Taming the King (Witchling Academy Book 3) Page 14

  “You think so?” she said, stopping unexpectedly at a door set into a small alcove. She opened the door and gestured me inside. We were in a sort of antechamber, which had been converted into a meeting room with a long, narrow center table, several chairs all around, the walls lined with screens.

  “I haven’t been entirely idle as you’ve been crashing your way through the monster realm and the home of the high Fae,” Danae said. “When Cassandra first brought you to our attention, you’d barely begun your tenure with King Aiden, but that certainly wasn’t the first time you’d ventured beyond the walls of your tavern.”

  She picked up a remote and gestured toward the nearest screen. All of them lit up with women’s faces. Some young, some old, some alone, some with children at their knee or shoulder. My eyebrows shot up as I recognized their faces. Because of course I did—these were the women whose pictures I had seen on the cabinets of the White Crane Tavern, the rogue witches my family had worked so hard to protect. Panic slithered through me.

  “They’ve done nothing wrong, no matter what Cassandra told you,” I said hurriedly. “They were looking for a new life, an opportunity to practice their magic and live their lives without oppression from their original covens. They shouldn’t be denied that simple freedom just because of where they were born and what they were.”

  Danae’s voice was implacable. “The coven exists to protect witches, to ensure they remain safe no matter what the prevailing dangers are in the world without. It’s to give them comfort and an opportunity to learn and grow.”

  “Maybe in Chicago,” I said derisively, “but that’s not what these women were experiencing. If you’ve done any research at all, you’d know that. And for the goddess’s sake, you do know all this. I wouldn’t have sent them through Chicago if I thought you’d squash them. Their situation was not good, even if they wouldn’t tell you that straight out.”

  Danae snorted. “They wouldn’t tell us anything straight out, and we learned not to ask. They were well trained by their guide on how to reach safety and freedom. Trust no one, not even another witch, unless you’ve known him or her personally for a full cycle of moons. Say nothing of the past to those you do trust if you can avoid it. For many a wall has witch’s ears.”

  I smiled a little at that. Our family had loved that line too.

  “We learned those lessons the hard way,” I said. “I’m not going to apologize for wanting to protect those who came to us to help them escape the coven. They wanted to live their own lives, and we gave them the opportunity to do that, nothing more.”

  “Nothing more,” Danae echoed, her voice taking on a darker cast. “Three generations of witches and their children, hundreds of women over those years, that you processed through your tavern and into the In Between. Some of them barely old enough to make their own decisions, sent to Boston by their well-meaning parents for an education at one of the elite academies. Those families never dreamed they wouldn’t get their children back.”

  I knew the witches she was speaking of. Some of them I’d personally helped.

  “Yeah, well. No witch who came to our door actually wanted to be there,” I said, the words thick despite my attempt to keep my emotions steady. “The truth is, even a lousy coven is family. And the way of the witch is a lonely one, no matter how many rally around you. The path to the goddess is filled with danger, but how much worse is that danger when you can’t trust your own family? When you’re a prisoner in your own home? When you’re forced to bow to customs and beliefs that, frankly, suck?”

  “And so you’ve appointed yourself wiser and stronger than those witches who have kept covens safe and thriving throughout centuries of persecution?” she challenged. “You, one insignificant family filled with witches of no great magic.”

  I winced to hear my own words thrown back at me. How often had I said words to that effect? Said them and believed them as simple fact.

  “It’s not about my magic,” I finally said, as I drifted from screen to screen, taking in the bright eyes and happy faces, particularly of the children who had never known the oppression their parents had faced. “It was never about our magic. The witches who came to us sometimes had more magic than we did. More magic, certainly, than they understood a lot of the time. But that magic had been buried, plowed under, nearly killed. Only, you can’t kill magic, you know? Take this woman here.”

