Chapter 24

 

 

“WHAT DID YOU do?” Oliver thundered at me.

I pulled my head back and resisted the temptation to creep backward just to open up more space between us. He had a long reach, and he looked mad enough to grab me and turn me over his knee like I was seven years old and I’d been caught misbehaving at school.

“Um, could you give me some context to your outrage?” I asked, but I had a pretty good idea why he was so agitated.

He closed his eyes and pressed his thumb and forefinger over them. “Please tell me you did not volunteer to fight as the Stone Order champion against the Duergar?”

I pulled my lips in and bit down on them.

After a moment of silence, he dropped his hand and squinted at me. “Aren’t you going to say anything?”

“You asked me not to tell you I volunteered to fight as the Stone Order champion. But I can’t lie.”

He gave me a hard, withering look.

“Don’t act like a smart-ass teenager, Petra.” He started pacing the tiny living room-slash-kitchen area. “How could you do this?”

I lifted my palms. “It seems like a good solution.”

He kept up his restless movements for a couple seconds longer and then seemed to realize how unsatisfying it was to pace in such a small space.

He halted and huffed out a loud sigh. “So, it really was your idea,” he said flatly.

I nodded. “Maxen didn’t like it at first either. He doesn’t want me to do it. But he sees that it’s a good response to the matter. I’m not going to die, Oliver. I know I’m twice any swordsman Periclase will send as champion. They don’t train the way we do. And I’ve got full stone armor.”

“I just wish you would have talked to me first.”

I raised a hand and let it drop. “I should have. But the end result would have been the same because I wouldn’t have let you talk me out of it.” We watched each other for a couple of breaths. “Does this mean Marisol has approved my suggestion?”

He pulled his mouth into a grim semblance of a smile. “I demanded to speak with you before she files.”

“You’re not going to change my mind,” I said quietly.

“I know.” He tipped his gaze upward, and his expression became pained. “But this is my fault, and I don’t want you to pay for my decisions.”

“Your fault because you sent me after Nicole?”

He nodded. He actually looked rather miserable. I averted my eyes and walked over to where my pasta was still steaming on the counter.

“I didn’t know he would go after you,” he said.

“Of course you didn’t. You have no blame for that.” I twirled my fork in the spaghetti. “And frankly, I didn’t exactly make things better for myself with my little confrontation with his bastard daughter at the reception for the dignitaries. Oh, and when I knocked her out, brought her here, and put her in jail. That probably didn’t help either.”

I stuffed a forkful of pasta in my mouth, watching Oliver as I chewed and using the food as an excuse to stop speaking.

“You do have a way of pissing off authority figures,” he said.

Moving a bit stiffly, he went to the sofa and sat down, propping his elbows on his knees and peering up at me from under his heavy brows. He still looked defeated and unhappy, but I could handle that. The pain in his eyes a moment ago had jabbed a little too deeply into my chest.

I swallowed my spaghetti. “I’m not going to die,” I said again.

“You sure as hell better not.” He straightened. “I’ll help with your training.”

I nodded. “Good.” I forked up another bunch of pasta.

The phone on the wall rang, and every muscle in my body twanged in surprise. I was unused to the sound of old-fashioned wired phones. I got up and caught it on the third ring.

“Hello, this is Petra.”

“I’m calling from the office of the Lady of the Order,” an official-sounding voice said. “Is Oliver Maguire there?”

“Yep.” I held the phone out to my father.

He rose and took it. “Oliver speaking. Yes, I’ve spoken to her. Yes.” His face turned grim, and his eyes slid to me and then away.

He listened for another few seconds and gave some one-word responses before hanging up.

“That was Marisol,” he said. “To make things official, she needs to knight you as the champion of the Stone Order.”

I stopped chewing. “Oh. Right.” I tossed him a wry look. “You pissed I’m stealing your title?”

He snorted and almost smiled.

“It needs to be done now, before she files the counter-petition.”

“I’m ready.” I wiped my mouth with a napkin and closed the spaghetti container. “Let’s do it.”

Oliver didn’t say a word to me on the way to Marisol’s office, but I had the sense it was important to him to escort me to this meeting. I was grateful he was there, though I knew there was very little he could do, even in the training yard, to help me prepare.

When we arrived, there was a small group waiting for us. Marisol and Maxen, of course. Marisol’s personal bodyguard Jaquard, who’d trained me in sword fighting when I was a teenager. A few Order officials.

