18. Aldrin

Chapter 18

Aldrin

C yprien rises and slowly claps his hands at me, stepping down from the dais. “You took your time in coming here. And no, it stopped being your chair when you were exiled. Are you going to let the rest of your people in from the cold?”

I curse under my breath, then motion for them to enter. The wards ripple, then fall away and the entire band is visible, with grim expressions and taut bodies, ready for a fight.

Except we are grossly outnumbered.

Keira stares at her sister sitting on that dais, examining every inch of her as though looking for signs of abuse. She takes a hesitant step forward, but I put a hand on her shoulder to still her. To keep her behind me. Caitlin’s eyes narrow on my touch.

I narrow my gaze on Cyprien. “How did you know we were coming?”

He stops his approach halfway down the hall and raises his eyebrows at the viciousness in my tone. “I would love to say I outwitted you. That I know you so well, I anticipated your every move, but that would be a lie. In fact, it was the human woman who helped me.”

Cyprien glances back at her over his shoulder. “Caitlin wanted her sister back. She had the audacity to demand I muster my entire force and chase you through the woods to find her. But I wouldn’t. Didn’t need to, because I knew you would come for Hawthorne. That you would have to hunt me down and force me to listen to your explanations on why my hasty assumptions were wrong, and that I should be on your side.”

“Get to the point, Cyprien.” I growl at him.

“Did you know that these women have the most fascinating bracelets, made from moonstone? Caitlin told me they were created from chips taken from the portals, so they could find their way back to the human realm, but they also gravitate toward each other. So when your little party marched here and snuck in so effectively that my guards wouldn’t have been able to stop you, we were sitting here tracking your progress.” Cyprien laughs. “The irony, that something so small was your undoing.”

I turn my simmering scowl on Keira, now hidden behind Klara, who whispers in her ear, and I beckon her forward. As she reaches my side, her sister’s facade of nonchalance falls away and Caitlin suddenly perches forward to the edge of her seat.

I place a hand on Keira’s arm. “Did you feel the bracelet?” I ask in a low tone.

“No, but I was too terrified to notice,” she murmurs.

“Keira, are you okay? He promised me you wouldn’t be hurt.” Caitlin stalks right off the dais and tries to charge past Cyprien, but he holds out his arm like a wall. She turns on him like a hissing wild cat. “You said she would be safe. He brought her to a damned ambush!”

“I said he would treat her well. I never promised she wouldn’t die from his stupidity.” Cyprien doesn’t lift his gaze from me. “Sit back down, Caitlin.”

The woman analyses Keira for so long I think she is going to defy him, but then returns to her throne.

“I’m fine, Caitlin,” Keira utters and the coiled tension falls from Caitlin’s shoulders.

I turn my hostility back to Cyprien. “Well, I’m here. What do you want from me? I assume there is a reason you traveled all the way to the borderlands from the capitol.”

The smugness drops from his face and his eyebrows knit. “Aldrin, I’ve come to realize that I was wrong. That?—”

“I’m sorry. Can you say that again?” I can’t help the grin that grows on my face. He has always been too easy to rile up.

Cyprien gives me a deadpan look. “I was wrong.” He suddenly claps his hands. “Everyone out. We have things to discuss.”

Soldiers file out of the room. They are a volley with multiple currents, and my people are an island of stillness within them. Around us metal plate armor clanks, chain-mail rattles, and leather swishes.

Hawthorne resolves out of the mass of soldiers and approaches me. I look him up and down, searching for signs of assault, but the young man’s skin and clothes are clean. His hair is pulled into its usual neat topknot, with the sides of his head freshly shaven. There is a scar that runs over his right eye and down his cheek, but it is old.

I slap him on the back. “Were you treated well?”

“Yeah, like the rest of them,” Hawthorn says. “They shoved me in the barracks and I caught up with a few old friends. Kept an eye on me though, so I couldn’t escape or get word to you.” I nod and he leaves with the rest of them.

I grab hold of Keira, and motion for Silvan, Drake, and Klara to remain. They slink into the shadows, watching and waiting for any threat. I walk to the dais with Keira in tow, but Cyprien makes a show of taking my seat again.

