Total pages in book: 141
Estimated words: 133191 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 666(@200wpm)___ 533(@250wpm)___ 444(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 133191 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 666(@200wpm)___ 533(@250wpm)___ 444(@300wpm)
“Are they kept separated because they lack beauty?” The thought had troubled me.
“No. Because they despise beauty and once upon a time sought to destroy it.”
“There was a war?”
“Millennia ago. Yes. They wielded weapons that could kill us but Aine was too powerful for them. We won the war, Aine destroyed any trace of the weapons and was benevolent enough to let most of the challengers live. There is another continent on Faerie, across vast, dangerous waters. We have not seen or heard from them in centuries. Thank goodness.”
My curiosity on the subject had grown, and Andraste had allowed me use of the royal library to read of the war. There I read that during the war, Aine discovered what she called the cauldron. It had the power to strip a fae of their memories so they could be reborn, something the fae required now that they were truly immortal. In their newly eternal evolution, fae children became rarer and rarer until only one or two fae children were born every century.
Now, however, was not the time to be thinking of such things when my glimmering mate was leading me toward her chamber.
It was as we moved from one floor to the next that we heard a harsh male grunt and a cry of pleasure. Both our gazes flew to an open doorway, a servant’s bedroom, where I flinched to see my brother and Lir naked. Lir was on his hands and knees as my brother powered into him from behind. And I knew him well enough to know he’d deliberately left the door open.
I curled my lip in distaste.
It was a sight I’d have liked to have gone an eternity without ever seeing.
As Andraste and I hurried away, she giggled.
I glowered at her.
She shrugged. “Your brother is so contrary.”
“He’s a dominating bastard.” He would just love that. Taking pleasure from Lir, making him vulnerable to him. It was his own way of punishing the fae for hurting the humans. To make him want him so much, to have power over him.
Eirik was good at that.
“I need you to spell the image from my head,” I grunted, pulling Andraste into her bedchamber. “Love me until there is nothing but you.”
And so she did.
The queen left the following day. Andraste and I stayed in bed for four nights to celebrate our privacy.
Thea glanced up from the entry to find Conall out for the count. If Jerrik’s journal of his time in Faerie was a lie, then the guy had an amazing imagination.
Staring at Conall, however, Thea believed Jerrik had once had a mate. The way he described his love for Andraste was the way Thea felt about Conall. The mating. It was intense.
She fought the urge to lean over and kiss Conall’s scarred cheek and instead turned the page to the next entry. Jerrik filled the pages with tales from the court, and as Vik had mentioned, he spoke of the queen’s fury over the fae who turned to werewolf and the fae who died trying to do so. The revelation had worried Andraste as she feared the queen discovering their secret, but Jerrik had refused to leave her side.
Finally, Thea skimmed through his entries until she got to the one that interested her most: the closing of the gate and the supposed spell upon the human world that Thea was a consequence of.
(Roman Calendar Year 128 BC)
It cannot be. I sit here in my cold stone home, no windows to guard against the sun, and I cannot fathom that Andraste is lost to me. Hours ago, she’d been in my arms. Hours ago, another world had made my existence worthwhile.
It is now lost to me too.
“Are you going to mourn forever?” Eirik had asked upon our arrival home. “Because that will grow tedious.”
“Do you not care she is forever lost to me?”
“No. She was beneath you. As they all are.”
“They made us, you ungrateful heathen.”
“Yes, but rather like a man whose mother pushed him out as a babe only to leave him to starve in the woods, I bear no loyalty to my creators.”
I’d attacked him.
Viciously.
Both of us were bloodied and broken but healing physically.
I did not know if my heart would ever heal.
Listen to me. My mind is so overwhelmed by the happenings. I need to find order in the chaos. I’ve started at the end. I must go back to this morning. To explain.
The queen’s seer had a vision.
I had been living on Faerie for months. Eirik would visit occasionally. “To make sure you are still alive.”
For me, however, even separated from my twin who had once been my other half, my life was here. With Andraste.
The fae celebrated each country throughout the year and it was time to pay homage to Samhradh, the lands of eternal summer. Samhradh Palace stood in the heart of Solas, the royal city of the Day Lands. If I thought the palace at Réalta astounding, there were no words for the queen’s home. It differed from the other palaces. Where they were long and rectangular, a building wrapped around a huge inner courtyard, the palace at Solas was tall and enchanting. A castle. Towering turrets of different sizes, spires, and a magnificent gated entrance created from gold. It appeared to be crafted entirely of shattered pieces of the opaque glimmering utilized for windows. Those shattered pieces, placed together, miniscule bit by miniscule bit, gave the castle the appearance of a building made entirely of diamonds.