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Peace, I schooled myself. Anger must be exchanged for reason. I was not the war commander I’d been before. I was to be king of this wretched place. Peace mattered above all else. So I would limit the number of heads that went rolling across the goldstone floor from the swing of my axe. But I would not spare them entirely.
The smirking Goldstone Guard who appeared on the other side of the desert expanse was a fitting candidate. His cropped dark hair lifted with an eerie wind, the gilded goldstone clasps at his shoulders, elbows, hips, and knees gleaming beneath the sun.
Behind me, one of the females in the delegation sucked in a breath.
It was beginning already—the deception. They’d sent this pretty young warrior out to distract us.
If only I could peer into the minds of my companions, warning them not to fall for these antics… but that power had been lost long ago, at the same time as the void power.
“What are your orders?” Gwen said from beside me, eyes trained on the elemental warrior. “He’s a Goldstone Guard.”
“I expected your tone to be less reverent, considering how spectacularly they failed to protect your betrothed.”
Guinevere’s face hardened instantly, her posture shifting subtly. Every weakness she had, crated up and contained, already a master of the control required by the elemental court. She would have made an excellent queen.
Instead, they had me.
I stepped out in front of the unit, perilously close to the territory of the Gremog.
“I am Arran Earthborn,” I said, my voice loud and clear.
True to his elemental heritage, the guard’s face did not shift at my declaration. But a second later, the breeze that had lifted his dark hair found my own, brushing across my cheek and pulling the long strands loose from the knot at the back of my neck.
Bastard.
The wind increased into a gale. Around me, I could hear the subtle shifting of my companions as they steadied themselves. I would not turn my back, even as my eyes began to burn. If they kept this torture up, I’d give the order to shift. Let’s see how that elemental poise faltered when confronted with the true beasts of our race.
But then the wind stopped, whispering away into a breeze and then nothing. The sand was gone, pushed up onto banks on either side of a narrow goldstone path, laid into the very ground itself.
The elemental inclined his head.
Our way across.
“Don’t step off the goldstone,” I commanded as I took the first step. Hardly wider than my two booted feet beside one another, I knew what it would mean to deviate from the path—death.
One step into that sand, and your foot would be ripped clean off, lunch for the Gremog. If you were lucky. Unlucky, and you’d be pulled down into the sand, either to be suffocated as those red-gold granules filled your lungs, or to bleed to death while the Gremog ate through you limb by limb.
Only on the goldstone path, so long as we did not disturb the sand and alert the Gremog to our presence, would we be safe. A brutal but efficient line of defense for the goldstone palace, the warrior in me recognized. But not how I’d have my delegation begin their sojourn in Baylaur.
When the last of our delegation had cleared the sand, the breeze returned. I did not turn to see the sand sweeping back into place. But I did hear the soft, preternatural rumbling as we mounted the stairs of the goldstone palace.
There, beneath the arched pillars gilded with more gems than I’d ever seen in one place, stood a tall female dressed in shimmering blue so light, it almost appeared white. Her dark hair fell in an intricate plait over her shoulder to her waist, sapphires and blue tanzanite woven into the thick strands. She was nearly as tall as I, with all the bearing of a queen.
But a queen she was not.
Greeted not by the Queen of the Elemental Fae, but a proxy.
That fire within my chest crackled in protest.
What sort of queen would not meet us herself?
“Welcome to the Court of the Elemental Fae, Arran Earthborn. I am Esa Lyonesse,” she said, though she did not bow. To her kind, our appointed titles meant nothing. For an elemental, blood and lineage were everything.
But I didn’t care what the ancestors who bore her surname had done in this court.
I waited until I felt Osheen and Gwen at either shoulder before I demanded:
“Where is the queen?”