“Let’s get started,” Marisol said, her voice carrying over the few quiet conversations in progress.

She lifted her hand at me, indicating I should approach. The others automatically backed off, giving us some space.

“I know I don’t need to ask if you’re sure,” she said, her voice low and her words meant for me alone. “You’re a decisive woman, and clearly a fearless one. But know I would not have made this decision if I didn’t have total confidence you could prevail.”

I blinked, unable to come up with a proper response to such unexpected praise.

“Now,” she said a little more loudly. “You must choose a squire before we can proceed with the knighting ceremony. Who will you name?”

My brows rose, and I blinked again as my brain tried to switch gears. I knew immediately who I wanted. “My page, Emmaline.”

An official hovering nearby went to a phone and began speaking into it. Meanwhile, Jaquard appeared at Marisol’s side holding a long, narrow object wrapped in silky gold fabric across his arms.

Suddenly, I realized what the bundle was. “Aurora?” I looked at Jaquard and then at Marisol.

She nodded. “The sword of the Summer Court.”

I had no idea how they’d managed to acquire it so quickly, but it had completely slipped my mind that I wouldn’t be fighting with Mort. I was required to wield Aurora, the sword of the Seelie champion. My opponent would fight with Twilight, the sword of the Unseelie champion and representative of the Winter Court.

Jaquard let the fabric fall away, revealing a decorated leather scabbard that looked older than Faerie itself. Maybe it was. He pulled the sword from its sheath and presented the hilt to Marisol. The blade was large—maybe an inch longer than Mort and slightly wider. The metal almost appeared imbued with sunlight, as it seemed to shimmer from within with the rosy yellow light of dawn.

I loved my broadsword, but Aurora had me spellbound. My fingers twitched with the need to hold it, my arms anticipating its heft and balance, my ears the sound it would make cutting through the air.

I was so absorbed in the weapon I didn’t realize Emmaline had arrived until she stood next to me, slightly out of breath. She shot me a quick look of pure delight and gratitude.

“We don’t have much time,” Marisol said. “We should begin.”

She held the hilt with both hands. I knelt on one knee in front of her.

As she began the knighting ceremony, the words seemed to pass through me, their meaning sinking into my cells. I wasn’t really listening in the normal sense. I couldn’t have repeated any of it later. My attention and focus were completely absorbed by Aurora.

Marisol touched each of my shoulders with the end of the blade, said a few more words, and then asked me to rise. Laying the blade flat across her hands, she presented it to me with her head inclined.

“Petra Maguire, the champion of the Stone Order and the Summer Court.”

A shiver began at the crown of my head and passed down through my body and out through my limbs. It reached my fingertips at the exact second I touched Aurora. Time seemed to pause. For a long breath, everything around me disappeared, and there was only the sensation of warm sun, the sound of summer breeze rustling leaves in the trees, and the feel of soft soil underfoot.

Then I was back in Marisol’s office. People were moving and speaking. Jaquard handed me the leather scabbard, and I sheathed the sword of the Summer Court and slung the strap over my shoulder like a bag, keeping hold of it with one hand.

Maxen came forward and offered his hand in a formal congratulatory shake.

“It’s done,” he said, as if he didn’t quite believe it. He kept hold of my hand as he gave me a long, steady gaze.

“I will win,” I said quietly.

“I know.” He gave me a firm nod, but there was apprehension in his sapphire eyes.

Emmaline came up and nodded at my hand, which was clutching the scabbard strap. She already had Mort slung across her chest.

“The sword?” she said.

“Oh, right.” I reluctantly passed the scabbard to her. As my squire, she was supposed to carry all my knightly shit around.

“First, we’ll go to the mineral room,” she said. “You have priority access to it from now until the battle of the champions.”

In a daze, I nodded, and Emmaline, Jaquard, Oliver, and a few officials herded me to the training area. From then on, it was a blur of mineral treatments, sparring, resting, and eating. My schedule was managed entirely by others, leaving me free to focus on getting ready for the fight.

Every sparring session left me exhausted, but my fatigue was swept away by the most intensive, expensive restorative treatments available. It was a strange condensed period of training, but the pure, single-minded focus of it was its own sort of ecstasy.

