Crown of Crystal Flame (7 page)

At last, after what seemed like an eternity, the door opened again. King Dorian’s valet, Marten, stepped into the sitting room. “Great Lord Sebourne? His Majesty will see you now.”

“That dimskull Dorian has reinstated Sebourne.”

Ellysetta looked up at Rain in shock as he shed his golden war steel and prepared for bed. “What?”

“Aiyah.
Told me so himself half a bell ago.” Rain dragged a hand through his hair in a distracted gesture and sighed. “I suppose I shouldn’t call Dorian a dimskull. We’re desperate for troops. I can understand why he did it.” He met her gaze. “But I have a bad feeling about this, Ellysetta. I don’t trust Sebourne.”

“You think he will betray us?”

Rain shrugged. “I don’t know. I told Dorian he should at least let Gaelen check Sebourne and his men for Marks, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Sebourne is still a powerful, well-connected Great Lord with many supporters. He fears that alienating Sebourne—especially after what happened with Colum—would spark a civil war.”

“He may be right.”

“I know.” Rain slid under the covers and pulled Ellysetta into his arms. “But I still have a bad feeling about this.”

Rain’s bad feeling left Ellysetta just as unsettled as he was. It took her a while to get to sleep, and when she finally did, she dreamed. Images flickered across her mind. Charred and broken stone, shattered glass, the ruins of a building. A dark hole ripped into a wall. Stairs leading down into a windowless room. A sconce lit, revealing a very large, dark oval mirror perched on a column of stone.

As Ellysetta watched, the dark oval of the mirror began to glow with silvery-blue light, just like the phosphorescent mirror pool at the heart of Grandfather Sentinel in Elvia. The surface seemed to ripple, and a face rose from the glowing depths. A Fey face, strong and stern, with paleblond hair and eyes like deep green wells.

A strange tug of recognition pulled at her. The Fey in the mirror was a stranger… but something about him struck a deep chord, as if she should know him—or once had. She reached out a hand, but before her fingers could brush the mirror’s surface, the mirror dissolved. The dreamview became a white blur.

When it focused again, she was walking in a grim, denuded landscape. The glare of a harsh white sun blazed down on a world leached of all color, alien and yet somehow still familiar. A river flowed in the distance, its surface still and black—the Heras. The tumbled ruins of a stone fortress lay scattered before it. From the shape of the hills and the destroyed fortress, she recognized the ruins as Kreppes.

The ground beneath her feet was covered in a thick layer of what she first thought were broken shards of sun-bleached shells. She stumbled on a rounded bulge hidden beneath the shards, and pain darted up her leg as her ankle twisted beneath her weight.

Ellysetta nearly fell to her knees, but she managed to catch her balance. She turned to see what had tripped her, and her stomach clenched with a sudden surge of nausea.

The rounded bulge was a skull… a man’s skull.

White teeth grinned in a macabre smile beneath the gray-white shadows of empty eye sockets.

She took a stumbling step backward, away from the skull, and the shells beneath her feet crunched and snapped. Only then did she realize these were not stones, nor shells. They were bones. Shattered as if by some god’s terrible hammer. Bleached white and brittle by the sun.

The remnants of what had once been living, breathing people.

Thousands of people.

And in the center of that barren landscape, upon that graven sea of the dead, Ellysetta stood alone. Garbed in scarlet from head to toe like a splash of blood on the snow-white field.

And she knew, with a certainty she could not explain, that every person whose shattered skeleton lay beneath her feet had died because of her.

Ellysetta’s eyes opened. The brittle white boneyard of her dream became the night-dark ceiling of the room she and Rain shared at Kreppes. She could hear the low voices of her quintet just outside the bedroom door.

She sat up, and out of habit turned to check the Sentinel blooms beneath her pillow. The flowering sprigs were still in place, as they had been every night since leaving Elvia. Not a Mage-sent dream then.

Beside her, Rain stirred. His hand flexed against the bed-sheets, seeking her.
Shei’tani.
The sleepy call drifted from his mind. Not Spirit, merely an unchecked thought.

She brushed back the silky spill of hair that feathered across his brow.
“Las, kem’san. Ruliath.”
Peace, my love. Go back to sleep. A push of encouraging Spirit accompanied the words, a gentle weave that she laid upon him without guilt.

