Epilogue
I suppose I’ll get used to it.
Liliana stared at her reflection for the thousandth time since the day that had changed the fate of Elden. The woman she saw in the mirror was Irina’s daughter, with a face of such luminous beauty that it had made Micah’s siblings and their mates stare, and hair so silken it was a mirror. It seemed her father’s death had broken, not created, a spell, one he must have put on her as a child.
Why, she would never know. Perhaps it was as Micah said—he’d feared her power and so had tried to break her. Or perhaps he had enjoyed the control it gave him over her and others, too. He would’ve gained cruel pleasure in watching men stumble over one another as they tried to win the hand of such an ugly woman. But in the end, the joke was on him.
Because Micah had loved her then, and he loved her now. He was the only one who didn’t stare—because to him, she was simply Liliana. Liliana, whose eyes remained a nowhere color that Micah called storm-sky and had decreed were nothing like her father’s. Liliana, whose body hadn’t changed much where it mattered. While her legs were now the same size, her back remained a mass of scars and she still had small breasts and a large behind, both of which Micah liked to see naked as much as possible.
Blushing at the thought of how he’d woken her this morning, so big and demanding between her thighs, she played with the emerald-and-diamond ring on her left hand, the central stone the color of a certain lord’s eyes. It was one of his mother’s, he’d told her, part of the hoard they’d found beneath the castle.
He had given it to her because he was going to marry her.
“It is customary to ask,” she now said as she turned to watch him button up a black shirt over that chest she’d licked and sucked and kissed not long ago.
“Why?” He shrugged. “I’m not giving you a choice.”
She surely shouldn’t encourage him, but when a woman loved a man so very much, it was difficult to be stern. “Let me.” She did up the buttons, shaking her head when he slid his hands down her back to curve over her bottom. “So your brother Nicolai is to take the throne?”
This was the third time they had returned to Elden— Micah couldn’t remain far from the Abyss for long, for it would unbalance the realms, glut the badlands with shadows. Yet he also had a deep, unquenchable need to heal the earth here, though the presence of his siblings meant he didn’t need to stay on a permanent basis.
So they came and went, the journey far easier now that her father’s spells had unraveled, his monstrous creations dying without his sorcery to sustain them. They most often traveled overland—the night-horses had claimed Liliana and Micah as their own, biting the nonmagical horses they’d been about to mount when they arrived at the inn the second time. The temperamental creatures were awfully possessive—much like the man she adored with her every breath.
“Yes,” he said, answering her question about Nicolai. “He will rule with his mate, Jane.”
Jane was tall and slender and appeared fragile, but she would make a strong queen. She was also not a princess. Neither was Alfreda, Dayn’s chosen. Breena’s mate was a berserker, quite wild and as uncivilized as Micah she was sure. Not a one had turned a hair at having her become part of the royal family. “I think,” she murmured, “your brother will be a great king.”
“Yes.” Petting her, he bent his head to kiss a line down her neck. “Dayn and his mate will be staying in Elden and taking over the guard.”
She shivered, stopped buttoning and began unbuttoning. “And your sister?” His sister, who had become a warrior, something that had caused her older brothers intense astonishment. Micah, of course, had simply offered to let her borrow his weapons.
He sucked over her pulse. “She travels with Osborn and the boys to his homeland, so that her mate can teach his brothers what it is to be an Ursan warrior.”
“Yes.” She wove her fingers into his hair, holding him to her. “The berserkers are needed still.”
“Hmm.” Continuing to kiss her, he began to walk her backward, toward the bed. “They will not be strangers to Elden, as we are not.”
Allowing him to press her down onto the bed, she waited for him to shrug off his shirt and prowl up to cover her. But instead of kissing her once there, he braced himself above her, his expression solemn. “I am the Guardian of the Abyss, Liliana. I will never abandon my duty.”
“Of course.” She caressed his chest. “You can keep your promise to the land by visiting regularly.” Short, intense bursts of working with the earth, they had discovered, had the same impact as if he stayed continuously in Elden.
“Will you mind living in the Black Castle?”
“Living there was the first time in my life that I was happy,” she whispered. “The place where I found you. You’re my heart. Jissa and Bard and Mouse are family.”
To her gratitude, Jissa had not blamed her for her father’s evil, and remained her very best friend.
“You—Bard, too—can die in truth now, if you choose,” she’d told the brownie, though it caused her terrible pain to think of a world without Jissa. “Leave the Black Castle for a day and a night and you will wake in the Always.”
Jissa had shaken her head. “The Bitterness would cry, cry. And without me, you will get into more, much more trouble with the lord. Dungeon you will live in.” A laughing look. “And…I would like to play more games of chess with Bard, he with me. Together we play.”
“Is it only chess you two play?” Liliana had jested, overjoyed at Jissa’s choice.
Except the tips of Jissa’s ears had turned pink.
“Jissa.”
Lips curving at the memory, she met eyes of winter-green. “The Black Castle is home.”
Micah’s smile shattered her, it was so very bright, and for her alone. “There are less servants there, too,” he muttered, referring to the people of Elden who had begun to come out of hiding in droves to help set the castle to rights for Nicolai’s wedding, “which means I can make you naked far easier.”
Laughing, she stroked her hands into his hair and tugged him down for a long, lazy kiss that ended with his hand on her breast and her leg cocked around his hip. “I will be planting some flowers, though.”
He reared back. “At the Black Castle? The gateway to the Abyss?”
Kissing his jaw, she nuzzled at him. “And I want more comfortable furniture—my mother will be visiting, after all.” Irina, too, had been freed from her ensorcellment. She did not know her daughter, but had touched Liliana with love from the first. The bonds would only grow deeper in time.
Micah groaned, began to pull up the red, red gown he’d brought her, so very pretty and dusted with gold. “As long as you don’t try to make the dungeons appealing. That I will not allow.” His hand on her thigh, rough and proprietary.
Shivering, she tugged him closer. “Done.”
Micah rocked against her. “Lily?”
“Yes?” she said against lips firm and sinful.
“We’re getting married in an hour. I already spoke to Nicolai.”
Her mouth fell open, and then she began to laugh. “My beautiful, arrogant, wonderful lord,” she said, kissing his jaw, his cheeks, his neck. “I can’t wait to be your wife.”
“Now tell me you love me.”
“I love you.” She kissed the spot she’d once bitten on his lip. “Shall I say it again?”
A delighted look. “Yes.”
He made her repeat it ten times. Then he said, “Your name is written on my heart, Lily.”
It made her cry. He yelled. Then he kissed her.
By the time the day was done, she was married to the Guardian of the Abyss, in the gardens of the Royal House of Elden that had come back to life. The snapdragon behaved and didn’t fry any of the guests.
The aseria flowers are blooming again in what was once the Dead Forest and is now a young, green playground, with saplings reaching for the sparkling blue sky. The firedancers have returned to circle above the castle at twilight, providing a show to which nothing can compare, and the lake runs clean and sweet once more.
There is still much to be done, but laughter fills the castle and the land, for the time of darkness is past and the blood of Elden walk its roads once more. This truth I write with untrammeled joy.
—From the Royal Chronicles of Elden, on the one hundred and seventy-eighth day of the Reign of King Nicolai and Queen Jane