Queen of Blood and Vengeance (Secrets of the Faerie Crown #4)

18. Veyka

18

VEYKA

Arran, Barkke, and Elora tied her to a chair.

She offered no resistance, allowing them to bind her hands, feet, and neck. She could not even turn her head without the rope burning into her pale gold skin.

And she still had the nerve to look calm and composed. Her perfect black hair fell straight, nearly to her waist, not a tangle in sight. Her slanted dark brown eyes were unmarred by bruises or wrinkles. I wondered what the cost of her powerful water magic was; clearly it was not physical. Not like the exhaustion that Lyrena’s fire brought or the ache in Cyara’s wrists.

Merlin stared at me with clear, unruffled grace.

Maybe her cost was madness. She’d have to be insane to stare at me without fear.

Either way, I’d make sure her death was slow and painful.

Barkke and Elora retreated to the other side of the door. Eilean Gayl did not have proper dungeons, so we’d put her high in a tower room. One window, which Arran covered with vines a foot thick, and one door, guarded by both elemental and terrestrial warriors.

I drew a dagger from my waist.

“How difficult would you like to make this, Merlin?” I asked, lifting my blade to the torchlight.

“I do not intend to make it difficult at all, Majesty. You want to know about the Sacred Trinity.”

Arran stilled beside me. The head of his axe was still in his hand. He always drew it in the same motion. He hooked his thumb and forefinger around where the head met the shaft, and slid it up with one quick flick of his wrist until he had the shaft perfectly positioned in his grasp.

But his fingers were still curved around the metal head.

Merlin divided her attention between us, nodding with what we were supposed to see as respect.

“I cannot bow, obviously. But you do not need to torture me. I will answer your questions.”

Anger surged through me. Rage I had not allowed myself to feel in the aftermath of hearing about Parys’ death. I had not fetched Igraine from Baylaur myself, merely held open the portal rift while Arran and Lyrena did it. I’d let her linger in Baylaur long enough. Now that Merlin was here, I could not delay facing the truth and all of its ramifications. I mourned, but I did not let it overtake me. I could not. I did not have the luxury of hiding as I had done in the months after Arthur’s death.

But confronted with Merlin’s perfect calm, I snapped. I lunged for her, my second dagger already in my hand. “That is where you are wrong. You murdered Parys—”

“I did not murder anyone,” Merlin quipped. She did not flinch away—not that she really could, given how tightly she was restrained—but her eyes were clear. As if she was ready to die. “Unlike Your Majesties, some of us are able to accomplish our tasks through nonviolent means.” She was practically begging me to kill her.

I swung, aiming for her thigh. A deep wound there would be painful, would gush blood, but would not impede her ability to talk.

Arran’s hand closed around my wrist.

How dare you, I raged, but I was met with a stern growl.

“You collaborated with the Dowager,” Arran said. He did not release my arm, keeping me a full two feet away from drawing blood.

“Briefly,” Merlin admitted freely. Wisely, her eyes focused on me, rather than Arran. If I went through the void, even he would not be able to stop me. “I had nothing to do with your brother’s death, and I was long gone before Igraine killed your friend.”

“You knew about Igraine’s involvement in Arthur’s death,” Arran said, his grip on me loosening fractionally.

“You are guilty,” I snarled. I shook free of my mate. A breath, that was all that stood between me and gutting the traitorous priestess.

But it was not my mate’s hand that held me now. It was his hope. I could feel it, small and white and glowing, deep in his dark soul.

Merlin exhaled. “Of not intervening? I suppose so. But I knew the Void Prophecy as well as your mother. Better, in fact. Because I knew what that coming darkness meant.”

I staggered back a step. I could not help it. Not even a lifetime of elemental composure could keep me in place.

“You knew about the succubus,” I breathed.

Merlin actually smiled. “Why do you think the Ancestors diminished the power of the priestesses? Too many of the witches were taken by the succubus; they had to be destroyed and their sacred object taken. They entrusted the grail to the priestesses. Nimue and Accolon felt that was sufficient power.”

The witches and the priestesses had both been eliminated after the Great War, in their own ways. I knew that, had seen the evidence. Only two witches had been left in Annwyn—one in the Tower of Myda, and one in the mountains of the Spine. I’d met them both and killed the first. The priestesses were not killed off, but their power reduced so that they were never more than one priestess and one acolyte at any given time. I’d punished Merlin in Baylaur for violating that law.

But we’d never known the true purpose behind those actions taken by our Ancestors. The explanation that Merlin offered was sobering in how perfectly it made sense. Witches’ minds could become unmoored from the present, making even the females vulnerable to the succubus. I’d seen as much in the Tower of Myda, guarded myself against it when I confronted the witch in the Spine, and leveraged it when Cyara used Diana to search for Accolon’s truth.

Percival had said that three joined together to make the Sacred Trinity—fae, witch, and human. Gwen corroborated it with Parys’ findings. And now, Merlin echoed them and added more.

