The Black Queen (Book 6) (27 page)

Gift would be angry with him, and so would Leen. Because to drink from the fountain meant Coulter would be betraying the oath he had taken to protect this place. He had vowed to prevent anyone—including himself—from violating it. And Gift had been quite clear about what constituted a violation: taking anything from the cavern; using any part of the cavern for personal gain; and entering any of the tunnels. Drinking the water would violate two of those rules: Coulter would take something with him, provided the water stayed down, which it had not for Nicholas, and Coulter would be doing so for personal gain.

Personal gain. He closed his eyes. When had he started viewing his actions in connection with Arianna as personal? From the moment he had placed his hand on Nicholas’s heart, and traveled through Nicholas’s Link to save Arianna from dying because she was trapped inside herself? Or had it been after that, when they kissed in the garden beside the palace, the day he had left her for good?

“Arianna,” he whispered. “What am I to do?”

He felt a slight magickal swirling in the air around him. He raised his head, felt something like fingers brush his face.

“Help me,” he said. “Show me what I’m supposed to do.”

“Coulter?”

At first he thought the voice came from inside the cavern, and then he realized it came from outside. It was Leen, calling for him.

“Coulter?”

The fingers were gone, and so was the sense of the presence, gone as if it had never been. His heart twisted. So close…

Leen came inside, her shadow darkening the entrance. “Coulter?”

“Here,” he said.

She walked up beside him, and sat on the stairs. She glanced at him. “What are you doing here?”

“Trying to make a decision,” he said.

She frowned. “About what?”

“Arianna,” he said.

“Has she contacted you?”

He shook his head. “Remember the day we saw that light?”

“You saw it.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’ve felt her since then. Off and on, as if she were in pain. As if she were in trouble.”

Leen raised a single eyebrow, a look that made her seem all knowing and mysterious at the same time. “So you came here…?”

“Hoping I’d get guidance. But I haven’t.”

“Well, maybe I can give you some advice,” Leen said.

He looked at her, waiting, not certain if she could help him or not. She certainly knew him better than anyone else did. Not even Gift knew him this well. Maybe Gift never had. But Leen had been at Coulter’s side ever since they’d met, and she had loved him, in her own calm way.

“All right,” he said.

“I was raised traditionally, and so many customs of my people are gone.”

Coulter straightened. Leen never talked about her family—slaughtered by Rugad when he came to Blue Isle—or her upbringing. She rarely spoke of her Feyness except as a fact, not as a way of life.

“When Arianna took on the role of Black Queen,” Leen continued, “I think those of us who knew her, and who knew you, believed everything would be as it was before.”

“I’m not following you. Ari and I had known each other only a short time when she became Black Queen.”

“I’m not talking about how it was with the two of you before. I’m talking about Fey custom, Fey tradition.”

His mouth had gone dry. He glanced at the fountain, wondering if his sudden thirst was a message to test the water, or if it was a physical reaction, a fear, of what Leen was going to say.

“Every Black Ruler has had an Enchanter at her side. Every Black King has used his Enchanter as a second in command, even though it’s never stated that way. Even Rugad had Boteen, and used him until the day he died.” Leen paused, and looked at the far wall as if she didn’t want to see Coulter’s face when she spoke. “I had always thought you should be at Arianna’s side, as her second. Her Enchanter. I would wager, even though I don’t know, that her mother, the Mystery, believed the same, which was why she was willing to guide her daughter in the words she needed to take over the Fey.”

“No one spoke of this.”

Leen shrugged. “Arianna left this place and never returned. There were no major Fey advisors to her at first, and she wasn’t inclined to listen to anyone anyway. She felt she had to establish herself on her own.”

“She did that,” Coulter said.

“She did,” Leen said, “but maybe now she needs help. Maybe now she needs someone she can trust. And more than that. Maybe she needs someone whose magick complements hers.”

Coulter shook his head. “I’m not trained.”

Leen put her arm around him and rested her head on his shoulder. “I haven’t heard you talk like that in a long time. Of course you’re trained. And in control. You train others.”

“Because they’re like me. Islanders with magick.”

“Because the Fey don’t know whether them to be afraid of them, or to teach them tricks they wouldn’t otherwise know. Coulter, you’re not the boy who lived in this cavern. Adrian’s been gone a long time, and you’ve made sure you’ve never cared about anyone else since.”

She sounded sad on that last. He knew she would have been beside him forever if he had only let her. But she needed more than a casual lover. She needed someone who adored her, and loved her more than anything. They both knew that.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“No, I wasn’t saying that for me, but for you.” She lifted her head off his shoulder. “This place inspires passion, Coulter. It exists because of some passions we don’t understand. You fell in love here. I think Arianna did too.”

“I lost the most precious person in my life here,” Coulter said, remembering the pain of that, how it had pulled him apart, how it could still pull him apart, if he let it.

“Did you?” she asked. “We all lose our parents.”

He turned to her. She had learned about the death of hers just before Adrian had died, and it hadn’t shaken her like it had shaken Coulter.

“Losing your parents isn’t supposed to end your life,” Leen said. “It’s just the beginning of your life as an adult. Adrian would hate the way you’ve lived. Without love, without any real drive.”

“I have my students.”

“Yes, and that’s a good thing. But you do that only because it’s something to keep you busy when you’re not sitting here, staring at the site where you lost everything.” Her arm remained around him the entire time she spoke.

He leaned into her. “I don’t know, Leen. When I used my magick to help Gift, I alienated him forever. Then, to keep us all alive, I had to kill hundreds of Fey. I could feel something leaving me then. Something that made me care about lives. I don’t want that to happen again.”

