The Frey Saga Book V Read online

  Grey slammed to the earth beside her, his perfect face smacking the ground hard enough to draw blood. He pressed up with both hands, their healing flesh too pink in the late-day sun. He grabbed for his sword, which was missing, and then for the knives at his belt, stepping in front of Ruby before she even had a chance to find her feet.

  She was so angry that she felt as if she could burn the very soul from that cursed changeling’s body. She screamed again. It was a bit of a roar.

  The changeling’s laugh echoed through the clearing, and the haze of Ruby’s fury cleared enough that she could take in their surroundings. They were centered in a ring of tall trees, the charred earth and broken limbs of their previous visit gone, swallowed by wild new growth. Their audience consisted of a smattering of changeling fey, tattooed spiders, and—horribly—Chevelle. He stood with his arms pinned behind him, staring beneath a lowered brow at Grey. She cursed her temper, because she’d clearly missed some unspoken communication between the two.

  “How in the name of the plague did they get you?”

  Chevelle let his level glare tip toward her. She winced. But he wasn’t quite angry enough for something bad to have happened to Frey, so she let her gaze continue across the clearing, finding Pitt. He stood straight, his face flawless and his thin cloak unspoiled, and yet there was something off in the color of his skin.

  She smiled. “Not quite yourself, I see. Seems a shame you’ve lost your ruby.”

  His answering smile was not nearly so mocking as her own—it held something more like a promise of pain. “I no longer need that stone.” His words lingered in the air, stinging with the power that had spelled them to life. “Now, I have you.”

  Ruby resisted the urge to look back at Chevelle. Pitt had been bound from using magic and from spellcasting, and he’d still been able to spell his words into being. It did not bode well for their situation.

  “You do not have me,” she said coldly. “There is nothing on Earth that could bind me to your will.”

  Pitt allowed her to take in his smirk before letting his gaze roam over Grey.

  “You might as well have done with me now,” Ruby said. “Because you will get nothing of me ever again. Not after what your underlings did before. I will die first.”

  She said the words with all sincerity, but Ruby knew there was some purpose for his keeping them there. Pitt had been captured and bound. During the fates’ dance ceremony, he had broken the highest of fey laws. If he risked staying in plain sight, there where the base energy ran so near the surface, he had sufficient reason for doing so. He was waiting for something.

  Ruby drew the fire into her palms. Keane had been the most powerful fire fey on their lands. Pitt had not chosen to ally with him without cause. But Keane was dead, killed at the hands of another changeling fey, turned into ash and dust by Liana.

  “You will die by my flame,” Ruby promised him, “before the sun sets on fey lands.”

  Pitt’s gaze flicked to the side, but before Ruby could act, spellwoven ropes were cutting against her limbs. She let loose her fire and Grey his blade, but there were too many forces working against them, and a moment later both she and Grey were caught in a web of spells and twine.

  Pitt flicked a finger, and Ruby’s bindings were yanked to the side, pulling her feet from beneath her so she landed hard onto the stone. He rolled his eyes at her resulting glare then walked gracelessly from the clearing as he uttered, “Bring them,” to his men.

  Ruby met Grey’s gaze, certain her concern was evident and plain. The changeling fey was taking them farther into Hollow Forest. The sun was falling low, the night things taking flight.

  In a matter of hours, the fires of Hollow Forest would seep through the broken earth to light a deadly game, and the changelings loved to play.

  28

  Frey

  I stood before the woman I’d known for the whole of my life, even during the times I did not know my own self, and could only shake my head in disbelief. “Why are you telling me this now? Chevelle has been taken by a changeling fey in league with plague knows who else, the fey lord has disappeared after him, and I’ve got a menacing little changeling here trying to tell me what to do.”

  Junnie glanced over my shoulder at where Liana waited in what was left of the broken trees. Anvil stood beside her, weapons in hand, with Rhys and Rider farther out, unbearably still. We do not have time for this.

