Page 75 of A Reign of Roses
“You have a witch that can portal an entire army across realms?” Valery asked.
Hart smirked. “Do you also have a unicorn and a troll that will turn my shit to gold?”
Kane didn’t grin this time and Hart’s eyes flared with understanding. “Creighton?”
Kane sat back down on the bed beside me and gave a single definitive nod.
“Briar Creighton…” Hart mused, leaning against the scarred wooden sideboard. “A brilliant witch and an even more brilliant fuck.”
A noise sputtered from me, and I realized I’d choked on my own spit.
Briar had been alive for hundreds of years; I guess I couldn’t fault her for sleeping with some of the most handsome, roguish men alive. For whatever reason, my eyes cut to Valery before anyone else, and saw she had turned a little pink. I hadn’t taken her for a blusher, but I wasn’t surprised. Hart probably had that effect on people.
Kane ignored Hart’s crudeness. “Once we’re back, we’ll rally our troops and return here, to your encampment. Then we can storm Solaris as one.”
“With all due respect, your kingliness,” Hart said, hopping back onto his makeshift perch and bending up a long leg to lean an elbow on. “There’s nothing stopping me from hitting him tonight without you.”
To my surprise, Kane only cocked his head appraisingly and asked him, “What are you, half?”
“My father was full-blooded. My mother mortal.”
Kane nodded to himself, assumption confirmed. He wasn’t a halfling—a mortal with trace ancestral amounts of Fae blood—but he wasn’t nearly as powerful a Fae as, say, Griffin or Wyn. Or as Kane had been, before being remade.
“Hart, your following is impressive. The work you’ve done…Having led a rebellion of my own, once…” The rueful smile didn’t reach Kane’s eyes. “I’m aware just how impossible this must have been. How much trust these people have in you, and you in them. But none of that will matter when you face Lazarus. Weakened or not, he’s full-blooded Fae. You’re half. You don’t stand a chance without us. In the end, only I can kill him with the Blade of the Sun.”
“Or me,” I supplied.
“No,” Kane said, low and authoritative. “It will be me. And only me.”
20
Arwen
It was shameful how longit took for the reality of our new situation to dawn on me. Far, far too long. I’d been so distracted by my injuries and Kane and our reunion that I hadn’t put the most obvious new piece of our complex puzzle together in my mind—
Kane had become full-blooded Fae, like me. Like his father.
He was now capable of taking my place in the prophecy.
Which meant the truth I’d spent so many months coming to terms with—that even though I wanted more than anything to live, Iwoulddie to save Evendell, to save my family, and my friends, and the man I loved—it wasn’t the case anymore.
One of us would have to die to end Lazarus, as stated clearly in the seer’s words, but now it was possible it could behim.
Which would mean I would live. A near eternity without Kane.
Knowing he had paid the ultimate price for my life.
I grasped at the stitches across my stomach as it heaved, Kane’s reassuring hand stroking my ankle once more.
This time it did nothing to soothe me.
Before this war was over, one of us would be dead.
One of us would leave the other behind. Alone. A greater suffering than anything I could imagine. There was no other way Lazarus’s reign could end.
While I bowed to this ruinous realization, the strategizing had continued around me.
“We don’t need to kill him,” Hart was saying. “Just to sack his city. Slay his army. Destroy his power source, which, thanks to your woman, has already been halved at least.”
