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“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I replied, trying to keep my tone cool. “My mate is behind you. Perfectly safe.”
In answer, she tossed tendril after tendril over her shoulder, forcing Draven to block and dive.
“Not him, you fool.” A cunning smile crossed her face. “The baby. Your baby.”
She stepped towards me. Behind her, I saw Draven moving slowly into position.
“He saw her in your dreams. The little girl.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “She’s probably dead already. The poor little thing. She won’t have had a chance.”
My hands twitched at my sides, longing to set her face alight, to see that lovely smile melt.
But I did nothing. She was not mine to take.
And I refused to show her just how terrified her words had made me for Medra’s sake.
“Lorion shot me from behind,” I announced, disregarding her attempts to frighten me and forcing thoughts of Medra aside for the moment.
She frowned, confused. For a moment, the red flurry of tendrils she had woven around her fell away.
“Here.” I touched my shoulder. “And here.” I gestured to my calf.
Tempest looked at where I’d indicated, but her expression suggested she thought I was a fool.
“So don’t expect my pity,” I explained, as Draven’s coils of black night wrapped suddenly around my sister’s exposed throat and tightened.
She gave a strangled gasp and dropped the grail, raising her hands to her throat, trying desperately to slice through the shadowy binding with her crimson vines.
The wooden chalice rolled towards my feet. I looked down at it with distaste.
“We have no child,” I told Tempest as the breath left her lungs. “There is no baby. Our father is wrong. Just like he has been about everything. You’re not a child of a god. You’re a simple fae. And just like a mortal”—I leaned in and lowered my voice—“you can die.”
The coils strained and constricted, and my sister’s lovely eyes bulged wide.
CHAPTER 24 - MEDRA
Someone was singing.
I pushed back the blankets and slid out of my bed.
Along the walls, candles flickered in their iron scones as I wandered through the castle, straining my ears towards the source of the sound.
Meandering slowly through corridor after corridor, the voice gradually grew clearer.
I trailed my fingers over a tapestry, feeling it flutter with an unseen breeze.
As I walked, I began to catch some of the words of the song. A plaintive tale of a child stolen away at night by her mother the queen, leaving her father the king to bitter heartbreak.
“A king revered,” the woman’s beautiful voice sang sorrowfully, as if the loss had been her own. “A daughter’s tears. A mother feared.”
A chill ran through me at the inhuman beauty of the voice.
Quickly, I ran up narrow stone steps towards the sound, my footsteps echoing off the walls of the tower.
At the top of the tower, I turned a corner and entered a small chamber bathed in moonlight.
A woman sat alone by the window. She was turned away from me, her face in profile.
A cascade of dark red tresses framed her face, glinting like strands of rubies in the moonlight. The hair fell in graceful waves, gently brushing across her slender shoulders and over the gown of black and emerald she wore.
