ARWEN
IT WAS SHAMEFUL HOW LONG it took for the reality of our new situation to dawn on me. Far, far too long. I’d been so distracted by my injuries and
Kane and our reunion that I hadn’t put the most obvious new piece of our complex puzzle together in my mind—
Kane had become full-blooded Fae, like me. Like his father. He was now capable of taking my place in the prophecy.
Which meant the truth I’d spent so many months coming to terms with
—that even though I wanted more than anything to live, I would die to save Evendell, to save my family, and my friends, and the man I loved—it wasn’t the case anymore.
One of us would have to die to end Lazarus, as stated clearly in the seer’s words, but now it was possible it could be him.
Which would mean I would live. A near eternity without Kane. Knowing he had paid the ultimate price for my life.
I grasped at the stitches across my stomach as it heaved, Kane’s reassuring hand stroking my ankle once more.
This time it did nothing to soothe me.
Before this war was over, one of us would be dead.
One of us would leave the other behind. Alone. A greater suffering than anything I could imagine. There was no other way Lazarus’s reign could end.
While I bowed to this ruinous realization, the strategizing had continued around me.
“We don’t need to kill him,” Hart was saying. “Just to sack his city. Slay his army. Destroy his power source, which, thanks to your woman, has already been halved at least.”
“I’ve been exactly where you are,” Kane swore, deadly calm. “I know how this goes, Hart. All of your men will die.”
Hart shrugged. “Perhaps, but is that not the risk each one of them signed up for?”
Oh, no.
Sometimes it surprised me how well Kane and I knew each other. We’d only met less than a year ago, and in that time gone with whiplash quickness from precarious allies to adversaries to friends, and now to something deeper, and much more profound than a couple. If I believed in such things, I would have called him my soulmate.
Which meant I knew what Hart’s blind focus on beating Lazarus would elicit in the man beside me. What his own demons—the men and women, the family he’d lost when afflicted by the same thing—would bring out in him.
Sure enough, Kane stood from the bed in an instant, his lighte rumbling. Sharp shadows of black and wisps of nightshade twined around his knuckles and wrists as he snarled, “You smug sack of shit.”
Valery crossed the room as quickly as I’d seen her move and placed herself in front of Hart and the sideboard. I sat up, my own warm lighte coursing down my veins and toward my fingertips in a way I’d only ever associated with seeing someone who needed to be healed. Some corner of my mind wondered if I were to look down, if I, too, would see yellow rays of light wreath themselves around my palms.
“Are you really so eager to cash in the lives of those who have put their faith in you?”
“All right,” the rebel cautioned, still seated atop his sideboard. “All right. Easy, everyone. Kane, your point is taken.”
He might have been placating him, as I knew it was fear that filtered through Hart’s viridian eyes, but Kane surprised us both by breathing out evenly and running a hand through his hair. Silently, the dark talons and thorns around his forearms retreated into his tanned skin.
“So,” Hart tried, calmer but still guarded. “Where is this blade you need?”
Kane scratched his neck. Silence gobbled up the cabin. My heart plummeted.
“You’re fucking with me.” Hart bit back a laugh. “Right?” “Kane,” I breathed. “You left it there?”
“When I awoke,” Kane said, voice like gravel, “remade, he’d fled with it. I searched for him, and found you with that kingsguard…” A haunting, sorrowful expression contorted his face.
I fought the urge to scramble toward him and deposit myself into his arms. We had been apart for too long, and I wanted to hold him. Instead I said to Hart and Valery, “We may have one last card to play.”
Kane cocked his head in silent question. “Amelia is in Solaris.”
His brows knit inward in sympathy. “Arwen…She isn’t—”
“I know. She told me everything. I still think we can work with her. All she wants is safety for her people. She knows us winning this war is the best outcome for Peridot.”
Kane was not having any of it. Cold fury burbled up where so much love had just occupied his silver eyes. “You want me to trust Amelia—”
“Another great fuck,” interrupted Hart, who was examining his dirtied nails.
Once again Kane didn’t bat an eye. “After she betrayed us to side with Lazarus? After she had her own father killed? After she signed your fucking death sentence?”
“Sheesh,” Hart muttered. “What a bitch.”
“Bird,” Kane tried, softer this time. “I’m not trying to insult you. Your positivity is one of my favorite things about you. But don’t you think it’s a little naive to believe that—”
“I said work with her. Not trust her. Hart, do you think you can get word to Amelia somehow? To tell her that if she can find the blade and bring it back to Onyx, we swear to spare her life despite her betrayal?”
“Arwen—” Kane nearly raged.
“Wait,” Hart interrupted. “You don’t even have your alliance with Peridot anymore?”
“No,” I admitted.
“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-land with 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.”
“Vendetta like that…” Hart shook his unruly head of hair. “Why’d you stop looking?”
“I had…” Kane tucked his chin down as if he’d almost faced me but thought better of it. “Other priorities.”
“Well,” Hart said, letting his leg drop over the edge of the sideboard. “He’s in Rose, somewhere.”
“What gives you that idea?”
“Ethera told me. When we were…” Hart jerked his chin toward me with a boyish smirk. “Having intimate relations, as you said. The two of them made a blood oath years ago. Probably right around the time he left Lumera and swore his army to her cause.”