It could not be. The answer could not have been sitting there in Baylaur all along. What did that mean? Arthur had died for no reason? All of the citizens of Baylaur, my subjects, dead because I had not realized? Not believed?

I rocked back another step.

“The priestess here had no knowledge of the succubus,” I said.

Merlin shrugged. “It has been seven thousand years. Much knowledge has been lost.” “But the grail was passed into my keeping, and with it the knowledge of its importance.”

I could feel Arran through the bond. While my insides screamed, his brooded. A dark, coalescing storm cloud. And at its center, that kernel of hope that he was so carefully nourishing.

“Why didn’t Accolon and Nimue use the Sacred Trinity to banish the succubus the first time?” Arran demanded, battle axe fully in his grip now. “Why carve those stones and lead us to believe that only Veyka’s sacrifice—”

He could not finish.

Merlin lifted her dark brows, exaggerating the slant of her eyes. I lifted my dagger in threat.

“They never united the three. The scabbards were entrusted to the humans, and the humans never offered them nor revealed their location during the Great War,” she said, one eye on my weapons, the other on Arran.

Outwardly, he was unchanged. But inside, I felt the clouds drop away until only that white ember remained. “The legend of the Sacred Trinity is true.”

“Yes,” Merlin said.

Another step back. Far enough that I could press my eyes closed as I tried to stem the swirl of feelings inside of me. “Where is it?”

“The grail is hidden.”

Arran’s snarl filled the small room, careening off of the curved walls, crashing against the wooden ceiling, echoing through our bones. He was a second from shifting. I could feel it in the air, that strange charge of energy that always filled the space before his beast took over. The wolf would rip out her throat.

He threw himself at her, the fatal blade of his axe pressed against her throat. He’d cut through rope and skin in a second, and she’d be headless. Truly dead. “Chalice, grail, call it whatever you like. But where have you hidden it?”

Arran was going to kill her. And I was inclined to let him.

Except for that glowing white ember inside of him. The one he’d been keeping alive, even as I let my own die inside of me.

I wrapped myself along the strong golden thread that connected us, slid my soul deeper until it was fully entwined with his. I caressed that precious hope he’d nourished—desperately, unflinchingly.

She cannot tell us if she is dead , I purred to his beast.

Slowly, so wretchedly slowly, I felt the beast recede and Arran’s conscious mind take hold once more. His hand was in mine. He stepped back, lowered his axe.

Merlin released a slow, measured exhale. “It is no small thing to be master of death. It is not something that I can simply bestow upon you.”

I hooked one thumb around a scabbard, the weight of the mighty sword sheathed down my back suddenly heavy. “Arthur bestowed the scabbards and sword.”

“No. You pulled the Excalibur from the stone. Arthur was only able to give you the scabbards because they are an heirloom of your house. The human that forged the scabbards for the Sacred Trinity eons ago was a Pendragon.”

I actually laughed. “You cannot mean that I am human?”

And yet, it would explain so much. Why I had never manifested elemental powers, why the scabbards had come into my possession. Why I was fated to be the one to banish the succubus.

“A distant ancestor was,” Merlin said with a shrug. “Tens of thousands of years have passed since the forging of the Sacred Trinity. Human and fae were not always as estranged as they are now. Is it so difficult to believe your mighty line might have a human or two mixed in somewhere?”

No, it wasn’t.

Once, maybe. But after everything I’d lived through in the past months, I knew better than anyone that history recorded only what its authors deemed most important. Elementals prized lineage over everything else. If there had been a human named Pendragon somewhere in my ancestry, the elementals would certainly have erased them long ago.

“It does not matter,” I said slowly, to myself and to the thoughts tumbling through my head. Because it didn’t matter. I was fated to banish the succubus. I’d already accepted that. But maybe, just maybe, the cost would not have to be my life. “Where is the grail?”

Merlin spared no glance for Arran. She stared into my eyes as she said, with that irritating ring of prophecy, “You must find it for yourself.”

I understood. “Finding the grail is some sort of test.”

She nodded. “A quest.”

I’d thought from the moment Arran dragged her in here that she was ready to die. That assessment had been correct. She’d die before she told me the location of the grail. Guarding it was her destiny, just as banishing the succubus was mine. I was ready to die for my fate; why shouldn’t I expect her to be as well?

But Arran’s thoughts had taken a more practical turn. “Does that mean she must find it herself?”

Merlin smiled. “I did not say that.”

“Fucking priestess,” I swore, spinning away. I paced to the door and then back again. On my second turn, Arran intercepted me.

“This is more than fickle hope, Veyka,” he said, taking both of my hands in his. “This is real.”

It hurt to hope. It hurt so much.

But I didn’t stop him when he went to the door and wrenched it open. Elora and Barkke appeared immediately. The expressions on their faces said all—they had heard every word of the interrogation.

Somehow, I managed to keep my throat from closing as I gave the order. “Summon Cyara and Osheen. We have an amendment to their quest.”