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Prologue
Jay
Our magic was dying. Our people were dying. And now, our queen was dead.
I stood at the foot of a mountain next to my best friend of the last two centuries, King Greyson Heroux. Grey was overlooking the too-still form of the love of his immortal life while his only son, Prince Nikolas, stood to our right, unable to look away from his mother’s lifeless body. Nik bowed his head, causing his dark curls to pool around his handsome face and hide the pain I knew lingered in the depths of his deep green eyes.
The sun began to sink behind Mount Renascor, leaving a pink summer sky of wispy clouds. Grey reached his hand out toward his late wife and roots and vines loudly erupted from the ground at the King’s beckoning. They wove an intricate pattern over the fragile body of Queen Heroux until they formed a mound. None of us altered our somber gazes as her small mass was pulled into and made part of the earth, disappearing completely.
Black shadows began to emanate from the Prince, unfurling at his feet and working their way up and out toward the mountain. Soon, the entire bottom half of Mount Renascor was shrouded in the darkness of the Prince’s formidable power. Then the mountain shifted twenty feet to the left, as if someone had picked it up and placed it over the Queen’s grave. The three of us stood in the silence of our sorrow, our eyes burrowing into the mountainside, until many hours after the pink sky had faded to black.
“We’ll find her, Grey. We’ll find her, or we’ll figure out another way to stop the magic from dying,” I promised the King fiercely, at last breaking our silence.
But, no matter what graveside promises I made to my closest friend, the truth was that I did not put nearly as much stock into prophecy as he did. And I was not going to just sit around while our people died waiting for us to find the girl who prophecy promised could save us all. I would find another way.
After another moment of silence, the King clapped me on the back and then cleared his throat, indicating to his son that it was time for us to leave the mountainside. Without a word, Nik’s shadows enveloped us and we popped out of existence, arriving moments later hundreds of miles away on the east coast of Valencia at the Emerald Court.
Nik turned away from us immediately, his footsteps muffled by the sounds of the crashing waves of the ocean, leaving his father and me with our insurmountable task of figuring out how to save the future of our Kingdom.
1
TWENTY YEARS LATER
Jay
Vlaise, the capital of the Kingdom, was located in the center of the nation of Valencia. The High Court could be found at the center of Vlaise. At the center of the High Court, there was a bustling thoroughfare of people and carriages surrounded by luscious, green gardens. At the center of that thoroughfare, there stood a statue. And there, in front of that statue, I stood, waiting for my new House liaison, Alarie Armand, to arrive.
I examined the statue, a new addition to the Court, wondering who was responsible for its commission. After all, as Contra to the King, second in power in the Kingdom to only the King himself, little happened at the High Court that I didn’t know about. But I’d allowed my duty to keep me away from the Court for more time than I should as of late. My guess was that High Lady Tragon, ever the opportunist in my absence, had managed to convince the King’s longtime consort, Gloria, that the statue was somehow in good taste.
Gloria was sweet, but even Grey would have to admit that she could be a bit too far on the glass-half-full side of things. And then, knowing my good friend, he’d likely thought a single piece of art to be too innocuous to require further questioning and had given in to whatever would make his love happy.
It was an overly large, gratuitous piece of “art.” A man, clearly meant to be a high fae lord, stood looking down at a petite woman, who equally clearly was meant to be a lesser fae servant. The woman held an ornate overfilled tray of silver-carved meats and cheeses up to the high fae lord, her head inclined with a soppily servile smile plastered onto her small face.
A lesser fae lord or lady would have undoubtedly objected to the caricature of the benevolent high fae lord and his obeisant lesser fae servant. But that was just the issue—there were no lesser fae lords or ladies still remaining at the High Court to voice their objection. The only lesser fae who could still be found at the High Court were, ironically, servants to high fae households.
I turned away from the irksome statue, more annoyed by its reminder of the unsavory machinations of the High Court that were allowed to flourish in my absence than by the statue itself, which Iwoulddispose of. My mind stayed on the present dilemma with the lesser fae as I walked away—their abandonment of the High Court and, most recently, rumblings of rebellion coming from the north.
