Cast in Faefire: An Urban Fantasy Romance (The Mage Craft Series Book 3) (22 page)

He only knew that it was time to go.

Slowly, over the span of eternity, he turned toward the Pit of Souls with the charges who needed him. Nothing remained in the chasm after that except vast, empty
nothing
, where souls could sink and sink, waiting for the instant of rebirth. He released them all at once.

Everyone but Arawn.

And then Seth followed them down.

Marion’s last cry was still trailing him.

Please don’t go
.

He still cared for one moment.

What was a moment in the span of a god’s experience, though? Was it a heartbeat, or the entirety of eternity that stretched between one Genesis and the next?

The caring drained out of him as he continued to sink.

Seth remembered the things he’d forgotten when substantiating. Every single detail of his eons ruling Sheol with Nyx. The instant that the Genesis void had consumed all of the planet.

Even an eternity coexisting with Elise and James.

Becoming the third god to a couple like them—a pair who were madly in love, with an emphasis on the “mad”—was worse than being a third wheel. He had been a roommate for two people who hadn’t cared about anyone else. But their room had been an entire universe, and Seth had been incapable of getting away.

Worse, they hadn’t wanted him to get away. They’d wanted him to suffer. They’d wanted him to be Death.

“I made you and you’ll do what I tell you,” Elise had said at one point. “If I want you to perform surgery on yourself, you’ll do it. If I want you to hop on one foot while barking like a dog for a thousand years, you’ll do it. And if I want you to kill my sister—”

“Just because you made me doesn’t mean you own me,” Seth had said.

And Elise had said, “You’ll regret saying that.”

She’d been right.

Seth’s only option to escape Elise and James had been to flee to a place gods didn’t care about: mortality.

Gods didn’t care about mortals.

Seth didn’t care about mortals.

The souls were taken by the Pit, and he felt a distant, momentary satisfaction over a job well done.

Then he felt nothing.

I
t was
quiet after Seth and Arawn left. All Marion could hear was a soft weeping. She needed a few minutes to realize that the weeping was coming from her.

She got up, swiping the tears off of her cheeks. She didn’t have time to mourn for Nori’s empty body in a puddle of blood. She didn’t even have time to mourn losing Seth.

Marion stumbled over the rubble to get to Konig. He was waking up. She helped him to his feet. “He shot my mom,” Konig said, his voice raw. “Seth killed my mother.”

“He was trying to protect me,” Marion said.

“You don’t understand. Seth killed the Queen of the Autumn Court and control is matrilineal. You’ve seen what happened to Niflheimr when its queen died.” Its protective magic had unraveled and the court had become a wasteland.

“But Rage—”

“Matrilineal,” he snapped. “He’s not king without a queen.” Konig pressed both hands to his temples, eyes squeezing shut. “The wards are already breaking down.”

Footsteps thudded among the rubble. Rocks slipped and shifted.

Hounds emerged from the chamber behind the thrones, loosed from the kennels that had contained them. Violet wasn’t the only ruler who had died. Seth had taken out Arawn, and there was nobody to hold the Hounds anymore.

One of them lunged for Heather Cobweb’s unconscious body.

Konig swept her off of the ground before it could bite, leaping backwards. Its mouth snapped on the heel of his boot. Sidhe blood spattered the floor.

Marion lifted her bow, heart pounding. Her arrows would do nothing against the Hounds.

A loud crash.

The collapsed rubble exploded. Jibril punched his way through it, landing between Marion and Konig with his wings flared. Even in the midst of so much destruction, the angel was clean and composed. “What in the names of the gods happened here?”

“My mother’s dead,” Konig said.

Jibril understood without the explanation Marion had needed. “Then there’s only one thing to do.”

He grabbed both Konig and Marion and burst into flight.

They lifted from the throne room, leaving the Hounds among the wreckage. Only when they were in the air did Marion realize exactly how far they were from the rest of Myrkheimr. The enchanted throne room was on a cliff in the depths of the forest, overlooking the rest of the kingdom.

From there, Marion could see the white shapes of the Hounds pouring through the trees, racing for the burning castle.

A dozen Hounds would do a lot of damage to the wedding attendees.

Jibril landed on one of the few towers that were still standing. There was an altar at its top, much like the kind that Marion had in the Winter Court. It must have been one of the points where the soul-linked wards could be connected with blood.

“You know what needs to happen,” Jibril said. “You both know.”

Marion’s heart sank into her stomach.

And it kept sinking.

