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"Perhaps it was the Shattered World's price for your being there," she said. "It had to keep one of you. Perhaps he was too entangled with the magic he wielded to dispatch the demon. Perhaps because he was bound to the skull by blood, he is now destined to stay with what remains of it. Or he has been consigned to the same fate as the demon, a truly noble sacrifice for us all. But ultimately, it is no longer our concern."
He hated her then. Truly hated her, in a way he hadn't allowed himself to feel in a very long time. Sometimes there was just too much of her mother in her. That compartmentalization of empathy in a damn box, hoarded like a scarce commodity she refused to waste on anything that truly mattered. When that quality surfaced as it did now, he saw Reghan's executioner, rather than Reghan's daughter.
"Is that the royal 'our', Your Majesty? Because it is very much my concern."
"And ours," Gideon said, stepping forward.
Keldwyn saw Jacob give him a warning gesture. Though Jacob himself wasn't always known for showing the proper obedience to a queen, one didn't speak in the presence of the Fae Queen until spoken to, a matter of intelligence as much as obeisance. If she was annoyed, she would simply turn him into an ice sculpture or a fish in the moat beneath her feet until she was ready to hear him talk. Recuperating from being turned into ice could take a mortal weeks.
Keldwyn shifted between her and Gideon, drawing her sharp attention back to him. "It is not simply a matter of him being adrift in the Shattered World, Your Majesty. Lord Uthe has Ennui."
He was aware of Gideon and Daegan's surprised reaction to that, as much as Jacob's lack of expression. It was as he'd expected. Lyssa had known. "His mind comes and goes, so it will hamper his survival chances if I am not there."
"From what I understand of Ennui, it might be best if the Shattered World finishes him off. You should not prolong his suffering. There is nothing you can do to reverse it."
"That remains to be seen." Keldwyn met her gaze. For all that he had thought about the repercussions these past few months as his feelings for Uthe grew, now he spoke without hesitation, sealing his fate once and for all in his own world. "He has given me two of their marks. I am his blood source now. My blood seems to rejuvenate him. It may reduce the effects of the disease."
He didn't startle her often, not deeply enough for it to be reflected in her face. He saw shock, which was echoed by the advisors around her. Cayden's normally impassive expression was twisted in an expression that showed he thought Keldwyn deranged. Or guilty of incomprehensible stupidity.
None of that mattered now. Only one thing did.
"If you feed him, if you are marked as his servant, you are no longer of the high Fae," she said stiffly. "It is a sentence even Tabor will have to accept, because it is in our laws. You know this. You had to know it when you let him mark you."
Her tone was accusatory, and he stood impassive before it, neither acknowledging nor denying. A flush suffused her pale cheeks.
"You will be stripped of everything. The Seelie and Unseelie courts, as well as the vampire Council, will no longer have your skills as advisor or liaison. You will be denied entry to the Fae world and you will never be allowed to return. In time, without a connection to the life force here, you will die."
"Given my strength...that gives me at least another hundred years. I am already over fifteen hundred years old, Your Majesty. I can end my life with his. It is a fair exchange."
Rhoswen stared at him. "I will not permit it, any of it. You may not return to the Shattered World. Once he is dead, it will break that bond. You are too valuable an advisor for us to accept your banishment. You will instead be punished by this court for your infraction of the law, and continue your service once you complete it."
"No."
Cayden shifted to a more offensive position, registering the change in mood between him and the Queen. Daegan, Gideon and Jacob, all fighting men, picked up the same vibes and moved closer, but Kel knew they needed to stay back. They all did.
As he looked at her proud, beautiful face, the deep anger in her blue gaze, he knew what the rage she was experiencing felt like. The right trigger could always bring it to life, no matter how deeply he'd buried it, and he expected it was the same for her. No one had ever had the misfortune of being this close to both of them when that ignition point happened at the same time.
His lover, his best friend, her father. Until now, nothing had ever hurt like having Reghan taken from him in a way he could have prevented. Reghan had forbidden it. Keldwyn had thought about killing himself when Reghan had been transformed into a rose bush and placed in a desert world, an ancient and enchanted Fae prison, to suffer and die. How long had it taken? For years Keldwyn had dreamed he'd been standing over Reghan, watching him slowly die, knowing his suffering but helpless to stop it.
Uthe had felt the demon through his blood link, even in the Shattered World. Ah, gods. Had Masako felt Reghan's actual suffering, his dying? If so, her strength to survive long enough to see Lyssa raised to adulthood had to be commended, for Keldwyn had been overcome simply from imagining it.
It was a feeling that made one want to tear down the world, incinerate it whole to escape that pain. It was the feeling gnawing at him now like a vulture ripping out his intestines, as he thought of Uthe in the Shattered World. How much time had already passed there?
Rhoswen knew that pain, in a different way. She'd lost Reghan before he ever died, her mind poisoned against him by her bitch mother. He wondered if Rhoswen killing Magwel years later had helped assuage that pain in any way. Given the way she was looking at him now, he would say no.
They claimed themselves superior to vampires, and perhaps they were, but one thing was a leveler between all humanoid species. They fucked up their heads and hearts over one another in ways beyond comprehension. He wondered if their destructiveness was a mystery even to whatever Creator had made the whole sad lot of them.
"This doesn't involve any of you. It's between me and her," he said. It wouldn't stop Cayden, but it would safeguard the vampire and mortals at his back. "What is it you seek here, Your Majesty?" Keldwyn said stiffly.
Her lip curled. "I want to know you can learn humility, Lord Keldwyn."
"You first, Your Majesty."
One quick step and she was close enough to slap him, nails raking his face. He caught her wrist. He had her easily on weight and height, but that meant nothing in a fight between two Fae. Cayden started forward, sword sliding from his scabbard, and Keldwyn proved the point. A lift of his hand, and the captain was trapped in place, caught in a force field spun by summer winds. Rhoswen countered with ice that flowed up Keldwyn's arm to his shoulder. He showed no reaction to it beyond a muscle twitching in his jaw.
"You have been guilty of a thousand insults to my person," Rhoswen said through gritted teeth. Her fingers curled in his grasp as they stared at one another, inches between his sparking dark eyes and her cold blue ones. "This will be the one that gives me what I've always desired--a reason sanctioned by law to strip your powers from you. I will keep them as long as I wish, and you will beg me to give them back. On your knees, a hundred years from now."
Kel thought of the section in the Templar Rule about penances, where a Templar was stripped of his mantle and required to eat off the floor for a year. Every action had consequences.
"I will meet that price. Debase me, make yourself feel better about the past that we cannot change. But you will do it after you give me access to the Shattered World to find him, to help him."
"You claimed to love my father, yet you stood by and did nothing. Nothing. You let him die, and now, you want to give all for this...vampire." She was spitting at him. The ice was petrifying the bones of his arm, making it numb and excruciatingly painful at the same time. He channeled it into his savage response.
"Because Reghan told me not to stop it," he snarled back. "Because he loved her more than anything. Because apparently love means standing back and letting your heart be ripped from your c
hest without lifting a finger to stop the one ripping it out. I swore I'd never do it again, and I won't. Even if it makes me the most selfish bastard who has ever lived, I will not let the noble, fucking, self-sacrificing nature of someone else I love take him from me."
Her expression was as frozen as his hand manacling her wrist, but he didn't stop. "Years ago, I stood before your mother when she passed sentence on your father, for no other reason than she hated him for not loving her more. Your father told me to let him go, to let things unfold as they should. I should have stood against the Fae court then. I should have stood against what was nothing more than a woman scorned, who knew nothing of what being a queen truly meant."
