Page 115 of Fae Reckoning

“Braque,” he called.

Braque spun to face the male who’d been his partner in complete adoration of the false queen.

“Stop this,” Ivar said.

I felt El turn, and followed her gaze to a sudden buzz of commotion near Pru and her granddoody. Several parvnits hovered around Zafi, whose little face was slack, her tiny eyes wide. The parvnits were squealing quietly—not to draw Braque’s attention, Iguessed—hugging her, and sharing hurried, urgent whispers that sounded like the buzz of bees. Their faces were smudged with plaster and gore. Tears streaked tracks through the grime like sparkling diamonds catching the light.

Before I could make sense of the scene, especially why Zafi had begun sobbing into the arms of a parvnit who was alternating between patting her acorn hat and her back, Ivar added a menacing, “Or I will make you.”

El and I faced the two males once more. Ry and West seemed to lean forward slightly, as if drawn to the tension between them, a fight none of us would have seen coming just a mere week before.

Braque scoffed. “You won’t make me do anything. I was always the more powerful one.”

Ah, so at the very least Braque’s hubris remained inside there.

“We are both descended from the same bloodline,” Ivar answered.

Braque’s dark eyes glittered. “The original bloodline of the royal elves from Faerie.”

“Aye. We have a duty to that bloodline.”

Again, Braque scoffed. “Duty! What duty? The elves abandoned us here. They forced us to live like scum when we deserved to live like kings!”

Several spectators shook their heads in outrage.

A goblin garbed in a tunic and breeches, which had been tattered to mere threads long before today’s skirmish, hollered, “You did live like a king! You wore the finest garments, ate till you grew fat as acoddled boar, and never had to raise a single plump finger to do anything for yerself.” The goblin’s long nose quivered as he trailed dark, accusing eyes along Braque’s body and the many signs of the easier life he’d led than any of them. “We goblins did everything for ye.”

“Or us,” interjected a parvnit. “Or the numenits.”

“Or the humans,” Elowyn added from beside me.

Braque’s head swiveled toward the goblin while his body remained rooted where he stood; not even his shoulders shifted.

Braque harrumphed haughtily and tipped his nose up into the air. “You dare address me? I’m your new king! My servants shall not address me unless I speak to them directly, or it will be your heads on a platter, and I shall eat you up for dinner.”

“For fuck’s sake,” West muttered. “Didn’t El just kill one like him?”

“Seriously,” Ry agreed.

Ivar sighed. As he took in Braque’s foolishness, I wondered if he recognized any of his own from his many decades in unwavering service to the false queen. “You are not the new king, Braque. You are a fool.”

Upon stiff, unmoving shoulders, Braque’s head spun around to glare menace at Ivar. “You dare address me that way?”

“Aye, I do.” Ivar spun his cutlasses by the grips before clutching them even more tightly than before.

“Then I shall kill you too.”

Ivar’s knees bent slightly, and he tipped to the balls of his feet. “Go ahead and try.”

Braque’s nose rose impossibly higher, and though Ivar was taller than he, the alchemist somehow managed to stare down at him. “Then I shall. You will regret your betrayal.”

“I owe you no loyalty.”

“You owed our queen loyalty, and you betrayed her. I am her successor. She chose me. She promised me she’d reward my service, and now she has.”

“Not from where we’re looking at you,” I muttered.

“She didn’t choose you,” Ivar said. “You opened yourself to a darkness that had nowhere else to go.”

---