Authors: Nia Davenport
“…But that was the very definition of courage. Being utterly terrified of something yet choosing to stand tall in the face of it.” ~ Skyler
Book II
Present time
The mortal realm
Chapter 5
I
stared at myself in the mirror looking at Abda’s finished product. After hours of primping, plucking, hair combing, knot pulling, make-up application, and corset tightening she deemed I finally looked like a princess. I sheepishly admitted to myself she was right. I wore the most beautiful dress I had ever seen. Its corseted top boasted a strapless sweet heart neckline and fit like a glove down the length of my torso. At my waist the shimmering gold fabric flowed outward in sweeping layers. My golden brown curls had been gathered and tamed in an elegant up-do at the base of my neck. A small, glittering tiara pinned them in place.
Tonight, the tiara served a far greater purpose than holding my normally unruly hair together. It signified me as Zander’s betrothed and Anthame’s Crown Princess and future Queen. He’d asked me the minute we returned Kiera safely to the High Palace. I was powerless to stop the words of acceptance that tumbled forth. I knew it couldn’t last but tonight…
I would pretend like it was a time of old. When I was a Queen in love with my King and he held me close as we danced in revelry
.
Whoa
, I thought to myself more than a little confused. That thought was definitely not my own. It was foreign. It held no place in my memory or the context of my life. Eerily, it was not the first foreign thought I’d had. Ever since Zander truly forgave me on the pier and asked me to return to Pleith I’d been experiencing them at random moments. They became more persistent after I officially became his betrothed.
“Miss Skyler we have to get you downstairs. Members of Anthame’s high society began arriving half an hour ago. The Queen will be livid if you do not make an appearance soon.” Abda’s fraught tone interrupted me from my thoughts.
I let the matter drop and filed it away to consider at a later time.
Chapter 6
I
stood outside the High Palace’s grand ballroom. Hushed laughter and eloquent music from the party floated beneath its closed doors. A pair of guards bowed as I approached and moved to open the doors. I waved a hand stopping them short. I needed a moment to catch my breath as well as collect my thoughts.
Tonight’s ball was in honor of Zander and I. He had fought with his mother long and hard about our betrothal. When he made it clear he would go through with it with or without her approval, she grudgingly relented. She knew I was no Lesser Noble but she still didn’t know I was an assassin. We thought it best to leave that part out. It would only complicate matters more.
I laughed at that last thought. I was about to drop a bomb on Zander that would complicate matters a lot more than the King and Queen of Anthame knowing I had been sent to the palace as an assassin to kill their only son. No matter how many deep breaths I took to calm my nerves they refused to steady themselves. The voice I allowed to guide me this far whispered it was time to tell Zander everything and to convince him to return to Faerie with me.
I tipped my head to the guards indicating I was finally ready for them to open the doors that loomed in front of me. They bent their torsos slightly at the waist then obeyed.
The grand ballroom’s doors opened to reveal a sea of glittering gowns and black dress coats. Every noble and wealthy high society person from across the kingdom had traveled to Pleith to celebrate their Crown Prince’s betrothal. Ladies danced with their gentleman escorts beneath the lavish crystal chandeliers that hung from the glass paned ceilings and swathed the ballroom in a sparkling glow.
The musicians stopped playing at the exact moment I stepped across the threshold into the room. One head after another turned in my direction creating a ripple effect until every pair of eyes in the ballroom were fixed on me. My cheeks heated in embarrassment. I looked down at the glittering shoes that matched my dress. When I looked back up Zander was making his way off the dais and across the ballroom toward me. The crowd silently parted creating a direct path from him to me.
“Skyler, you are the most beautiful girl in not only Anthame but across the known world.”
The depth of the emotion radiating from his gaze told me he didn’t mean it as an exaggeration. In his eyes I was perfection. It warmed my heart and set butterflies aflutter in my stomach. No one had ever looked at me that way before.
“Dance with me,” he muttered as he swept me up in his arms and began moving us around the dance floor in a much more elegant pattern than I could have accomplished on my own.
