The Queen's Price

THIRTY-NINE

“There, now,” Anya said as she tucked the final pin into the coil she’d made of Saetien’s long black hair. “Now let me cover it with this netting, and you’ll be all set.”

Saetien stared at her reflection. With her hair put up this way, she looked older. Looked . . . mature, which would be fine. Would be good, in fact. But if this made her look matronly . . . “Isn’t netting old-fashioned?” Meaning suitable for old ladies rather than young women.

“It’s black, so it matches your hair,” Anya replied as she placed the netting around the coiled hair. “I’ve added a little shielding to it, so even sharp little puppy teeth won’t be able to get a grip on your hair.”

Thank the Darkness for that.

“Besides,” Anya continued, “just because something is practical and traditional doesn’t make it old-fashioned.” She blew out a breath. “Had a guest here not long ago who thought like you. She said the same about netting being old-fashioned. Only she made the mistake of actually teasing some of the puppies with her braid, even though Kieran and Ryder warned her not to do that. Well, she wore herself out with the playing and fell asleep with two of the pups still with her. Don’t know if they liked the smell of her hair or just weren’t ready to stop playing, but there she was, sound asleep, and there they were, chewing on that braid and having a good time being quiet.

“Well, she woke up by herself and started having a fair fit because she had half the hair she’d had before she fell asleep, and there were chunks of hair all over the yard because the pups didn’t know about using Craft to seal the ends to hold the braid together.”

Saetien turned around so she could look Anya right in the eyes. “You’re making that up.”

“Hand on heart.” Anya put her hand on her chest.

Saetien started to reach up to make sure she still had hair. Then she lowered her hand. “It’s practical. And traditional.”

Anya smiled. “Exactly. If you and Shelby are going to puppy school, best you go down and get some breakfast in you.”

Obediently, Saetien headed downstairs. Anya wasn’t quite as bossy as the servants who worked for her father at the Hall, but she’d give them a fair race for the trophy.

Everyone was in the breakfast room when Saetien arrived. She stopped herself from calling attention to her hair, but Kieran noticed the aborted move when she started to reach up.

“Anya found some netting for your hair?” he asked.

“Looks good,” Kildare said with a nod.

“Indeed it does,” Eileen agreed with a smile.

“Anya told me a silly story about a guest who had her braid chewed off.” Saetien rolled her eyes to indicate that she wasn’t about to be fooled, just in case Anya had been teasing.

Except . . . Ryder winced, and Kieran said, “Ah. Well, we did warn her not to get the puppies thinking that her hair was a toy.”

Saetien sat down with a thump. “You mean Anya wasn’t teasing?”

Four people shook their heads.

“Woman upset the whole stable with her screeching.” Kildare buttered his toast a bit fiercely in response to the memory.

“She had her sights set on Kieran,” Ryder said. “Well, she did,” he insisted when Eileen scoffed at the suggestion. “Why did you think he asked you to put her up on this side of the house and had Brenda sleep in the guest room on his side? He figured Brenda would be as fierce a protector as any Sceltie.”

The look in Eileen’s eyes held steel. “Kieran?”

“She never got close to my bedroom, let alone my bed, and she packed up and was gone the next day, so my reputation remains unsullied.” Kieran’s lips twitched with amusement. “But even the youngest pups realized that my scolding about the hair wasn’t sincere, since they had solved a problem for me, which is why some of them still think braids are toys.” He pointed a finger at Saetien. “You’ll have to put some effort into convincing them otherwise, for your own sake as well as other young Ladies.”

She bared her teeth in a smile that had Kieran’s eyebrows rising.

“How was playtime with the foals yesterday?” Kildare asked.

Saetien took her time buttering a piece of toast. “It was fine.” Butter, butter, butter. “They let me win a race. It was a close call. Caitie was watching and declared that I won by a nose.”

A lot of male throat clearing.

Eileen reached over and patted Saetien’s hand. “That was kind of the foals to let you win.”

“It was,” she agreed.

The men excused themselves with more haste than manners.

“The pony cart will be out front for you when you’re ready,” Kieran said before he closed the breakfast room door.

“What is discussed is private, but how are things going between you and Prince Butler?” Eileen asked as she refilled their cups. “He can be a bit prickly about the past.”

“It’s not what I expected.”

“That’s a truth that can be said about a lot of things.”