And wielding Aurora . . . it was better than any high I could imagine. I had a couple brief twinges of guilt when I caught sight of Mort with Emmaline on the sidelines of the training yard, as if I were cheating on my broadsword. But I knew Mort and I would reunite. Aurora was mine only for a few days—a short, passionate, wholly absorbing affair—and I let myself get swept up in the glow of it.

When the Summer Court’s blade cut through the air, it felt much lighter than it appeared, almost as if it wasn’t made of solid metal at all. By some magic I didn’t understand, it seemed to condense its mass on impact. Light and swift as it moved, but bone-jarringly weighty when it hit. It was the most perfect weapon I’d ever touched.

“Your opponent will have a sword just as swift and powerful,” Oliver said from a few feet away.

I was sparring with Jaquard, and I’d forced him back to the edge of the training field. His face dripped with sweat. Oliver kept even with us as we fought, calling out corrections to me. He’d been coordinating and overseeing my workouts for the past two and a half days.

“Get used to the weapon, but don’t get overconfident,” he warned.

Jaquard parried and lunged at me with movements that were so practiced they seemed more like reflexes. I sidestepped a jab and whipped Aurora up to impact Jaquard’s side just below his ribs. The blade bit into his stone armor, and he winced.

We paused and Oliver came forward. The three of us watched in silence as Jaquard lifted his shirt to reveal a crack in his armor. Blood began to seep through it.

“Damn, sorry about that,” I said. It wasn’t the first wound Aurora had inflicted on my training opponents.

“No apologies,” the expert swordsman said. “You need to see how the champion blades affect stone armor.” He pointed at the crack. “This will be you if Twilight strikes you edge-on.”

I nodded, flexing my jaw muscles and rolling my shoulders to try to relax my arms and neck. We’d discovered that Aurora could crack rock armor, but only with a very precise hit with the edge of the blade. The flat of the blade or even a slightly angled slice didn’t seem to cause serious harm.

Oliver turned to me. “Your opponent may not know about this, but we can’t assume it for sure. The Duergar have people with stone armor. If the wielder of Twilight happens to practice against one, they’ll likely discover this weakness.”

A New Gargoyle had never fought a battle of champions, as the last fight had taken place before the Cataclysm and the emergence of our kind.

“Get that treated, Jaquard,” Oliver said. He lifted a finger at me. “And you go to the mineral sauna, and then go home for rest and food.”

I released my own armor, and in its absence the familiar ache spread over my skin. Fatigue began to set in at once. I’d been working out with fully activated armor for extended periods, and it was incredibly draining. If not for the rejuvenating treatments in the mineral sauna and salt baths, I’d have been comatose.

Emmaline jumped up and trotted over to take Aurora. She accompanied me to the mineral room.

“Tired?” she asked.

I nodded, circling my dominant arm. “Nothing that can’t be fixed, though.”

I hadn’t been in the mood for much conversation since I’d been knighted, but she got it, for which I was grateful.

When I emerged from the mineral sauna with steam clinging to my skin, Emmaline was waiting with a towel for wiping off my face and hands.

“Food’s waiting, and I ordered more salts for your bath,” she said with business-like efficiency.

As we passed through the corridors, eyes lingered on me. Everyone knew that I’d been knighted and would be fighting the Duergar champion.

“How’d I look out there?” I asked Emmaline, mostly as an excuse to ignore the curious looks.

“Amazing,” she said, her voice edged with awe. “I can’t even describe what it’s like to watch Aurora in action.”

“Ah, so it’s not me, but the sword?” I teased.

“Well, it’s both,” she said. “I can’t imagine two such weapons clashing. It will be like watching the gods themselves. You’re going to slaughter the Duergar champion, of course,” she quickly added.

At her mention of the gods, I went quiet, remembering how Jasper had sworn that the Tuatha de Danann had returned. In the whirlwind of the past few days, there hadn’t been an opportunity to think much about his wild claims.

When I returned to my quarters, I found Nicole in the kitchenette. It was the first time I’d seen her in days. The Stone Order was supposed to find her an apartment of her own, but at the news of my impending battle, every New Gargoyle had flocked back to the fortress in support, and there was a bit of a housing shuffle underway.

I realized I’d hardly spoken to her since breaking her out of the Duergar kingdom.

“Hi,” she said. She curiously scanned the welts on my exposed arms. “Did you get hurt?”

I shook my head. “Nah, this is just what happens after long use of stone armor.”

She plopped a tea bag in the mug of steaming water she’d just pulled out of the microwave.

