Teaching the King (Witchling Academy Book 1) Page 20

  I pulled it out and stared at the brief line.

  Find King Aiden.

  34

  Aiden

  “We don’t have much more time to waste,” Niall said, drumming his fingers on the table in a rat-a-tat motion. “At least not if we trust what we’re seeing.”

  I couldn’t disagree with him. Magnus stood back from the portals he’d just constructed, showing all the high Fae’s major border holdings. Three were quiet, with only the expected movement of their inhabitants going about their business, the small, comforting signs of industry continuing. Two were silent for entirely different reasons—they were shattered hulls, their inhabitants long since evacuated after the most recent wraith attack. Creatures who were not the wraiths, as we now knew, but agents of the Fomorians. Using a nuisance that had long harried our borders to hide a god. We would be ready for them now.

  The other three portals were opaque with obscuring snow, including the one I was most interested in.

  I stood and moved closer to it. “How can you even tell it’s the right spot?” I grumbled. “I have no record of the last time we traveled to the castle of the mountain Fae.”

  “It was expressly forbidden for the first hundred years of the ocean king’s reign,” Magnus said, surprising me. The gaps in my education were coming hard and fast now, all of them for political purposes. But not the political purposes of my own father. Because he too had been lied to, and possibly his father before him. Generations of lies at the highest level of the Fae with only a cohort of demons knowing the truth. That didn’t sit well with me, though I knew Magnus didn’t lie to me. He believed what he was telling me. I could thank my own Fae intuition for knowing that. But was he telling me the truth?

  “That’s far too long,” I protested. “You don’t ignore your enemy so completely in defeat, lest they become your enemy once again.”

  “Fair enough, but you won’t know the truth of it until you go there.”

  “Which we can’t do,” Niall said. He stabbed his fingers at the three border holdings, then turned to the ones that were obscured. “We can get away with sending small contingents to protect these keeps. They don’t appear to be targeted, but that can change in an instant. But what is this?” Again he stabbed his finger at the obscured portals. “That’s snow. Have you ever seen a storm so strong? It’s one thing in the high reaches of the mountain king’s castle, it’s not right on the border, but deep within the Wicked Mountains. These other keeps, however, are ringed around the sea, yet they’re also snowed in. We should be able to see more than we do.”

  “You can,” Magnus offered, glancing to me. “You can enter the portals. It is your right as the king to travel through them at your whim.”

  “But which one?” Niall muttered. “We could land hip-deep in a battle, or we could be drowned in a storm. There’s no telling.”

  I grimaced. He wasn’t wrong. Portal magic was indeed the province of the king, and I used it as often as I could, but only to carry us into war or out again. Had the return of the Hogan witch improved my ability with it? Was I willing to risk my own warriors to find out?

  Of course I was.

  “These holdings… Let’s assume they’re all under attack,” I said. “What’s our worst exposure?”

  “Jewel Point,” Niall said, gesturing to the first obscured portal, and I grimaced, remembering Belle’s prediction while under the spell of her great-grandmother’s rite. The last time I’d seen the place, it’d been quiet and untroubled. Now it was coated in a driving, icy rain. “It’s the farthest out, and if we don’t secure it quickly, it will be taken again and we’ll be right back where we started. We need to start at that point and work our way in.”

  “I disagree,” Marta spoke up. “I come from that area. Jewel Point may be the farthest, but Oceanside is the lowest. If these are the Fomorians and they’re coming up through the sea, that may be the breaching point. We have heard nothing but positive reports from Oceanside, but when have we actually explored it? There have been battles upon battles elsewhere to distract us. The entire castle could be lost, and would we really have known it?”

  A rustle at the door caught my attention, or not even the rustle itself, but the shift in the energy immediately before it. Belle, I thought, and a second later, she burst into the room, looking distracted, even nervous.

  “Oh!” she said as the entire room focused on her.

  “Mistress Belle,” Magnus said as he turned to her, giving her a short bow. “How may I serve?”