The music restarted but not a single soul moved. The attendees remained rooted where they stood when I first entered the ballroom. All gazes stayed fixed on the two of us.
Oblivious to the bodies around us, Zander’s eyes remained fixed on me as if I was the only person of importance in the room. He led the dance twirling me in sync with the music as I followed his lead.
I was not the most graceful dancer in the world but when given a decent guide, I could do alright. Zander was more than decent. He moved as if dancing was what he had been born to do. He spun me outward as the music came to a crescendo then back into his arms in perfect time with the final chord. His lips made contact with mine as our bodies came together. The world temporarily faded away leaving only him and me and the beautifully, perfect moment.
A different ballroom in a different palace flashed before my vision. Though the surroundings and people were foreign to me, the young man twirling me around the dance floor then ending our dance in a searing kiss was identical to the one whose arms I remained encased in. But the emotion I experienced in my vision was just as foreign as the surroundings and people within it. I should have been excited, happy, and giddy with love and the rush of adrenaline as I was now. Instead I felt a sense of foreboding that left me sorrowful and anxious. My gut twisted in dread of what the near future would hold as if the dance was the last intimate moment I would have with the young man who held me in his arms. The applause and cheers of the crowd from the ballroom in Pleith pulled me from the vision and back into reality.
“You okay?” Zander whispered in my ear, his concern evident in his tone.
“I’m okay.” I forced out a smile. It appeared genuine enough that he believed me.
The Queen stood on the dais and the King followed her, motioning for Zander and me to join them. The crowd immediately quieted.
“That’s our cue,” Zander squeezed my waist then took my hand. He led me through the still parted high society sea.
Once we stood on the dais alongside the King and Queen his mother began her speech. “Our son, your Heir, has chosen a bride. We are gathered here in celebration of Prince Edwin Alexander the Fifth’s betrothal to Lady Skyler Errin. Anthame tradition dictates that the High Council confirms her as your future Queen. However, in lieu of the Lady’s heroic aid in the rescue and safe return of our Princess, our King has bypassed the High Council’s confirmation. When Prince Edwin ascends to the throne of Anthame, Skyler will sit beside him as your Queen.”
The crowd dutifully erupted in applause at the conclusion of her speech.
The Queen wore her elegant mask of love and acceptance well. I wondered if I was the only one who could see through it. Her eyes briefly flashed dark with resentment confirming that the words she spoke were every bit a bitter pill for her to swallow as I suspected they were. The hard set of Zander’s jaw told me that he saw through the mask as well.
“I am so happy you came back with us, Skyler. We really will get to be sisters now,” Kiera whispered beside me.
“I could not have asked for a more perfect one.” I squeezed the Princess’ hand.
A pain shot through my chest as I said the words. Zander’s ten-year-old sister was the sweetest little girl. Her close relationship with Zander reminded me of my relationship with my brother. It broke my heart that I was about to rip him from her life as mine had been ripped from me. I tried to comfort myself in the thought that at least her brother would remain alive. It didn’t work. In Faerie, cut off from the mortal world, he would be just as dead to her. She would also miss him just as much.
Kiera lived life as a Princess in the High Palace with a Queen for a mother who was more concerned with acting the part of royalty than a parent and a King for a father whose time was consumed by running a kingdom. It was a position envied by many but detested by her. It made for a lonely childhood. Zander was the only one who made time for her. He loved his little sister dearly, doting on her and spoiling her rotten.
A light blinked on in my head. I had been worrying over a suitable replacement for Zander the past couple of days. My heart would not allow me to take Kiera’s brother away from her without leaving someone who would care for her and look after her in his place. No one could ever replace him, but I knew of someone who would come in as a close second. After I told Zander the real truth and convinced him to return to Faerie with me I would also ask him to persuade his mother to send for Lady Emilia Katherina of House Freyberg to return to court.
