Total pages in book: 141
Estimated words: 132138 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 661(@200wpm)___ 529(@250wpm)___ 440(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 132138 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 661(@200wpm)___ 529(@250wpm)___ 440(@300wpm)
I think I would know if she died.
She can’t die. Not when we’re so close.
Shim shakes his head. “She was sleeping earlier. I could feel it. You have to get used to the connection now that it’s strong enough for you to feel it. When she’s sleeping, the hum changes.”
Yes, I noticed it. “It’s like it’s muted and calm, and when she wakes up there’s a liveliness to the sound.”
“That’s right. But now there’s nothing. She was awake and moving and then nothing.”
I think back to those last few moments. My brother is wrong. “Not nothing. She was confused.”
The phooka huffs and tosses his head back and forth. “Perhaps the princess was drugged.” He sniffs the air. “I’ve heard that sometimes executioners are kind. They drug the ones they set on fire. Smells like they’re already at work.”
Panic, pure and unadulterated, races through my veins. I start to run toward the village, but my brother’s hand stops me.
“Don’t you dare. This is my element, not yours, brother.” Shim’s eyes close briefly. “I can feel it. The fire. Idiots. They can’t kill my mate with fire.” He looks up again, and his normally dark eyes go a distinct reddish orange. “Stay away from it. We both know it can burn you.”
“And we both know that a sword can cut you in half.” I look to the phooka, who has far better senses than either of us. “How many people are out there?”
The phooka takes a long breath. “Many. At least twenty. By the horrible smell of them, I would say almost all men.”
And men will have swords. Two against twenty.
Or are we just two? What did Roan say back in Aoibhneas? That the dead I bring back are powerful. Chaos. Perhaps chaos can be our friend for once.
“Can you grab the fire? Keep it from her?” I ask.
“Already done, brother. Though I doubt anyone knows I have control. I can’t see anything, so I’m simply keeping it in a circle. How do I know she isn’t burning already?”
“Because I don’t smell the divine scent of roasting princess yet, Your Highness. No way I would miss that. Control the fire. I’ll see what I can find out.” The air around the phooka shimmers, and the horse becomes an odd-looking creature. What speaks to me is a combination of a large squirrel and a creature I’ve only seen in vampire DLs. A lemur. But lemurs are slow, and the phooka is not. He scampers up into the trees, using long claws. The leaves above our heads shake, delicate green shells raining down.
My whole body is on edge. Bronwyn is in that village. She’s close, so close. It’s everything I wanted since that first moment as a child when I closed my eyes and saw her in my dreams. She was a girl, even younger than me and Shim. In that first dream, I remember the three of us looking at each other as though wondering what to do, and then Bron showed us a game. A silly thing. She threw a pebble and then hopped and skipped to pick it up. Unseelie games tend to involve blood and often death. It was a sweet thing to spend time with the wide-eyed girl.
When we woke the next morning, we laughed about sharing a dream.
We were still dreaming of her when we turned sixteen, and I knew that somehow, someway Bronwyn completed us.
And then I saw a picture of her and set the idea in my father’s mind to merge the tribes through marriage.
“I can’t stand this waiting,” Shim says.
I hate it, too, but finding Bronwyn won’t mean a thing if we don’t live through the experience. We need to stay calm. Rushing in might be bad for Bronwyn, too. What we really need is an army.
An idea plays through my brain. I need an army, but my father ensured our army won’t follow me. He didn’t mean to, but he treated us like fragile idiots for so long, no one will follow us. No Unseelie alive will follow a fragile king.
I open my senses and find that cold place deep in my center where my power resides. I can’t have a living army. Roan is in charge of the men we brought. But there are more than the living to consider.
“Damn me, Lach. What are you doing?” Shim’s eyes are wide.
I feel for them. The dead are everywhere, as much a part of the land as the living can ever be. The dead are oddly eternal, shifting from one form to the next. From living to corpse to food and fertilizer, and in their own way, right back to living.
But I want the corpses. Yes. They will do nicely.
“Getting us some backup.” I call to them, reaching out with my mind, tendrils of power flowing like a cool river, sweeping up the dead in its wake.