She could see the battle in his eyes. Still he did not trust her—why should he when she had given him no reason?—but his obvious fear of the witch won out. He nodded.
He leaned down and this time he whispered in her ear. “I shall not be far. Do not think to double-cross me.”
Arianne rolled her eyes. She’d had plenty of opportunities to escape on the long trek up the mountain. Opportunities to grab the sword that hung from his belt and use it against him. Her abilities with a blade rivaled those of any soldier. She could have killed him twenty times over at least.
She long ago learned how to take advantage of being underestimated.
But now was not the time to disabuse him of his arrogance. Now was the time… to see her sister. Her hands shook as she walked away from him, a mixture of a fear and nerves and thrill and anger—so much anger—coursing through her blood.
Arianne followed a barely discernible trail through the slice of forest. The further she went, the lighter the world around her got. The trees were thinning.
Then, in a single step, she was out of the woods. Crossing into an open glade. It was, in a word, beautiful. An oasis of vibrant green in the wintry gray world of the White Mountains.
Was this where her sister had been hiding? It seemed like a paradise compared to the bleak, powerless existence her kin had suffered over the years.
Then she saw it. At the other end of the glade… sat a small wooden hut. The only habitable structure—if it could be called habitable.
Her breath caught.
It was the saddest little hut, not much larger than Arianne’s wardrobe, perhaps two paces square. The roof sat at an odd angle and several of the siding boards hung from a single nail, providing no protection at all.
Arianne’s heart crept into her throat. This was where her sister lived?
All this time, all these years she had spent angry at Callie. Cursing her for leaving their people so helpless, cursing her for leaving period.
Over time Arianne had built up an imaginary world that Callie inhabited. What great things she would produce with her practically unlimited powers… Sweet-meade fountains and candy-coated cottages. Herds of unicorns. Riches and abundance.
Nothing like this.
No one should have to live like this.
“I neither want nor need your pity.”
Arianne spun around at the sound of a voice she had not heard since they were both young girls. And yet she recognized it instantly.
“Callie,” she gasped.
It took every ounce of restraint not to rush toward her sister, older by mere months, and wrap her in a hug, make her promise that everything would be all right.
Callie was a shell. Her hair—long and dark like Arianne’s, but with looser curls—looked like a knotted mess, as if she had not seen fit to brush it once since leaving home. Not in ten years. Her clothes, an ankle-length dress made of thin black cotton with long sleeves and a front-lace, was torn in several places, worn through in several others.
Arianne took a step toward her. “You must be freezing.”
Callie laughed. Not the joyous laugh of the long-lost sister, but a maniacal cackle that sent shivers down Arianne’s spine. She stepped back.
“The cold does not touch me.”
“I see,” Arianne said in a small voice.
Callie’s tone sent shivers down Arianne’s spine. This was the dark-hearted witch she imagined her sister had become, but it felt hollow. Like it was a show, a shield.
Arianne was at a loss for words. She wanted to say something—to reassure Callie that things would be better now or ask her what happened to make her like this—but she couldn’t form the sounds. The proud tilt of her sister’s chin, the dangerous glint in her eyes warned Arianne that to speak those thoughts would be the end of whatever conversation they might have.
She closed her eyes for a second, drew in a fortifying breath. There would be time for sisterly things later. First, she needed to get to her primary purpose in seeking Callie out. Tearloch would not wait indefinitely. She needed to say what needed to be said before his patience vanished.
Arianne opened her eyes and asked, “Did you get my message?”
Callie squinted, twisted her head, like a wild dog listening for a sound on the wind. When she looked back at Arianne, the expression on her face could have cooled the sun itself. “You are not alone.”
Callie started in the direction from which Arianne had entered.
Arianne shouted.
Then the entire glade exploded in a flash of light.
Chapter 12
When Arianne screamed, Tearloch did not stop to think. He burst through the edge of the trees, into the open glade the princess had entered just minutes before.
He did not get two steps into the clearing before a blinding light filled the air.
He couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. Could only hear muffled sounds. His vision blurred through a thick layer of… something.
He could make out the shapes of the two sisters. Arianne advanced on the witch. There was a struggle. Muffled screams and shouts penetrated the thick fog.
He clearly heard, “No,” and “Let him go!”
The sisters struggled for a few moments longer and then suddenly his world cleared. His frozen motion continued, propelling him forward, and he stumbled into the clearing.
Arianne rushed toward him.
“Are you all right?” she demanded, her palms pressing into his cheeks, his shoulders, his chest.
There was true panic in her voice. He did not know how to react to such sincere concern—not from her, not from anyone. He was a solider, a warrior. He cared for and protected others, not the other way around.
As he let her concern wash over him, seep inside, he found that he quite liked it.
“Why princess,” he teased, “I didn’t know you cared.”
She rolled her eyes and smacked him on the shoulder. “It’s self-protection, I assure you,” she said, her voice wavering with emotion that her aloof response could not hide. “Wouldn’t want to give your clan a reason to be out for blood. Again.”
