“They’ll be okay, you know,” Reyna said from behind him. “There were only a handful of archers, and we drew a lot of them away from the village. Duff’s a good fighter. So are the others. They’ll win quickly and escape to the border. I’m certain of it.”
“Then, why do I feel as though we’ve lost something?”
Reyna wrapped her arms around his waist and took one hand in hers. “Because for a few days Oxgrove felt safe, like somewhere we could stay forever. It felt like home, like your village back in the grasslands. The kind of home one could settle into and spend many long and happy years. And I don’t think you’ve been somewhere that feels like home for a very long time.”
Shuddering, he squeezed her hand. “Well, there you’re wrong, Reyna Darragh. Because you feel more like home than any place I’ve ever known.”
24
Mariel
The lords and ladies were arriving to court. It had not taken as much convincing as Aengus had thought. A few carefully worded letters had done the trick. All they’d had to do was convince just one, and then the others quickly fell in line. Over the past week, four royal families had come to Tairngire, bringing with them thousands of fighters. If the Ice Court attacked, it might just be enough.
A mere day after the arrival of Lord Finnbar and his family, the final courtiers who had made the trek to Tairngire, Aengus decided to celebrate his impending victory against his enemies. Lord Finnbar had come the furthest, all the way from Tawold, located on the southeastern coast beyond the Blade’s Pass. Their banners rippled in the Tairngire wind, embroidered with a scythe on a field of golden wheat. It was a familiar sight to Mariel’s sore eyes.
She remembered those banners well from when she’d been nothing but a child. Lord Finnbar had been lord even then, and he’d always been kind to her.
That night, they called a feast to welcome the lords and ladies to the castle. Aengus ordered the servants to transform the Great Hall into a celebration fit for a king’s coronation. The banners were freshly washed and then rehung along the walls, highlighting the glittering golden crown that was the sigil of the Air Court.
New tables had been built especially for this feast, the timber taken from the Witchlight Woods. Mariel had many a thought about that, but she kept them to herself. Now was not the time to argue, and it had already been done. Whoever had chopped them down would be dead soon enough. The trees of the Witchlight Woods did not take kindly to an axe.
Mariel sat at the head table, to the right of the Grand Alderman. Wearing the sizeable golden crown that had once sat on Sloane Selkirk’s head, Aengus had clearly taken up the mantle of what he thought was his. He sat where the king should have sat, smiling broadly as he motioned for the servants to lay out the roasted pig before him.
Luckily for Aengus, it was not boar.
The rest of the tables seemed to have been divided into two camps. On the left side of the room sat the lords and ladies who Aengus already considered loyal to his cause. They had already been in Tairngire when he’d stolen the throne, and they had yet to scurry back to their manors and castles. Mariel thought they were not loyal so much as scared. He’d already executed some of their peers. If they spoke too broadly, he might just turn his murderous glint on them, too.
The right side of the room held the new arrivals. In addition to Lord Finnbar and his wife, Lord Malcolm from The Plains, and his daughters, had answered the summons. Next to them sat Lord Neil and Lady Regan from the great city of Faladrast and old friends of poor Lady Epona. Finally, at the very end was Lady Keely from further south, down where the villages were poor and scarce and had been ravaged by war. Mariel wondered if Aengus saw these courtiers as enemies or as friends.
She knew how she saw them.
When she’d asked Aengus why he’d decided to separate them so thoroughly, he had mumbled something about wanting to be able to tell who was who. Mariel thought it odd. Did he not know the names of his own lords? Likely not.
With a deep breath, she pushed back her chair and stood. “Welcome, everyone. Thank you to the lords and ladies who have journeyed from all around the realm to be with us this day. Many of you have not been seen in court for years. Aengus and I feel very grateful you have come now. Don’t we, Grand Alderman?”
She smiled as Aengus shifted uncomfortably on his seat, clearly taken off guard. Aengus was the kind of cunning male who was always searching for a way to best his opponent, whether or not they knew he was his opponent at all. He had never sparred with Mariel though.
Once, she had breathed and bled courtly life.
Smiling, she spread her hands wide, and her fingers glistened from the remnants of her silver dye. Lord Neil and Lady Regan latched their eyes on her hands, their faces impassive. But when Mariel turned away, she could see them whispering fiercely out of the corner of her eye.
“As is often customary, we have some bards here to regale you with some wonderful lore, but I thought I’d start the night off with a story myself.” She held back a smile when Lord Neil and Lady Regan looked keenly interested. She’d caught their attention. Now she merely needed to hold their throats and force their eyeballs to see.
“This is quite out of the ordinary,” Aengus murmured, but he did nothing more than that to stop her. He couldn’t, or he would make himself look bad. Poor Princess Eislyn, stuck inside a court without her sister or her betrothed. A sweet little thing she was, or so the tales suggested. Mariel knew she did not perform that part of Eislyn well.
Mariel cleared her throat. “Once, there was a golden crown. It was small and dingy. Faded and dull. It had been cast away into a corner of the castle, and no one had thought of it for years.” She kept her voice steady, her eyes roaming the hall. Her gaze landed firmly on Lady Keely, a slight yet strong noble with gold-and-silver hair who had seen far more death than most. The villages and hamlets down south had not fared well in the war.
Mariel continued. “The crown belonged to the previous king, so it needed to be tossed away. Meanwhile, the new king and queen fashioned glorious new crowns that sparkled in the light. These crowns were a sight to behold, and the realm spoke of them in awe, so much so that the banners were remade and embroidered with this new vision of the crown.
“Until, one day, a child stumbled upon that old crown. She liked it very much, but she thought it needed some sprucing up, so as to save it from being tossed away again.” Mariel smiled as Lord Malcom, an old male from The Plains, leaned forward, his golden eyebrows pinched together.
“ So, the child dipped the crown in silver dye and proudly wore it atop her golden head. Unfortunately, the king and queen were not fond of that silver crown, so they took it from the child and threw it out of their window, straight into the middle of a terrible storm. The child cried, of course. She’d loved that crown and vowed to find it the next morning. Only when she did find it, it was no longer silver but golden once again. The rain had washed the dye away and had polished it clean. Now, it gleamed brighter than every other crown in the kingdom. And so it sat on the queen’s head forevermore.”
Mariel sat, heart hammering.
Aengus awkwardly cleared his throat. “That was, uh, quite the tale, though I’ve never heard anyone get quite so emotional about a bloody crown!”