Page 23 of Pining for the Prince
How Gwil had got the information about a potential missing stone was a different story. Despite Gwil saying he hadn’t slept with Chase, Hyax couldn’t believe he’d have refused the attentions of a Queen’s Concubine, they’d been trained to deliver ultimate pleasure and were masters of seduction. It hurt to think about how either Gwil had lied to him, or he had somehow developed trust issues because of his jealousy. But that would need to wait, there were bigger things at stake than his heart.
Queen Talia folded her arms across her chest, her expression neutral, as Hyax approached. “Son or not, you do not barge in here uninvited.”
“I know about the Stone of Ljin.” He sat in the chair opposite. “I won’t be sent away so easy as last time I asked what is going on.”
“What is it you think you know?” she asked. He’d seen her act like this with senior politicians, both fae and from other species, but never with him.
“That the one currently mounted on the Coronet of Alphal is fake, and you have no idea where the real one is or who took it.” The latter part was conjecture based on Goya being involved. No way would Talia have resorted to outside help if it had been something she could have rectified herself.
“A bold claim. One you can substantiate?”
“Chase.”
Her eyes narrowed and her nostrils flared. “Listening to a traitor? Not a very princely thing to do.”
“I might have dismissed it if he hadn’t been the victim of an orc attack to keep him quiet, or that Goya hasn’t been a visitor, meaning you think it’s somewhere in the human realm.”
“You’ve always been the smartest of my children. There are days when I believe that we shouldn’t risk the succession to the chance of whoever is born first.”
“You’ve always underestimated Wavel.” He didn’t mention that Pawl, oldest and next in line, was not what he’d consider to be an intellectual, but he at least wasn’t naïve and would listen to his siblings for guidance.
She smiled, a knowing look suggesting she knew what he was doing. “Rather than explain this to you and have to repeat it all to others I will call everyone together. Meet me in the family room in an hour. That should be sufficient to round them all up.”
He headed to his suite, preferring to spend the time alone in a place he wasn’t going to be disturbed. It felt strange to fly through the halls of the castle knowing that most of those he passed would have no idea of the lurking concern. It wasn’t justthat the stone was missing, but that they didn’t know who had taken it.
An hour sounded a little excessive to him, but he’d not expected her to admit anything so quickly so he wouldn’t push. This was a victory, and he might be able to offer his further involvement through the work he did with Gwil. They had built a solid reputation over the years, his mother commenting a number of times that it was good for him to have an interest outside his royal duties—the part about Gwil being a vampire she wasn’t so enthusiastic about. He buried the pang of jealousy at the thought of Gwil and Chase. What did the traitor have that Hyax didn’t? Or maybe Gwil hadn’t been lying. Chase was capable of engineering a situation to his advantage and Gwil had been angry, and defensive, when Hyax had accused him of fucking a flower fairy.
He couldn’t let himself brood on this. Gwil wasn’t his boyfriend, he could sleep with whoever he wanted. There’d been a couple of incidences of late where they’d both been touchy over the other one going out, but was he trying to read something into the situation that wasn’t there?
Hyax changed into clothes more fitting for a fae meeting than a human assembly, nothing formal but jeans, no matter the designer, were not suitable, neither was a T-shirt. A tailored mandarin-collared jacket and matching trousers were a better choice. Once dressed, he didn’t have that much time left to get to the family room, which was the inner sanctum where a handful of trusted servants were the only non-family members allowed inside.
Hyax took the circular staircase closest to his rooms as far down as they would go, and a left turn to what appeared to be a dead end, but as Hyax approached a doorway opened and he entered the larger circular chamber known as the family room. His parents and four siblings were already there. His sistersFazat and Qual were seated at the table on either side of Pawl and there was an empty seat for him next to Wavel.
“Now we are complete, I can begin,” Talia said from her position at the head of the table. “We have a serious situation that, up until now I, as your queen, have been handling on behalf of the tribe. However, as information is beginning to leak out, I felt it was time to bring you all into my confidence. I can only stress this is a delicate situation, not even the other tribal leaders are aware.”
Hyax had suspected there would be a spin to the way the news would be delivered, and his role in the timing would go unsaid.
“It has recently come to our attention that the Stone of Ljin mounted on the Coronet of Alphal is a replica. Despite extensive investigations, we are still unable to ascertain exactly when the switch was made or by whom, or where the original may currently be.”
Pawl hissed, and Fazat gasped. Several people tried to talk at once but Talia brought them to order. “Settle down, this is no way to communicate.”
“That’s why Goya was here, wasn’t it?” demanded Wavel. Hyax’s siblings were furious, which was to be expected. “Do you think the stone is in the human realm?”
“Yes, in both cases. A series of raids has been conducted but with little outcome. I will make the security council reports available to you all and you’ll see the exhaustive nature of our efforts to date. But the reality is, the human realm is not somewhere we have jurisdiction or in-depth knowledge, which is why we engaged Goya and his team.”
If he hadn’t prior knowledge, he would have been as shocked as his siblings but even this short amount of time had given him space to think.
“But this can’t be the humans. Apart from it being unlikely they would know of the stone’s existence, none of them would have been able to infiltrate the fae realm. It must be one of the paranormal species that are cohabiting,” Hyax said. “Do you have a suspect?”
“You’re right about the humans, and there are more likely culprits than others. As you can imagine we can hardly accuse anyone as first we would have to admit there was something missing.”
“Any reports of the wider fae population realising?” Pawl asked.
Hyax hesitated, but knew if he didn’t mention his experience and it became known later he’d be reprimanded. “I was working on a retrieval case in London, and I noticed an interference of sorts. Nothing major, and I was balancing three different spells at the time.”
The look his mother gave him was all the confirmation needed that she already knew about his unpermitted use of the portals. “Similarly to Hyax’s experience there have been a handful of cases where more complicated spellcraft was being used and the caster felt a lapse in concentration or slight loss of control. But nothing from the wider population up until now. There’s been no intelligence from the other tribes so we can infer it’s fairly contained.”
Qual’s brow crumpled, his older sister was a healer by training, and like his other siblings she had a different flavour in her skills. “That’s unlikely to last indefinitely. Are the other stones somehow compensating?”