Lilly resolves out of the shadows and stands to Cyprian’s side, behind the throne, clearly still his second in command. I didn’t realize how much I missed her calm presence until her honey-gold eyes land on me, glowing with warmth.

She dips her head to me in acknowledgment, and the firelight shimmers off the tattoo of long lines and swirling runes that cover her forehead and entirely bald scalp in an intricate cap, in perfect harmony with her caramel skin. Earrings that run up her peaked ears and connected by a chain dance with the motion.

I drag my attention back to Cyprien, and stop just below the dais, though it kills me. “Tell me. Will you back me? Do you believe in the corruption now?”

Cyprien holds up a hand. “Not so fast. I was merely saying I was wrong in assuming you went so far as to let two human girls into this realm. Not even you would push it so far.”

Disappointment crashes within me. I may have won the first battle before I walked in the door, but the greater still lays ahead of me.

“No. I did not,” I mutter.

“We have become fast friends, Caitlin and I. She has told me a lot of interesting things about humans.” Cyprien raises a hand in her direction.

“Not fast enough friends, since you still hold me as your prisoner,” Caitlin snaps at him.

“You are my guest.” Cyprien gives her a sidelong glance, as though they have had this conversation countless times. “Have you not made friends here?”

Her cheeks color, but she mutters under her breath. “A guest that can’t leave.”

Cyprien leans forward in his seat, the thick braids of his long, dark hair flicking forward over his shoulder and the gold beads threaded into them clinking. “Do you know that when we brought her back here, she knocked three of my soldiers unconscious and almost burnt down an entire building in her attempt to escape and rescue her sister?”

I nudge Keira beside me and give her a sidelong smile. “The two of you are similar, then?”

She gives me a long, withering look. “I am still not happy with you. Do not forget our bargain.”

The reproach burns.

Perhaps I was not fair in my test of her. Even the thought of it, of what she had been willing to do with me, is enough to heat my blood and make my head explode. The frustration makes me mad.

I turn that energy back to Cyprien instead. “Tell me again about how you were wrong. How you made yet another fast assumption and turned your forces against me over it, without talking to me first. Without asking a single question. You should have known me better.”

“I don’t know you at all anymore, Aldrin!” Cyprien erupts, standing from the throne. “What were you doing at the border of winter, killing the twisted creations that they sent into our lands? Destroying the evidence of it. Can you not see the land grab into spring the Winter King is making? There is snow everywhere here. The Frozen River once had ice in it the size of my fist. There are platforms of ice now, the size of a barge. The dam above is almost completely crusted with ice. The Winter King is using his love of technology to force the season in our lands.”

A deep fury builds within me until fire runs through my veins and I cannot contain it any longer. My every muscle is taut, twitching with pained restraint, because all I want to do is hit the man in his face.

“This is the kind of narrow-sightedness that got my sister killed.” I growl at him.

“Don’t you dare bring Lorrella into this! Don’t. You. DARE. Do you think losing my wife and our unborn child did not kill me also? We had never heard of a woman dying in childbirth before. How was I to know? I did the best I could.” Cyprien’s face turns red and tears build at the corners of his eyes.

I run a hand through my hair as grief threatens to overwhelm me. It shivers through every extremity of my body, but I cannot turn into a howling, crying mess here. Not in front of this man. “You should have taken her to the druids. The humans would have known what to do. Their women sometimes die in childbirth.”

“Like you said. Their women die in childbirth. They can’t always prevent it.” Cyprien’s eyes are cold. Dead. “I lost my wife. My child. And the friend who had been my brother since before I married his sister.”

A silence extends as we glare at each other, all the anger and pain at Lorrella’s death thrown between us instead of unpacking the grief behind it.

“Every day I wake up and still look for her in my bed, as though my sleep-ridden brain cannot understand that she is gone. Even after all these years,” Cyprien murmurs, and the gods help me, his voice cracks.

I shake my head in an attempt to violently remove the emotions I cannot handle. Otherwise, that darkness will swallow me whole.

