Page 86 of Fae Reckoning

Roan sniffed as those emerald-like eyes shone. “Thought he’d be with me for a few more decades at least. Raised ‘im from when he was wee, that I did.”

I’d done the same with Bolt. I’d seen his mother-mare push him out into this world. My stallion was bringing up the rear, several feet from the nearest lumoon, but I still could tell he was meeting my stare.Survive the day, boy, I pleaded silently.Please. He neighed softly and jerked his head up and down a fewtimes. I hoped that meant he’d find the way to keep safe. I didn’t want to have to do without him.

“May Rompa-Romp’s memory live forever,” Hiroshi offered so his words wouldn’t carry beyond the walls of the tunnel. “May his essence voyage to the Etherlands.”

Equally quietly, the rest of us, even Ivar, repeated the sentiment. Ivar was gazing at his horse, whom Edsel had healed until all that remained was a mild limp that would likely fully heal with more time. When Ivar caught me looking, he scowled and jerked his head away.

“For Rompa-Romp,” West said, “and for everyone else we’ve lost and who’s suffered for the cause.” The turmoil swirling on my friend’s face made it easy to guess he was thinking of all that Ramana had endured at the hands of the false queen.

“Now let’s move,” Xeno said at my back, stare pinned on Elowyn, as it so often was. “Our allies might be dying out there.”

Grimly, I nodded, as did several others. Xeno was right: any delay was unwarranted. But it had been all too easy to share some moments of connection when they might be our last. Without another word, Ryder swept aside a thick tapestry and allowed it to close behind him before Elowyn could follow. Moments later, he pulled it aside and stuck his head out.

“It’s clear.”

Before his assurance finished landing, Elowyn was out in the corridor with him. Then we were all stalkingwith hushed footfalls as rapidly as we could across a hall that served as a gathering place for guards and staff. It was wide enough to make me nervous to cross it, but not as cavernous as so many other spaces in the public areas of the palace. It was a fraction the size of the Hall of Mirrors or even the Great Salon of Delicacies. Thank the Ethers for small blessings.

When Ryder was mere paces from the next tapestry-concealed entrance, Gadiel, whom I’d last seen in the fae dungeon with his throat sliced open, materialized in front of it. A moment later, Lady Aleeza, who’d been icepicked to death at one of Talisa’s balls, appeared beside him. Their bodies wavered, the tapestry-lined wall showing through their translucent bodies.

A sense ofwrongnesssank into the marrow of my bones with an icy chill. I lurched forward to snag Elowyn and tucked her behind me. Xeno had lunged ahead, and he and Ryder formed a wall in front of my mate.

But Gadiel and Aleeza weren’t the only dead to make a reappearance. Several other translucent bodies had appeared between us and our retreat, and more were surrounding us.

Talisa’s trap had finally been sprung…

Weapons out, we huddled together as the specters solidified. A pygmy ogre, one of several, carried his severed head tucked under an arm. Bulging eyes blinked dully at us as the head licked its thick, worm-like lips.

“That’s totally disgusting,” said Zafi’s tiny voice from a patch of blank air. There wasn’t a single other sign that the parvnit was there and invisible—a skill I’d be grateful to also have at the moment.

While the pygmy-ogre head took us in, I recognized many more of the dead. Some of them had died soon after my arrival at court, a variety of lords and ladies I now had little doubt Talisa had murdered, who’d long ago faded from polite conversation. Among the more recently deceased, I spotted Sandor, the king’s potions master who was down one eye, which had apparently been gouged out, in addition to his tongue. Several of the females who’d vied to be my wife and who’d competed in the Nuptialis Probatio wore their fanciful dresses, hair piled in lurid colors, and vicious snarls upon their painted faces. Eliana, daughter of a viscount and viscountess whose parents had disappointed Talisa, stood at the front of a line of the young females, all of them rocking slowly back and forth.

More faces I vaguely recognized but couldn’t place for the discoloration and swelling they’d endured in death filled out the circle that was quickly tightening around us. Others were strangers, and interspersed among them were several more who carried their own heads: Yorgen and his wife Idra, whose children’s lives I’d saved; Millicent, who’d shed her feethle form for her female body, her usual disparaging sneer curling the lip of the head she carried in front of her body with both hands; and Russet Sterling, whose skull had been bitten off by the dragon head that had animatedfor Elowyn during her match against him in the Gladius Probatio. He’d been a bully and proud lackey of Lennox Heath. His morbid fate was one I didn’t mind.

I scanned the growing crowd, half expecting to find King Erasmus the Bloody and Crown Prince Saturn, who’d been a friend. At this rate, I expected Talisa to treat her father and son with such flagrant disrespect. But all I found were more unrecognizable grim, gruesome faces, many with their eyes, ears, or mouths severed—to become the disembodied observers Elowyn had described to me, surely. Clearly Talisa’s spies were every bit as nauseating as Elowyn had explained.

“What kind of sorcery is this?” Azariah asked in a wheeze of fright that I wouldn’t have recognized as his had I not been standing near him. His tail, mane, and wings shivered.

“This,” Ivar said with a dour press of his lips, “is blood magic.”

“The magic so dark it was forbidden by our ancestors, when they still lived in Faerie,” Azariah said.

“The very one.” Ivar was sounding more like our ally than before, as if even he finally saw Talisa for the monster she truly was.

“Thisis how the queen’s become immortal?” Elowyn asked.

“No, I don’t think so,” Ivar answered. “I think she uses blood magic only to control them.” He frowned. “Or maybe? I’m not really sure. I knew she used the dead as spies, but I never…” He shook his head. “I never imagined this.”

“Will killing them hurt her?” West asked.

“Canwe even kill them?” Reed chimed in. “They are, after all, already dead. How do we kill something that no longer carries an essence?”

That was an excellent question, to which none of us had an answer. Silence descended upon our group, made all the more noticeable by the low-pitched moaning from the dead—or was itundead?

“At least they’ve stopped,” Ryder said, but that was little consolation. They were here to kill us. Or at least to stop us from interfering with Talisa, who wanted to kill us.

Hiro and Reed had moved to stand at my back—or Elowyn’s back, really; we were all protecting her. I spun in place to take a quick count of our enemy. It seemed the last of them had finished materializing and were rapidly solidifying.

“Tula?” The name tumbled from my lips before I fully registered what I was seeing.

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