He didn’t suppress his smile, and was rewarded with a sunny one in return. In that shared moment, a brief connection, Tearloch felt his heart thud heavily against his chest. There was something more between them this quest. He believed he had been fighting that feeling alone. Now he had reason to hope he had not.
Dark movement caught his eye, and he remembered where they were. And why they were there.
Arianne’s face fell into a scowl and she whirled away.
“What is wrong with you?” she demanded of the witch. “Do you do that to every stranger that steps into your glade?”
The witch shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. You are the first two fae who have ever dared to enter.”
Arianne twisted to look at him, her face wide with shock. She turned back to her sister. “Since when?”
Because the witch was half human, her mortal side had the power to feed his fae magic with negative emotions. Though she tried to maintain her air of apathy, Tearloch sensed a deep emotion beneath the facade. A sadness.
His magic rejoiced, even as his heart ached.
“Ever,” she finally said.
“Oh Callie.” Arianne clutched a hand to her chest, just above her heart.
The look on her face nearly broke him.
Tearloch knew without a doubt that, were the princess human, his magic would be fully charged by the pain and guilt that were flooding through her. Even without that magical connection, he could sense her pain.
He didn’t know what urged him to do so, but he reached out and took her hand, laced their fingers together. To reassure her that he was there, and to reassure himself that she was. She rewarded his instinct with a tight squeeze.
“I got your raven,” the witch said, clearly diverting the conversation away from the subject of her isolation. “You said you need my help.”
Arianne took a step back. Maybe s
urprised by the sudden shift. Tearloch ran his thumb in reassuring circles over the back of her hand. He had no place in this conversation, but he could at least make his support clear.
She recovered quickly.
“We do,” Arianne said, stepping forward once more. “I do.”
The witch laughed. “What can I,” she said, “a solitary witch, high up in the White Mountains, possibly do to help you, High Princess of the Clan Deachair?”
“Callie, please,” Arianne began.
The witch bowed low to the ground. Her voice dripped with sarcasm as she said, “I am your humble servant.”
Arianne looked at Tearloch, clearly at a loss.
“The Moraine are hunting a traitor,” he said. “The Princess thought you might be able to help us locate him.”
The witch turned her dark eyes on him. Studied him so intently that he swore she was reading his thoughts.
With powers like hers, she quite possibly was.
He stood strong, even had to bite back a smile when he felt the princess’s thumb rubbing circles on his hand in the same way he had just done for her. He had the strangest sensation that, together, they could face any foe.
“A traitor?” The witch smiled wickedly. “Sounds like my kind of Moraine.”
Her disdainful gaze swept him up and down, as though she were judging him and finding him wanting. As if he cared for her approval.
“They think we are sheltering him,” Arianne said. When the witch’s eyes flashed at the word we, the princess quickly amended, “They believe he fled to Deachair lands. If we don’t find him, the clans will be at war.”
The witch seemed to consider this. Tearloch could not be certain if she was deciding whether or not to help or just wasting their time. They did not have time for such nonsense. Not when a traitor was on the loose and two clans were on the brink of war. He would not stand there being toyed with. They needed results.
“If you cannot help us,” he said, “we will be on our—“
“She has not told you the entire truth,” the witch said to him. Her gaze flicked to her sister. “Have you?”
Arianne tensed.
The witch stepped to within inches of him, closer and closer until they stood toe to toe.
“She has not told you,” the witch gloated, “of the curse.”
“Callie, no!”
Tearloch lifted his brows. He wasn’t sure what kind of game the witch played, but he knew she was trying to drive a wedge between him and the princess. She could not know how futile such a task would be.
He gave Arianne’s hand a reassuring squeeze.
“All we seek is the traitor’s whereabouts,” he replied.
The witch’s sickly smile made his hair stand on end.
“Very well,” she said. “I will tell you where the traitor can be found.”
“Thank you,” he started to say.
But she interrupted. “After,” she said, not breaking their eye contact, “my sister finds our father.”
“Finds your…?” It took several full seconds for Tearloch to register the meaning of her words. What she suggested.
He looked at Arianne. “Princess?”
She dropped her head, closed her eyes. Their fingers were still entwined, and through that touch he felt the weight of her despair.
“King Drustan,” she said, her voice tight with emotion, “is missing.”
He had to force his jaw to unclench. “For how long?”
Arianne raised her head, looked directly into her sister’s gloating eyes, and said, “Since shortly after Callie ran away.”
“Ten years ago,” the witch said. “Almost to the day.”
“Ten years?” he echoed.
The Deachair king had been missing for a decade? And no one had noticed? How was that even possible? Surely someone would have realized the king was gone. There had been diplomatic envoys and royal events and meetings of the unseelie council. No, the king could not have missed all such things for a decade without notice.
“Impossible,” he said.
But the turbulent look in Arianne’s eyes told him the truth. In them he saw shame and horror and, deeper below, pride.
