Page 12 of Queen of Ever

‘I’ll be right back,’ I said, running a hand down the smooth curve of her beak.She watched me with a single, narrowed yellow eye, like she didn’t believe me.A chill breeze swept through the canyon, reaching beneath my shirt and skating over my skin, and I suppressed a shudder as I eyed the dark path I was about to tread.‘Don’t stray.’

She rumbled in the back of her throat, gaze fixed on the cave mouth as I left her and walked towards it, magic already buzzing at my fingertips in anticipation.Ethan had sourced directions to this particular canyon, one marked by scorched ground and shaped like a crescent moon, and he’d been shifty in revealing how he’d attained the information.I knew it was as rash as Arun had warned to come here on such shady intelligence, so rash I hadn’t told him I was going.It would only worry him, and I’d made up my mind to go no matter what he said.

The ground dropped steeply away, descending into a dusty dark that felt like it would swallow me.But walking into it was still better than doing nothing, still better than waiting around reading reports and dreaming of Imogen.Shafts of daylight cut through the shadows ahead, like pinpricks of reality reaching into the depths of possibility, and I sought them out, bound in the oppressive sense of unwelcome that weighed down on me, as present as the humidity.Leave,the walls seemed to whisper.You don’t belong here.And as a High Fae prince, I didn’t.But I went anyway.

The path levelled out, still muddled with shafts of filtered daylight, opening into a wide cavern that echoed with my footsteps.The air was thick, dormant, and it settled over me like something sticky.As I picked my way into the cavern, I began to catch sight of shards of bone in the sand.Ribs and knuckles and skulls.Animal, mostly, but not all.When my gaze caught on something glinting up at me from beneath what looked like a pelvis, I bent, plucked it up and twisted it this way and that in a beam of light.A green gemstone the size of a grape.I rolled it between my fingers.

‘How fortunate,’a voice hissed, wrapping around me, shivering across my skin and raising the hairs on the back of my neck.‘It has been long since a High Fae has been foolish enough to wander into my lair.’

I dropped the gemstone and dusted my fingers off on my shirt.‘Ruisin?’I called.In the depths of the cavern, something was moving in the dark, unfurling with a crunching of sand and clinking of stones.A luminous eye blinked open, reflecting the light like a cat’s.A deep, rumbling growl shook the ground as the eye began to move, drawing closer, and a head began emerging around it.I couldn’t help the thrill of fear that sent me jolting back a step and turned my fingertips cold with magic waiting to be unleashed.A long, scaled snout baring teeth as long as my forearm, two enormous curling horns.A burst of hot air pummelled into me as he growled again, and it reeked of smoke and decay.I began to see vivid flashes of those teeth sinking into my flesh, those huge, clawed feet gripping me, as the fear became a frantic, high-pitched demand torun.

‘Who is this boy who speaks my name as though he has a right to know it?’

I shuddered at the words spoken directly into my mind, disgusted with the oily feeling they left behind, like I’d been invaded by a foreign presence in my own damn head.

‘Someone who has brought you a gift,’ I said, trying to rein in that bodily fear and keep my voice forceful, full of the authority I had to try to wield.Slowly, I bent low, rolled the fat, glistening orb of black opal across the floor, flashing seams of red and blue and green as it caught in a beam of sunlight.Plucked from among my grandmother’s treasures.There was nothing like consulting the tastes of one old dragon to appease another.Ruisin lowered his snout to it, gave a huffing sniff that stirred the dust, sending particles spiralling through the beams of sunlight.‘And someone who knows you were present when Oberon split the lands of the Seelie and Unseelie.’

He drew back, turning his head until he fixed me with his other eye.‘You seem to know many things you ought not to, faeling.I’ve long been written from Oberon’s story and left to rot in my exile.’

‘If you help me, I couldendyour exile.’

Ruisin’s head stopped swaying, stilling as his eye narrowed.With another buffet of hot, stinking breath, he opened his maw, displaying all those pointed teeth, androared.I cringed down as the sound shook the cave, sending streams of dust trickling from the ceiling.He kept his teeth bared as he drew closer to me again, pacing forward and revealing the rolling, muscled body at the end of his neck, easily big enough to swallow me whole and still be hungry for more.A pair of wings were folded into his sides, their ends dragging on the floor.

‘Do not toy with me by offering that which you cannot give.There is little to hunt in these lands.I will be glad to make a meal of you.’