“What was the nature of the oath?” Hart shrugged. “No clue.”
Kane scratched his chin in thought. “I always assumed a mortal like Ethera never aged due to some kind of spell or curse…Seems it’s the blood oath that keeps her so young.”
“And so fucking crazy…” Hart said, eyes glazing over as if recalling a specific memory. When Valery cleared her throat, Hart’s eyes found ours and he schooled his face. “Look, betrayal a half century ago or not, Aleksander Hale’s Blood Fae army is ten times more powerful than Rose’s mortal one. They’re machines. They draw their power from blood. Drinking it, pulling from people’s bodies, corpses, necrophilia, lathering themselves in it…You know what that means? Carnage, war, losing a fucking limb—it only makes them more powerful.”
“I know that,” Kane gritted out. “It’s why my father enslaved them in the first place. Both to fight for Solaris and to keep them from turning that power against him.”
“You’re going to let your hurt feelings stop you from using an army like that?”
Kane remained silent, though his jaw had gone rigid.
“He tried once,” I said softly. “We have no reason to believe Aleksander wouldn’t deceive us again.”
“Gods, he betrayed the fallen son of Lazarus. Who’s now full-blooded… He’s a dead man anyway. He’d probably be thrilled to work off his debt to you.”
Kane only said, “We’ll get through to Ethera, somehow.”
“So,” I said, my mind swimming a bit with all the new information. “Hart will get word to Amelia to somehow extricate the blade from the palace in Solaris in return for her life, and we’ll speak with the Scarlet Queen and convince her to rally her army for our cause? Without endangering thousands of southern Rose lives…”
The sharp-boned witch nodded in my direction, though Hart’s expression darkened with doubt. And I didn’t blame him. It was ambitious at best.
“Amelia won’t believe you and I are aligned,” Kane said to the rebel. “Her default is distrust. Here.”
Kane pulled his mother’s black signet ring from his pinky and offered it to Hart. “She knows what it means to me. Tell her it’s a sign of my word.”
Amelia, who had been one of Kane’s closest friends. One of his only friends. Who knew his history, his suffering—my heart stirred for the bond they’d both lost.
Hart nodded, placing the onyx-and-silver ring in his pocket with care.
“Once we have our armies and the blade,” I said, “we’ll bring everyone back here. How long do you think it will take Lazarus to rebuild even half the lighte we destroyed?”
“Two weeks,” Hart said. “Three, tops.” “We’ll move quickly, then,” Kane said.
I was way ahead of him, already easing myself from the bed and sliding on borrowed boots.
Kane motioned back toward me. “Thank you again, Hart.”
“Don’t mention it.” Hart hopped down from his spot atop the sideboard. “Kane, once we win….” For the first time, Hart appeared less assured. He
shot Valery a look that I couldn’t quite read. “I don’t want our good men to war over the throne, and I know it’s your birthright, but—”
Kane shook his head. “It was my brother’s, not mine.”
An ache pulled at my chest with his words. With the memories I knew plagued him. Kane never wished to usurp his father. Not before he rebelled, not after when he inherited the throne from King Oberon in Onyx, and absolutely not now that he was full-blooded. It was his father’s dream to have a true Fae heir on the Lumerian throne. Kane would never fulfill it.
Hart remained silent, showing a tact I’d yet to see from the spirited would-be king. He was waiting Kane out. Allowing him to make the first offer.
“Should we win,” Kane said in the end, “as the son of Lazarus, I will crown you king of Lumera. You have the people of this realm behind you, and that’s what matters. In return, I only require that you will agree to a handful of my political requests, no questions asked.”
“A generous offer.” Hart grinned broadly. “And one I’ll gladly accept.”
“You’ve proven yourself a decent man,” Kane said. “Perhaps a pig, but…”
Hart only laughed, rough and genuine. “Perhaps so. But I love this land. I love these people. And each one of them deserves a life better than this one.”
“Indeed.” Kane nodded. “It will bring me great relief to see you take his throne.”
“Me, too, friend.”
Kane extended his hand and the two men shook.
For some near-indescribable reason, the simple act made my throat tighten with emotion. I wondered if I’d just beheld something very pivotal for the future of all realms.
Kane’s bright eyes on mine told me he felt the same. “Do you have a steed to spare? I’ve always found the first few days of the channel easiest on horseback.”
Hart shook his head. “We don’t have that kind of time. Valery and her coven can open a portal between realms.”
Valery nodded to us both and excused herself, and Hart followed suit before stopping in the doorway. “If we succeed, there will be ballads written about this afternoon.”
Kane grinned that chilling, glittering smile of his and my heart thumped at his devastating beauty, multiplied only by his joy. “I hope they leave out how many powerful women you’ve fucked.”
Hart beamed. “I don’t.”
The door closed softly behind him, leaving just Kane and me, alone again at last.
He took a tentative step toward me and leaned down, brushing his thumb across my cheek and cradling my jaw. The curve of his silver rings slid gently along my chin.
Those slate eyes were tired, his face bruised, his hair shiny and tousled around his face.
I’d never be used to his heartbreaking looks.
I tried to swallow them, but tears pricked at my eyelids and slid silently down one cheek and then the other. Kane’s brows knit inward, worried.
But I shook my head and covered his warm, large hand with mine. We were going home.