I finally spotted what I’d been standing in the courtyard waiting for—an older gray carriage came into view. It was obvious that the carriage was older because it had been modified to add a partition for the driver. Newer carriages, like the ones most commonly found around the High Court, were made with a separate cabin for the driver. This change was made necessary by the problem that kept me preoccupied and away from the High Court so often these days. It was the same problem that allowed High Lady Tragon’s politically ambitious and not-so-secretly bigoted contingent to press their thumbs upon the scales of the High Council advising King Heroux in my absence.
The magic of Valencia was dying, and it had been slowly doing so for the last twenty-three years. And no one, not even the King or I, knew how to fix it. So carriages once propelled by the magic of a lesser fae transporter were now powered by Azurinium, a precious mineral from mines that could only be found in the realm of my Court. And unlike before, when a lesser fae transporter could simply instill a carriage with magic and send it and its contents on its way, carriages now required the guiding hand of a driver.
I guessed the contents of the dated carriage approaching to be my new liaison. She was probably the daughter of some high fae lord from a provincial town, a lord withjust enoughmoney and influence to get his daughter to the High Court under the auspices of furthering her studies but with the true intention of finding her an advantageous suitor. I was already beginning to regret my decision to take on a liaison for the first time in so many years. But I quickly tempered my own second-guessing, reminding myself that until my powers returned to their full strength, I needed all the resources I could get. I had to prepare my House and the Kingdom for what was coming.
An earsplitting crack, like two boulders crashing together, ricocheted through the commotion of the busy roundabout, interrupting my troubled musings. I jerked my head toward the direction of the noise in time to see the head of the high fae lord statue begin to roll off its shoulders. The severed head landed with a deafening thud atop the large tray held by the lesser fae servant. I immediately scanned the courtyard and then, sensing no other danger, ran with speed considered fast even among the high fae in time to catch the marble head before it continued its path, rolling and possibly striking a bystander below.
For a moment, the chaos of the consistently busy circle was silenced.Everyone just stopped. They stared at me as I cradled the thousand-pound head in my hands. I felt their choked-off words hang in the air as their eyes slid across my body and then darted away, as they always did, as if frightened by the mere possibility of meeting my gaze. Although no one looked directly at me, I knew they waited for my next move. I flicked my hand in the air, a casual command for everyone to move along.
And then, like a switch had been flipped, the clamor resumed with renewed vigor, everyone casting cautiously curious looks back at me and the beheaded statue. I turned my attention back to the severed head, running my thumb along the edge of it and noting the clean cut. As I had suspected, the head had been purposefully and magically detached. That meant that in the few short minutes that I had turned my back to the statue,someonehad donesomethingto cause the head to separate from the shoulders of the high fae lord.
I wasn’t surewhatthe something was, but I was fairly certainwhothe someone was—Don Davante, the newest face in lesser fae leadership and the man who I now suspected to be single-handedly responsible for the rumblings of rebellion coming from the north.
The don had recently ignited a passion within the lesser fae populace, resulting in the formation of the most competent and cohesive lesser fae contingent in Valencia in the last fifty years. And one of his favorite pastimes, when he wasn’t amassing resources in Lord Dumont’s lands in the northwest, was expressing his thoughts on the high fae-dominated High Court in increasingly public and theatrical ways. So far, the don’s influence had been disruptive but nonviolent, which was why I’d not yet put an end to it.
With the traffic starting back up, I checked back on the gray carriage in time to see a pair of nude stilettos emerging from its opened door. Asingularly beautiful woman stepped out into the twilight of the approaching evening. I took in her small frame, trailing my eyes up her slim legs that appeared freshly kissed by the sun’s golden rays. My gaze made its way to her face, a face that was captivating because, and not despite of, her apparent lesser fae features. Her brilliant green eyes were laced with a thread of light gold, signature to the lesser fae. She had sharp cheekbones that defined her petite face, and her lips were red and held an enticing pout I usually found lacking from the thinner lips of any high fae lady.
The alluring woman was immediately followed by another woman, a high fae lady with ordinary looks made more plain by her immediate comparison to her ravishing companion.The mousy woman had to be my new House liaison. She fit the bill. But her travel partner… I didn’t know who she was.
Perhaps she was a household servant who had come to see off the high fae lady and catch a glimpse of the big city?
