Page 59 of Fae Exile

“I’m not dreaming,” I insisted though I registered the longing in my voice. I turned toward them. “I can’t keep faking it with her. She’s going to know, and then she’s going to kill me anyway.”

“Yeah,” Ryder said, “but if you run off into the Sorumbra after El right now, she’s going to hunt you down and have your head, and then she’s going to figure out the only plausible reason for why you’d tear out of here after being her puppet all these years.”

“He’s right,” West said on a sigh of resignation. “She’ll find out Elowyn’s alive. You know she will.”

My right thigh muscle twitched with an actual need to chase after my beloved. I didn’t care how difficult it would be to find her in the Sorumbra, I’d manage it. I’d always find her, no matter where she was. My heart would guide me to her as surely as a compass.

Ryder shifted closer, his pale eyes heavy with the weight we’d been forced to carry since before puberty. “I for one still haven’t gotten over how swiftly she chopped Idra’s and Yorgen’s heads off.”

West huffed. “That’s only ’cause she was trying to cover up how she’s the one who killed...” He trailed off to gesture towardour surroundings and the ghost of the man who’d once been our friend.

“Just because she’s always favored our man,” Ryder said, referring to me as my thigh twitched again, “doesn’t mean she won’t do the same to him just as fast. She’s not stupid.”

No, she wasn’t. She was a brilliant and ruthless strategist, and that fact had long made our jobs so much harder.

I looked at Hiro, and in his stare I saw the same burden I was currently carrying.

“Nothing I don’t know,” he said. “I’m still not sure I can keep doing it, especially when she’s trying to get her filthy hands on Rush all the time.”

I gulped at the fresh reminder, when I usually did my best to pretend I didn’t notice how close she’d come to forcing me into her bed.

“We have to do it though,” Ryder persisted, his brows and lips tugging downward in a resignation that probably broke him as much as it did me. “We have to get the trials back on track, get Rush crowned prince, and only then can wemaybelet up a bit. Once Rush is prince, she can’t take that shit back. One step at a time, guys. We do this first, then we figure out if there’s a way to end it all sooner.”

He met the agony in my gaze with his own. “Then we find Elowyn, free the dragons, and Gadiel and everyone else too. But we can’t do anything so long as she holds all the power.”

“I understand it, of course I do,” Hiroshi said, before whispering, “I still don’t know if I can stare her in the face and hide my disgust.”

I inhaled then exhaled slowly.You and me both, buddy.

“Besides,” he went on, “not sure what we can do at this point to stop her from finding out it was us down in the dungeons. Maybe the roasted pygmy ogres get played off as a natural accident, and she believes they unchained the dragon first.Maybe she doesn’t even think anything of the dead feethles. But the ones that got away?” He shook his head. “They’ll go straight to her, if they haven’t already. Our only chance is that the palace will be in chaos right now and the nobility’s probably in hiding.”

Before I could talk myself out of it, I barreled forward. “So we hurry. We go to the throne room now, convince her we’ll be of more help finding Azariah and getting the trials back on track ‘to secure her reign’ than sticking around. We find the feethles who got past us and I get in their heads. We try to muddy the waters of what we did down in the dungeons. And then we hunt the pegicorn down, get him back here, and get me crowned.”

Acidity burned the back of my throat. Without bothering to hide my distaste, I swallowed it down, pointing at my three brothers in turn. “But the very instant that crown hits my head, I’m finding her.”

“We’ll help you do it,” Ryder said. “We’re all back on track, then?” He looked at each of us.

Scowling, I nodded. West and Hiroshi did the same, Hiro adding, “We just leave the dragons down there to be tortured until then?”

Ryder squared his shoulders as if he had to carry the burden of that horror on his own. “For now … yes.”

He should know better. When the four of us were together, we never shouldered anything alone.

Seconds ticked by, each of us lost in our own thoughts, steeling ourselves once more for what our lot in life would require of us.

When I was no closer to accepting that I couldn’t gallop off into the Sorumbra to find Elowyn, I grunted, “The sooner we get to it, the sooner we’re done.”

And with silent assent, we trekked back across the palace to the throne room, where the queen once more sat on her throne. It alone was untouched. Pillars had crumpled, shattered glassand crushed stone littered the floor along with piles of other debris. The king’s throne was decimated far beyond that level. A heap of dust, it made me wonder if that had been the queen’s work, not that of dragons many stories below.

The moment we entered the room, though many feet still separated us, her stare met mine and trailed every one of my steps until I was bowing before her. Ivar and Braque stood at either of her sides, looking down upon us.

In a voice too light for the circumstances, she said, “You may rise.”

Instinct raced toward my heart like a stake as I tilted my eyes up to meet hers up upon the dais.

Her wicked smile was spreading when movement in the back corner near the wall drew my eye.

It was the guard who’d witnessed me releasing Idra’s and Yorgen’s four children.

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