It sank and sank and sank like balefire eating its way through the Earth’s mantle, heading straight for the burning liquid core.

“We have to get married,” she said.

Because the queen was dead, the wards had failed, and the Hounds were about to kill everyone—not just the innocents of the Autumn Court, but the members of the council who had been attending Marion’s wedding. The leaders of every preternatural organization in the world.

If the Hounds killed them, then all of the world would be thrown into chaos.

“We have to get married as quickly as possible,” Marion reiterated, and it was a struggle to get the words out when her whole body was shaking. “Then Konig can fix everything. He can save the Autumn Court.”

Grim realization crept over Konig. “I’ll be king of both unseelie courts.” He seemed to take no pleasure in the knowledge.

“Take one another’s hands,” Jibril said.

Konig grabbed Marion’s wrists since her hands were limp. “Skip the ceremony. Just do the important parts.”

Jibril put his hands over theirs. He focused on the prince first. “Do you consent to marriage with Marion Garin, and swear to love, honor, and obey her until death parts you?”

Sidhe magic flared over Konig’s flesh, sparking throughout the crystalline walls of Myrkheimr. The oath was not merely words.

“I will love, honor, and obey you, Marion,” Konig said.

It felt like chains were looped around Marion’s throat, tightening with every syllable.

Myrkheimr shook. Smoke billowed up the sides of the tower, spreading black clouds into a perfect blue sky. All of the Autumn Court was falling into darkness.

Jibril was calm as he turned his focus on Marion. “Do you consent to marriage with Prince ErlKonig, and swear to love, honor, and obey him until death parts you?”

Magic flashed again. In the glint of light, Marion remembered being struck by Konig. She remembered the fear. The pain.

She remembered Seth’s promise to never hurt her.

And then Seth plunging into balefire with Arawn.

“You have to consent,” Jibril said. “You have to say the words.”

Marion blinked, and the tears started flowing down her cheeks. They dripped from her chin and splattered on the chest of her torn wedding dress. “I will love, honor, and obey you, Konig,” she said hoarsely.

The magic yanked tight.

Under calmer circumstances, it would have been a beautiful thing—the way that it wound around them like loops of spider webbing, joining their hearts and bodies.

Marion and Konig joined eternally in holy matrimony.

It was Konig’s moment of triumph, but he looked every inch as ragged as Marion. It might have been delusion that led her to think that he looked regretful.

“Hold me,” Konig said. “Don’t let go.”

She continued to grip one of his hands while he extended the other toward Jibril.

The angel slashed his palm.

Blood the color of silver-edged sapphires gushed from Konig’s flesh. And then there was no flesh at all. There was only the power at Konig’s core. Reality’s loose grip unraveled to reveal the truth of him—the sidhe rather than the man she’d married.

Marion had seen him like that before, when he’d been trying to rescue her in Port Angeles. He was raw Earth energy. He was the wind that carried in the first storms of winter. He was the thunderstorm, the hurricane, the tornado carving valleys into planes and flattening every human habitation in its way.

Konig was magic.

He was Myrkheimr.

The wave of the new king’s power crested over the Autumn Court, carrying Marion’s consciousness along with it. She could see every inch of his kingdom—
their
kingdom. She saw fires extinguished in a heartbeat. Walls lifted from victims trapped within the wreckage. Hounds ripped apart and flung into the ocean.

Konig’s presence was so mighty that he consumed Marion’s senses. She was only half-human, but half was enough.

He overwhelmed her. All sense of the world shut down.

And then Marion awoke, lying on her back at the center of the tower. There was no howling, no screaming, no magic. She sat up, her hair frizzed into a foam around her head, with no sign of the pins that had carefully held it in place.

Konig braced himself on the altar, back in his man-like form. He shined brighter than the moon. His eyes radiated. He had taken over the wards on Myrkheimr and driven out all invaders—not just the Hounds, but the possessed human beings, too.

Nothing remained in their kingdom but silence.

* * *

T
here was very
little to recover in the wake of the wedding.

At another time, Marion would have been impressed by how effortlessly Konig’s magic reassembled the Autumn Court. Myrkheimr didn’t seem to require reconstruction, but simple healing; within minutes, it was restored to the same state as the day before without so much as a bloody Hound paw print marring its halls.

Fixing Myrkheimr didn’t bring back the dead.

Marion and Konig agreed to make their first appearance as king and queen barely an hour later. It was just enough time for Marion to strip off the bloody wedding dress in numb silence. The diadem that Violet had commissioned was in a box on her dresser, but Marion didn’t put it on.

