Page 63 of Fae Reckoning

Elowyn looked back and forth between us. “What’s going on?”

Larissa held my stare as she answered. “Nothing for you to worry about. You have enough to think about since it looks like it’s on you to save the world.” The sorrow of her eyes extended to her smile. “Is that about right?”

Elowyn breathed slowly. “Yep. Looks like it.”

“Then how do we help you get it done?”

Steadying Saffron with a hand, Elowyn stood. “Best I can figure, first we see if there’s any way to save anyone else the queen’s been draining before she kills them all. See if my map is really gone or if there’s a chance we can get it back. Maybe Ivar will be more forthcoming now that the queen essentially left him to die at our hands. And then after all that, we build a fucking army.” Her eyes flared violet as they blazed into mine. “We murder the queen. Free the dragons and everyone else who’s been under her tyrannical rule. Then you and I become king and queen of Embermere, true stewards of the Mirror World.”

To hear her speak with such determination, as if our victory were a given fact, stirred power in my veins.Here is my queen.

“When I touched the land…” Our companions stopped whatever they were doing to listen. “Well, the land and I connected. It … they, maybe?—I dunno, but they spoke to me.”

Several of the others drew in sharp breaths. My heart pounded.

“Do ya mean ya actually heard the voice of our sacred land, lass?” Roan asked, his usual gruffness subdued.

“I do, and I did.”

More gasps.

“Never heard o’ such a thing,” Roan added.

“She’s the one to save us all,” Edsel put in. “I knew it. Didn’t I tell ye, Elowyn?”

She chortled darkly. “You did. Shortly after you tried to kill me for daring to consider Pru a friend, if you recall.”

“You didwhat?” I snarled at Edsel, discovering Ivar’s cutlass suddenly in my grip.

“It’s a long story, Rush,” she said. “And everything’s fine now.”

“Tell me,” I growled at the goblin. How dare he threaten my mate?

I felt her hand on my shoulder before I registered that she’d moved. “There are too many stories and too many updates to share now. After this is all over, we’ll have all the time we want to catch each other up.”

“Is that a promise?” The question came out with a serrated edge, as if I barely dared contemplate a lifetime with her for fear that it would be snatched away from me.How easily your faith comes, Rush. How easily it goes.

To Edsel, El said, “Maybe to make up for holding a blade to my throat”—she squeezed my arm so I wouldn’t leap over the bodies between us to throttle the traitorous goblin—“especially when I was so close to dying”—a vicious growl ripped from my throat, but I stayed for my mate—“you’ll do me the favor of checking on Larissa.”

“What’s wrong with ‘er?” Edsel asked, peering at her from a couple of patients over. “Mmmm. She ain’t quite right, I can see that now. What ails ye, girly?”

Larissa sighed and set down the bowl of gruel. Absently, she trailed gentle fingers alongthe forehead of the fae in her lap. So gentle and kind, my sister, so magical. The world would be such a darker place without her in it.

“I’ve been sick for a long time,” Larissa eventually said, her voice as soft as a whisper, as if she didn’t want to admit to the burden she’d carried so stoically and for so long. “It would have killed me a long time ago, except for what Rush has done.” Unshed tears glistened in her eyes as she gazed at me. I didn’t deserve them.

“He’s sacrificed everything for me,” she continued. “Thanks to him, Braque’s been giving me one of his powerful healing potions once a month all this time. It’s the only thing that’s kept me alive.”

“How long,exactly, since the last one?” I asked around a tight throat.

She shrugged. “I was overdue when she put me on that stage.”

“Dammit!”

Edsel frowned. “And what is it exactly that ails ye, girly?”

Larissa looked everywhere but at me or him and shrugged again. “No one knows. It’s so rare an ailment that it doesn’t even have a name. If not for Braque’s genius with alchemy … well, I wouldn’t be here. And if not for all that Rush’s done, the queen wouldn’t have agreed for Braque to help me.”

“See?” Ivar piped up from where he still sat out of our way, bound to the chair. Xeno continued to guard him, but the changeling no longer bothered withquestioning. Ivar’s face was distorted with swollen, discolored bumps, covered in cuts, smeared with blood. The male was prepared to die for his precious queen. The snakes slumbered atop his lap in a perturbing scene that Hiroshi would probably erase soon. There was no point to torturing the advisor if he wouldn’t help us subdue the queen no matter what we did to him.

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