Page 47 of Fae Exile

“There might be more beyond where we could see,” Hiroshi said. “We don’t know how far this pit extends.”

“It could span the entire length of the palace,” West said.

The palace of Embermere was huge. It had begun as an identical match to the one in the Golden Forest, home to the ruling royal elves. Legend told us it had been resplendent and that it opened its doors to all fae to celebrate the coming and going of the seasons. Its interior had been designed to accommodate the aristocracy from all corners of Faerie.

“The underground caverns could be even bigger than topside,” I added. “She could’ve dug deeper, farther.”

Silence descended heavily on our shoulders as we considered the range of implications of what we’d discovered. The dragon of such beautiful burnt orange waited, its stare wrapping around me as if it could make out not only my body in the dim gloom, but also my squeezing, aching heart—the half-dead lump that had endured what I’d done to Elowyn.

“We have to know how far it goes, how many of them there are,” Hiroshi said with an urgency that was also simmering in my own blood, readying to boil.

“We have to get them out of here,” West insisted.

“What happened to all your”—Ryder’s tone turned mocking—“the dragons are killers with a taste for fae?King Erasmus wiped them all out for good reason?”

“Fuck Erasmus, and fuck the queen,” West snarled so bitterly it was easy to understand all he meant by that one statement.

The royals of Embermere had lied to us and used us and manipulated us to our breaking points. Fuck, I’d stabbed myown beloved in the heart just so she could escape the damned queen!

No more. No fucking more.

“We have to get them out of here,” I said. “We have to get every single one of them out. And every fae in that prison too, every human she has as a slave. We need to free them all. We can’t wait.”

It was I who couldn’t wait. All at once, I realized I couldn’t wait a second longer, not to do what was right, not to go after my mate, to beg her forgiveness and hope she’d be able to understand I’d done the only thing I’d known how to in order to spare her a worse fate.

“You know we can’t do that, not yet,” Ryder said.

“Come on, Ry,” West grunted. “We can’t just keep looking the other way.”

“What’s wrong with all of you? You see a dragon?—”

“Dozens of dragons,” West corrected. “At least.”

“Yeah, dozens of dragons,” Ryder went on, “and suddenly you forget our years of strategy? Every sacrifice we’ve made? Need I remind you how many there’ve been, and how serious some of them were? Ramana, for example?”

“I don’t fucking need you to remind me of Ramana’s sacrifice,” West snapped. “I think of it every second of every cursed day of my life without her.”

“Then you know what we have to do.”

I knew as well or better than any of them. Even so, “We still can’t just leave them.”

“How’s this any different than her torturing the shit out of fae day in and day out?” pressed Ryder, who wasn’t usually the only voice of calm reason among us. “It’s not.”

But it was. Somehow, this horror was worse than the many that had come before it. Could the beast have truly respondedto my silent plea and spared me from either murdering four innocents or betraying my feigned allegiance to the queen?

No, if anyone might have a connection to the fierce creatures, it would be Elowyn, not me. She was the one who understood.

“They’re just...” Hiroshi trailed off for a breath. “They’re magnificent. Even cut to hell and back, they’re so magnificent. There’s no way they could be the evil beasts the royals make them out to be. I’m sure of it. They’re all the good the mirror world is supposed to be and isn’t.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Ryder said.

But of course it did. So very much.

“We’re already on borrowed time. With the shaking over, she and Ivar and Braque’ll be scampering back soon. The feethles will find them to tell on us. Every one of them’s a total suck-up. They’ll be searching for her just to turn us in.”

Dammit, he was right.

“And that’s assuming we didn’t set off some other alarm without realizing it. And at some point, fresh pygmy ogres will arrive to change shifts, and even they aren’t stupid enough not to figure out, at the very least, that the others are dead.

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