He was so weary. The fact that her dream had woken her but not him was proof of his utter exhaustion. He had been so strong for so long, but his vast power was beginning to flag. Madness—both from the trauma of war and from their uncompleted truemate bond—was chipping away at the powerful barriers that held back the torment of his overburdened soul. Yesterday, his thoughts had been so loud her quintet had heard them on several occasions.

Since the moment she’d called him from the sky, he had taken care of her, looked after her, put her safety before his own. Now it was her turn to give him back a fraction of that devotion. She loved him so. No longer because he was the hero of her dreams but because he was the Fey, flawed and yet so fine, who had won her heart. He was a king, a great and noble leader of the immortal Fey, but he was also just Rain, her beloved, hers to protect.

And she would protect him… just as fiercely as the tairen defended the pride.

When she was certain he was well and deeply asleep, she rose from the bed and dressed quietly, drawing a thick, furlined velvet cloak over her gown. There would be no more sleep for her tonight. The strange, disturbing dream hadn’t terrified her, as her dreams often did, but it had left her tense and unsettled all the same. She needed to get out of this room and go for a walk to clear her thoughts.

In the antechamber outside the bedroom, she was surprised to see the five warriors of primary quintet instead of her secondary.

“What are you doing here?” she whispered, closing the door behind her. “Shouldn’t you all be asleep?”

“Shouldn’t you?” Gaelen countered.

She arched a brow, then had to smile.
“Mei sorro.”
The phrase, which meant well struck, was one Fey warriors used in training when their sparring partners hit a good blow. It was a phrase she’d become quite familiar with since Gaelen and her quintet had begun training her in the use of Fey weapons. She was getting better at hitting precisely where she aimed but still had work to do to improve her own defenses.

“More dreams?” Bel asked softly. He watched her closely, his gaze filled with a mix of certainty and concern.

“Aiyah.”
She grimaced, then confessed, “I’m beginning to question the real reason Lord Galad gave me those Sentinel blooms. They seem to make me dream more, not less.”

“You’re starting to learn the true nature of Elf gifts,” her uncle Tajik muttered sourly. “When an Elf gives you a rose, always look for the thorn.”

She turned to the red-haired Fire master with a puzzled frown. “Why do you hate the Elves so?” Her uncle never had a kind word to say about his woodland kinsmen.

“I don’t hate all Elves,” he clarified. “Just their king.”

“What has Lord Galad done to earn your wrath?”

“You mean besides sentencing my sister and her mate to a thousand years of torment? “

“You were bitter before you learned that.” She pinned him with a level gaze.

Tajik looked away. “I loved once. An elf maid named Aliya. With her brother’s consent, we would have bound ourselves to one another in
e’tanitsa.”
He shrugged. “Instead, he sent her to her doom.”

Ellysetta’s hand flew to her throat. “Aliya was Lord Hawks-heart’s sister? Tajik, are you saying Galad Hawksheart sent his own sister to her death? “

Tajik nodded. “I could have saved her, but he made sure I didn’t. Had she lived, it would have changed a Verse in a minor Song, but he said that one change might have rippled to a greater, more important Song, and put its outcome in danger. He wasn’t willing to take that risk. Her death ensured that change wouldn’t happen.”

“Oh, Tajik.” No wonder he harbored such enmity towards the Elf king. If Galad Hawksheart had intentionally sent Rain to his death, no power on earth, the Seven Hells, or the Haven of Light would have spared him from her wrath. She laid a hand upon her uncle’s arm.
“Kem’san avi i ver’baloth.”
My heart weeps for your sorrow.

“Beylah vo, kem’jitanessa.”
He covered her hand. “Now perhaps you will understand that when I say you be wary of Elf-gifts, it is no idle warning. I know just how far Hawks-heart will go to protect his precious Dance. If he thought tormenting your dreams with those Sentinel blooms would benefit the Dance, he would give them to you without a qualm and never tell you their true purpose.”

Was it possible? Could the Elf king have gifted her with the Sentinel wreath not to protect her from the Mage’s dream-attacks, as he had claimed, but rather to open her mind to prophetic Elvish dreams?

Your Elvish blood awakens.

The memory of Hawksheart’s words echoed in her mind. Since the moment she’d drunk the Elves’ liquid sunlight and placed her hand on the Elf king’s Mirror, her dreams had not stopped or grown less frightening. Instead, they hummed with a sense of veracity she could not shake, no matter how much she wished to.

