A Reign of Roses (Sacred Stones #3)

Chapter 32

32

Arwen

The freezing air wove through my lungs as I launched myself into Kane’s arms.

“My bird,” he murmured, pulling me into him. I inhaled at his neck, savoring his scent and warmth as he stroked his fingers through my hair. He only pulled me from him to kiss me once and ask, “Are you—”

“I’m fine,” I said, refusing to let go. Gripping his shoulders more tightly. “I’m fine.”

I pulled Kane even closer, relishing the fresh air outside the vast castle gates, amid the hustle and bustle of Revue bathed in snowy starlight.

“Holy Stones, Arwen, I am so sorry,” Mari said from behind us.

When I finally released Kane and got a decent look at her, my throat tightened. Mari’s eyes were ringed in red. She looked stricken.

Griffin watched her carefully, backlit by the glowing, rosy lights of the city center. I couldn’t tell if his scowl was from disappointment or the discomfort of empathy.

“Don’t do that to yourself,” I said, reaching for her hand. “You didn’t—”

“There’s no excuse.” Mari shook her head vehemently. “I never should have tried something so…My magic has a mind of its own, I fear. And—”

“You didn’t know Ethera would have lilium. Or that we’d end up relying on you so soon after you left Briar’s.”

Mari nodded once but I knew that look. Knew the shame in her eyes. Knew how it affected her to have let us down. I pulled her into my arms. “I love you. Be kind to yourself, please.”

“That’s my cue,” Aleksander deadpanned.

“Not so fast,” Kane growled at him.

I released Mari, sagging a bit with the movement. Too quick. I’d moved too quickly…

Kane motioned to me. “Heal her of the lilium.”

Aleksander sighed, and without another word, shining black claws—long, razor-sharp, not of any creature I could describe—sprouted from his fingers and slashed gently against my wrist. The pain was brief. Just a bloodletting—

But not like any I’d done before as a healer. Aleksander waved a still-clawed hand across the wound and little specs of white alloy—the lilium—lifted from my blood. I flinched but felt no further discomfort, even as drops of red fell from my wrist into the snow at my feet.

That lighte he used—he wasn’t as Fae as Kane and I—I didn’t know if he could even shift. But those claws—something beastly, immortal, ancient as ammonite…I would have recoiled from them if they hadn’t brought me such relief.

Energy funneled through my entire body as he removed each fragment. Liberation and power —I nearly purred.

Aleksander’s jaw had gone to rigid steel. He kept his eyes on the city before us even as he used his strange power. Those elegant nostrils flared until enough lighte had returned that I healed the small incision on my wrist myself. It would be a bit longer before I’d recovered enough to heal Griffin’s wounds.

I uttered my thanks, and Aleksander paced farther away from us. I wondered if my blood or Griffin’s was bothering him.

“Are we done here?”

Murder glinted in Kane’s eyes, but he nodded once.

Aleksander pursed his lips, as if debating whether to press his luck. He must’ve decided it was worth asking, because he said, in a low voice, “And you and I—we’re…”

“If I was planning to kill you, you’d be dead.”

Aleksander dipped his head as if to say, Fair enough , and turned to leave us.

“Wait,” I called after him.

The Hemolich whirled, those illuminated eyes as bloody as the magical glowing signs and streetlights behind us.

Kane groaned in frustration. “Leave him.”

“You and Griffin were weakened when you found him,” I said under my breath, glaring. “He could have killed you, but he didn’t. ”

I hurried toward Aleksander before he could change his mind. “How did you convince Ethera to let me go?”

“Does it matter?”

“It does to me.” I was desperate for any shred of information he’d spare regarding my future child.

“I told her the truth,” Aleksander said, red eyes studying the place on my wrist where I’d bled. I tucked the offending limb behind my back. “Your lighte can’t heal a spell,” he said.

My jaw slackened. “It can’t? How do you know?”

“You aren’t the only Fae with healing abilities.”

Though my eyes hadn’t left Aleksander’s pale, chiseled face, I knew Kane had come to stand beside me, his cedar and leather scent heightened by the winter snow, both calming and fortifying at once.

“She still could have killed me,” I pressed.

“No,” he said, eyes brightening to an even more vibrant shade of crimson as they held mine. “She couldn’t have. I told her that as well.”

“Why not?”

Aleksander sighed, plunging his hands into his pockets and looking around the lively square. Citizens bundled in dyed furs and sheepskin gloves were hurrying in and out of a nearby tented market that pumped nutmeg and coffee-scented steam into the night air. His eyes were stark with how much he despised it all. “You ask a lot of questions.”

Kane released a warning growl beside me. “Answer her.”

Aleksander’s face contorted, as if Kane’s protection of me sickened him.

In the end, he said, “We made a blood oath, Ethera and I. Fifty years ago. They’re similar to spells, presided over by powerful sorcerers to ensure their binding ability. But, unlike a common spell, every blood oath requires…” He fished for the right words. “An escape clause for both parties—a way out, should either of us need one. Ethera thought killing you would destroy my way out, leaving me bound to our deal for eternity. But Ethera is impulsive and uninformed: One cannot affect their own oath. The sorcerer’s magic won’t let you. Ethera just didn’t know.”

“So by killing me, Ethera would ensure Kane and I never bore children…” I worked the ramifications over in my mind. “How does our future child have anything to do with your ‘way out’ of a decades-old blood oath?”

If Kane was startled by my words, he didn’t give anything away. He hardly bristled at my side.

“It doesn’t,” Aleksander said to me, and then again to Kane, more emphatically, “It doesn’t. Like I just told you, she was wrong. She’s not right in the head, if you can’t tell.”