She attended the mass funeral with her hair loose around her shoulders and wearing the one black dress she’d found in her closet. It must have been designed for another funeral. That was the only occasion Marion could imagine warranting such a modest gown.

Konig was stiff beside her as all the bodies were laid out in the courtyard.

Two hundred thirty-six in all, counting Violet and Nori.

In the wake of battle, the ruling king and queen were meant to spend a night holding vigil over the people they’d lost. Marion doubted that the vigil had been held by freshly coronated newlyweds before, but then, the sidhe hadn’t had very long to practice their traditions.

“We don’t have to do this,” Marion said. “We can have them buried immediately.”

“It’s sidhe tradition,” Konig replied dully.

She didn’t offer to end the vigil early again.

They didn’t sit, didn’t move, and barely spoke as hours passed. They should have been celebrating their wedding night. All of the sidhe courts should have launched into weeks of partying.

Instead, they waited with the dead.

It wasn’t his mother’s body that he lingered over as the evening wore on, but Nori’s. Her body was cast in shades of crimson and amber from the sunset, which made the smears of blood on her body look black.

“Arawn said you were having an affair with her,” Marion said. She wasn’t sure if she hoped he’d deny it or not. At that point, it seemed like cheating on her was one of the less damaging things he could have done.

He didn’t deny anything.

“I need sex the way you need to breathe, princess. Should I have suffocated while waiting for you? Or should I have forced myself on you? I chose to fulfill my own sexual needs so you’d have room to rediscover yourself. What would you have preferred I do?”

“There had to be better options than those,” Marion said. “Ymir saw everything, didn’t he? That’s why he’s not talking. You did that to him.”

“Yes, a hex,” Konig said.

That made her angrier than learning he’d slept with Nori.

Marion walked away from him to try to compose herself. She didn’t go far—only to the fresh growth of vines against one pillar, where she could inhale the scent of its pollen and stroke her fingers over the soft leaves.

Once they left the courtyard, the surviving members of the Autumn Court would come in to pay their respects, the bodies would be buried, and there would be other matters of state to address. This might have been Marion’s only opportunity to talk everything over with Konig for weeks to come.

“We can’t divorce,” he called to her.

She had already been inching toward that thought, trying to avoid drawing the same conclusion. “It exhausts me, the thought of staying with you. I’ll worry you’re hexing people to hide information from me. Or I’ll worry you’ll throw yourself at Heather if I withhold sex one night. Or worry that you’ll be enraged by some perceived insult and take it out on me, physically or magically. It is
exhausting
.”

Those words didn’t evoke fresh anger from him. When he looked beaten like this, it was difficult to imagine that Konig could ever have become angry enough to hit her. “I’ve made mistakes.”

So had Marion. Her entire life had become an attempt to rectify the errors she’d made before losing her memories, and the errors she’d made in the weeks since. “Are you sorry?”

He nodded as he stared at Nori’s face. “I’ve never been sorrier for anything. I’d do better by you, if you let me.”

“I don’t know why I should.”

“If not for me, then for our people. We rule all of the unseelie now, Marion. I just don’t think I can do it without you.”

“I won’t be able to trust you ever again,” Marion said. “How can we rule together when we can’t win the war between ourselves?”

“Because we need to.” He stepped between the bodies to join Marion, gripping her hand the way that he had when they’d exchanged vows. “You deserve better than me, but I need you now more than ever. Thousands of people need you.”

She didn’t respond.

Yet the silence from the dead was deeper.

Marion could punish Konig by leaving him—and what a satisfying punishment that would be. The easiest thing to do, by far.

All of the unseelie would suffer for it.

“I’ll stay with you,” she said. Konig leaned in to kiss her, but she pulled back before he could. “We’ll rule together, but I do this for the people, not for you. I want to love you, Konig, but until you prove that you can do better, I’m not going to be with you…like that.”

Some of that familiar old anger flickered in his eyes. “You’ll want me to remain chaste too, won’t you?”

“If you want to salvage our marriage,” she said. “Yes. You’ll be chaste. You’ll
suffocate
. And you’ll be happy I’ve given you the opportunity.” Gods, that was a cruel thing to say. It hurt to say it. It was the sweetest pain she’d ever felt.

“I’ll wait for you if you’ll wait for me,” Konig said. “Stay away from Seth. I don’t want you to see him anymore.”