“We’re not at war, Coulter. There’s no one to fight. I’m sitting beside you in the first country in the Fey Empire that the Fey failed to conquer. I’m beside you because we became allies, we became the same nation, with Arianna and Gift as our leaders. Our lives are different now because there was no conquest, because there was cooperation.”

He frowned. Her argument made sense, but there was something wrong with it. “Then why do I think Ari’s hurt? And what was that light?”

“I don’t know,” Leen said softly. “If I did, I would tell you what to do. But let me put it to you this way. What if you find out later that something happened to Ari, something you could have fixed, but you didn’t? How would you feel then?”

His heart twisted. “And what if I’m wrong? What if I get there and she’s fine?”

Leen looked up at him, and there were tears in her eyes. “Hug her for me. Tell her I miss her, and that if she ever needs anything, she knows where to find me.”

“You wouldn’t come with me?”

“No, Coulter. I don’t belong there. I belong here, taking care of the students, watching this place for Gift.”

Coulter sighed. “Do you think he’ll ever come back?”

“When we’re old, maybe. When he’s a great Shaman and we’re just people he once knew .”

Coulter bowed his head. He and Gift had been closer than two people should have been for years, but time changed that. Time, and Coulter’s fear, his quick response to Rugad’s invasion of Gift’s mind—even though it had been a correct response. And, strangely, Gift’s unwillingness to share Coulter’s friendship with Arianna.

“Funny,” he said, “how you can lose everything by not doing anything.”

“You haven’t lost everything yet,” Leen said. “You’ll always have me.”

Coulter wrapped her into a hug. She felt warm and strong and alive in his arms.

“You were wrong, you know,” he whispered against her ear. “I have loved. I have let one person get close to me.”

“But I was always a substitute,” she said softly. “We both knew it.”

“Maybe on one level,” he said. “But not as my friend. I’ve never had a friend like you, who loved me and wanted nothing for herself. I was always the friend who acted that way.”

“With Gift.”

“For a long time, he was the only friend I had. And now you are. Are you sure you won’t come with me?”

“I can’t,” Leen whispered. “It’s hard enough letting you go on your own.”

He leaned back out of the hug enough to kiss her on the lips, gently, in some ways the good-bye kiss they had never had. She kept her eyes open as he did so, the tears still lining the rims.

When he pulled away, he said, “You know, I asked for guidance, and I was disappointed no Mystery appeared to me. But I think they heard me anyway. They sent you.”

Her smile was slow. “If I ever become a Mystery, I’ll be one very angry Fey. I don’t expect to die at someone else’s hand.”

He cupped her face. “I don’t expect you to die.”

“Because I’m hard to kill?” she asked, playfully.

“Because you’re the strongest person I’ve ever met.” He stared at her for a moment. “The school will be a challenge.”

“We have good instructors.”

“For most,” he said. “But I worry about Matt. His magick is stronger than anyone else’s.”

“Except yours.”

“Perhaps.”

“He’s young. We can train him for a while. You’ll be back before we need you.”

“What if I have to stay at Arianna’s side for good?”

Leen winced slightly before she covered it up. If Coulter didn’t know her so well, he wouldn’t have seen it. “We can always send Matt to you,” she said calmly. “Maybe the big, bad city might tame him.”

“Maybe,” Coulter said. “But he has that same reckless streak his father had, that same disregard for the rules.”

Leen smiled fondly at him. “I think it goes with the magick,” she said. Then she stood and extended her hand. He took it and let her help him up. She put her arm around him again, and led him out of the cavern.

They stopped behind the swords. Darkness had settled over the mountains. Dash sat at the very edge of the platform, staring at the village below, his frame barely discernible.

“This isn’t even a pretty place,” Leen said. “It’s stark and it’s terrifying and it’s dangerous.”

“Filled with bad memories,” Coulter said.

“And good ones,” Leen said, pulling him closer.

“It’s the only home I’ve ever chosen,” Coulter said.

Leen was quiet for a moment, then she said, “You didn’t chose this one. Gift asked you to stay.”

Coulter let her words sink in. She was right. He had done as Gift asked, without thought to what he wanted. He had wanted to be at Arianna’s side, but had thought it wrong for both of them—for her more than for him. In traditional Blue Isle, where women had never ruled, he thought it wrong for her to have a man beside her. The Islanders might have seen him as the real power, however wrong that would be. And he had thought he would fail her if pushed.

But that had been fifteen years ago. Since then, he had healed some, and Ari had proven herself. The Islanders accepted her for who she was, and the Fey had given her no quarrel.

And his own words were haunting him:
Sometimes you could lose everything by not doing anything.

It was time for him to start acting instead of reacting. It was time for him to go see the woman he had always loved.

THIRTEEN

LUKE HAD NEVER spent time in the Queen’s bedroom before. He had seen it, of course, had even slept in the adjacent dressing chamber, but he had never really sat in the bedroom, and had time to contemplate it.

It was a lovely room, open, and filled with light. In the summer, he supposed, it was filled with scents from the garden filtering in through the open window. The bed was big and covered with comforters, the chair he sat on soft and welcoming. Only he didn’t feel welcomed. He sat on its edge like an intruder, a man who was out of place in a world he had once known.

Arianna was sprawled across the bed, her gown and fingers stained black, her face an odd gray. Her birthmark stood out red against her skin. Her eyes and mouth twitched as if she were having a particularly bad dream. She looked thinner than she had in years—not since he met her had she been this thin. Then, though, she had been gaunt from her days on the road, hiding from Rugad, the Black King.