  I stopped, smiling as I took in the woman’s gray-streaked hair, her deeply content green eyes as she gazed back at whoever had taken her picture. “She was a spirit healer. One touch and you felt better. A prolonged touch and you suddenly were spilling your guts, ridding your soul of toxic ooze. This one could heal a grieving heart—tell me that’s something we don’t need more of in this world.” I gestured across the table and up on a high screen. “And him, he could infuse anything he built with magic. Subtle magic, not strong enough to be detected, but magic all the same. His family sent him to Cassandra to build torpedoes or some shit, but he didn’t want that. None of them wanted the paths others had laid out for them. They wanted to find their own way.”

  “And you took it upon yourself to help them do it, co-opting the sacred portal into the In Between, a place you truly didn’t understand, and then letting them loose, some into my own backyard. Any coven who had found them could have and should have reported them.”

  I shrugged. “Witches aren’t snitches.”

  “Oh, that’s where you’re wrong,” Danae said, with such certainty that I looked back at her, surprised. “Witches have all the same attributes, good and bad, of any group of people, Belle. But you believed in that phrase. You believed in the good intentions of your family in sending those lost witches into the world on their own. And that belief is what carried them forward. A Hogan witch gave them that.”

  I stared at her a second longer, then shrugged. “Someone had to.”

  She smiled. “I agree with you there. Though not every witch’s life improved as much as you wanted it to. You could only show them the path.” She waved at one of the images on the wall, and I squinted, then drew back in alarm.

  “That’s Celia’s mother,” I said, taking in the well-dressed woman with cold eyes and a stern face—a completely different expression from the eager, flannel-wearing woman who’d been captured in the White Crane’s photo collage. “But what’s wrong with her? Why does she look so…angry?”

  Danae laughed, a little dourly. “She became a dark witch after she sacrificed her daughter in an arcane spell to please her lover. At least she had the unwitting grace to give Celia the necklace that she’d been gifted by your family—though she expected it to aid the potency of her spell, not to thwart her plans. That necklace triggered a portal her mother didn’t know anything about, allowing Celia to escape when her mother came at her with torches lit to catch her on fire. She had been drugged, but not disabled, and in her extremity, she didn’t remember much. Still doesn’t, in fact.”

  I stared at her, Celia’s fearful gaze haunting me—she’d been hunted with fire. That was all she’d recalled about her entry into the Riven District. Maybe…maybe that was a blessing. “And how do you know all this?” I finally managed, but the question wasn’t serious. This was the high priestess of one of the most powerful covens in America. She would have her ways.

  Danae nodded. “I made it my business to track down the witches who the Hogans aided over the past thirty years or so,” she said simply. “You did your best to protect them all—and now you will prepare for a war to protect yet another family not your own, while you’re tied up in knots bound by both the Fae and the Fomorians.”

  Her mention of the Fomorian jolted me. I didn’t think I’d get a better chance, so I blurted out my question without fully thinking it through. “Am I really married to the king of the Fomorian? Is that something you know? Or can tell me? Like, that’s not seriously a thing, right?”

  Danae’s brows shot up, and her smile was pure steel. “It’s a thing. The king of the Fomorians
has bound you with a sacred contract between the two of you—one sealed with ancient magic hundreds of years in the making.”

  I winced. “Freaking great.”

  “You cannot run away from it,” Danae continued. “The only one who can set you free from its hold is King Lyric himself. But as you should know better than anyone, every contract does have a breaking point. And this one not even the Fomorian king knows. But you’ll recognize it if you see it, rest assured.”

  “Or you could tell me. Because that would be way easier,” I suggested, and Danae laughed.

  “Oh, believe me, I would if I could. But Fomorian magic is highly personal and driven by emotion to a degree even they wouldn’t acknowledge. Remember that, and you’ll find the weakness in this contract of the mighty Fomorian king. Unless I miss my guess, you’ll find the equal and opposite of this emotion in the contract you’ve forged with King Aiden. Quite a lot of kings for a rogue witch to handle, wouldn’t you say? Especially one who is a leader of nothing and no one?”