“They’re trying to get me to summon stone armor,” she said. “If I can’t, the Duergar king might be able to take me again.”

Her eyes were sunken with dark smudges under them. Her glance flicked to my squire, and she watched Emmaline set down my gym bag and then leave quietly with the swords.

I peeled off my sweatshirt, still damp from the mineral sauna. “Still feel like you’ve fallen down the rabbit hole?” I asked.

Nicole was staring over the rim of her mug at nothing. She nodded, her eyes still unfocused. “Magical rock armor, battling Fae kingdoms, champion swordfights . . . Sometimes I’m positive I’m in a coma and this is all a dream.”

She’d been angry before, but in that moment she just seemed pensive.

“No luck with the armor yet, huh?”

“None whatsoever. Based on what I’ve been told, I’m starting to think you all made a mistake about my bloodline.”

“But you do believe you’re Fae now?”

She sighed. “Yes. I was able to detect glamour, and I passed a couple of other minor tests.”

I eased back onto the sofa, stretching out my tired legs. “It’s a lot to take in,” I said quietly.

Her focus sharpened, and she looked up at me. “I have to figure out the stone armor. I can’t go back to the Duergar kingdom.” Her face had paled. “I’ve learned enough about the Unseelie to know I can’t end up there.”

I sat up and then pushed to my feet. “I might have something to help you,” I said and disappeared into my bedroom. I rummaged around in a box on the floor of the closet until my hand closed around a cool stone.

I came back to Nicole and held it up. “I used this when I was learning.”

The stone, about the size of a large marble, was the soothing pale white-blue of aquamarine.

She came over to examine it, and I handed it to her.

“How does it work?” she asked.

“Use the techniques they’re teaching you to summon rock armor, and keep that in your hand,” I said. “Imagine you can spread the minerals from the stone like butter over your skin. There’s nothing magic about it, it’s just a visualization exercise. But it might help.”

An almost-smile touched her lips. “Thank you,” she said and then slapped her fingers over her mouth, her eyes wide. Her hand fell away. “Oh, shit. I’m not supposed to say that here.”

I chuckled. “It’s okay. There was no magic attached to the words, so I won’t hold you to it. I’m sorry I haven’t been around much. I’m supposed to be helping you adjust, and I’ve done a piss-poor job of that.”

She lifted a shoulder and let it drop. “Eh, you’ve got bigger worries.”

My food arrived just then, as well as her escort to another session with Fern, her magic coach of sorts. Nicole folded the aquamarine stone in her hand and tucked her fist into the pocket of her jacket, giving me a little wave with her other hand as she disappeared out the door.

I did feel bad I hadn’t been more present. Nicole looked like a lost puppy. Not that I could do much for her—she’d been ripped from her life and home and thrust into a strange place that probably seemed like a fever dream. But once the battle was over, I’d make more of an effort. Most likely I was going to have to move back into the fortress, anyway, considering the way things were going on the other side of the hedge with my Guild job.

I stiffened, suddenly remembering my new assignment, and let out a string of curses. The chances of completing that job on deadline were slim to none, with my current obligation as the Stone Order’s champion. After a moment, I had to laugh at myself. Was I seriously worried about some piddly lost-object assignment when I might not even survive the challenge? It was a reflex, though—keeping good on my promise to make a life away from the fortress so I could hunt vamps. And in spite of how hard I’d fought in the past ten years to make it on my own on the other side of the hedge, I’d somehow ended up right back in the stone fortress.

I planted my hands on my hips and blew out a harsh breath through pursed lips. Kind of ironic. There I was, the champion of the Stone Order and about to fight an epic battle in Faerie but on the brink of bankruptcy and eviction from my apartment on the other side of the hedge. An observer might wonder why I was trying so hard to make it out there.

But I knew why—here, in Faerie, I might be the champion of the moment, but if I stayed permanently, I’d be under Marisol’s thumb. And on the other side of the hedge there would be criminal vampires on the loose, luring people in with their glamour, enticing them with the promise of VAMP3 charm, and victimizing weak and unstable people like my mother.

A rap on the door interrupted my sour thoughts.

A knot of officials, with Maxen and Oliver in the lead, stood on the other side. It was an array of tense faces and serious, unblinking eyes.

“It’s set,” Maxen said. “The High Court has ruled that the battle of champions will happen at dawn tomorrow.”