  But Belle’s attention wasn’t on him. It wasn’t even on me, a matter I noticed immediately and didn’t much like. Instead, her gaze had gone to the portals, leaping from one to the next, her eyes wide.

  “Danger returns here,” she said, her voice taking on her witchling intonation as she pointed to one of the portals, which should contain the hall of the mountain Fae beyond its curtain of snow. “They search for treasure they haven’t found.”

  Marta turned to her, her silvery eyes unreadable. “They, whoever they are, won’t be finding treasure at that castle. There are no mines there,” she said, but her manner was soft, almost apologetic. I understood why. Belle had suddenly taken on the demeanor of a mystic or sage. No longer the no-nonsense witch, she seemed wild, untamed, and not quite of this world or any other. But she frowned at Marta’s words, shaking her head.

  “Not gold nor silver, not like that. They look for ancient tools that were stripped from them. Weapons. They search.”

  “The Fomorians?” Niall asked when an uneasy silence settled over the room.

  Belle frowned, seeming confused. She glanced along the line of open portals, her face clearing. “They won’t disturb these places. Not soon, hopefully not ever, but—”

  She drew in a sharp breath at the portal blinded by snow, trained on the mountain Fae’s lost castle…or what had once been a castle. “Only wind and ice rule there, nothing more. And there…” Her eyes widened as she glanced at the other portals, but she shook off whatever she was thinking and focused solely on the portal leading to Jewel Point. “They are there. They attack even now. The screaming…”

  “Jewel Point,” Niall said again. “We’ve men ready.”

  He glanced at me, but I still watched Belle. “Do they fight?” I asked, and she started, her hands going up as if to ward off whatever she was seeing in the portal. I fixed my gaze hard upon it, but I could see nothing.

  “They fight,” she whispered. “You must go. The power that threatens them is too great…no!” Her final word was a half-choked gasp.

  That was all I needed to know.

  “Let’s go,” I ordered Niall, and he sprang into action, grabbing his weapons and leaping for the portal, a half dozen warriors right behind him. I turned to Belle. “Stay here. Stay here and stay safe. I will be back.”

  “You must go!” Belle’s eyes had gone milky gray, the shade of a winter cloudburst.

  “How is it that you can see into the snow, but I cannot?”

  She blinked, refocusing on me, and to my surprise, she smiled. “I had to have something useful in warfare, right? Why else did you have need for that first Hogan witch?”

  I couldn’t tarry long, but I took both her hands in mine as the warrior Fae began to move through the portal and the cries of the battle rose.

  “Stay here, stay safe with Magnus,” I implored her. “I will return, and we’ll take up this conversation and get you the answers you seek.” The answers we both needed. The time for guessing was over. But first came the battle.

  She nodded quickly, and the smile she gave me tore through me straight to my heart. “Your people need you.”

  “Yes.”

  I turned and moved to the portal, turning back at the last second as I stepped into the chaos of battle to see Belle’s gaze drift over to the right…

  And then her eyes widened in sudden, abject horror as a violent explosion tore through the room.

  35

  Belle

  Th
e blast came from the side roughly, unexpectedly. As if the surge of power of the High King using his portal magic to exit the room had created an equal and opposite force pushing out from the other side of the room, from one of the other portals.

  The explosion shot me several feet across the chamber, then reversed with twice the power, sucking me back. I thought I saw Aiden turn, felt the shock of his reaction, then I was gone. Even Magnus, who leapt for me, his face twisted with surprise and dismay, couldn’t reach me in time. I fell through the portal of swirling snow, surrounded by buffeting winds that crashed into me from all sides, sending me tumbling head over heels through the open air. It wasn’t quite as bad as a Boston winter, but it was close.

  For just a second, I saw the image that looked impossibly familiar to me—a winter-locked castle, buried in snow and ice. Then I was through an enormous window, hurtling headlong down a frigid marble floor, my way blocked by not a single stick of furniture until I crashed heavily against an equally cold marble wall.