  “The humans are not solely Pitt’s responsibility.” Junnie’s voice was low, though I was fairly certain Liana and all of my guard could hear her. “Asher, too, had a plan to take control of them.”

  I frowned at her, not entirely surprised but not wanting to delve into it just then.

  “He’d been planning it since the moment he ensnared my sister. He obtained her easily enough but not without cost. And though she refused his bidding, she still possessed a special gift. She still held sway over animals.” Junnie did not mention her sister’s ability to sway humans, nor did she remind me that Asher had taken the child he’d created with her as well—my mother.

  Thoughts of the massacre surfaced, of my mother in a rage, bringing in an army of men. It had been an attempt to stop him, as had Fannie’s actions. Both had turned to an opportunity for the old Council, the Order of Light Elves—to overrun the North and cripple our rule. “And so… what? What does any of that matter now?” I had been restored to the throne. Junnie had taken headship of a new Council. All of it was over.

  She cleared her throat. “I did not wish Isa removed from my side merely to keep you in your role as lord.” She glanced again over my shoulder, but that time, I thought her eyes might have met those of the eldest and most brutish of my guard. “I needed her removed because she holds evidence that could damage far more than either of us or our new duties.”

  “Junnie,” I whispered, “my Second waits for me at the hands of a deadly fey. If you cannot hurry this tale along and tell me what the curses you’re talking about…”

  The corner of her lips drew down. “Asher figured it out. Some sort of dark spellwork, worse than what he used to gather power. But all of it tied together, somehow, the energy within her and the talent she holds drawn from his castings.”

  My mouth went dry. Old secrets, dark and unspeakable things I’d hoped to never think of again, rose from the past. They crawled up my spine, raising the fine hairs of my neck and niggling at the back of my mind. It was bad. Worse than bad.

  Junnie could see I understood. But she didn’t know the half of it. “The safest place for Isa to be is on barren ground, where the fey cannot reach her without exhausting their power and where my own people cannot discover the darkness inside of her.”

  I wanted to ask her what this had to do with the fey, with Isa, with any of it. But I was afraid I knew. Asher had used the fey for his experiments—his children. He had made a deal with the fey. “What else?” I whispered.

  She sighed. “He used the knowledge he’d gained to cast over Isa when she rested inside her human mother’s womb.” Junnie swallowed hard, as if remembering something horrible. “It was too late when I realized. The child had already come to term.”

  I bit back the curse that wanted to tear free of me. Junnie had kept it a secret since before Isa had been born. She had protected her ever since without a word of it to me. “Again, I ask, what importance does this have now, when my people are waiting in Hollow Forest?”

  She straightened, apparently no longer interested in restraining her tone. “Asher made a deal with the changelings. But the fey were double-crossed and forced to gather the remaining knowledge themselves, so that they might protect themselves from the damage they’d all wrought.”

  The humans. The reason they’d taken Ruby. I felt the chill up my spine again, that darkness of times so far away. They’d not just taken Ruby—they’d taken her mother’s diary—another fey who’d discovered the means to keep halfbreeds alive.

  Asher had spelled my line’s power over the humans into Isa,
and in that regard, she was stronger than any of us. He’d told the changeling fey he could do the same, spell into them the ability Ruby had, so that they weren’t tied to the base energy.

  “But don’t they understand?” I asked Junnie. “This isn’t the same. Ruby can live free of the base magic because she’s half elf. Because that part of her does not need to be tied to it.”

  “No,” Junnie said. “She’s able to harness it because she survived. Because she lives and is part of both and therefore can hold the energy of her fey blood along with the magic of our own.”

  I recalled long ago, when Junnie held the small babe in her hands. The human, Molly, had not survived childbirth, and Junnie had saved the infant, hidden her away. “Asher told the girl her babe would be king,” Junnie had said, as if such a thing were true in a land of lords and councils. But he had never meant for her to be ruler of his own lands. He had far greater plans in place.

  I didn’t know whether he’d intended for his child to be a king of human lands or of a wider realm altogether. To each of his children, he’d promised a rule, and each of them had been built for a special kind of toil.