He instantly understood. Somehow she had managed to keep secret the king’s disappearance—a fact that would have left her clan vulnerable to attack from virtually every side, both friend and foe—and had ruled in his stead with no one the wiser.
Ten years? Arianne couldn’t have been more than eight or nine years old at the time. Not more than a year or two after the night he found her in the hedge maze.
All he wanted to do was stare at her in complete and total awe. How had he ever viewed her as weak or frivolous? How could he not have seen the inner strength that made his own look weak and frivolous by comparison. At her core, she was stronger than any warrior he had ever known.
He had only one question. “How?”
Chapter 13
Arianne choked out a laugh at Tearloch’s question. How indeed.
“Stubborn will,” she replied sheepishly, her cheeks burning with shame. “And a palace full of clever, dedicated fae.”
Looking back, she could almost not believe it herself. A child of eight, taking the place of a powerful king? Pure folly.
She had been lost. Her mother dead, her sister fled, and then her father after. Alone in the world, with nothing but her title and her clan to rely on. And so she did what she had been trained to do. She ruled. She had never stopped to think of the impossibility of her pursuit.
He stared at her. Would not stop staring. She threatened to crumble under the scrutiny.
He should not have learned this. No one outside of the palace should know. That Callie had somehow found out, that she knew and still stayed away…
Arianne shook off the fear and self-pity. Now was not the time for questions and clarifications. They were here on a mission, and her sister would have to make another demand.
“I have no idea where to find King Drustan,” Arianne said.
If she had, she would have found him and brought him home long ago.
Callie surprised her by saying, “I do.”
She said it so casually, so… dismissively. As if this life-changing information were no big deal. As if finding their father hadn’t been Arianne’s greatest wish for the last ten years.
Clenching her fists against the overwhelming urge to launch herself at her sister, she spat out, “You’ve known all along, haven’t you?”
Callie shrugged.
“Why?” Arianne demanded. “If you knew where he was, you must have known how alone I felt… Why didn’t you go to him? Why didn’t you come back and bring him with you?”
Her unspoken question hung in the air between them, as tangible as the grass beneath her feet and the mountains looming above her. Why did you leave me all alone?
As the seconds ticked on, Arianne gradually realized that she was holding Tearloch’s hand like a vice. He had been so quiet, so silently supportive that she almost forgot he was there. But she had felt his strength, drew on it to maintain her own.
Embarrassed by her desperate grip, she tried to let go. He did not release her. Instead, his own grip tightened.
Arianne could not have put into words how much that meant to her. It gave her to courage to stand tall as she waited for her sister’s answer.
“Because,” Callie said finally, her dark eyes filling with a sudden sheen of tears, “I cannot.”
“What?” Arianne gasped.
“The price of the curse.” Callie spread her arms wide, gesturing at the relatively small expanse of the glade. “I cannot leave this valley.”
Arianne stared at her sister. Callie had been trapped in this glade, just as Arianne had been trapped in her role as de facto queen. Each sister had spent the last ten years, unable to move on from a moment in the past. The last traces of the anger and rage and bitterness she’d felt of the years since Callie left seeped out of her as she finally realized the whole truth.
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br /> “You,” Arianne began, but emotion choked her voice. She started again. “You can’t undo it, can you?”
This time, her sister’s laugh was tinged with tears and self-mockery.
“I was very specific with the spell,” Callie explained through her emotion. “I didn’t want to regret it the next day and be able to simply remove it because I felt bad.”
Callie wiped at her eyes.
“And did you?” Arianne asked. “Feel bad?”
The tragic look on her sister’s face was the answer.
“What will break it, Callie?”
“Only the thing I wanted more than any else in the world,” Callie replied, the tears now streaming down her cheeks. “For my family—my beloved sister and the father who had shunned my mother—to love me enough to find me.”
Arianne’s knees buckled. If not for Tearloch’s quick reflexes, she would have collapsed to the ground.
But he released her hand in a flash and his arm wrapped around her waist, held her upright. He pulled her close to his side, letting her use his body for support.
Arianne had always prided herself on her strength, her independence. Over the years, she’d had to possess both in endless quantities. Both drained from her.
She saw it all so clearly now.
Callie’s mother had been a human witch, she had enchanted their father and conceived a child. When Callie was born, her mother returned to the palace, tried to use the baby as leverage to become Deachair queen.
Drustan had taken in the baby, but turned the mother away. He had a wife he loved and their own baby on the way. Callie’s mother had never been seen again. Though the girls had grown up as sisters, there was always the sense that Callie was different. Other. Lesser.
When Arianne’s mother, Queen Bronwyn, died on her la ainmhi, the palace fell into mourning. Many blamed Callie’s mother for the death. The other palace children were the worst. She was teased, taunted, shunned, and more. They called her the Queen Killer’s Daughter. Arianne never had, but neither had she stopped them.
Then, one day, Callie was gone. Disappeared through their secret cavern beyond the palace walls. Many had presumed her dead. Their father went mad with the double loss. He disappeared shortly after.