Later that day, Saetien stood on her side of the gate and waited for Butler. Kieran had said it was a bit early to be going, and it probably was, but she’d been thinking about these people all day. Alexandra Angelline, the Chaillot Queen who had struggled to hold on to her Territory in the face of a terrible scandal, with the powerful families in Beldon Mor—the ones who weren’t involved in Briarwood—asking how she had let that evil remain hidden, how she’d allowed it to take root, how she could claim she didn’t know about it when one of the men who had helped make that place lived in her own house. When one of her granddaughters had been committed to that place.

Had those powerful families begun to wonder if Jaenelle Angelline really had been an eccentric, troubled child or if she had been a child who had tried to tell them the truth about the dangers and corruption hidden by people like Robert Benedict?

And Dorothea SaDiablo. Powerful High Priestess of Hayll, who had wanted to control the Realm of Terreille. Had wanted to control more than that?

Jaenelle Angelline had ruled almost the whole of Kaeleer. Dorothea had wanted to rule Terreille. One was beloved while the other was hated for wanting the same thing. Why?

Impatient to hear the next part of the story, Saetien had started walking to Butler’s cottage with only Shelby for company. It wasn’t that far, and it wasn’t dark yet. Besides, having Kieran and whoever was pulling the pony cart just sitting out there in the dark while she talked to Butler was foolish for both man and horse.

She was halfway to the cottage before Kieran and the pony cart caught up to her.

He said nothing. She picked up Shelby and climbed in.

“He won’t open the door before he’s ready,” Kieran finally said.

“I know,” she replied, “but the answers he gives me fill my head with more questions.”

“That’s not surprising. Families can be complicated.”

That was certainly true of hers. It had begun to sink in, really sink in, that her father, whom she loved, had hated the woman who was her great-grandmother. And yet he’d married Surreal, Dorothea’s granddaughter.

The horse stopped, then snorted when she didn’t climb down.

“Shelby can wait here with us,” Kieran said.

She climbed down and walked the rest of the way to the cottage, where she stood by the gate and waited. And waited.

The light was fading, but there was still enough for her to see the flower beds that created a wide border all along the fence and should have provided color along the front of the cottage, especially now that the spring flowers were starting to bloom.

“Can’t the man tell the difference between a flower and a weed?” she muttered as she studied the beds. They were overgrown, unkempt, and full of weeds. They could be lovely with a little care.

Every year, her father had helped her plant flowers in a small space that was hers and hers alone. Tarl wouldn’t let his gardeners touch a thing between the stakes that marked her part of the flower beds in the courtyard that was surrounded by the family’s private rooms. Tarl would fill the watering can for her, and when she was very little he or her father would help her with the watering because the full can was heavy, but caring for the plants and pulling the weeds was up to her.

She’d been a fierce weeder.

She missed taking care of something that was just her own. She didn’t count Shelby because she and Shelby took care of each other. Not the same thing as filling her hands with good earth.

The door opened. Butler walked down the flagstone path and stood on his side of the gate.

“You said Alexandra Angelline was Dorothea SaDiablo’s pawn,” Saetien said, trying not to sound like she was bursting with questions. “What did she do?”

“Alexandra arrived in Kaeleer with her daughter, Leland, and Philip Alexander, along with guards, escorts, and several Ladies who served in her court—and at least one man who was there to carry out Dorothea’s orders,” Butler replied. “She showed up at SaDiablo Hall with the intention of confronting the Warlord Prince of Dhemlan, the man she’d been told controlled Jaenelle and now also had Wilhelmina as his unwilling ‘guest.’ Whatever story Dorothea had spun about the man, Alexandra wasn’t prepared to face the Black-Jeweled Warlord Prince who was the High Lord of Hell—and she wasn’t prepared to see Daemon Sadi again. She wasn’t prepared for the number of Warlord Princes in residence or the number of Queens who had gathered to take a look at someone they had considered an enemy since childhood.

“Wilhelmina was never without an escort, was never left unprotected. She didn’t want to go back to Chaillot, didn’t want to go back to any place in Terreille. Ordinary methods of persuasion weren’t going to work to extract the girl from the High Lord’s care and ‘protection.’ So Alexandra agreed to methods that required the skills of Dorothea’s man. Hayll’s High Priestess had provided her man with compulsion spells to use on Wilhelmina in order to get her away from the Hall and get her back to Hayll.”

“You mean Chaillot,” Saetien interrupted. “He would have taken her to Chaillot.”

