Page 77 of A Reign of Roses
“So the only army we’re waiting on is Onyx’s?”
Kane and I remained silent and Hart loosed a long, irritated sigh. He was right. Onyx and Hart’s rebels alone, as fearsome as both armies were, couldn’t defeat all of Lazarus’s Fae soldiers. Let alone their allies of Amber and Garnet, too.
“Do we have any other options to take Peridot’s place?”
There were nine kingdoms in Evendell. Not counting Onyx and Peridot, or Amber and Garnet—who had long ago aligned with Lazarus—that left Jade, which was uninhabited; Pearl, which was army-less, too, its precarious location high above the clouds serving as defense enough; and Opal, which was a sprawling no-man’s-landwith only a handful of territories and a treaty that declared them neutral in all wartime affairs.
“Citrine?” Hart suggested.
“We tried,” I said. “They won’t fight with us.”
“And Arwen broke their prince’s heart,” Kane added with a cruel smirk. “Which didn’t help.”
Hart grinned at me like that was a delectable piece of information.
“That only leaves the Quartz of Rose.”
Kane shook his head. “The Scarlet Queen—”
“Now she,” Hart mused, “was the greatest fuck. But the things she wanted me to do to her a—”
“Hart,” Valery admonished.
He went wide-eyed. “What? People love that story!”
Kane rolled his eyes. “The Scarlet Queen is mad.”
Hart waggled his eyebrows at me as if to say,Yeah she is.
I couldn’t decide if I found him repulsive or adorable. A bit of both?
“And,” Kane continued, “she’s got her own unruly kingdom to keep an eye on. The southern dissenters still threaten to wage war on the north, and they’ve only grown stronger the past few years.”
“Couldn’t we try to convince her? Rose won’t be spared by Lazarus. Hart, if you’ve had…intimate relations with the queen, wouldn’t she be open to discussing with you?”
Hart shook his head. “Only if you were willing to tramp out her enemies in the south. Frankly, you’d have better luck tracking down Aleksander’s army.”
“No.”Kane’s voice hadn’t sounded so uncompromising the entire afternoon.
Aleksander…
My mind drifted to a conversation Kane and I’d had in his cabin in Crag’s Hollow that rainy, harrowing night.
“I even convinced Aleksander Hale to join us, the leader of a peculiarly savage race of Fae called Hemolichs…they draw power from corpses, wounds, even their own injuries, making them unmatched warriors. Some drink the blood of animals, mortals, or other Fae to keep their lighte strong.”
“Why not?” Valery asked Kane.
“He hasn’t been seen in decades. And even if he had—I wouldn’t trust that filthy Blood Fae for all the coin in this realm.”
A smile leapt up Hart’s face. “Lovers’ quarrel?”
“I watched hundreds hanged because of him,” Kane growled. “My own mother and brother among them.”
It was Griffin who had told me that Aleksander’s men, his army of Hemolichs, were enslaved by Lazarus and used like prized fighting dogs. That Aleksander had agreed to fight in Kane’s rebellion, but instead gave them up to Lazarus in turn for freedom for his people. By the time Kane and a handful of Fae escaped Lumera and he went looking for Aleksander, the Hemolich was gone. The last they’d heard, he’d used his army to help the mad queen of Rose, Ethera, win her civil war against the south, and hadn’t been heard from since.
“You didn’t kill him?” Hart asked, as if it were expected protocol to eviscerate any man who betrayed you.
“He’s been hiding from me for fifty years.”
