Page 1 of Fae Exile

1.ONE LONG, ETERNAL NIGHT

~ ELOWYN ~

The days melted into one long, eternal night, marked only by the steady, rhythmic, clip-clopping of the animal beneath me, and a pain so intense that I scarcely occupied my body. I was at once light and heavy, torturously hot or bitterly cold, with no relief in sight. No choice but to endure ... or to surrender my life and be done with it once and for all.

Slender, gentle hands tended to me gingerly, wiped the sweat-soaked hair from my face, cooed what was probably encouragement, and rubbed something thick and goopy onto the wound on my chest.

No, not just my chest,my heart. How it continued to beat I had no idea—it wasn’t because I willed it.

My will died when Rush pierced my heart just as I’d finally begun to believe we were bonded—mates—that the enormity of what I felt toward him—from him—could only be explained as destined, a connection beyond the ordinary, a transcendent link ... a bond both profound and inviolable.

I’d been so burdened by Zako’s betrayal, and yet the lies and many deceptions of the man who’d claimed to be my father had proven to be insignificant when compared to the grand Drake Rush Vega’s treachery. Zako’s offenses faded to themorass of the inconsequential. Rush’s betrayal dominated my every lucid thought. Those moments of crisp awareness were far and few between, and yet Rush’s hauntingly beautiful face and mesmerizing moonlit eyes captured all of them. My memories conjured up how his lips, sensual and lush, had wrapped around words I’d never dreamt I’d hear—howhe loved me, howI could trust him, howI should listen to my heart.

And then he’d plunged a blade right through it.

More time drifted by, like a raft shredded apart on a churning sea, its myriad parts undulating to every corner, never to be assembled again.

My thoughts crystallized until I was once more able to direct them instead of being carried away with their current, mere witness to their insistent taunting.

Soon, I was able to distinguish night from day, my inner torment from the voices of my friends surrounding me, always nearby, always heavy with worry.

Pru was there, hers the hands that had tended to me since we left Embermere, her usual impatience and demands softened until her care bordered on maternal.

Reed was there too, his eyes big with concern. Never saying much, just watching, ever walking alongside me and whatever creature bore my weight.

I heard Roan’s deep grumblings, and Finnian’s even, intelligent voice, both subdued and serious. And Xeno ... I heard Xeno, the friend whose fate had eluded me until the very end. His words were terse, clipped, void of much of their usual warmth.

Bespelled bindings strapped my outstretched body to the steed beneath me, and it took me another few days to be able to tilt my head to confirm that some occasional whimpering wasn’t my own, but Saffron’s. The dragonling seemed smaller than when I’d last seen him, still curled in on himself as if afraid an attack would arrive at any moment, from any direction. Crouched atop a saddle meant for people, not creatures, he rode a horse behind mine.

When I finally felt capable of speech, I croaked, “Where are we?”

“We’re nowhere yet,” Finnian answered, causing me to search him out. He stalked on foot at the front of our group, which included several more horses and a pony, his stare remaining pinned up ahead and constantly roving across our surroundings.

“Then where are we going?” I eked out, my voice rough as if I hadn’t used it in years.

“Where even the queen’s might doesn’t reach. Into the Wilds. You’ll be safe from her there.”

“It’s everythin’ else we’ll need to be worrying about,” Roan’s bass rumbled. “In the Wilds, everythin’ you see wants to kill ya.”

I tried to tell them it didn’t matter anyway, I felt dead inside already. But that little bit of talking had exhausted me, and sleep dragged me under its tempting clutches, obliterating more day or night or whatever. None of it truly mattered, not anymore. Not then, possibly not ever.

2.THE MOST PUTRID, ROTTEN, SLUDGY CESSPOOL EVER

~ RUSH ~

Hers a face that was so similar to Elowyn’s and yet lacking all that I loved about my mate, the queen winked at me coquettishly from across the Hall of Mirrors before throwing her head back in laughter that had to be fake. Surrounded by eager courtiers, she sat atop her throne at yet another party in what seemed like an endless line of them.

There was nothing to celebrate, yet the queen assigned one nonsensical theme or another to her vacuous festivities. Tonight we honored the birthday of her father.The Mighty King Erasmus, Our Kingdom’s Savior, she called him. To everyone else with a mind of their own, he was Erasmus the Bloody, responsible for extinguishing the dragons from the mirror world and plunging our land into a consuming darkness it hadn’t yet escaped.

More than ever, the queen needed to distract her subjects. The Nuptialis Probatio should have begun and finished by now, and yet ... as one of its two champions wasn’t here, the magic of the Fae Heir Trials forbade it. No matter how much the queen threatened the skittish pegicorn Azariah to launch the next stage of the trials, he couldn’t.

While the queen distracted her court from the fact that the Nuptialis Probatio should have followed just three days after the Gladius Probatio, I was busy trying to distract her from arriving at the inescapable reason why the magic of the trials refused to continue—the source of both my buoyant elation and my bone-chilling terror…

The mate bond between Elowyn and me had engaged on her end in time.

The love I’d been waiting for all my life had survived.

She lived.

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