Page 50 of Fae Exile

Her grin only widened, exposing teeth that, even in her person form, were too sharp. “Oh, I know you’ll have more important things to do.” She batted her lashes in more measured artifice. “Just as soon as I tell the queen that what she’s so long suspected is true.”

My pulse stopped bouncing around my neck to still entirely. After all we’d sacrificed, after all we’d done,thisis how it’d end? Through the intervention of a petty, power-grabbing girl desperate to climb the ladder of aristocratic hierarchy?

We should kill her now before she got the chance to betray us. No one would miss her. The queen would forget about her quickly enough.

“You were having a foursome,” she announced triumphantly. “You’re all sweaty and flushed, and your clothes are askew.”

Greedily, she licked her lips. “Her Majesty will want to know right away.” She giggled. “Then she’ll want you all in her bed.”

Her eyes met my stare. “You most of all.”

18.BACK TO THE DRAGON’S DEN, WE’VE GOT US A QUEEN TO MURDER

~ ELOWYN ~

The sun was inching toward the gnarled mass of trees that herded us into a single-file line. Finnian led the way, hacking with his machete at whatever refused to move for him, sweat coating his face from the continuous effort. Whether by an enchanted ointment he applied to the gash on his thigh, the advanced healing powers of the fae, or both, he’d been able to remove the tourniquet an hour before.

The linen of his britches was stained dark with his dried blood, and he walked with a heavy limp. Even so, he refused my offer to ride Bolt, insisting the stab wound to my heart was more grave and I needed to allow myself every grace I could to heal.

As if the Sorumbra understood anything about grace.

My weeks in its midst had taught me the animals of the Wilds only respected power. Their reigning impulse was to kill, feed, and survive. The mightiest ruled until such time as they were no longer the mightiest. Then they died, and brutally so.

My entire group of friends was depending on me to assert enough power to ward away whatever disgusting, horrid monsters decided to attack us next.

Darkness, when the worst of the beasts prowled, would engulf us within a couple of hours. Already, apprehensiongnawed at my insides, the sensation much like a clawing, unsatiated hunger, except that we’d eaten not long ago. Reed had quickly learned the habits of the armacoon, both the spotted and spiked varieties, and hunted them successfully. In killing the creatures, he displayed a respect I’d never witnessed before. He insisted on using all parts of the animal he could, and he’d begun assembling plate armor from their tough shells.

Even with his hunting prowess, and with the warrior skills of the rest of us—save Saffron and Pru, who was uncharacteristically calm, given how much the queen’s constant death threats had rattled her—it wasn’t enough. In the end, it would all come down to me and whether I could glow again.

Sure, I could again repeat the unexpectedly pretty words Roan had fed me and I could even pretend I believed them despite the hollow feeling they left in their wake, but would that be sufficient this time? What about the next? Especially when the cost of my failure would be so incredibly steep?

“You’re thinking too much, Wyn,” Xeno muttered from where he walked alongside Bolt’s shoulder.

Despite the severity of his injuries, he too had refused my offer to ride Bolt. They’d all turned down the ride, even Pru and Roan, and both their legs combined didn’t add up to the length of mine. Like Finnian, they stressed I needed to recover full strength more than anybody.

Since the discovery that my ears were now tipped like all the other fae, and the assumption that I’d had a spell on me before that limited my power, they all took it as a foregone conclusion that I’d upend the queen’s rule and forge a new way of life for her many subjects.

Shiiiit. I couldn’t even figure out what to do with my own life, let alone bear the responsibility of an entire realm!

The royals of Embermere had cast me away, bespelled so I couldn’t even call on my own power, subjected me to a life whereI’d forever be an outcast, a servant dedicated to the whims of others. They’d next abducted me, shot my friend, then shot me—twice—before forcing me into a brutal competition for my life, one I was equipped to fight in only because I’d taken it upon myself to train until I vanquished the worst of my weaknesses; had captured and tortured my friends; attempted to kill me over and over again, until the queen hadsucceeded;and by dragonfire the only way I’d survived was bycoming back to life. I’d had toresur-fucking-rect. That’s how close I’d come to the queen finishing me off for good. What in the blazing lava was I thinking going back? Who did I think I was to imagine I could make a difference when she had already proven she could crush me as easily as a tiny, insignificant bug?

Okay, sure, the blood of Odelia Catalina Corisande, true heir to the murderous legacy of King Erasmus, and Oren Amadeo, the most formidable drake of his generation, ran through my veins … but so fucking what?It hadn’t saved my mother. Nor had it kept my father from being the queen’s spineless lackey. What chance did it have of doing something entirely different for me?

“Wyn?” Xeno said.

When I finally glanced at him, the tilt of his brows and the concern in his warm eyes told me it hadn’t been the first time—or the third or fourth—he’d called out to me.

I clutched a napping Saffron closer to my waist, the horse’s rocking gait lulling him, and smiled down at Xeno. “Hey.”

The deep bruising on his cheek and collarbone was already fading, and the myriad cuts that dotted his flesh were scabbed over despite the gunk that coated them, now dried and flaking off. But despite a recovery that was far faster than what a human was capable of, it was significantly slower than normal for him.

Which didn’t bode well for his ravaged wings.

“What are you fretting about now?” he asked.

“How’d you know I was fretting?”

He snorted, and I couldn’t help but notice how handsome he was. Even beat to shit and filthy, his strong body and face, soft lips and eyes, guaranteed he was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen.

---