The dream she’d just had, and several others before it, were no Mage-spawned nightmares sent to torment her. They were potential verses of her Song, brutal, vivid visions of the dread future that awaited her if she did not find a way to complete her truemate bond with Rain and defeat the High Mages’ evil plans for her.

Ellysetta pressed the heel of her palm to her heart. The walls felt like they were closing in, as if the weight of the world were pressing down upon her, oppressive and suffocating.

“I need some air,” she said, and bolted for the door.

Except for the guards standing at their posts and the occasional footstep of a watchman going about his night duties, all of Kreppes lay silent and still beneath the starry, moonlit winter sky.

After rushing from her suite in the west wing, Ellysetta climbed the stairs to the ramparts, where the cool air and open sky made her feel less closed in. She walked along the northern battlement in the company of her quintet and looked out over the river into Eld. She didn’t know what she was expecting to see. Some sign of malevolence, perhaps, or approaching evil, but all she saw was the unbroken darkness of Eld’s great forests, stretching across the horizon, and the silvery shine of moonlight reflecting on the swirling confluence of the mighty Heras and the Elden river Azar.

“Doesn’t look like such a threat, does it?”

She turned to see King Dorian step from the shadows of the wizard’s wall, the raised walkway spiked with high, open-roofed towers set back from the main battlements.

“Your Majesty.” She inclined her head. “Forgive me. I didn’t see you there. I did not mean to intrude.”

“Your presence could never be an intrusion, Feyreisa.”

The compliment flowed off his tongue with both courtly ease and surprising sincerity. How strange it seemed. She’d grown up all her life seeing this man’s image on the coins that passed from one Celierian hand to another in commerce, and now, here he was, standing beside her on a silent night on the eve of war, offering the pretty charm of a courtly Grace. Master Fellows, the Queen’s Master of Graces who had taught a woodcarver’s daughter the ways of Celieria’s royal court, would have beamed with pride.

“It is strange, how peaceful it looks.” The king continued, nodding towards the vast, shadowy forest to the north. “I have fought in three wars before this. Always, I could see my enemy approaching. I never realized what a comfort that was.” Hands braced on the flat surface of the stone crenel, he scanned the dark horizon. “I keep looking for the campfires, the ships, the troops that experience tells me must be there, yet, my reports say this enemy can simply appear, with no warning, and in great strength. This… nothingness… is very unsettling.”

“Perhaps the waiting is actually the first part of the attack.” A chill breeze blew through the fortress’s night shields. She drew her velvet robes tighter and plumped the fur collar higher about her neck. “To constantly be on your guard, knowing your enemy is stalking you, but not knowing how or when the next blow will come… such torments are one of this Mage’s favorite weapons.”

“No doubt because it is so scorching effective.” Dorian pushed back from the wall and turned to face her. “Is that what it’s like to be Mage-Marked? To feel as if you’re constantly waiting for an attack? “

The question took Ellysetta by surprise. No one had ever asked her what it was like, to be Mage-Marked, and though Dorian had always treated her with impeccable courtesy, he’d never invited personal confidences.

“I suppose it is, in a way,” she answered. “The pressure is always there, but it doesn’t just come from without. It also comes from within.”

“How so?”

“Well, he doesn’t just attack you. He also tries to trick you into betraying yourself. Sometimes, the tricks are very persuasive.” All her life, she’d battled the Mage and the nightmares he sent to torment her. Since coming into her power, that torment had only grown worse. “I doubt I could have lasted this long if not for Rain. He is my strength.”

Dorian looked away. “You are very lucky to have a love so selfless and steadfast.”

His glum tones made her empathy flare. The sense of loss—even despair—that had surrounded him these last days, spurring his temper, fanning his anger, suddenly made sense.

“I know how blessed I am to have Rain,” she agreed. “All my life, I dreamed of a Fey-tale love. My mother always tried to discourage me. I was an unattractive child.” She smiled a little, remembering. “She no doubt meant to spare me the pain of lost hopes, but I didn’t realize that at the time. So when she’d tell me to set aside my dreams of Fey-tale love, that such great loves weren’t meant for mortals, I’d remind her that she had found such a love with my papa—” She hesitated, then admitted softly, “—and that you had found such a love with the queen.”