Page 50 of The Queen The Fae Forgot
I didn’t know which one I feared more.
I felt something icy run through my veins every time I thought of the guard. Why had his first thought been to assume I was an imposter? I thought we’d made sure that rumor died?
I supposed even the glamour I’d placed wasn’t perfect, but that presented us with a new problem.
The sun had long since set by the time we reached the doors to the second ring of the city, only to realized they’d shut with the sun. It would be nearly impossible to make it back to the castle without drawing attention to ourselves now.
The three of us crouched for a long moment between an overturned cart in another cramped alley. All the alleys in the outer ring had started to look the same. The sounds of the riots had started to die down, though I wasn’t sure if that was because they’d actually been quelled, or if we’d just finally worked our way far enough away from them.
Either way, it wasn’t until that moment that I found myself panting for breath between Zev and Finch, that I realized how exhausted I’d become—or how long we’d been running and hiding, ducking through these streets of my city, just to keep my own people from tearing me apart. As if sensing the way my heartbeat quickened, still, Zev put his arm over my shoulder, pulling me into him. Finch somehow wormed his way beneath his arm as well, on my other side, and pressed his face into the hair at the back of my head. He took a deep, steadying breath before he finally voiced what the rest of us were thinking.
“Unless we want to sleep on the streets, we’d better find an inn.”
“Yeah,” Zev said, glancing up and down the alley. “If we can find one in this ring tonight that isn’t ready to lynch the next fae that steps foot inside.”
CHAPTERSEVENTEEN
The distant soundsof the clash were barely a memory by the time we found an inn where Finch was able to secure a room for us. Even then, he was only able to do it by bribing a beggar boy to purchase it for us, and then—just to be safe—I used a little glamour to make him forget he’d helped us at all.
For once, I felt no guilt at all using my glamour.
I collapsed into the inn’s bed expecting for exhaustion to instantly claim me, but instead, I felt the opposite. A surge of energy raced through me, causing me to sit back up so quickly that it startled Zev and Finch, both still unlacing their boots at the bottom of the bed. Their heads snapped towards me, their hands reaching for their weapons in alarm.
I held out my hands to reassure them, but there was nothing reassuring about the breathlessness that had taken over my voice.
“What … what was that we just heard?” I asked, my brain only just now processing what it was Rayner had been saying, now that the immediate threat to our survival had passed. “What did he mean when he said that the veil between the realms had been breached?”
Both Zev and Finch looked at each other, and I knew from the pause that followed, that I was not going to like their answer.
“Rayner …” Finch started, glancing nervously at Zev for support, and then back to me. “He was talking about Avarath. About Faerie.”
Avarath has turned its eye.
A shiver ran down my spine at the sound of the familiar name.
There it was, the prophecy again. The harder I tried to avoid it, the more unavoidable it seemed to become.
Once again, as I closed my eyes, I saw that images of the bodies piling higher and higher. I tasted iron at the back of my tongue and smelled the warm scent of blood. I never wanted to see that image again, but once again, it haunted me.
I sat at the edge of the bed, my arms wrapped around my knees, as the two fae finished kicking off their boots. I hadn’t bothered undressing yet, but I found myself unable to move from where I sat, hunched over, as if barely holding myself together.
The unrest that we saw tonight, that was not something that had happened overnight. That was the kind of unrest that had been brewing for some time. The queen could have mentioned this to me when we made our first bargain, she could have told me that the other courts had been called. It would have been a useful bargaining chip on her part. She’d warned me that the other courts might rebel, but she’d said nothing of the people that were already in the throes of it.
What could be her purpose?
Did she not want to admit her own weakness, her inability to keep her people in line in the weeks since the king had died? But couldn’t she have instructed me to put the people under a glamour too, to calm them, as my father surely had? That was the only explanation I could think of for why this rebellion was happening now. There had always been unrest in the humans of this realm, I’d seen it all too often with my own eyes growing up among them. But it had never come close to this.
The king’s influence must have been terrible.
I thought back to the dilapidated houses, the conditions that the humans of this city were expected to live in, while all the while sitting in the shadow of the opulent lifestyles of the fae that had taken this city from them to begin with. There was no way they’d lived here, all this time, like this, willingly.
“Aurra?”
Finch’s voice, softer than usual, tore me from my thoughts. He knelt before me, one hand outstretched. It took me a moment to understand what he meant, but his gentle hands nudged me in the right direction. He took my foot and moved it to press in the middle of his chest while he began to undo the laces one by one.
“What are we going to do, next?”
“We have to do something about the people. We can’t let them destroy the city, can’t have men like Rayner stirring this kind of dissent, but what if he’s right? What if there’s even more to worry about then there obviously already is?”