‘I don’t make idle promises.I’m the heir to the Unseelie throne.If I don’t have the power to end your exile now, one day I will.’

He snapped his jaw shut.‘A prince, is it?’His head drew closer, tilting to better see me.‘Moriana’s boy.’The words resonated in my head with more weight than the others he’d spoken, making me grit my teeth against the sensation, leaving me with the conviction that he knew my mother personally.And that it would only make him more likely to eat me.‘Then the royal line only grows stupider as the eons pass.You’ve no power while you are only heir to a throne, and I am not so isolated that I don’t know of your prophecy, prince.’

‘A temporary barrier.I’ll wear that crown one day.I might not be able to repay a favour until then, but if you’ve been around since the days of Oberon, what’s a bit more time?’

‘And what sort of help are you seeking?’

‘A halfling friend of mine told me your history and where to find you.I mean no disrespect in coming here.I’m only looking for information.’

He considered me for a long, tense moment, raking me over with that unblinking eye.Then he huffed and withdrew his head, turning on his great haunches as his body began to warp, shift, scales rippling as his legs shortened, his tail and his wings rescinding, his entire being shrinking down, down, down, until I was no longer raising my eyebrows in disbelief at a dragon, but at a naked man poking around a mound of what looked like rags mingled with gemstones, tarnished silverware and jewellery that had been hidden beneath his massive bulk a few moments ago.He was huge, broad-backed and taller than me by at least a head, and I wasn’t exactly diminutive.He fished what looked like a tattered old towel out of the pile and shook some of the dust and sand free, before tying it around himself and turning back to me.His skin was weathered to an almost leather-like appearance and covered in old wounds that stood out in pale scar tissue.There was one across his chest that looked like he’d just about been split from collar to sternum at some point, and I wondered who would be bold enough to take a blade to a dragon like that.Wondered with even more interest what sort of blade they’d had that could cut through dragon hide, which was supposed to be almost impenetrable.The only vestiges of his dragon form that remained were the pair of curling horns poking out of his matted hair, and those unnerving eyes that he fixed back on me.

‘No funny business, prince.I could eat you in this form just as well as I could in the other,’ he said, beckoning me over with a wave of his hand.‘Let’s not stand here in the entrance way like a couple of idiots.’

Warily, I followed him deeper into the cave system, keeping magic prickling at my fingertips the whole time.The cavern narrowed, becoming a cramped doorway which I had no idea how Ruisin even fit through.I had to turn my shoulders sideways and squeeze through in a half crouch before I finally emerged on the other side in a cozy little burrow that looked like it may have been hewn out of the rock with claws and teeth.It contained a couple of chairs, a shabby little bed, and it was lined with shelves displaying what must have been the dragon’s most prized treasures.Fat gemstones of every colour, a gold chalice, a dagger with a rough wooden hilt but a blade that gleamed strangely, like it had been dipped in moonlight.

‘You’ll not hold your magic half-cocked throughout our whole conversation, will you?’Ruisin’s words interrupted my thoughts, and I returned my attention to him to see he’d sunk into one of the chairs.‘It gives me a headache to feel it humming away.’

It made me feel a little dizzy to keep it at the ready, so I wasn’t much keen for that either.‘No tricks?’

‘I’m the one who has been exiled and reviled by your kind, boy.I should be the wary one and yet here I am, inviting you into my trove.You could stand to have a little more courage.’

Flexing my fingers, I let the magic settle, drawing away from my hands until it was just a sleeping fizzle in my blood one again.

‘So, a halfling friend sent you to me.Have relations between high and lesser fae improved so much that you can call one another friend now?’

I didn’t know how to respond to that comment, and remembering what Ethan had told me about Ruisin, I thought it better not to get into talking politics with him.‘He told me you were the one who brought the different factions of lesser fae together to accept Oberon as High King.’

‘A fat lot of good it did me.Look at the squabbling that has broken out since then.Wars and hierarchies and a split kingdom.Oberon’s dream was of a united land, not of what this realm has become.’

‘Were you there when the treaty between Seelie and Unseelie was written, too?’

‘I was.’His expression grew shadowed.‘A treaty that would never have been necessary if Oberon hadn’t been so blinded by the love of his sons that he decided to split the land across the Sunder in the first place.I warned him it would only lead to ruin, but he had seen too much success by then.It drove all the realism out of his head.Made him forget why we worked to unite the land in the first place.’

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