Page 69 of Fae Crown

“But she’s not dead, right?” I recognized the desperation in my voice.

With a sad smile, he shifted on his stool. “She isn’t dead … but she’s not all the way alive either.”

“What does that mean?” I asked too quickly, too panicked.

“It means that her body is here but the rest of her isn’t. She’s been here alone and drained for too long.”

“But I heard Dashiell say you can perform miracles.”

“I don’t perform miracles. I’m very old. I’ve taught myself how to help fae heal themselves. Odelia is beyond my help. All I can do is offer her comfort until…”

I still had so many questions. The need for so many more answers.

But all I could feel then was my hope strangling itself as it died. It was more painful than the sum of my many injuries combined.

My mother was so near—and yet she’d never been farther away, or more unreachable.

I needed to understand where exactly I was, how I’d gotten here, and where I’d next go. How long until the queen discovered where I was. How I could get back to Rush and Saffron, find Xeno, Pru, and the others. How I could heal and survive to fight the queen and her shadows, how I could fulfill the destiny the sapphire dragon told me I had, and that I wouldn’t deny.

Assuming I was willing to pursue it at all anymore.

“Do you know where my gran’gobbler is?” Edsel asked.

“What have you been giving me to put me to sleep?”

“Olvidian. But?—”

“I want some now.”

He opened his mouth, obviously to protest.

“Please,” I said. “I’ve had all I can take for now.”

When I next woke, I would figure out how to reassemble my life from its current shards.

Right then, I needed only to forget.

Edsel seemed to discern the many things I didn’t say. When he pressed the cloth to my nose and mouth with its now familiar cloying sweet smell, his eyes were big, dark, and understanding.

The queen also tried to break him, I thought as darkness swept me away.He doesn’t look so broken.

17.CROWN PRINCE AND FUTURE KING OF EMBERMERE

RUSH

Vanities were commonly found solely in the rooms of females at the palace. Even the king’s chambers lacked one, though they did boast a full-body standing mirror, ornately decorated with a gilded double-dragon royal crest and a sizable ruby worthy of the queen’s ostentatious tastes in its center.

And yet, despite the fact that by all accounts I was a formidable warrior, winner of the damn Gladius Probatio, and leader of the Amarantos clan, I sat atop a plush velvet stool of a deep violet, across from a large matching vanity the queen had ordered sent to my room an hour ago.

Now Horst did his best to avoid my tracking stare through the mirror as I watched him free my hair from its usual slim, scattered braids, and entwine feathers into the loose strands of silver.

The feathers were as long as my hand and a deep, iridescent indigo that shone with gold when the light ofthe lumoons bobbing around my head danced across them. A dusting of golden specks dotted their ends, suggesting stars in the nighttime sky.

I’d only ever seen them on the bird itself, but there could be no doubt these belonged to a maletrufy. A very dead trufy, I’d wager. He wouldn’t have given up those astonishing feathers with which he courted his mate any other way.

The feathers, along with a black silk robe, had arrived with the vanity—moregiftsfrom the queen.

When the goblin hooked a feather into my hair in such a way that it revealed the pointed tops of my ears, I growled.

---