Page 7 of The Fae Queen's Captive
Her voice is low and musical, lilted the same as the others’, rich in a way that’s intoxicating to hear. Like each of her words is a sip of a sweet ruby liqueur. “And there was no trouble?”
“None, Your Majesty,” Idalia says.
“Good. The banquet will begin soon, then. You should be ready.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
When I hear them rise behind me, the woman speaks again. “Morven, please wait outside the doors. You will be needed before you can make yourself ready.”
Morven’s displeasure radiates so palpably through the space that I can sense it even with my back to him and my eyes on the hem of the woman’s dress.
“Yes, Your Majesty,” he answers stiffly, and then I hear him leave after the others.
After the door closes, we are alone.
“Look at me,” the woman says, and curiosity still burning brighter than any other feeling, I obey.
Chapter4
Even without the thin circle of gold set in her hair, there is something about her bearing, something about her expression…It reminds me of the way cats sit and stags stand. It reminds me of the unhurried way the moon skims across the sky. There is a completeness about her, a certainty, and a well of power that isn’t interested in proving itself, since such a thing would be unnecessary. Redundant. It speaks for itself.
She speaks for herself.
The queen is not beautiful in the usual way, but sheisbeautiful, of that there is no doubt. High cheekbones, brows in dark arches. Her eyes, blacker than the spaces between stars. A mouth with a full lower lip and then a sharply peaked upper lip. Those lips are painted a dark red, but they seem to be the only ornamented part of her face, for the lashes fanning thickly from her eyes need no assistance, and neither does her skin, which is smooth, save for two faint lines bracketing her mouth. I could call them smile lines, but I won’t, because it is hard to imagine her smiling often enough to cause them.
The queen’s jaw is squared and precise, and her nose is long and bumped at the bridge, and when it’s all put together, the strong, dramatic features and the coal-black eyes, she’s impossible to look at and impossible to look away from.
I am suddenly very grateful to Maynard for forcing me to my knees.
“Welcome to my castle,” the queen says finally. “Have you seen anything like it?”
I’ve never been in a room lit by mushrooms and walled with chained books, nor have I been in a castle carved entirely from earth and bedrock, nor I have I ever been kidnapped on Halloween night. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone like her, whose face I could look at for the rest of my life and still need to look at longer.
“This is a dream,” I say, sounding more dazed than certain.
“All things are dreams,” the queen says, voice as cool and impersonal as the walls made of falling water outside this room.
“How can I wake up?”
“You cannot,” the queen says. “There is no waking from this. There is only this and the dream you came from, nothing else.”
I swallow, dropping my eyes back to the hem of her dress. I want to wake up. I want to be at the fair with Alfie and the others; I want to be in my bed at the farmhouse, counting the hours until I’m back in Edinburgh and my hookup apps pull up more than theno results in search radiusmessage I get out in these parts.
“Why am I here?” I whisper.
“Do you even know wherehereis?” the queen asks.
“I guess not.” Maybe if it isn’t a dream…maybe if I’m still awake and this is real, thenherematters. Because if this is truly the castle de Segovia stumbled upon, then I need to know how I got here and how to get back. How to bring others here, maybe.
How to bring others to the castle made of mist and mushrooms? Yeah, right, Janneth. This place can’t be real.
“This is the Court of Stags,” the queen says. “In Elphame, which is called Faerie by most.”
Elphame is a word I know plenty well, between a fun semester gamboling with Thomas the Rhymer and several weeks’ worth of late nights poring over records of the Scottish witch trials for a paper. And even though my focus is on the medievalarchaeologicalrecord, I’m enough of a former fairy stan that I soaked up every fairy mention I found in my research. And you know what? Okay, between Elphame and the castle, I think I’ve got to be dreaming. I just listened to a great audiobook about mushrooms and fungus last week, and I was rereading de Segovia’s journal, and maybe I fell asleep on the bed. And I’m so tired and rumpled and chronically sex deprived that I’m having a weird, super-active dream about Elphame and mushrooms and a hot, scary queen.
The queen’s fingers find my chin, and she tilts my face up to hers. “You don’t seem surprised.”
“Faerie isn’t real,” I tell the fairy queen. “So I know this must be a dream.”