Emily had been my roommate when I first arrived at court as an assassin posing as a lesser noble competing to wed Zander. She was a little too perky and sometimes did not know when to shut up, but she was kind and compassionate and fun and would be wonderful as a lady-in-waiting for Kiera. Emily had asked to be mine. I figured she would not mind being Kiera’s. It would put her exactly where she wanted to be: living life in the High Palace.
Stop stalling. It is time,
the voice that had guided my actions thus far whispered from the depths of my being. I took a deep breath then turned to my left to face Zander. “Can we go out on the balcony?” I asked over the melodious music and happy chatter of the partygoers.
Chapter 7
I
sat on the balcony’s edge wringing my hands together. I’d deceived Zander once. I arrived at the High Palace posing as a lesser noble from the House of Alastair under the pretense that I was there for the same reason the other ninety nine high society girls I arrived with: to compete for the heir of the House of Roth and Crown Prince’s hand in marriage. I had really been sent to the High Palace as an assassin. My mission was to get close enough to Zander to quietly, cleanly, and inconspicuously kill him. We first encountered each other by chance in the halls of the palace. He wore a guard’s uniform and I originally mistook him for a palace guard. It was not love at first sight but our initial encounter left me just as enthralled with him as he was with me.
The competition to wed Anthame’s Crown Prince did not allow for the competing girls to spend time with Zander until they had been weeded down to the final ten Elite. True to his nature, Zander ignored that particular rule and along with it all pretenses of tradition and decorum. He insisted on inviting me to breakfast in the royal gardens every morning then going horseback riding beyond the palace grounds afterwards.
I knew it was his version of attempting to court me and I allowed him to do so to get close to him. Though not for the reason the King’s treacherous High Council member, Krishna, had hired me for. I never intended to kill Zander. My mission remained what it had always been since I arrived in the mortal realm: locate the last living male heir of the Asteroth bloodline and return to Faerie with him.
I could have physically overpowered him and dragged him to Faerie, but our plan would only work if we had his willing cooperation. So I went along with Zander’s attempts to court me to gain his trust and grow close to him. I reasoned it would make it easier to convince him to return to Faerie with me.
What I did not plan on was my having to tell Zander that I had been sent to the palace as an assassin to kill him. I was forced to do so when I learned that the person who wanted Zander dead was willing to use means other than myself to achieve that end when it seemed I was taking too long to get the job done. I couldn’t run the risk of the heir to the Asteroth bloodline being murdered before I could get him to Faerie. He was our only hope of ridding the realm of Belial’s cruelty. I told him I had been sent to the palace as an assassin so that he would be aware of the threat to his life and prepared for any possible attacks. I did not tell him that I was a fae or about Faerie and his destiny within the realm.
Before I could divulge that real truth his little sister was kidnapped by the very man who wanted him dead in a bid to seize control of the throne of Anthame. We tracked his sister down, killed Krishna and returned her home safely. I told myself I would confess my duplicity the moment we returned Kiera to Pleith but I had been stalling for days. I’d not only gotten close to Zander but I had allowed him to get close to me. In the midst of my machinations I irrevocably fell head over heels in love with him. He was my sun and my stars. Precious spots of brightness that lit up my otherwise dark existence. I broke his heart and in turn shattered my own when I confessed my supposed deception. He closed off his feelings for me and I feared he would never forgive me. A wise old man I met during our journey to rescue Kiera told me true love doesn’t hold grudges. It can’t help but to forgive. Fortunately, he was right. Zander finally forgave me once we freed Kiera from Krishna’s clutches.
Now I was about to tell him that my deception never stopped and ran deeper than he could have ever fathomed. I was not anything or anyone I ever pretended to be. Everything he thought he knew about me was really the life Emilia lived and would have continued living if I had not found her sobbing in the field outside her home when I first entered the mortal realm. My love for him was as real as it gets, but he would never believe me a second time. He would not be able to see past or forgive the deception again and I cannot blame him. I loved him, I would always love him, but I didn’t deserve him. My heart would forever ache with the loss of his love but it was a sacrifice I would willingly make. Faerie needed him more than I did.
