Page 136 of Fae Reckoning

I brushed her hair back from the other shoulder too. Despite the fact that she was about to be crownedqueenof an entire realm, she’d opted for a lovely yet simple, gauzy dress of a deep pine green that accentuated her natural perfection. Her face was fresh and bright, berry juice tinting her lush lips a beautiful forest red. Unlike Talisa or her court ladies, El didn’t hide what they considered flaws. The scars along an upper arm, her chest, andneck, where dragonlings had raked their claws when her advanced healing powers had still been bound were faint but there, a reminder of her life in Nightguard, before she’d suspected she had a destiny as grand as this one.

Countless stares trailed my movements as I pressed a kiss to her lips, tasting the sweetness of fruit. “You and I will never be anything like them.”

“How can you be so sure?” Her gaze looked beyond me to the rows and rows of fae crowded around trees and bushes, occupying every free space.

We’d issued an open invitation to anyone who wished to see their new monarchs crowned. Fae from every segment of society—and from many of the uncivilized parts beyond it, too—had arrived: from the drakes and drakesses of the other seven clans to pygmy ogres—that one had surprised us—from the elusive river nymphs to the even more elusive wind sprites, to the changelings to the arbosauruses, who blended in among the other trees save for the way they shook suddenly, shocking anyone inattentive enough to lean against them.

I kissed El again. Her eyelids fluttered closed.

“I’m sure because I know you,” I said. “I know your heart. You want only the best for all the fae.”

“I really do,” she admitted, kissing me another time before opening her eyes.

“And you know I do as well,” I said.

“I do.”

“Besides, the land has chosen you.”

Her palm pressed to my tunic, over my heart. “It’s chosenus.”

“See?” I beamed at her. “We’ll be fine. The fae will be fine. Our world will heal.”

Her lips pulled back from mine to frown. “The land chose her too though.”

My spine stiffened some. “It did. But she wasn’t always the way she was at the end, or the land wouldn’t have.”

“Mmmmmmm.” Her stare scanned our audience. “The landwillbe sending someone to crown us, right? It’s how it’s always been done?”

We’d already been waiting too long. “Aye, of course, my love, since the creation of the Mirror World when the land crowned Prince Borromeo before he’d even found his queen. Whenever the land’s representative arrives, we’ll start. Everyone else is ready.”

It had also been El’s idea to issue special invitations to every kind of fae so that they might choose to send a representative of their own to the coronation. It was to be a symbolic gesture, but an important one, conveying that she and I would rule with the well-being of all as our priority.

Creatures and people had arrived in hordes over the previous week, filling the forest to bursting and beginning the long road to healing the prejudices among our kind that the former royals had fostered. We’d had to post guards throughout the woods to break up early brawls, but as the days had ticked by, the tensions had ebbed, until currently those who weresmall mixed with the large, and those who were brutish hovered protectively over the dainty.

The palace’s staff—staff, not servants anymore, and certainly not slaves—every member of the staff had been given the choice to stay or go—had been working tirelessly to prepare a feast capable of accommodating all of them, and cask after cask of golden wine and sunrise spirits also waited the festivities that would follow.

“Can’t say I’m not glad the umbracs didn’t show,” El said, again only for my ears. “If I never hear a single thing chitter again in my life, it’ll be too soon.” She shuddered at the memory of her time in the Sorumbra.

I chuffed, rubbing a hand along my short hair, still unused to the new length. “There are far worse fae out there than the umbracs that we can both be glad didn’t see fit to make the trek.”

“Oh.” She worried at her bottom lip. “Like what?”

I kissed her, trying to erase the worry. “No need to learn everything at once. We have long lifetimes together for that now.”

“Right.” She laughed, a low, soft trill. “I keep forgetting that part. We have centuries together now that…”

Though she didn’t say it, I could still guess at the rest of her thought:Now that we don’t have a raging, murderous bitch trying to kill us at every turn.

And with what relentless madness had the raging, murderous bitch tried to kill us. While we’d been busy repairing the kingdom since her death, we’d made anumber of alarming—though not entirely surprising—discoveries. Talisa had many more pieces lined up along the edges of her gameboard, ready to put into play. Thank the Ethers, she hadn’t had the chance to implement all parts of her strategy, or the results of our coup might have been quite different. There were starkly few members of the court she hadn’t wielded leverage over. Even the scaless Octavia Lily Rose, who was in line to inherit the title of visdrakess, and who’d grown close to El during the Nuptialis Probatio, would have had a difficult choice to make had Talisa forced her hand. Her twin Octavio Linden Oak had been one of the fae we’d recovered from the fae dungeon, where he’d been waiting for his sister to prove her loyalty to Talisa by betraying Elowyn—and if not that, then for his death and likely his sister’s as well. Story after story along those lines had surfaced, and it had been largely Talisa’s underestimation of the threat we posed that had spared us. It had taken us days to march to the palace, but despite all that time for her to prepare, Talisa had assumed she’d have another chance to defend herself.

More shocking was the discovery of journals and annals her predecessors had kept, dating back from the beginning of the Mirror World, detailing the progression of the study of power, magic, and essence, until it had devolved into the appropriation of others’ magic and life force to expand that of the royals.

Talisa’s magic had allowed her to manipulate the life force of others, a trait passed down through herfamily, who’d grown increasingly greedy and desirous of more than the land would provide them.

They’d begun taking the life force of one creature to stuff it into that of another, altering the other’s makeup in a way that they then passed down through their own breeding over the generations. Eventually a royal decided the dragons possessed the most potent of all magic, and their attention focused on them in earnest, to the exclusion of all others.

When Erasmus eradicated the dragons, he took their power into himself as they died, something his ancestors had never done. The king absorbed so much power that it eventually overloaded his system and killed him. That was a surprise: Talisa actually hadn’t ended her father. She had, however, taken his essence into herself when he’d died so as not to “waste it,” an admission we’d found scrawled in her own hand. That had been her first taste of another’s power, and it had been far from her last. She’d been torturing dragons for years to determine if their power would be greater if they gave it to her of their own will instead of her taking it by force. She never got what she wanted from them, not even when she began stealing the magic of hatchlings still in their eggs, presuming that the moment before birth was when power would be the purest and thus the strongest.

---