Before I know what I am doing, my treacherous legs take me up the steps to the dais. I grab Cyprien and crush him in a bear hug and hold him there for a long time, like I can’t let him go. His entire body goes completely rigid within my grasp and he holds his arms out, away from me, before awkwardly patting me on the back.

“I am sorry,” I say hoarsely. “That I blamed you. That we have hardly talked since.”

“As am I,” he utters. “I should have listened to you, then and many times over the years since.”

I let him go, then pull away. “Listen to me now, Cyprien. The Winter King is not making a land grab, despite what the high chancellor is claiming. She does not even believe it. Would this fortress be empty if we were about to go to war with winter? Claims of an old enemy at our gates and the fear-mongering that goes with it is the best way to unify a people. The best sleight of hand so they cannot see the truth.”

Cyprien gives me his classic thin-lipped frown. “And what truth is that?”

I have to get through to this man. To resist the urge to shake him. “You saw the spriggans my soldiers put down. The creatures were in suffering, many hardly able to function. Their bodies were rotting away and turning to ash, dissipating on the breeze while they still lived. Why would the Winter King do such a thing?”

“The official word is that he has unleashed a disease that attacks our low fae.” Cyprien’s voice is chipped with ice.

“The spriggan are of both winter and spring courts, why disease his own subjects?” I whip back.

“Maybe something went wrong. Maybe he doesn’t care about his own subjects.”

I raise an eyebrow at him. “You have met Erik. A man doesn’t change that much, Winter King or no. He is not his father. Do not forget the war ended between our courts because he worked hard for the peace treaty.”

Cyprien taps his temple with a long finger while thinking, but that frown is gone.

I pounce. “The lowest fae, those with the smallest drops of magic, they’re falling apart. Fading away, because there is not enough power left in these lands to sustain them. The lands are dying where the courts border and the magic is at its thinnest.

“What you see here isn’t a winter land grab, it is a spread of the desolation at the borders. There is now an icy wasteland where our court meets winter, not their usual snowy plains, but a place devout of life, with immense cracks of darkness running through it. These are voids where all matter has been sucked away, as though the rifts are gates to another realm that is absolute nothingness. Like the night sky without the stars. The earth around them disappears to ash drifting on the breeze, just like those spriggan. The magic is fading away from our realm and our entire world will die when it is gone.”

I need Cyprien on my side. For him to listen to me. He still has influence in this court. “Come to the Dividing Cliffs, Cyprien. See the evidence for yourself.”

He shifts uncomfortably. “If there is evidence, then why does the high chancellor and the entire council believe as they do? Why is no one looking at it?” The fight has gone out of him.

“Because no one cares to see. They are too stupid or too afraid,” I counter. “It is easier to deny what is right in front of our faces, than to acknowledge this threat that none of us know how to deal with. To admit that this was our doing, and that we don’t want to change our comfortable lifestyles to fix it. War with winter is easy in comparison. It is our oldest dance. We all understand it.”

Cyprien rolls his neck. “I will think on it.” He turns to Lilly. “We have a lot to discuss.”

“Yes. It seems that we do.” Lilly tips her head to me ever so slightly again. “It was ever so nice to see you again, Aldrin, and witness your unique perceptions. I hope you will stay at this fortress while we deliberate.” She says without a hint of mockery, and her motherly tone makes me feel like a boy running around the palace again, when she used to give me treats.

Both turn away from me, to slip out the back door beside the dais, but I block them with my body. “Why did you come here, Cyprien? Surely it wasn’t to monitor me. If the high chancellor wanted to know if I were a threat, she could have sent anyone.”

“I am here,” Cyprien says, “because I am losing faith in the high chancellor. I have wondered for months if I was wrong in allowing her to remove my king from his seat of power and send him into exile.”

Cyprien looks me straight in the eye. “Aldrin, my king of the Spring Court, please do not prove my most recent change of heart wrong. Because if you are indeed worthy, if you prove to me that everything you have said is true, I will fight to the ends of this realm and into the next to return you to your rightful place. But first,” He holds up a finger. “First, I need to be convinced.”

Those words smack into me with the force of a stampede of crazed kelpies. Cyprien turns on his heel, nods to Lilly at his side, and both leave the room.