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Reason had nothing to do with it. Shim gave the vampire a placid smile. He wouldn’t be thanking him in an hour when he realized they were gone.
We’re coming, Bron.
Nothing was more important than Bronwyn. Nothing.
* * * *
Torin walked into the room. Deep underground, he could feel the cold chill in his bones. The place of hags and their black magic.
“Why do you need me here, Your Majesty?” Maris asked, her blonde head held regally despite the cesspit they were walking into.
“I told you. I want my queen by my side.” The hags had insisted that both royals be in attendance as they worked this spell. The spell that would lead him to Bronwyn Finn.
“She isn’t alive. I identified the body myself.” Maris had dressed for the occasion in all white, making her sure to stand out in the gloom. His bride had always preferred white and sunny shades, saying they were Seelie colors. Torin rather thought it a clever disguise to mask her dark, brittle heart. Maris was a vision of loveliness amid the gloom. Her very tranquility was what had made her such an effective partner in betrayal.
“Your Majesties.” Una greeted them in true form. They could be nothing less in this space. Her bland attractiveness had fallen away, and her truth made Maris stop and shudder delicately.
Glannis joined her sister. The hag’s nose had grown by three inches, and her flesh sagged everywhere. Una was thin to the point of gauntness, her cheeks hollow and lips sunken in. When she smiled, he wasn’t sure he would call it a smile, Torin noticed the hag had no teeth.
He had rarely seen them in their true forms, not since that fateful day they had saved him from the ogres and set him on his path to purity.
Of course, what they didn’t know was that once he’d won the day, he intended to get rid of them as well. But not until he had no further need of them. Until that glorious day, he hid his distaste.
“You’ve had hours and hours. What have you discovered?” Torin asked, wanting nothing more than to get this over with.
Glannis frowned, her skin sagging until he wasn’t sure how she could see. “Bronwyn Finn is alive.”
Maris gasped. “Impossible. I saw her body.”
“This body, Your Majesty?” Una asked, gesturing toward the back of the cave.
A girl sat on a log, her youthful face illuminated by the firepit in the center of the cavern. She appeared to be fourteen or fifteen, a girl trapped forever in the first blush of her womanhood. She was dressed in a fine overdress of sheer, pale pink silk. Her hair was pinned up in elegant braids. She wore a sun-shaped pendant around her throat, the crest of the Finn line.
Maris stared at the girl, moving in closer. Torin had to give his bride credit. She matched her actions to her words. She wasn’t a shrinking violet. She’d slit a few throats in her own time. His queen walked up to the girl and put a hand under her chin. She looked delicate in the firelight, the dead girl. There was no question she was dead. Her pretty gown was blood stained, and there was a hole in her belly. Yet she sat there as calmly as she could, as though she waited to be called into the temple or the schoolroom.
Maris looked at the girl before turning back to the hags. “Yes. This is Bronwyn Finn. I knew the little brat. I was forced to spend ti
me with her after my parents sold me to the king. She used to call me sister. You think I wasn’t sure? You think I didn’t know the very Fae I was forced to live with for a year?”
Una’s matchstick hand came out, a bony finger shaking. “No, Your Majesty. That’s why it worked so well. You saw what they wanted you to see.”
Torin stepped up. He wasn’t sure what Una was going on about. His little niece sat there, her blank face staring up at him. She was the only one he’d felt a bit of remorse about. Bronwyn had been a sweet child, seemingly harmless. She’d just wanted hugs and little presents from his travels. She’d been a bit starved for affection from a father who had been too busy raising a warrior king.
But he hadn’t hesitated when he’d heard the prophecy. He’d sent his soldiers to kill the one person in the world who could take his heart. And now she sat staring up at him with nonjudgmental eyes, and he wondered who the little brat would have become. She would have been married off, perhaps to the Unseelie princes if the rumors were true. She was better off dead.
“Speak plainly, hag. I tire of these riddles. We got rid of all the witches weeks before the coup. Maris sent the queen’s personal advisor away herself. There was no one with magic here in the palace. Surely you’re not saying that my queen was derelict in her duties.”
Maris frowned his way. “I did as I was asked. I identified the workers with magical abilities and either killed them or sent them from the palace on various errands and then had them butchered. I did my job, Your Majesty. I rather fear that perhaps the hags did not do theirs.”
Glannis shrugged, and there was a rolling motion of her flesh. “We were unaware that there would be guests in the palace until after the battle. We were not allowed into these sanctified walls until the charms and wards against black magic were taken down.”
“Yes,” Maris said, latching on to the idea. “They weren’t taken down until after the battle. So there was no magic in the palace until after Bronwyn was dead.”
Una shook her head. “No black magic, Your Majesty. But white magic was always permitted in the palace of light, encouraged even. The very marble of the palace reflects good intentions and strengthens spells. Spells of protection. Spells that could hide a true face.”
Glannis brought a knife to her arm. She stood over a pitcher that bubbled over with some foamy fog. The hag sliced into her own flesh, her expression never betraying the pain she must have felt, if a hag could feel anything at all. Torin watched as black blood oozed from her veins like some noxious oil and spilled into the pitcher. Glannis smiled, showing off blackened teeth.
“Fear not, Your Majesty.” Her laughter cackled, bouncing off the walls of the cave. “I feasted well for the last days. I am filled with much blood.”
