Page 9 of Fae Reckoning

“Yeah.” The first started up the stairs. “Let’s eat ‘em for queenie.”

I grimaced. Though the guards hadn’t hesitated to chase me at the queen’s command, I knew all of them, if not by name, their faces—Arno and I had been friendly.

As if Larissa were the mind reader instead of me, her hand touched my shoulder, her fingers light against my tunic. “They’ll be alright. They know how to take care of themselves.”

I swallowed gravely. Dense as tree trunks though they were, pygmy ogres could be formidable foes. The brutish oafs made up for their lack of finesse with fearless brawn.

“Yeah, of course. You’re right,” I said. Even if she wasn’t, there was no time to waste.

I clasped her hand and dashed across the wide hallto the opposite row of cells. Once in their shadows, I ran.

“Hey,” called a prisoner. “Help us!”

I didn’t waste time informing the male with the broken voice that the only way I’d be able to help him or anyone else was if I first survived this day. My focus remained on the wall at the very end of this dungeon—the one that wasn’t a wall at all.

Seeing their captors gone, more prisoners clamored for aid. I didn’t so much as glance at them either. They would be in a deplorable state, and I couldn’t afford a single distraction, however slight. But when we were paces from the wall that I hoped would grant us passage, I allowed myself to look despite my firm determination to the contrary.

Through the bars of that final cell enclosed on one side by the wall, in its dank, dark, essence-quashing depths, right where I’d last seen him, I found my friend Gadiel, former visdrake of Magiarantos. Leaning against the wall, his legs were long in front of him. His feet were bare of their usual boots. His head was slumped forward, heavy against his chest. His long hair was stringy, hanging around his face in thick, clumped strands.

He looked as if he could be sleeping to whittle away some of the misery of his sentence. But an aching loss that swept through my chest to my limbs suggested differently. The shouts of pygmy ogres and men entwined to reach us from the stairwell, yet still I drew closer to my friend.

Little of the faint light from the corridor filtered into his cell. A patch of blood so dark it appeared black spread across his tattered tunic. No mistaking the black line that sliced across his throat, though it was made finer by the slump of his head. A knife was still clutched in his hand.

Myknife. My blade. The one I’d given him in case…In case, what, Rush?

I knew full well why I’d done it: in case the agony grew too great to bear. In the event that the better option was a swift death and passage to the relief of the Etherlands.

Grunts and pained cries wafted from the stairwell. Larissa was suddenly behind me.

“Rush,” was all she said, but I already knew: even in this, the queen had robbed me. There was no time for a proper sendoff for a very good man.

I snaked an arm through the bars of Gadiel’s cell and retrieved my blade. I was already standing as I whispered in his direction, “May your memory live forever. May your essence voyage to the Etherlands. May you enjoy well-earned peace there, my friend. Farewell.”

Clutching the blade with too firm a grip, my anger on Gadiel’s behalf tightening my hold, I added, “We won’t forget your sacrifice.”

He’d been one of few with the courage to take action to end the queen and her reign of terror. He’d failed, aye, but he’d shot that arrow straight at her heart. Fuck, the man hadtried. Sometimes that was all wecould do: try, and keep going until we succeeded—I glanced at him one final time—or we died.

With Larissa mirroring my steps, I turned my back to Gadiel, clutched her hand, and raised the other that held my blade. I pressed it to the wall and pushed?—

The wall was as solid as its damp, moss-riddled stones suggested it should be.

4.TO BE ANYWHERE BUT HERE, ABSOLUTELY ANYWHERE

RUSH

Twisted, thorny vines of glowing silver raced along the back of my hand as I pressed it against the wall at the back of the fae dungeon. It was entirely too impenetrable. Any reasonable man would have known the wall, enchanted by the queen’s alchemist to admit only those approved by her, wouldn’t open despite the inexplicable sensation—intuition, perhaps—that urged me forward as if I were somehow on the right path.

“Dammit, Ry,” I muttered under my breath, even though it was by no means my friend’s fault he hadn’t adapted his illusion magic to allow my future passage.

As a first-born child, and a male at that, my parents had groomed me for the leadership role of a drake for as long as I could remember. I’d learned warfare tactics along with my letters. No one would have anticipated that my grand escape scheme would lead Larissa and me farther into the palace, deeper underground, whenanyone with enough sense to flee the queen would know any chance at survival lay above ground, where the doors actually opened to a possible path beyond the palace.

“Rush?” Larissa questioned, glancing behind us.

The commotion in the stairwell had grown loud enough that I worried it might trigger some sort of alarm. The queen was purposefully secretive about the security measures she had in place in her dungeons.

The pygmy ogres were grunting and bellowing, their rage so potent, their devotion to their queenie so complete, that I feared none of the guards would survive—and Arno had a wife and children, the youngest of whom still sported pink, cherubic cheeks and sprightly pigtails.

A pygmy ogre wailed, conjuring bitter memories of our devastating fight with them in the throne room, the day I’d seen no alternative but to stab my mate through the heart.

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