Page 2 of Sweetling
Maxim had known. Perhaps he always had, or perhaps his daughter had foreseen it.
In the end, Maxim and Aine played their parts, dying so that their daughter might live.
Allarion now had to do his—and it’d begun that morning, watching poor Aine’s torment and doing nothing.
The punishment for his foolish hopes lay in pools of crimson blood on the pavilion, a fate far worse than he could have imagined unspooling before him.
Maxim had been his friend for longer than humans had kept histories, for longer than the courses of rivers and the span of forests. They had been boys together, those precious few years when fae were young, scampering through the reeds that lined the Lune River to catch dragonflies. They had trained together, claimed their dread-mounts together, fought the orcish hordes together.
Everything, together.
So when Allarion had discovered Maxim’s secret fifty human years ago, the very foundations of his being quaked.
A hidden, veiled house by the sea on the border of the faelands. A human mate, pregnant with their halfling child.
To be trusted with such a secret had honored Allarion, but he’d never been able to completely shed his jealousy and resentment. For the life Maxim had hidden from him. For the life his friend had.
Those died with Maxim.
None of it mattered, not anymore.
Allarion’s gaze skittered up from the lifeless bodies of Maxim and Aine, watching as the Fae Queen straightened. Her glamour fell back into place, swathing her in perfect beauty. Long ringlets of hair so white it shone like starlight swept slender shoulders and lissome arms. A graceful neck, delicate swooping collarbones, a rosebud mouth, and glittering eyes of sapphire blue complemented a supple body draped in midnight velvet. And four oval wings, more delicate than stained glass and gleaming like pearls, folded at her back.
If the moon could walk this world, it would look like Amaranthe did then.
But she was nothing but a beetle-bitten acorn, hollow and rotten.
His rage burned hotter and brighter than the sun, pulling him toward collision and violence. The sword strapped at his hip hung heavily, and the magic under his command shuddered and whispered encouragement.Do it,said the air,end this.All would be better without her.
Oh, he wanted to.
He vowed in that moment that no matter the cost or time, he would be witness to Amaranthe’s destruction.
But he remembered his vow to his friend.
This wasn’t the end but the beginning. And Amaranthe’s end wasn’t his to have.
That was now Ravenna’s.
It took some days for Allarion to escape the seaside court of Fallorian. The gleaming city was full of winding cobbled streets, juniper and poplar-shaded courtyards, glittering reflection pools and steaming mosaic-tiled baths, and gardens of flowers and crystal—a place of immeasurable beauty that felt every day like a trap closing in around him.
He was watched everywhere he went within the city, the limestone towers and coral arches not hiding him for long from the Queen’s spies. The harbor, crowded with white oak ships that hadn’t sailed out in centuries, offered no opportunity, nor did the serpentine curtain wall that snaked around the city itself. The five great towers of Fallorian gleamed in the daylight, pink and green with the iridescence of abalone shells, their light seemingly following him at every turn.
Fae did not mark the passage of time like the other folk did—yet, Allarion felt it keenly, a knife in his chest with every day that passed without success.
He kept to his duties, aware that all within the Queen’s court watched him and anyone ever associated with Maxim. There were whispers in the courtyards, deep in the shade of the poplars, that even the most distant cousin of Maxim’s line was being hunted for information.
Allarion had already been squeezed by the Queen’s hand for that information, before Aine was captured, and he hadn’t broken. He insisted he knew nothing, and that was what Amaranthe got from him. He might have been kept longer had his mother, Idrisil, the matriarch of House Meringor, one of the oldest aristocratic houses alongside the royal line, not intervened. Ever the politician, despite her retirement, Idrisil had made her veiled threats and half-promises.
For now, Allarion was free. But his name and mother wouldn’t spare him from another interrogation should he give Amaranthe any reason to send out the long reach of her arm. His first detainment had been painful enough, and as the Queen continued to go without her ultimate prey, her temper only worsened.
The city seemed to hold its breath, awaiting whatever cruel blow would come. Even before she slaughtered her heirs, Amaranthe’s temper was legendary. Many knew to keep indoors and quiet. Those with estates outside the city fled in the night. His mother and older sisters had begged him to return with them to the Meringor estate, but Allarion refused. Doing so would inspire more suspicion, incite further royal animosity toward his family, and ultimately keep him further from his goal.
Escaping the faelands.
For days, the agony of waiting alone in the city—entertaining no guests in his family’s villa overlooking the sea, releasing all their staff, writing no letters and talking to not a soul—ate at him like the fevered diseases that befell the humans. In the echoing caverns of the villa, surrounded by luxury and wealth but alone with his own company, Allarion nearly went mad with it.
He dared not even speak with his trusted dread-mount, Bellarand the Black, who awaited him outside the city walls.
