Page 73 of Fae Crown

Tattoos finally fading, I sat atop the extravagantly plush stool in front of the annoyingly opulent vanity. How dare she send them to me? As if nothing were more important than my preening in a mirror. My performing for her and her audience demolished my every iota of self-respect.

“Remove the feathers,” I told Horst. “I won’t be needing them.”

Horst’s breathing was choppy, but he set down the nipple- and dick-feathers and climbed his stepstool to begin undoing his work.

“Send a message to Her Majesty saying that I won’t be providing entertainment for her ever again. I am to be a crown prince and a future king of Embermere. I will be acting like it from here on out.

“If she wishes to punish me, then I’ll take my punishment. But I’ll take it as a man, not as her plaything. And if she decides to kill me, then whatever might await me in the Etherlands, or even the Igneuslands, will damn well be better than this.”

18.AN EQUALLY DOOMED AND BLESSED BLOODLINE

ELOWYN

I discovered myself already mid groan when alertness rushed in. It was sweltering beneath the covers, and I went to kick them off?—

“Finally!”

The exclamation was loud with its obvious exasperation, and accompanied by the soft chiming of tiny bells: Dashiell.

Uncertain if I was ready to deal with the man’s attitude this soon after waking, I kept my eyes shut, kept myself still, and endured the miserable heat. My legs felt clamped in place. I itched with the need to move them.

If it was possible to sense another person rolling their eyes, I would have sworn I did. Dashiell alsotsked.

“How much olvidian have you been giving her?” he accused whomever else was in the room. “I don’t have all day to wait around for her to wake up.”

“I’ve been giving her just the right amount,” Edselsnapped. “She needs it. Or have ye failed to notice she looks like she was attacked by an entire clan of bloody dragons? There’s barely a patch on her body that ain’t sliced to shit and back.”

This voice—and prickly temperament—had been a constant over the last days, so many that I hadn’t been able to track them as I slipped in and out of consciousness.

“If ye’re unhappy with the job I’m doing, then by all means, I’ll quit. No matter what ye like to say, ye ain’t paying me enough for all this trouble,” Edsel said.

I probably shouldn’t have cared that the goblin was so evidently ready to be rid of me. And still … I did.

Silence stretched out for long enough that I was deciding to confront Dashiell just to get out from under the covers, when the tinkling of glass, wood, and metal stopped me. Behind my closed eyelids, my eyeballs stung, and it had been days since that had happened.

Edsel was packing up the many vials and jars and bowls he kept at my bedside. As soon as I admitted to not knowing where Pru was, that she was likely in danger somewhere still out in the Sorumbra, he’d rush off to find her.

A heavy sigh that sounded like Dashiell’s, I peeked open my eyes in time to watch him turn toward the goblin.

“Wait. Stop.”

Edsel harrumphed loudly and continued packing a series of delicate vials into a padded wompa leathercase, his movements jerky despite the obvious care for his instruments of healing.

Dashiell rose from the foot of my bed—which was when I noticed my view was markedly different from that of the previous days—and hesitated a moment before approaching the goblin. When he reached him, again he paused, but eventually rested a hand on Edsel’s shoulder.

The goblin flinched but didn’t cast off the man’s hand.

The two were a study in contrasts. While Dashiell wasn’t particularly tall for a fae man, the goblin’s head, held high, only reached groin height. Dashiell was lithe and slim; Edsel was stocky, strong, and sturdy.

But I tore my gaze away from the interaction that would have otherwise intrigued me to examine my new surroundings. The shabby clapboard cabin that had been scarcely more than a rundown shanty had somehow vanished while I slept. I now rested in a magnificent room with white-washed walls, a polished wooden floor, large windows with the curtains drawn shut, and a bouquet of fresh flowers adorning a small table on the opposite side of my bed from where the males stood. Even my bed was new, my blanket a crisp forest green woven through with strands of gold.

My mother, who’d languished in the bed beside mine … was not here.

In an instant, I was so cold I couldn’t believe I’d just been hot, and lament crowded my throat, making it difficult to swallow my swellinggrief.

She was barely alive anyway, I told myself in a desperate attempt at comfort.At least I got to share a room with her. I thought she was dead, so at least being in the same room was something.

Butsome-little-thing, when I’d longed to know the woman my entire life, wasn’t nearly enough…

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