  I sighed, looking around at the screens of women my family had saved over the years. No, the women who had saved themselves.

  “I just can’t figure out how to break free,” I muttered. “Of Lyric, I mean. Aiden…I don’t want to break free of him. I should, but I don’t.”

  Danae’s gaze was softer now. “Then what is it you most fear about having been captured by the Fomorian king? What was the truest point of concern for you?”

  I stared at her. “Other than he’s our sworn enemy and the Fae’s too?” I asked, not bothering to hide my derision.

  She gave me a thin smile. “Other than that,” she said. “I mean yes, of course it’s laudable that you don’t want to outwardly betray Aiden, but Aiden is scant better. I mean, he captured you and pressed you into service as well.”

  “He didn’t force me to become his wife without me having a say in the matter.”

  She shrugged. “Didn’t he? Don’t all those who fall in love and crave the touch of another ultimately seek to dominate? To drive them in some small way, even if it’s to force the gaze of the other to rest upon them? I can assure you, whether he made it obvious or not, King Aiden was quite intent on pursuing you once he decided you were his mate. Convince me I’m wrong.”

  I opened my mouth to protest, then shut it again. “I can’t convince you of that.”

  “So?” she pushed. “What is it about the Fomorian king that makes you panic, Belle? Unlike Aiden, King Lyric hasn’t chased you into the human realm. He’s had limited access to you in the monster realm. He hasn’t made good on any threats he may have made either against you or against the Fae. I rather doubt he threatened the witches of your coven or the rogue witches you helped pursue freedom either.”

  I frowned. “No, he hasn’t done anything like that.”

  “And yet you remain so afraid of him. And you haven’t the creativity to ask why?”

  I bristled at her challenge. “You know, don’t you? You’re toying with me.”

  She shook her head. “Only insofar as I know that you know what it is. Let me tell you about the Fomorians. There’s a reason why they failed in their pursuit of mortal dominance. It’s because humans were more self-determined than the Fomorians had ever expected. Determined to love, to fight, to dominate. Yes, it took the work of witches to help overthrow the Fomorians. It took the help of demons and the Fae who agreed to let us bend their power to our aim. But before any of that, it took human desire to stand up to the most insidious of Fomorian powers. We did that. And once we did, the rest all fell in behind. Then humans stopped believing in their own magic, gradually, slowly. Maybe powerful witches did as well. Did that scenario ever occur to any of you?”

  I blinked, anger skipping through me. I had no time for this high priestess’s veiled criticisms, nor of her mocking my family after all we’d gone through. Hogan witches were rogues for a reason. We’d never have what it took to be part of a coven.

  And now, I needed to get back to the fight.

  “Good talk,” I informed her, forcing myself not to get angry at the amused lift of her brow. “But now I’ve got to go.”

  26

  Aiden

  The party was winding down when I felt the shift in energy, the promise of stormy gray eyes and laughter. Belle was back, and all I wanted was to be with her. But once the seal had been broken on the tongues of my people, it didn’t seem like they were willing to shut up. One after the other came up to me, their expressions bright, their smiles wide, relief mixing with genuine excitement that I couldn’t ignore. What had I done to deserve the trust of an eager people, not simply willing to be led, but wanting to take part in making the future different from the past?

  Cyril and Lena were pulling their weight as well, both of them circulating—mending fences, building bridges.

  Perhaps the biggest shock of all was Rone, king of the forest Fae. His tongue had grown looser as the evening went on and as the honey mead flowed more freely. He’d slapped Cyril on the shoulder and laughed loudly at a somewhat embarrassed Lena’s joke, and now he grinned at me, aiming his flagon of what had to be alcohol at me with a darkly menacing air.