“The shadows are back in your eyes.” Zander peered at me in concern. He tucked a wild strand of my bronze locks behind my ear. "I'll have to try harder to chase them all away."
I smiled up at him but it didn’t quite make it to my eyes. I felt like I was fracturing into a thousand pieces inside. I knew what this moment would end in. When I am done saying what needs to be said Zander will look at me through cold, detached eyes, like in the cave at the waterfall when I revealed I had been sent to the palace as an assassin. He will take a step back from me and the mask of Prince Edwin Alexander the Fifth, heir of House of Roth, which he wears for the rest of the high society world of glittering balls, grand titles, and political scheming he hates so much will slip back into place. His spine will straighten and his chin will jut out ever so slightly. His relaxed, easygoing nature will be replaced with forced rigidity. The worse of it all will be when he tells me he loves me in a flat voice that lacks all intonation.
"Skyler, what's the matter?" Zander asked with increased concern.
I knew he saw the tears threatening to fall. It was taking all of my willpower to hold them back. I began carving a second painfully deep wound into my chest the moment I started falling in love with Zander knowing the depth of my deception. Just like the wound, once the floodgates opened they would never close.
Zander moved to wrap his arms around me in comfort but I shifted out of the reach of his embrace. I did it as a kindness to the both of us. It spared him the burden of having to disentangle himself from me and me the pain of feeling his arms go rigid around me.
“I lied to you,” I blurted out before he could say or do anything to make me change my mind or turn into a coward and take selfish refuge in the comfort of his love and the mortal realm.
Belial could not touch me here. If I stayed I would never have to see his wretched face or be under the merciless torment of his brutal thumb again. I could marry the boy I loved, become Anthame’s beloved Princess and future Queen, and live in the High Palace in safety and comfort. I could spend the rest of Zander’s mortal life pretending to age beside him as we grow old together over intimate breakfasts in the royal garden and treasured stolen moments of happiness in a little cave beneath a breathtaking waterfall. I would be free of Belial’s reign of terror and blood for the first time since I was a frightened nine-year-old little girl hysterically wailing as the bad king man butchered her family. I would be free.
But the rest of Faerie would not be. Darrien, Ysabeau, Selene, Ignacio, Khamaad and Lor would not be. Emilia, the young teenaged girl I found weeping in a field and promised to help make things better for would not be. I would be saving myself while damning an entire realm to an eternity of brutality and cruelty. I couldn’t do it. I could not be so selfish. I continued with my confession, forcing the words that wanted to stubbornly stick to the roof of my mouth out.
“When I told you I was an assassin sent to the palace to kill you it was not really the truth. I mean I was hired to kill you, but doing so was never my intent. I only used it as a cover and a means to get close to you.” I was babbling. I didn’t know exactly what to say and how to say it.
Confusion and hurt flashed in Zander’s eyes, but he remained quiet waiting for me to finish before he rendered judgment. It was one of the traits I loved most about him. He looked for the best in people. He measured them by their hearts and their intentions instead of merely by their actions. He knew things were not always as they appeared and he waited to learn the truth in its entirety before passing judgment.
“My name is Skyler Errin but I don’t belong to Anthame’s low society or in any other place in the mortal realm.”
Disbelief mingled with the confusion on his face.
“I suppose I should start at the beginning,” I sighed. “It might make what I tell you more believable.”
I told him about Faerie and how our legends say it and the mortal realm were created by Chaos and Order after Chaos introduced magic into the world. I told him about King Regias and Belial’s coup and his subsequent reign of tyranny. I told him about the one atrocity after another that Belial committed. I told him about the Order and its leaders and how I came to be Belial’s ward and what he sought to use me for. The Order unearthed the same information Belial did from his very own Seer, a fae with the magic of both foresight and hindsight. I told him that instead of taking him to Faerie and delivering him to Belial who would see him dead in order to eliminate the threat he posed to his rule, the Order had come to me with a different plan that I willingly went along with. We planned for me to bring Zander to Faerie but to deliver him to the Order’s leaders instead.
