Page 50 of Across an Endless Sea

“You think I haven’t tried that?” I retort. “He won’t take it.”

Prae’s mouth snaps closed, and her grip on my bloody dress loosens enough that I can wrench myself away from the wall. Unfortunately, that’s where my freedom ends. She tugs me along a corridor and into a dusty, disused parlour.

She slams the door behind us and releases me in favour of pacing the space.

“I need you to swear to me that whatever magic you worked on Caed, it wasn’t the cause of this… obsession he’s developing with you,” she hisses, after several moments.

“I would never do something like that,” I reply, running a hand through my new shorter hair, trying to get used to the uneven length as I sink to my ass on the floor. “I didn’tmeanto do anything, and even if I did, I’d never want to mess with someone’s free will. I don’t know if you’ve realised, Fomorian, but I’m barely fae. My own Guard said I was barely better than a mortal.”

Drystan’s criticism has been going round and round in my brain since my very first days in Faerie, and I fully expect Prae to agree with him.

But she doesn’t.

Instead, she’s staring at me, open-mouthed.

“What rock-brained male put that stupid thought in your head?” she asks. “You’ve faced down Elatha without wetting yourself, which is more than can be said for a good third of your kind.”

I snort. “Oh great, my list of accomplishments begins and ends with ‘didn’t lose control of my bladder at the sight of the creepy enemy.’ They’ll definitely be writing songs about me for years to come.”

Prae smirks. “Careful, too much sarcasm and I’ll start to think Caed is rubbing off on you.”

Great, at least someone finds my depreciating self-talk amusing.I rub at my temples, trying to alleviate my ever-present headache. It’s no good. I’m doomed to suffer this migraine until I escape from this horrid mountain.

“Unless the oath is affecting him in some way I don’t know about, I’ve never done anything to influence his opinion of me,” I admit with a sigh, letting my head thunk back against the wall. “To be honest, if this is what him being obsessed with me looks like, I don’t want it. I wish I’d never come here. I just want to go home.”

The final words are barely a whisper, but Prae hears them and shakes her head.

“You were the idiot who got caught,” she mutters, coming to sit beside me in a strange moment of camaraderie. “But I suppose we’ll give you some credit. You had died twelve hours before, and Caed is creepily good at doing impersonations.”

I grimace, because that excuse won’t fly if I ever see Drystan again. The grumpiest member of my Guard willnotbe pleased to hear I fell for a glamoured version of him. Oh well, at least Lore will be happy to see me. Jaro too. I’m not sure about Bree, given how we left things, but I hope he can forgive me.

Thinking of the rest of my Guard only makes my homesickness worse, so I change the subject quickly.

“Will… will you be okay… with the challenge?”

Prae scoffs like the idea is ridiculous. “The challenge will be easy. That’s not the issue. The issue is that when I win, everything that was Lev’s becomes mine. The fucker is second in line to the throne.”

I frown, because I can’t see the problem there, and she sighs.

“Technically, I’m Elatha’s only niece. I should have Lev’s position, anyway. But my mother was a traitor.” Her hand comes up to rub her cloudy, scarred eye, and she sighs again. “Long story short, she tried to kill off all of Elatha’s children and convince the court that I was Balor reincarnated to take power for herself.”

“I take it that didn’t work.”

Prae shakes her head. “It backfired massively. She told Bres—Caed’s older brother—that Caed was a stain on the bloodline, and that he should challenge him. Bres was eager to prove himself, so it wasn’t hard to convince him. Caed won, of course. He was just a kid, but he couldn’t be killed and he had magic. But Bres’s death meant that Elatha lost his favoured heir—you can imagine he didn’t take kindly to discovering his only sister was responsible.”

She grimaces and looks away, suddenly interested in a large cobweb above the door. “He had my mother brutalised. She died horrifically, and her body was gibbeted from the walls for weeks, until it stank so badly that no one could pass under the gate without holding their breath.”

“What does that have to do with you?” I ask. “You weren’t involved, were you?”

“I was only six,” she says. “So no, I didn’t know anything. But Elatha removed me from the line of succession and made it clear I was tainted by association.” Her fingers brush her left eye—the cloudy one—for a brief second. “I’m alive and left to my own devices only because Caed protected me from the rest of our cousins and because I pose no threat. The moment I kill Lev, all of that changes.”

I chew at my lower lip. “Will Elatha hurt you?”

She shrugs. “I’ve given up trying to predict what he’ll do. Maybe he’ll send me to the front lines in the hopes that I’ll die there. It would be an easy move. There must be hundreds of fae who want a piece of my ass for what I did to their knight commander.”

“If you get me out of here,” I whisper, gut clenching in doubt at my own thoughts, but I’m committed now. “And my brother lives, then you can stay with me. I’ll order the fae to leave you alone. It probably wouldn’t be easy.” In fact, I’m sure being a Fomorian living among fae would be awkward at best. “But it would be safer.”

Bracing myself, because I’m almost certain that Prae will erupt at the idea of betraying her people, I’m surprised when she breaks out laughing. “Ancestors, can you imagine the chaos?”

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