Kane chewed through the words as he said, “What was the nature of your oath?”

“I pledged my people to her cause against the south. The last war they’d ever fight for someone else.”

“And in return?”

Aleksander’s eyes flashed. “Any Hemolich would be permitted to reside within her kingdom. As free men.”

Kane’s brows rose with interest. “You’re saying your people face no persecution here in Rose?”

“Of course not.” His tone told me continued discrimination toward himself, toward his people, had wounded him so thoroughly he was numb to it now. “But they aren’t in chains.”

“That was fifty years ago,” I said. The queen had dropped her entire plot to kill me tonight at his behest. “Why do you still have such power over her?”

“We talk.” Aleksander couldn’t hide the way whatever he was leaving out soured on his tongue. “Occasionally.”

I wouldn’t get more information out of Aleksander. He was a vault. I spun on my heel to be rid of his lethal eyes and their punishing glare.

“Your people,” I heard Kane say. And I wanted to stop him. To tell him I’d already tried and nearly had my head bitten off, but—

“I won’t ask them to fight someone else’s battle. I don’t wish to purchase or force them. But this war…it is all of ours to fight. We’ve likely only got a fortnight before we leave for Lumera. Come with us.”

Any exhaustion or revulsion eddied from my mind, replaced by surprise. Kane had all but sworn not to ask Aleksander for his army. He was too angry, too proud.

“I can’t,” Aleksander seethed at Kane.

“There is no price we could pay?” I asked. “Nothing at all we could offer you?”

“You have nothing of value to me,” Aleksander snarled.

“Defeating the man who enslaved your people isn’t of value? Saving the human lands that housed you and all other Hemolichs for half a century, after you swore to fight Lazarus alongside Kane and the rest of them and then lied to flee Lumera like a coward isn’t payment enough?”

“Arwen.” A note of caution.

“No,” the Blood Fae hissed. “It’s not.”

It wasn’t anger that filtered through my body, but something else. Something more sorrowful that fueled me as I said to him, “They’re wrong to assume you’re a monster. They are . But if you continue to behave as one…why should they ever stop?”

I wrapped my hand through Kane’s and pulled him backward toward Griffin and Mari.

I was done with all of them. Aleksander. Ethera. Amelia. I understood just as well as they did the brutality of war. I didn’t want our people, all those warm faces back in Shadowhold, to be slaughtered, either. Of course I didn’t. But we couldn’t all sit on the sidelines while—

“There is one deal I would broker with you both,” that unfeeling voice called into the winter night.

I whirled first.

Kane, with his many years of life experience and knowledge of Aleksander, had the good sense to keep walking. Keep moving toward Griffin and Mari. Usher them away from whatever might come out of the Blood Fae’s mouth. Had I not pulled his arm back, our hands still intertwined, we both might have left before Aleksander could have said—

“When your firstborn daughter comes of age, send her to live with me, here in Rose.”

I coughed on nothing, choking on sheer incomprehension.

Aleksander only plowed on, drifting closer, like a shadow across a wall. “A fair deal. My army, my people, thousands and thousands of lives at stake, for the mere company of your daughter. I will not hurt the girl. You have my word. Will not touch her. But—”

Kane unleashed a predatory growl. “You must be as mad as the queen you serve.” Visceral fury rippled across his shoulders and jaw. He’d dropped my hand, and I knew if my eyes dipped I’d find thorns and curling smoke twined across his fists. I was shocked they hadn’t already sliced through Aleksander’s pale flesh.

“Get out of my sight,” Kane seethed. “Before I rip you apart as I should have years ago.”

“Hear me out—”

“You think anything you could say would convince me to give you my child ? You, who would wish to drink her true Fae blood like a fucking fine wine?”

“You know my restraint, Kane. Any other Hemolich standing before not one but two full-blooded Fae…” He sniffed the air with lupine poise. “They’d be rabid for your blood. Foaming at the mouth. I could actually protect the girl—”

“You said the queen was wrong…” My head was reeling. He was hiding something. Some connection between our future offspring and his deal with the mad queen. “You said our child, if we even had one , would have nothing to do with your age-old oath.”

Aleksander bared his teeth. “I lied.”

Ablaze with unbridled rage, Kane’s fist sprang forward and collided against Aleksander’s jaw with a jarring crunch . I gasped, more shocked than afraid, as they flew into the snow.

Aleksander’s blood sprayed, painting the white frost beneath them like a canvas. Kane’s, too, as his knuckles split open, pounding the Hemolich’s face and jaw relentlessly.

“You fucking betrayed us. They’re dead because of you, and now”—he panted between blows—“now you fucking ask—”

Before he could deliver the next punch, I yanked Kane backward and off the fair-haired man. Kane’s eyes were feral when they found mine, but there was a great sorrow behind the fury, and my chest caved in at the sight.

Behind us, Griffin had begun to stalk over but I shook my head as if to say We’re fine. The last thing we needed was a brawl.

“We would never, ever allow our child anywhere near your filthy kind,” Kane seethed. “Over my dead fucking body. ”

Aleksander groaned as he worked his jaw back into place. Bright red blood painted his lips and nose and the dirtied snow beneath him. Then, with a grace I’d never seen from any creature—Fae or otherwise—he knelt lower to the ground and dragged his tongue across the wet snow, licking up both his and Kane’s blood. His glowing red eyes never left us.

I gagged at the sight, hauling Kane backward before he well and truly killed the man.

“What was that—” Griffin started, Mari hidden behind his hulking form.

“Nothing,” I fired back, cutting him off. “We’re leaving.”

When Kane shifted into his dragon form, he released a roar so violent, the snow shook from the buildings below us.