Once Zander crossed into Faerie the magic of the realm would recognize him as one of the Asteroth bloodline. He would immediately begin to change from mortal to fae. It would take time, but as he did he would develop and be able to wield magic as well. The type could not be predicted until it started to manifest but all of the Asteroths to ever exist claimed powerful magic. The Order’s leaders would hide him while Faerie changed him and help him learn to use his magic as it manifested. Faerie needed him to challenge and kill Belial. His Roth blood was through his mother’s line and for reasons Belial’s seer refused to reveal, Zander in particular was the only living Roth whose blood Faerie would recognize as Asteroth.
To Zander’s credit he did not automatically dismiss my confession as the ramblings of a young girl gone mad. He did however take a step back from me and regard me through suspicious eyes.
“Let’s say I believe you. Did you ever love me at all? Was any of what you appeared to feel for me ever real? Or was it simply all a part of your plan to gain my trust so that what you just told me would be more digestible? Was I always just some pawn to be used in a game of
political
scheming
?” His tone grew more disgusted as he spoke.
He flung the words at me. They hit me with such force that I physically recoiled from them.
The knife to my heart sparked a bitter, ugly, furious emotion that bubbled up and out of me. I had no idea where the context of the words I spoke next came from but the truth in them reverberated through every cell in my body.
“How dare you accuse me of not feeling for you? Not loving you? How dare you stand before me with condemnation in your eyes? You deceived me far greater than any wrong you feel I have committed against you. You lied to me. You broke me. I loved you and you promised our bond would last for an eternity. You held me in your arms and twirled me across a ballroom floor and promised you would forever be my King and I would forever be your Queen. You made me need you more than I needed oxygen to breathe or a life to live. You made be believe we would have forever together. Then you left me. You drank from the cup of un-making and left me. Not just for a millennium or two but for forever. You could never be re-made. Never be reborn. When I found you soulless and forever lost to me in our chambers I shattered into a million, tiny, fractured pieces. You left me
forever
after promising and making me believe we would have forever.”
My entire body shook violently from the strength of the emotion that overtook me. I wanted to launch myself across the space he had put between us, both to close the distance and to attack him for placing it and an endless eternity between us. I forced my limbs not to obey the madness that had overcome me. I clenched my fists together and held them tightly at my sides. As I fought for oxygen awareness of my surroundings faded.
I was back in the other ballroom that overwhelmed my consciousness when I first entered the one that contained Zander, the royal family, and all of Anthame’s high society. Only this time I was an observer instead of a participant in the scene that played out. A girl who looked like me but not danced in the middle of the room with a boy whose eyes were identical to Zander’s. She laughed and looked up at him lovingly as he twirled her in his arms. He looked down at her with love and adoration but when he smiled back, it did not reach his eyes. There was a sad darkness that lurked beneath their surface.
“I love you,” she said to him.
“I love you more,” he said back to her. His words were genuine but his tone held an odd note.
The girl was not naïve. She was more perceptive and aware of others’ emotions than most and picked up on the wrongness. “Promise me we will have forever,” she half demanded half pleaded. Her voice came out strained and desperate sounding.
The boy hesitated. When he did not immediately respond the girl grew more frantic. Tears threatened to spill from her eyes as she gulped in large panicked breaths of air. He hated to see her upset and hated even more to see her cry. He truly did love her with every fiber of his being. But even though they both looked no older than eighteen, he was millennia older than she. The expanse of time she had been alive was only a hairsbreadth in comparison to the thousands of years he had lived. Immortality wasn’t the prize most mortals thought it was. Ennui was weighing on him again. More heavily than ever. He’d loved the girl in front of him at first sight and thought she would relieve his burden. She did at first. He loved her more passionately and more strongly than he had ever loved another. She was vibrant and fierce and beautiful and full of life. But the strength of his love for her only caused the truth of his existence and hers to press down upon him more heavily. They could have an eternity together but she would eventually fade. He would not. Even knowing what he planned to do he looked down at her and allowed the lie to pass from his lips. “We will have forever.”