I take Shaye’s hand and she hoists me up with ease. Her biceps are wider than the limb I struck on my fall. The woman could likely break me in two if she tried and after years of manual labor, I am not frail.
“So he was hiding in my world to get away from the Boltovs and their Butchers?”
“Oh, right, I never finished.” Shaye sighs and shakes her head. “I hate this story.”
“You don’t have to tell me.” Though I do desperately want to know now. Kings, evil knights, runaway royalty, it has all the makings of the storybooks Joyce would read to Helen and Laura. The ones I would hear by pressing my ear to their doors at night before I’d creep back to my bed and tuck myself in.
“You want to know, so I’m going to tell you.” Shaye takes a breath and continues the tale. “King Aviness the Sixth’s death sparked a seemingly endless cycle of people vying for power. There are three things that give a king control over the fae: the glass crown, the hill on which the first king was crowned—which is also where the glass crown resides—and the magic of the ancient kings. If a man controls all three, he controls the fae.”
“I see. So just one of them isn’t enough?”
“No, though any one of those three things holds immense power. So any family tangentially related to Aviness tried to exert their claim to the glass crown and powers as the true rulers of the fae, but the Boltovs always got to them before they could get anywhere near the crown, much less the hill of the first king on which the High Court sits.
“Most retreated into these woods for protection, some abandoning their bloodline altogether, not that it made any difference. The Boltovs saw that the trees were watered with their blood, systematically hunting out any of the Aviness lineage who could lay claim to the dormant, old magic of kings. Davien was only tangentially related to the bloodline, but it didn’t spare him from the hunt.”
“Tangentially related? What does that mean?”
“His mother was a widow. She remarried…poor thing didn’t even know that her new husband was the last, distant survivor of the Aviness family.”
“How could she not know?”
“He was only related through a number of marriages and cousins removed, a rogue twig on the family’s branches.”
“It sounds like the man Davien’s mother married hardly had the blood at all,” I say.
“Indeed. The last true Aviness by any significant measure was put to death nearly thirty years ago.”
“And if Davien was born before his mother married, he has no blood relation to the family at all, merely marriage.”
“Yes, but that’s enough of a link to make the Boltovs nervous.”
Davien’s story is eerily similar to my own in some ways. I can’t help but think of Joyce, widowed and with child, marrying with the hopes of security and secret ambition. “Does he have any siblings?”
“No.”
At least no one suffered like I did. “So I take it the Butchers killed his father?”
“And mother, even though she had nothing to do with the family other than a marriage band and vows.” Shaye pauses as we pass through another town of ruins. The sun is beginning to creep over the horizon and the morning’s first light paints the stones in a ghostly hue. “Oren, Davien’s butler and nanny from birth, took Davien and retreated back to an old Aviness stronghold on the other side of the Fade. One that still had some of the old wards. It was the best chance for Davien to reach adulthood beyond Boltov’s reach—when he would be strong enough to return and fight for us all.”
That explains why it looks like a castle. “Why would a fae stronghold be on the human side of the Fade?”
“Because the elves find perverse delight in taking our land and when the world was cut up, some of what was ours went to you humans.” She wears a look of disgust. But in a positive display of her character, she doesn’t seem to direct it toward me. More at the circumstances…and those long-ago elves.
“So Davien was raised in the human world?”
“Yes. Cut off from our people and the magic of Midscape…he’s lived a lonely life of struggle. The only thing that’s kept him going is the obligation to free us from Boltov’s tyranny. Because their grip becomes tighter on these lands by the day. And if he dies—if the last with a claim to the power of Aviness perishes—then nothing will stand in the way of Boltov finally unlocking the full power of the glass crown. The power of kings will no longer be tied to the Aviness bloodline and will be free for the taking.”