  I lay there for a second, stunned. It had been summer back in the realm of the High King, and I’d only been wearing my long-sleeve T-shirt and jeans. The cold leached into me almost immediately here, in this castle that seemed frozen in the depths of winter. I sat up shakily, drawing my knees up close to hug them, glad that everything seemed to be intact on my body. I was banged up, bruised, but nothing appeared to be broken. I peered around the room lit by large windows that gaped out onto the raging storm, but it was clear that it was still daylight in this place, even if the sun was hidden behind the heavy storm.

  It was also as empty and silent as a tomb. I got to my feet, my arms still wrapped tight around me, trying to will my circulation to deliver needed heat to my extremities. At least my movements didn’t bring the residents of this castle running. The place was pristine, no dust, no cobwebs, no debris of any kind—man-made or animal born. It looked freshly swept, the floor actually polished, yet it gave the sense of an aching, empty loneliness.

  The wind howled, and I glanced at the nearest window, the heavy storm lightening just enough for me to pick out a range of mountains in the distance. Instantly, I recalled my conversation with Aiden. Was this the castle of the mountain Fae where Aiden’s own ancestors had won their claim to the title of High King?

  I frowned. It seemed reasonable, but he hadn’t said that the Fae who lived here had been killed. If anything, they’d been left to their own devices to live quietly, away from the politics of the royal family. This place, however, looked deserted. I patted my pocket, insanely relieved to feel my Swiss Army knife still there. Pulling it out and opening it made me feel at least marginally more protected. I moved toward the large doors, and as I approached, I blinked.

  Had I not noticed the small pedestals of flowers at either side of the door, tiny white flowers that I recognized as some variant of baby’s breath? My lips twisted, and I leaned a little closer, poking the blooms with my knife. Sure enough, there were tiny white sprays of mugwort poked into the bouquet. It had been one of my great-grandmother’s favorite flowers, the strongest protection against the Fae. She’d made up bouquets like this and set them around her house, and my grandmother had done the same. My mother hadn’t had much patience for flower magic, or much of any magic, probably because she recognized we weren’t as strong as we’d once been. We needed to focus on the strength we did have, she always said, not moon after what we’d lost.

  I glanced back and was surprised to notice something else was in the room, a small bookcase, filled with books, just like the bookcase in my great-grandmother’s cottage.

  Even as I smiled fondly at the familiar shelves, my brain finally caught up with my surroundings enough to realize that this couldn’t be right. Why would my great-grandmother’s books be here? She would have had no reason to come to this place. The battle that had originally brought the ocean Fae to power had predated the arrival of the Hogan witches by several centuries.

  The bookcase vanished.

  “Freaking illusions,” I muttered, waving my knife around for good measure, as if to poke any would-be fake images before they could materialize. What was it about the Fae that they could command illusions so easily, just to dick with humans? Even their abandoned castles carried on the game. These guys seriously needed a better hobby.

  I lifted my left hand and tucked it under my right armpit, folding my right arm close to my body, though I still kept my knife clutched tight in my right hand. It really was cold in here. Hustling across the room, bent against the cold, I poked my nose out the door and discovered an equally austere and forbidding hallway, with only one defining characteristic besides being large and cold: flowers. Small pedestals of flowers that extended its length about every twenty feet.

  I grimaced, then headed down the long hallway. This was a trap. It had to be. There really was no other option. Unfortunately, I didn’t have portal magic. I was going to have to hang out here until Aiden finished fighting the good fight and came to fetch me. That chafed almost as much as knowing I was being punked by the freaking Fae.

  “You got something you want me to see, bring it,” I grumbled, stopping periodically to study the Fae-bane clusters. Sure enough, every single one of them contained the combination of baby’s breath and mugwort. How could the Fae stand to have these bouquets in their pretty castle? Then again, there were no Fae here that I could tell. They could be disguising themselves with invisibility glamour, but what would be the fun of that? No Fae could put up with not being seen for long. Self-absorption was coded into their DNA.

