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“Nor can I step into the fae realm from now on.” Lorelei didn’t lower her gaze. She refused to pretend to any shame over her actions. “That’s why you chose this space for our meeting.”
Morgana waved off her words impatiently. “This once, yes. But—”
“It won’t disappear, will it?” There was a part—a large part—of Lorelei that wanted to step back from this tentative brink and shield herself in self-defensive distance before she could be hurt again.
But that was exactly what her mother had done to her all those years ago … and Lorelei had no desire to repeat the example.
She wasn’t ready to lower all of her shields. Not yet; perhaps not ever. The lessons she’d learned across her life were real. But she had recently realized that not all of her shields were necessary … and she had loved her mother enough as a child to risk a single step forward now—if Morgana did the same.
“We can meet again like this,” Lorelei said. “We can even try to do it on a regular basis, to come to know each other once again … but only if you finally let down your guard. If you want me in your life, then treat me as someone you care about. Respect me and my choices—and ensure that Oberon’s attempt to murder me and my consort receives the punishment it truly deserves.”
Lifting her chin, she looked at Morgana with all the haughtiness of the powerful queen her mother—for better or for worse—had made her, not the child who had simply yearned for her parents’ love. “I have my own eyes in your court, as you do in mine. I will find out if you decide once again to choose the comfort of others over my and my consort’s safety.”
Ire flared in Morgana’s eyes. The immortal Queen of Efaelen was not often spoken to in such a manner … but she held her tongue for a long moment. Finally, she let out a carefully controlled breath, like a gently unfurling bud. “Oberon has been a challenge to my patience since I first met him. I’ve granted him as much leniency as I could for Reynard’s sake … but until now, I never understood how far he was willing to go. He will not overcome this offense. I swear it.”
Lorelei lifted a single brow, mantling her own power around her. “And if Reynard protests again? Weeps and swears to Oberon’s true remorse?”
The small, wry smile that twisted Morgana’s lips told a bitter story in itself. “Unlike you, apparently, I chose a consort who would never claim too much territory in my heart. It seemed the safest choice.”
… After your father, the sentence finished silently between them.
Lorelei lowered her head in a slow nod of understanding.
They had both reacted in their own ways to her father’s betrayal, hadn’t they? She might never forgive all of her mother’s choices, but for the first time in decades, she could glimpse the possibility of a true relationship between them as adults, based not in either of their own queendoms but in this permeable, shifting middle space.
“Very well,” she said. “You know how to reach me with a message.”
Morgana inclined her own head gravely. “I won’t capture you without warning again.”
Twenty years ago, Lorelei would have flown into her mother’s arms for a final tight embrace before they parted. Today, she only said, “Until next time,” as she felt the silver walls of aether turn pliant to her will at last.
As she landed in her own warm stables, Bluebell looked up at her with a pleased, welcoming chirp, his golden fur shadowed in the darkness and his massive beak still bloody from his latest meal. Stepping towards the gryphon, she felt a lightness in her chest that she hadn’t known in years.
Perhaps she hadn’t lost quite all of her first home or family.
Even as she had that thought, though, she realized that the mirror-box in its silk reticule, still hanging from her belt, was vibrating—and with such intense agitation, she could only imagine it must have been trying to alert her the whole time she’d been trapped and unreachable in the aether.
With a muffled groan, she snatched it out of the reticule and flipped the box open, pressing her side against Bluebell’s big, leonine form for strength. Even his familiar warmth and the affectionate nuzzle of his feathered head against her shoulder couldn’t comfort her as she took in Ailana’s grim expression in the mirror.
“Lorelei! Finally,” Ailana breathed. “Come quickly. We may already be too late to save him.”
30
There was, of course, no lock inside the door of the luxurious bedroom to which Gerard had been led. From the richly gilded mirror on its nightstand to the elaborate designs etched on the low-burning gas lamp and the silk hangings on its large four-poster bed, it had clearly been designed for royal guests—and if Gerard had somehow lost all of his wits, he might have believed Otto’s words and imagined this stay to be an actual honor.
However, he didn’t miss the lack of any windows—or the click of a heavy iron bolt being fastened into place on the other side of the door.
“This is the price of weakness and treason…”
Memories flashed across his vision, still brutally vivid after all these years. The executioner lifting his axe high, again and again, while the voracious roar of the crowd filled Gerard’s ears to bursting … and his own body sat paralyzed with fear and horror beside his ferociously smiling grandmother.
Her fingers had gripped his closest arm like bejeweled claws.
“This is the price…”
He’d been running from those memories for years, with his meticulously polished reputation and his obdurate refusal ever to look beyond the blinders of his duty.
The iron bolt closing him in now was a mere formality … which, frankly, seemed unnecessary, with two armed guards already stationed outside to prevent escape and his sword in their keeping.
