onto it.

I grimaced at the squishing squelch before remembering there were more eyes on me. I schooled my face into disinterest, hoping I hadn’t been too late to conceal that I saw what others apparently didn’t.

“Our magnanimous queen will now come down to encourage our fighters with a few private words,” Azariah said as he drew closer, leaving behind a mess of eye white, brown iris, and pink and red and black. Bile tickled at the back of my throat before I made myself look away.

The crowd clapped at Azariah’s pronouncement, though it was difficult to believe any of them would consider their queen “magnanimous” after the display she’d put on for the week of the Gladius Probatio.

Royal guards, dressed in her colors only, emerged onto the field moments before she did to another smattering of applause. Her crown towered above her head, thin chains of silver hanging down from it, framing her face, ending in a pair of rubies the size of quail eggs, the deep and vibrant color of freshly pumping blood.Each of the crown’s five spikes was capped in more modest versions of the same stone. Her dress was a long and draping fog gray, a train skimming the ground behind her, sending clouds skittering. Red crystals adorned her décolletage and the hem of her skirt. Her skin was pale, her hair dark as night, trailing loose behind her, picked up by that same breeze that tickled Rush.

She was a vision, a spectacle. No trace of the woman who’d openly fondled crotches and breasts the previous night.

And she’d left the king behind. I at last found him atop his throne on the balcony, a scant few inches behind hers so it could always be dismissed as an accident by the staff.

His attention was already on me, but it revealed nothing beyond the fact that he was a shell of a man dominated by his wife.

The queen’s stare, as intent as a hungry predator’s, was also on me.

She stopped within a dozen feet of me, her guards rushing to fan out around her, especially as my fingers twitched around the many weapons I could throw her way before any of them could stop me—sans the magic which I suspected all of them, as fae and her personal guard, must have.

A surge of energy swept up from my feet and zipped across the entirety of my body, leaving me tingling all over, while I also experienced a simultaneous pull toward Rush. As if he held his arms openwide to me, I took my eyes off the apex predator to glance at him.

It was a mistake.

The queen hissed and her little bloody spies zoomed toward me like a swarm of wasps. But with her glaring wrath now on me, I managed to keep myself from wincing. Whatever limited power I’d discovered, she couldn’t suspect it.

A single eye with a gray iris that was somehow familiar crept slowly closer until it bobbed an inch from mine. My fingers now itched with the need to swat away the grotesque sight.

I only smiled at the queen, wondering if she recognized how much I hated her, if I outwardly appeared as close to shattering whatever vestiges of civility remained in me as I felt.

“All hail Her Royal Highness Queen Talisa Zafira Tatiana!” Azariah called out.

As one, the spectators in the stands bowed their heads to her.

“Very good,” the queen said to the magical creature. “Now give us some privacy. You too,” she added to her sentinels, who, unlike Azariah whose relief was etched across his long white face, hesitated. But none complained, retreating just out of earshot.

“Your Majesty,” Rush said, bowing deeply.

The queen turned toward me expectantly. But I only held my head high in a silentFuck you, bitch.

She scowled so fiercely her eyes flared blue, then waved a couple of fingers in the air. Instantly,my body wanted to obey her power, to bend so deeply my nose neared the ground and that small lump of eye gore.

I dipped in a feigned reverence she surely didn’t deserve. Before, her power had wrapped around me with the force of steel bands—irresistible. Now, her power felt like the strands of spider webs—strong but breakable. I could fully resist the urge.

When that desire to bow ceased, I rose, and when I smiled at her again, my amusement was genuine.

“What do you have to smile about?” she snarled.

“Nothing in particular,Your Highness, I’m just happy to see you.”

Rush grunted and apparently choked on air. He coughed and wheezed, all while shooting me panicked looks that told me,Don’t poke the fucking dragon.

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