  At length, I came to a pair of pedestals that flanked another doorway, the corridor beyond them terminating at the large bay window overlooking yet more storms. Had it always been like this? Who would have built a castle in a land of eternal snow and ice? Or had that simply been the legacy of losing to the ocean Fae?

  Out of a fit of perversion, I resolutely did not look into the doorway that I was clearly supposed to. Instead, I moved to the large window. The mountain swept precipitously down beneath me, and the snow ghosts of evergreens bent beneath their canopy of snow and ice, struggling against the storm. The fact that they still stood at all surprised me, and there were even pockets of actual green visible, but only briefly. I thought I caught a sliver of a frozen lake, sunlight glancing off its surface before the slate gray of the clouds rushed in again. I tried to imagine this vista without the storm, the snow, the wind. It might even be beautiful. It might—

  A clatter of hail battered the window, making me lurch back. Clearly, this wasn’t part of my tour.

  “Okay, okay,” I protested. “You guys are still assholes. Good to know that doesn’t change.”

  I retraced my steps to the doorway and peeked inside. Then I blinked. This room wasn’t empty. It was far smaller than I expected, and curved like a turret. Books lined the walls floor to ceiling, and there was a fireplace, unlit but still inviting. On the chair beside it was a woven throw, casually tossed as if its owner had only left to go fetch a cup of coffee. I could see the corner of a glass case, and more bowls of my great-grandmother’s Fae bane. Was this some sort of protected room? Had she carved out a sacred space for herself here, somewhere the ocean king couldn’t find her? My eyes widened as I thought of even another possibility. Had this been where she fled before eventually making her way back to the human realm?

  Curiosity got the better of me, as of course it had to. Either this was a legacy of my great-grandmother or it was a trap so carefully laid that I would spring it eventually. Might as well put everyone out of their misery.

  I crossed the threshold, bracing myself.

  A fire sprang up in the grate, cheerful and bold.

  That was it. Nothing burst from the walls; nothing dropped from the ceiling. I swiveled to the glass case and froze. There were only four items in the case, but the sight of them made my throat constrict. A crown of emeralds. Two matching inlaid shackles of steel, delicate, and strung with gemstones, sized for women’s wrists. And a scroll
of parchment tied with a silver ribbon.

  The contract between the Hogan witches and the High King of the Fae. It had to be.

  36

  Aiden

  “You bastards!” I could hear Niall’s roar as we surged forward into battle, the Fomorians, masquerading as wraiths, outnumbering us five to one. But we pushed through them with fury we’d never before achieved. Something else had changed as well. The swirling mist that made up the wraiths couldn’t hold their appearance the way they normally did. The way they had in countless battles over the last few years.

  Now when we struck, shouting the war spells freshly learned, our blades reverberated off actual bodies, pierced real skin. The illusions of wraiths exploded away, crying out in a language that was harsh, guttural, and wrong. A language that seemed faintly familiar, and yet one I couldn’t decipher, one my mind sheared away from understanding as a horror to be avoided at all costs.

  I didn’t need to understand the Fomorians’ cries of pain and fury, I just needed them dead, and we bent to our task with renewed excitement. No longer to let them go, but inflicting real and lasting damage to their number, as they had harmed so many Fae. The carnage went on into the night, a new wave of Fomorians surging up from the sea only to be struck back.

  Eventually, it ended. As if the cry to retreat had been given just out of Fae hearing, the Fomorians dissolved into the mist.

  “How did they do that?” Niall demanded. “The disappearing? Did you see them enter a portal? They just left.”

  “I don’t care as long as they’re gone,” Marta groused. She leaned over her broadsword, catching her breath. We were not without our own injuries. The wounded dragged themselves to lean against the walls and stairs of the battered castle, until slowly, one by one, new faces and figures appeared, stepping out of doorways, coming up from underground passageways through barricaded panels. Beautiful faces streaked with tears and dirt. The Fae of Jewel Point.