  Junnie needed me to know that my predecessor had made a deal with the fey.

  As we tore into the sky at the hands of flying fey, Liana’s warning from long before echoed through my ears: “Do not chase after the halfling. She will have her own path. Save the others.”

  I trusted Liana not at all, but she had made bargains with my own allies even as her kind made them with the man who’d started the whole thing. I could not discount that she’d risked herself against Asher and Pitt’s plans.

  We dove through the trees of Hollow Forest, their jagged leaves cutting even at the fey. We slammed through them, crashing into the open air again only to hit a wall of scents that burned my nose. Sulfur and spice and strange flora were thick in every breath, but no trees or plants grew where the fires would burn. The ground was a dark mass of jutting rock, spiking skyward and diving to depths that left nothing for the eye but shadow and stone.

  At the edge of that stone was the changeling, Pitt, a horde of his men, and Ruby, Grey, and Chevelle.

  The fey carrying us took to ground at the edge of the trees near Pitt, and behind us, I heard the chattering and cheers of countless more fey, our audience.

  My gaze found Chevelle where he stood bound, his arms behind his back and a line of blood smeared over the side of his face. I felt the tremor of magic rumble through me, but the cool touch of the staff held me from acting too rashly. I stared into his dark-blue eyes, so like the depths of a shadowed sapphire, like his mother’s. That dark secret, one that only he and I knew, surfaced again, wanting to steal my focus. It was a secret that should never have reappeared, one that should have died with Asher.

  But Asher had been consorting with fey. And there we were, dancing around a tale we’d vowed never to speak of about the dark magic Rune and Asher had played with and the other things no one else knew.

  My fingers tightened on the grip of the staff. Asher and Rune had known what they were doing. Those sessions, the training, all of it had been a ruse. They’d been teasing out ways to spell the magic, searching for breaks in the surface to let themselves in. It had happened well before I came along, long before Isa.

  It had just taken him so many years to perfect it that one of us had finally caught up with his deeds. I had taken him down before he could implement his plan.

  “Release them now or suffer the consequences by my hand.”

  Pitt laughed, which could only be more insulting because he’d had to spell the sound to life. “And what would you do to me, Lord Freya, that has not already been warned?”

  I smiled a wicked grin I’d learned in my youth. Asher had wanted me as his own. He had studied the boundaries the ancients had laid into place to discover how they affected fey magic. He had studied methods with which to transfer and bind. He had wanted me for my talent, to control an army of humans and bring down his enemies. He had wanted me at his side. He had used Chevelle to hurt me, had tried to turn me against my own mother.

  Asher had taught me more than how to fight. He had taught me how to be cruel. He’d taught me how to win.

  I lifted my staff a breath off the ground and let my smile fall away. When I slammed it again to the earth, it was without regard for the fey standing behind me or Junnie at my side. It was only for the changeling fey who threatened to destroy us, who aimed to bring down the very people from whom he had come.

  Ruby’s scream tore through the clearing, echoing off the jagged stone. Rock crumbled and shattered, falling with a scattering of trees into the pit below the formations of dark rock. My magic rolled through it, slamming into those on the other side. Chevelle knocked into Grey’s side, forcing him to take a knee as Chevelle did, but Ruby was too far from them, tied and bound by spellwoven ropes, the ends of which rested in the changeling’s hand.

  Pitt’s form shifted into something not quite elven, his shade going a sickly green, and beside me, despite the thundering rattle of earth, Junnie loosed an arrow. It stabbed into the changeling’s hand, but he did not free Ruby. Pitt’s fingers only shifted, sliding over the rope and back again, not letting her go. When the stone collapsing into the earth hit what lay beneath it, columns of flame shot toward the sky. Two of Pitt’s fey were hit, the rest splitting to take hold of their prisoners or cover Pitt’s back.