  “You discount the witches of the human realm as being our friends at your peril, my king,” he said. “You make a grand show of tolerating humans and of being wary of their mischief, but you forget that they remain fascinated by us. They always have been, since the early days. Maybe not right after our ejection.” Here he punctuated his words with wobbly fingers held up as if quoting someone else’s term. “But you can rest assured it didn’t take them long to come venturing into the forest again. Helps that most of them were women, and it is a peculiarity of the forest Fae that we tend to grow a lot of male warriors. You’d think it would be the opposite. Females are much better at slipping around in the darkness. But males were what we had, so males the witches found, and it proved to be a benefit all around.”

  “But ultimately a challenging one,” I pointed out, not wanting to puncture his goodwill but finding myself curious. “There can be no offspring from a witch and a Fae, after all.”

  “Can’t there now?” he asked with a gleam in his eye and a smile that could be construed as challenging.

  I blinked, but before I could ask him to elaborate, two of his own men came up on either side of him, with firm and slightly wary smiles.

  “King Rone is known for his steady hand in battle and his sure ability to carry three times his weight in drink,” one of them said. “It’s possible you’ve done what we’ve never been able to, and that’s gotten him all the way drunk.”

  At this, Rone laughed uproariously, but he allowed his men to steer him away. I looked after them with interest, wishing for Niall by my side. Instead, it was Marta, tall, lean, and amused, who eyed the forest Fae with interest. “I think there’s a great deal about our cousins in the forest we’ve missed of late,” she said, and the edge in her voice made me glance her way.

  “What do you mean? You don’t see any trouble there?”

  “Not trouble in the usual sense. But just as we had no idea of the extent of the damage to the line of the mountain Fae, the forest Fae have remained too quiet for too long. They can posture all they want about having simply tried to avoid your father’s notice, but I think there’s more to it.”

  I sighed. I had to agree with her. “You think there has been open interaction between the Fae realm and the human realm?”

  “That’s exactly what I think. And it’s not necessarily a bad thing. We have come to a time in the realm where we can’t be as choosy about our allies as we have in the past. If the lines of communication have already been opened between the Fae and the humans, perhaps we should welcome that and not give them grief over breaking the rules.”

  She regarded me with a smirk. “After all, it’s not as if bringing a witch into the home of the High King was something contemplated at the fall of the Fae.”

  I gave her a wry grin. “I suspect not. And if I have learned not
hing more from the experience of re-finding the Hogan witch, it’s that I should not underestimate humans. They have a tenacity of spirit that gets them out of trouble almost as quickly as it gets them into it.”

  “Truer words were never spoken. I think I will go and see what other secrets King Rone would like to share now that he’s clearly refilled his cup and seems intent on enjoying the evening to its fullest.”

  I lifted my brows at my battle-hardened warrior. “Be careful with him. If he’s used to humans, he may not understand the subtle strengths of a Fae warrior.”

  She smiled with dark humor.

  “Oh, that’s exactly what I’m hoping for.”

  The angle of our ambling walk had taken me to the far side of the gathering room, and through the tall windows, I could see the academy situated at the far end of the lawn. Lights played in several windows on the first floor and one lone aerie at the roofline. It caught my attention and held me fast.

  “Go,” Marta said, laughing. “And don’t underestimate your human either. She needs you more than she realizes. And you need her right back.”

  “King Aiden,” another Fae called, breaking free of his group, and I gritted my teeth.

  “I need her more than ever,” I agreed as the noble Fae approached, beaming so hard, I thought his face might break. “If I could just get to her.”

  27

  Belle

  I groaned and paged through a few more sections of the book of magic, to no avail. The answer wasn’t coming.

  Danae had tricked me, taunted me down foolish paths, preyed upon my own insecurities. I’d returned to the academy and summoned Jorgen and Gwendolyn as I’d noticed the lights of the castle far down the lawn. Aiden would be there, celebrating, strategizing, doing whatever the Fae did during Fae parties. I was his queen, I supposed, so I should be there too. As the owner of a tavern, I had no issue with gatherings, even if I typically preferred to spend my time alone. But a party wasn’t my place right now. I was the wife of the High King, and I was the Hogan witch. And I needed to understand what Danae was telling me.