Page 62 of Fae Exile

I’d find the way to survive, to honor my duties as drake and mate.

The queen’s chuckle this time was part seductive purr, part husky smoke that arced out to entwine around my throat and choke me.

“Yes, I have heard.” Another chortle. “Of course I have. Which makes it all the greater shame to have to kill you.”

I opened my mouth?—

“Save your breath, Rush. I made my decision before you walked into this room. I need someone I can trust with complete obedience.” She looked around me at the friends I dared not glance at. “Which means they won’t serve me either.”

She leaned back in her throne, flicked her hand in the air, and drank from the silver goblet when the goblin once again appeared. “It’s unfortunate. I wasted so much time grooming you. And taking care of that sister of yours too. Now she’ll die.”

She sighed, licked a droplet of deep crimson from her lower lip while my own blood chilled to ice. “But alas, I have time to find another heir.”

“Yes, you do, my queen,” Braque added with a sweet lilt that made me want to kick him in his big, ugly head. “Plenty of time to find someone worthy.” He sneered at me. “Grateful.”

“But Your Majesty,” I protested, doing my best not to be disgusted with my wheedling. It was humiliating—but anecessary last-ditch attempt to secure a future that would spare so many thousands from the darkness currently consuming the mirror world.

“The magic of the Fae Heir Trials won’t allow it. I’m still the male champion, ready to match up with my bride. You can’t kill me.”

She rocketed to standing. Every single one of her personal guards that stood in a semi-circle behind her throne winced this time, not just the one who’d betrayed me.

“Youdareto tellmewhat I can and cannot do?” she bellowed so loudly I wondered if the volume might have rattled the glass in the large wall of windows had any of it survived the dragons’ fury.

She marched toward me with heavy, angry steps that shook the dais until she stood so close she could touch me—or I could slice off her head, a desire that blazed through me as hotly as her sudden ire.

Craning her neck down so her breath whisked across my forehead, she seethed. “Embermere bends to my will. The entire mirror world and its magic does as I want.Irule the magic.Icommand it. No one else. Just me.”

And that was the very moment when, despite all appearances, I knew in my heart that somehow, some way I couldn’t yet see, everything would be all right.

No one commanded the magic of Faerie, so no one commanded the magic of its mirror. The power that ran through it was contained to the land. No one person could possess it, only wield it with the land’s permission.

The situation morphed from a harbinger of my doom to a forecast of her own.

Maybe not by my hand, and perhaps not today, tomorrow, or even this century, but someday the queen would meet herdemise. And the land would claim back all she’d stolen from it and its creatures.

As powerful as this queen was, with her awful bloodlust and the creeping darkness she’d inherited from her father, the power of Faerie that ran through the mirror world, that coated its very skeleton, was stronger.

It forever would be.

“The magic of the Fae Heir Trials yields to me,” she continued in a yell I only blinked against.

Incongruously, the anxiety and pressure released from my body, replaced by a pure faith I’d perhaps never before experienced in my life. If I ever had, I hadn’t since I was a child, so many decades ago, when I was still ignorant of the horror that swept our realm like a worming, infectious disease.

“If I say the trials are over,” the queen went on, “then they are. If Azariah dies because of it, so be it.”

“It will be his honor, my queen,” Braque said.

She stared hard at me. “Exactly. Nothing happens in this realm without my say-so. Once you and your friends are dead, I’ll allow an appropriate time for your subjects to mourn you”—she swept a lazy hand through the air as her features drooped in pretended grief—“and then I’ll begin a new set of trials, one that will yield an actual worthy heir.”

“Yessss, Your Majesty,” Ivar said, his glare on me. “Yes!”

She turned and, after an unconcerned glance at the remains of the king’s throne, sat on her own. Her lips parted to reveal usually white teeth stained with pink. “May your memories die with you, and may your essences burn forever in the Igneuslands.”

She spat again, this time aiming for my boots. Her aim was true.

But I remained in this odd space only faith could explain, partially detached from my body and the circumstances seconds away from threatening it.

When she raised both arms, I sought out her eyes and caught them right away. But when I attempted to push my thoughts into hers, she only cackled as I slammed against a mental wall as impenetrable as stone.

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