“I urge a cautious response,” Edain tells her. “Finn can still be useful to us. Perhaps Evernight won’t pay your price for him, but the prince is known to be loyal to his men. If he wants his little pet back, then he’ll have to agree to some sort of arrangement.”
“Fuck you.” This Finn spits a bloodied gobbet of spittle at Edain and bares blood-stained teeth in a smile.
Edain tears a silk square from his pocket and wipes the blood off his hand and shirt. “Careful now. We’re bartering with your life, and I seem to be the only one who gives a damn if you live or die.”
“Kill me then. I’ll die for my prince here and now if it will spare him your trap.”
The loyalty in this Finn’s eyes steals my breath, because nobody in my mother’s court would ever offer their life for her like that.
“Throw him back in his cage,” Mother finally says, before her fingers dig into my wrist. “I care not. If Evernight can be brought to heel, then I will have him grovel at my feet. Right now….” She wrenches me cruelly toward the door flap of the tent. “My daughter and I go to greet the queen of Ravenal and pay her respects.” Her fingers leave cruel marks on my arm. “And she will be signing a marriage contract today.”
7
ISKVIEN
If Mother was surprised by my smile when I greeted Maren, and the easy grace with which I signed my name to a marriage contract between Aska and Asturia, there’s no sign of it on her face as she leads us into the heart of the Hallow.
I keep waiting for the lash to fall but it occurs to me that the reason she doesn’t suspect something devious in my heart is because I’ve never dared openly defy her before.
She thinks me cowed.
We climb toward the Hallow.
It’s a nexus point where leylines meet, and we used it to arrive here yesterday morning. The power of the Hallow can be used as a portal, except one is bound by the leylines. You can only travel to another nexus point, another Hallow.
It’s also the place where the Seelie Alliance meets whilst at the queensmoot, and there is to be a gathering of the heads of the alliance.
The gently sloping hill is capped with ruins, with the Hallow right in the center. It’s a sacred place and to spill blood here is forbidden. Each queen is allowed to bring five guards only, and the space around the Hallow has been cleared for two hundred yards around it so that any threat can be seen coming.
The enormous standing stones of the Hallow cast ominous shadows as we walk between them.
Some still bear lintels; enormous wedges of stone somehow hauled on top of a pair of sentinel stones. Other lintel stones lie cracked and shattered at their feet. Some of the scholars at the Akvaran University in Aska have tried to study this Hallow, and believe they’ve found the quarry where the stone came from—nearly a hundred miles away from this place.
Nobody has been able to fathom how the otherkin who once ruled this world managed to get those stones into place. Their tools were primitive, their magics bound to the Hallows and their gods. And yet the floor of this particular Hallow is polished slate so smooth it almost seems like an obsidian mirror. Bronze glyphs are etched into the stone, and research has proven that on certain nights of the year, moonlight will spill through little holes in the sentinel stones to create a perfect circle of moonlight on each glyph.
It wasn’t just a portal to the otherkin.
It wasn’t just a place of worship and sacrifice.
It was also a calendar of all the celestial events, and right now, the little circle of moonlight lights up the glyph that corresponds with Lammastide—or as some of the Askans refer to it, Lughnasadh.
Five golden thrones have been brought into the Hallow.
We’re the last to arrive.
“Greetings, Adaia,” calls Queen Maren, her smooth dark hair tumbling in a silken fall over her shoulders. A black crown circles her head, the points akin to a spear. She’s rumoured to be the most beautiful woman in the world, and if she’s not, then she’s very close to the top of the list.
Lucidia of Ravenal slouches in her chair, looking irritable. She clutches a shawl around her shoulders as if she feels the cold, and maybe she does, because age is starting to settle over her face and hair like a mantle. The fae live for enviously long centuries, but Lucidia has taken that first step toward the grave.
It doesn’t make her any less dangerous.
She squints in our direction. “You’re late.”
“My apologies.” My mother leads us toward the throne in front of the Asturian standard. “I had a little… issue to deal with within my camp.”
“One can believe that,” says a deep, masculine voice that picks every pronunciation out carefully.
My entire body clenches as if he purred those words directly into my ear.
That voice.
My head whips toward the Prince of Evernight’s throne and the breath drives from my lungs as if a fist slammed into my sternum. He looks like a prince from a fairy tale, but I know better; I’ve had those hands on my skin in every way possible. This man is no hero. He’s the villain, and temptation is his crime.
The prince stares at me expressionlessly. If not for the intense gleam in his green eyes, I’d almost think us strangers. But it’s there. The heat. The memory. That soft mouth is pressed into a thin line, his cheekbones sharp enough to cut butter. I can feel that mouth moving over my skin, his tongue tracing lazy circles around my navel as he dips his head lower.
Of them all, he alone doesn’t bother to wear a crown.
He doesn’t need to.
There’s no denying this male has power. There’s no denying he’s dangerous. Clad in a black velvet doublet, he reclines at ease, both arms resting along the arms of his throne.
And he looks at me as if we share a secret and he’s just dying to ask me more about it.
Even though I half-expected it from the second I heard him speak, shock ripples through me as I stare into my lover’s eyes.
The Prince of Evernight.
I fucked my mother’s dearest enemy.
Oh, my gods.
My heart skips a beat and the blood drains from my face. Shock turns my feet clumsy, and I trip over absolutely nothing, slamming into Edain. My stepbrother grabs me swiftly, leaving me tangled uncomfortably in his arms, with my nose driving into his velvet-clad chest.
This is the single most embarrassing way to make my official welcome to the alliance, and I can practically feel my mother’s glare searing into the back of my neck as Edain sets me to rights.
“Iskvien?” Edain murmurs.
“S-sorry.” I brush the velvet nap free of the indentation of my face and then realize I’m rubbing my stepbrother’s chest right in front of everyone.
His eyebrows shoot up.
He freezes.
Please, please swallow me whole, I silently beg the Hallow.
A shiver runs through the slate beneath us, gravel skittering across the ground. It’s enough to tear everyone’s eyes from my face, and I dart behind my mother’s throne, not daring to look at anyone as I hide behind Andraste.
Especially the Prince of Evernight.
I scrape a trembling hand over my mouth.
What am I going to do?
I bedded the enemy.
I fucked the Prince of Evernight, and in doing so, I gave him the gift that my mother has promised Etan.