“Wilhelmina would have been Dorothea’s ‘guest’ to make sure Alexandra continued to assist her efforts to get Jaenelle Angelline away from Saetan. Jaenelle was the real goal because whoever controlled the Queen of Ebon Askavi could control the Realms. A witch powerful enough to crush Saetan’s and Daemon’s power and bring those men to their knees? Factions of the Blood had been trying to get control of Jaenelle ever since Saetan became her legal guardian. What Dorothea and Alexandra didn’t understand was that Saetan recognized the truth about his daughter’s nature, and he didn’t stand in front of Jaenelle in order to protect her from the rest of the Blood. He stood in front in order to protect the Blood from her.”

“What could she do?”

Butler studied her as if the question puzzled him. “When Jaenelle was fifteen, the Dark Council insisted that Saetan wasn’t a suitable guardian for a living girl and that they, the Council, would appoint someone else. Saetan descended to the full strength of his Black Jewel and prepared to destroy the Council. Before he could strike, Jaenelle said they could appoint another guardian when the sun next rose. Saetan was devastated by that pronouncement, since he loved her and he’d waited thousands of years for the Queen he was supposed to serve. The coven and the boyos, however, viewed her statement differently. Correctly, as it happened.”

“What did happen?” Saetien asked when Butler didn’t say anything else.

“The sun didn’t rise. Not the next day or the one after that.”

Saetien’s jaw dropped. How awful, how terrifying, to wait for a sunrise that never came. Waiting in a forever-dark world. Did the Blood outside of this Dark Council know why the night didn’t end? “But the sun did rise. It had to.”

Butler nodded. “Eventually, it did. The Council sent one of its members, a man who got along well with the High Lord, and requested—begged, if you want the truth of it—that Saetan remain Jaenelle’s guardian and that he ask his daughter to restore the sun. Which he did when the Seneschal finally granted him admittance to the Keep.

“Love was the only leash that could hold Jaenelle Angelline, but it was a leash that had a knife edge honed for war and had to be handled carefully.”

Butler hadn’t created a ball of witchlight, so he was little more than a dark shape backlit by the lights shining from the cottage windows. Somehow, that felt right for the telling—and hearing—of this part of the story.

“Dorothea’s man, Osvald, used the compulsion spells and got Wilhelmina away from her rooms,” Butler continued. “But he didn’t take into account that kindred would react the same way as a human protector, and Wilhelmina had become friends with a young tiger Warlord Prince named Dejaal, who was the son of Jaal, a Green-Jeweled Warlord Prince who served in Jaenelle’s First Circle. Wilhelmina was frightened and struggled, despite the spells Osvald had used, and Dejaal responded the same way any other Warlord Prince would respond—he attacked the man who was hurting his friend. A call to battle spread through the Hall, and kindred and humans converged on the area. An Eyrien Warlord Prince who was Lucivar’s second-in-command at the time wounded Osvald, but Dejaal had been killed before the others joined the fight.”

Saetien shook her head. “The residential areas of the Hall are made up of blocks of rooms that surround open-air courtyards. Unless you can fly, there’s no quick way to leave.”

“No, there’s not,” Butler agreed. “And in a place where one male sounding the alarm has all males responding as if they’re standing on a battleground—or a killing field—a man has no chance of removing a woman who doesn’t want to go with him. But Osvald tried, and a young Warlord Prince died because of it.”

“What happened to Osvald?”

Silence. Another of those moments when Butler looked away. “The son of a Brother in the Court was killed by an enemy on home ground. When something like that happens, the males in the First Circle have the right to decide on the form of execution. They gave Osvald to Jaal and Kaelas, who was a Red-Jeweled Arcerian Warlord Prince. I don’t know what those two cats did to that man, but having seen what two cats the size of Jaal and Kaelas can do to a human, it would have been a terrible way to die.”

“But Wilhelmina was saved.”

“Yes.”

When he didn’t say anything else, Saetien realized he was waiting for her next question. What was she supposed to ask?

Think. Think. When it’s a court, it’s never just the person who commits the act who is held accountable. A debt is owed by the person who gave the order.

After a minute, Butler said, “When a Queen comes to another Queen’s territory to visit or for business reasons and brings members of her court to serve her—or protect her—it is expected that she will hold the leash on everyone who came with her, that she will make sure they behave properly and not cause trouble for the hosting Queen or her court. For allowing Osvald to try to abduct Wilhelmina, Alexandra was held accountable for the death of Dejaal.”