  Anvil was running toward them with half of my guard, and Rhys and Rider had disappeared into the trees. A black wolf leapt from the dark forest, launching onto the back of the enemy fey, and he let loose a scream as the beast tore through the flesh of his shoulder, dragging him toward the ground where the wolf’s brethren piled on.

  The fey in the trees behind us shouted and cheered. They did not care who was lost as long as the base energy was fed, chaos reigned, and destruction was had. And there in the dark of Hollow Forest, mayhem was about to be unleashed.

  My power rippled through the earth, delivering a continuous strike to the changeling fey. But he was not a weak being, and he had managed to break free of his bonds to reach the river of power beneath the fey lands. With Ruby at his side, he gritted his teeth in an ever-changing face and rolled into something new, something taller, thinner, not in the least alluring or pleasant, and a bit gray.

  Ruby’s face contorted in pain as she raised her eyes to the sky. Her mouth came open as if to scream, but instead, only fire burst from her form.

  It was not the fire of a halfling girl. It was the fire of Hollow Forest. It was flames of an energy that did not feel wholly fey.

  Junnie loosed another arrow, taking down one of Pitt’s men. I could see her expression and knew that she was realizing what was happening along with me. Keane had been the most powerful fire fey. Pitt had used him, and now that he was gone, he planned to use Ruby instead, but Ruby was not a full-blooded fey. It would kill her.

  I was running before good sense could get in the way. Across the broken earth, Rhys slammed his staff into one fey while Rider cut down another. Rider’s sword swung perilously close to Chevelle and Grey, and then Chevelle stood, his hands finally free of the magic holding him. He did not glance at me as he moved for the changeling, and my feet moved faster still. Grey was headed for Ruby, her body alight with the flames of dark energy that rose from the earth. Grey was already burned, but it was no simple fire. One of Veil’s fey slammed into one of Pitt’s, the power of it crashing into the energy of the field.

  Chevelle reached into a pouch at his hip, only strides away from the changeling fey, and one of Junnie’s poisoned arrows struck Pitt in the neck. He growled, flashing a row of sharpened teeth, and snapped the wood to fall from his flesh. Grey reached Ruby with Rhys behind him, and the two threw up hands to attempt to douse the flame with magic.

  Chevelle crashed into Pitt, knocking him backward, and the changeling wrapped his hands over Chevelle’s neck, not to choke him but to reach bare skin, to better serve his power. Chevelle returned
the favor, and the two locked in a physical battle just as I neared. I held the staff upward, and Anvil swung at the back of the changeling’s knees. Anvil’s sword sliced through flesh, cracking bone, just as Chevelle was hit with a blast of power that threw him across the field and nearly into the chasm of jagged rock.

  I focused all my energy through the cold ironwood of my staff, and power exploded from its stone.

  Pitt caught it, dragging me near, and between us struggled the energy of the base magic and every bit of power Asher had gathered with darkness and spellwork before he’d given it to me.

  Energy seared through me, ice and fire in an unbearable storm, and I fought to gain control. Pitt’s face had gone the color of earth and soil, and I could feel the flesh of my palm burning against the ironwood staff. I pressed it forward, focusing harder through its stone, and felt the tremor of a hairline crack splitting across its surface.

  Something dark snaked up my legs, curling in wisps and semisolid claws. My stomach dropped. It was not the work of Chevelle, who had been knocked near the chasm of stone by the changeling. It was something else, someone with a talent for spellwork and dark magic.

  The claws of smoke tightened around me, crawling slowly up my torso and onto my arms. I tried to shout for help, but my teeth were gritted hard against the effort to fight Pitt. Our power slammed and twisted, fighting against itself and roiling into a squall.

  The spells rose higher, tugging at my arms, curling their fingers over the skin of my throat.

  Someone else, my mind kept saying. Something dark. Something that is going to cause us all to lose.

  Junnie’s power slammed into Pitt, and Ruby’s scream shifted into a weak and dying sound, not because less power ran through her but because it was more, too much for her to handle. I squeezed my damaged hand tighter around the staff, hurling every bit of my energy into the stone.