Page 3 of Queen Takes Triune
I turned my head slightly and met Carys’ gaze. Descended from the Welsh goddess of spring, Carys Tylluan had joined me in New York. She wasn’t a strong queen—unless you counted a formidable ability to see numerical probabilities.
The kind of gift that a Triune candidate queen would value.
Keisha Skye, the former queen of New York City, had seen value in such a gift. After seeing how Carys helped me confirm the most likely path to defeating Ra, I could too.
I started to stand, Guillaume and Rik automatically moving with me and lifting me to my feet. G started to back away, but I lifted my wrist toward him. “You should feed so that you heal quicker.”
He caught my fingers in his and lightly pressed my wrist to his mouth, his lips caressing my skin. “I should decline and protest that I’m fine, but I can’t find it in me to ever refuse to taste you when you’re offering.”
He bit me so gently that I barely felt the piercing of his fangs in the tender skin of my inner wrist. The stroke of his tongue tightened muscles deep inside me. It’d be ridiculously easy to let things escalate, but I’d rather get home to my manor house before indulging.
I focused determinedly on Carys’s face and asked the hard question I’d been avoiding. “What’s the probability that I’ll be called to the Triune as they say?”
“One hundred percent.” Her eyes gleamed with excitement at the prospect, though her bond weighed that ambition with sympathy. A much older queen who’d known what she was from birth, Carys had been raised in a nest and instructed in Aima ways from the beginning.
I’d expected her excitement. Her gift seemed tailor-made to assist in the political gambles of the biggest game of all. However, the sympathy made my stomach clench.
“I saw the likelihood in New York,” she continued. “When you said you were going after Ra, I got chills down my spine and the hairs on my nape stood at attention. I still didn’t know how you could be successful against him, but it didn’t matter. I saw you taking a seat at a table with the crown on your head. I knew what it meant.”
Her owl chirped and Carys nodded. “True.”
“What?” I asked.
“I don’t knowwhichTriune is calling you, only that you will be called.”
Guillaume licked my wrist and lifted his head, but he kept my hand in his, his fingers warm and strong. Rik had his palm in the small of my back, a steady, formidable force. My lifelines, holding me steady. Keeping me from freaking out. “I didn’t know there was an opening on the Skolos court.”
Carys cocked her head slightly. “There isn’t. There are three queens on the Skolos Triune. One of them is related to your dragon.”
Mehen stepped closer, a sneer twisting his lips. “A Gorgon still lives? How’d I miss one?”
I blinked, surprised at the bloodthirsty tone of his voice, though with hindsight, I shouldn’t have been surprised in the slightest. Leviathan, king of the depths, had eaten so many Skye siblings in our fight that he’d been too miserably full to shift back to his human form. I couldn’t begin to imagine how many people he’d killed over the centuries, even though he’d been locked in a prison outside of our world for most of those years.
I just hadn’t expected that he’d have killed his own family.
He jerked his head to me, his eyes glittering like chips of emerald ice. “My own lovely mother exiled me from the nest the first time I shifted. I was seven years old. Not a single Gorgon nest would take me in. So yeah, I fucking destroyed them as soon as I grew enough in strength and age to accomplish the task.”
Mehen was an Aima king, so he could shift into his dragon without a queen’s blood to bring the gift alive inside him. They were notoriously dangerous to control. Guillaume had told me stories about a young king killing everyone in the nest accidentally.
My mighty dragon had gone back to do the deed on purpose.
He stood before me, eyes blazing with fury, his shoulders braced and wide, ready for a fight. His hands fisted at his sides. Outwardly, he was ready to tear me apart limb from limb.
Deep inside, all I could see was a dark-haired, green-eyed, skinny little boy, hugging his knees, huddled in a cave, cold and hungry and alone. Sobbing.
His pride kept him from ever admitting that he feared I would turn him away. He’d found acceptance in my nest, but deep inside him, the scared little boy still feared I’d abandon him, just like his mother. “You’remyking now, and I will never allow you to leave.”
His throat worked, his jaw clenching. He finally nodded but didn’t attempt to say anything. I deliberately focused on Carys to give him time to pull himself together. “If the Skolos Triune is full, then what do you meanwhichTriune?”
“The third court is a possibility.”
Originally, there’d been three courts of three queens, but the third court had died out ages ago according to Guillaume.
He nodded, confirming that memory. “But maybe Isis wants to revive that court.”
“Was it Her court before it died out?”
Carys shook her head. “No single goddess controls a Triune. It’s always been a trio, and to my knowledge, it’s been at least ten generations since an Isis queen sat on any Triune.”