“But she wasn’t executed,” Saetien said quickly. “She didn’t actually kill the tiger.”

“She wasn’t executed. She was stripped of her power, broken back to basic Craft. Still a Queen but no longer able to wear any Jewels.”

Saetien stood there with her mouth open. A Queen without any power? How . . . ? “The High Lord broke her?”

“No,” Butler said quietly. “The Queen of Ebon Askavi broke the Queen whose actions led to the death of a member of the Dark Court. Witch broke Alexandra.”

“But . . . Alexandra was Jaenelle’s grandmother. Witch broke her own grandmother?”

“What would you have had her do?” Butler’s voice turned sharp. “Oohhh, I see. Alexandra should have been reprimanded for violating her responsibilities as a Queen and a guest, should have had her wrist slapped and been told she was naughty, but should not have suffered any real consequences? After all, it wasn’t a human that was killed, was it? A Warlord Prince, yes, but just a tiger. Just an animal. Nothing important enough to defend.”

“I didn’t say that,” Saetien snapped. But the thought had been there, quickly followed by anger that anyone would think that Shelby might be expendable because he was a dog. “But she did it to her grandmother.”

“Witch called in the debt owed to her by another Queen. Alexandra being a relative had nothing to do with Jaenelle’s decision. It couldn’t. That is the price of being a Queen. Every personal decision, every private choice, has consequences, since every choice affects your court. You’ve seen Witch, seen the Self that lived beneath the human skin. Living myth, dreams made flesh. But not all the dreamers were human, Saetien. Generations of kindred dreamed of a Queen who would help them, who would protect them from humans who saw them as less. Centuries of Blood with one desire. Centuries during which three strong men yearned for the Queen they wanted, needed, to serve. It took a long time for all those dreams to come together to shape the Queen Kaeleer needed. To shape the Queen that Saetan needed. And Lucivar needed. And Daemon needed.

“Not all the dreamers were human. That is why Jaenelle Angelline was beloved as a Queen and could rule the Realm of Kaeleer. Every race in the Shadow Realm had a little part of the making of this Queen, and Jaenelle saw no difference between a Warlord Prince who was a tiger and a Warlord Prince who was a human. If he was under her hand, he was hers to protect—and she did protect her own.”

“Then why was Jaenelle born in Chaillot? Why wasn’t she born someplace in Kaeleer? Why did she end up being Alexandra’s granddaughter?”

“Because Alexandra was also one of the dreamers,” Butler said quietly. “But unlike Saetan and Lucivar and Daemon, she didn’t recognize the dream—and so many terrible things happened because of that. Those terrible things also became part of the living myth, just as Saetan’s love—and Daemon’s and Lucivar’s love—also helped shape who Witch became.”

“What happened to Alexandra?” Saetien asked.

“Alexandra, Leland, Philip, and the rest of the people Alexandra brought with her were escorted through the Gate nearest to Chaillot. As far as I know, they returned to Beldon Mor.”

“But Wilhelmina stayed.”

“Yes, Wilhelmina stayed.”

“And she forgave Jaenelle for breaking their grandmother?”

“In the discussion between Wilhelmina and Jaenelle that followed Alexandra’s return to Chaillot, Wilhelmina conveniently forgot that Jaenelle had been protecting her for most of their lives. She said things that caused a heart wound that never fully healed—and that was the last time the two of them were together.”

Butler’s voice sounded bitter, and Saetien heard an anger that still burned for a woman who died centuries ago.

“What happened between Wilhelmina and Jaenelle?” Saetien asked.

Butler shook his head. “That’s enough for tonight.”

“Will you tell me?”

“Yes. But not tonight.” Butler started to walk away; then he returned to the gate. “Who decides which races are human enough to be important, Saetien? What are the requirements? That a being have two arms and two legs? That they have hair and not fur? Skin that is all one color?” He paused. “What about wings? Is that not a sign that a race might be less than human?”

“How dare you!” The Eyrien race not considered human just because they had wings? Her cousins not considered human? What a filthy thing to say.

“If Jaenelle hadn’t stopped the Dark Council and the Terreilleans who coveted kindred lands by refusing to see any race as less, do you really think it wouldn’t have come to that eventually?”

Butler returned to his cottage and closed the door, leaving Saetien shrouded in dark thoughts about things she had never considered because she’d never had to.