At least the little usurper had been telling the truth about the royal bedroom, it looked to be cleaned recently enough but unlived in. The decorations would all have to be re-done, my father had very questionable taste in decor, but that was simple enough to order done and as long as I had a comfortable bed and a hot bath I would be content for now. Still I found myself itching to make the place more my own and get all traces of my traitorous family swept and mopped from the stone of the castle. Maybe a complete turn over in servants would be in order so that they did not hold any lingering feelings of misplaced loyalty and certainly my bastard brother would need to be dealt with eventually. Feros had seemed dead set on keeping him alive for some unknown purpose, but unless he fessed up to that purpose soon I had a mind to just pay the little bastard a visit in the middle of the night and feign ignorance in the morning of how he ended up a twisted heap at the bottom of the stairs.

Mistra inspected the room with me, running her hands over the covers on the bed and pulled them back, leaning down to take a sniff of the sheets underneath. Her face showed surprise and she took a second sniff to confirm her findings.

“The linens don’t smell stale, they must be keeping them fresh, lucky for us,” she commented as she ran her hand over the fabric. “Soft enough I suppose, I can tell the bed was dressed for a man in mind though, not soft and silky like a woman enjoys. Why men seem not to care that their clothing and linens are like a metal grater against their skin I can never figure out.”

“I think it is about the quality of men you’ve been around, males of the demon variety are not anything like what I would call delicate creatures. In personality or physical form, come to think of it,” I commented.

She looked up and smiled at me, at first mischievous, the lines of her face making her look like she was about to make a crude joke, but then her expression softened. The smile was still there but there was something distant and sad about it. We hadn’t had a chance to speak about it, but we both knew when we secreted away in the night to come reclaim this kingdom that the fae were bound to show up at any point and that they would be on their own to deal with it. Of course dealing with them probably meant retreating and just letting them have the castle would be the only smart move. Though I thought Rafe was much more stubborn than smart. I expected that given any sort of a choice Rafe was of the mind that he would go down with the ship and fight until he last breath.

“Do you think they made it?” she asked as she broke eye contact and smoothed down the covers on the bed. “My family I mean, do you think any of them would be smart enough to have left?”

“I don’t know, I don’t think we will until we go back,” I answered, avoiding my opinion that her father definitely would not, though I felt she probably knew that one already. “Maybe the fae have not even come at all yet, there could still be time. They did not seem to be in too much of a hurry and had not come after us immediately, maybe something has delayed them. Some conflict in their homelands that called them back.”

She shook her head at my answer, looking distant still. “They have, I’m sure by now.”

“It has only been a few days since we snuck away, it is very possible that everything is as we left it and everyone is safe and whole.” I sorely wanted to believe it for my own sake too, I was trying very hard not to think of Mari and what her fate would be once the fae arrived. At least I knew she had a small chance, she would flee without a second thought at the first sign of danger and likely take no effort to try to save anyone else.

“I feel like something has changed, I suppose it could be my mind and worries running away from me, but I think I will return to ruin.”

I didn’t really know what to say to that that she would find to be all that comforting. She knew as well as I did, perhaps more, that there was a large chance she was right and everything was already destroyed. It had been somewhat of a strange miracle that the fae had stayed away as long as they had. In fact, the fact they had taken time before marching on us was probably a glaring bad omen, meant they had probably taken time to strategize and prepare.

“Do you worry for your family?” I asked.

Mistra tried to keep a stoic distance from her family, especially her father since she had aspirations to usurp the line of succession and take over the throne, but it had always been obvious that she had a soft spot for wanting his approval and he certainly doted on her in his own grumpy way. She had planned on taking a non-violent path to her ascension if she could help it, though I knew she was prepared to do it through other means if it really came down to it. I had always wondered how that would play out once she was ready to make her move for the throne and how she planned on dealing with her feelings of family or if she had shoved down and avoided thinking about that aspect of her plan in order to not have to consider it until she was forced to. Knowing her as well as I did, I was more inclined to think the truth was closer to my second educated guess.

“Mmm…” she hummed lowly through her closed lips. “Sort of. Come sit and let me brush out the travel knots from your hair.”

Doing my hair was a sort of comfort for her, like keeping her hands busy working for someone else kept her focus on the here and now instead of the worries in her head. That or she was trying to seduce me, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t on her mind at the moment.

I moved to sit on the edge of the bed and undid the towel I had wrapped around my wet hair. Getting a hot bath and being made to feel fresh again had been an absolutely ethereal moment, though I had missed the running water present from the underground hot springs around the castle Yser. I had forgotten what a luxury it was to not have to call any servants and wait for the heated water to be brought in buckets. Granted, there was also a sort of satisfaction I had gained from ordering my new servants around, it had cemented that I was now in control and had finally regained what had been unfairly ripped from me. I was still relishing the look on my old nursemaid’s face when her eyes had fallen upon me for the first time in all these years. I had looked dirty and disheveled from the trip, but her face gave away that she did not see my road weariness, but her own dark, troubled future in my presence before her. All her venom and dismissal of me and my right to the throne as a child was catching up to her and I couldn’t wait to plan the ways that I would make her pay for treating me like an object to throw away and forget about once one she preferred more had been presented. My punishment for her betrayal would not come soon, I would let her fall into complacency, then I would gut her. It would take time to find her biggest weaknesses then decide how to best twist the knife.

Mistra sat behind me and curled her legs beneath her so she could be close enough to easily rake her fingers through my messy hair. Neither of us had thought it important to pack any sort of hairbrush or comb and therefore we had both been wearing braids the whole journey to keep our hair from being an absolute matted mess from us having to rough it sleeping out on the ground. Still, our sense of beauty and vanity hadn’t been on the forefront of our minds so by the time I had finally been able to take the braids down and give it a good wash I had been sickened by the amount of dirt and debris that had been loosened. I was especially surprised by the number of nearly transparent leaves and small twigs I had pulled from my locks that had held on since the demon realm. It seemed like after just a couple nights sleeping on the ground using Mistra as a pillow had still led to me having an entire small shrubbery locked into my braids. After one scrub of my body and hair it still felt very dirty and I called for a whole change of water so I could scrub my hair until it felt comfortable and clean to my standards. All the agitation and soap had left it a knotted mess and I didn’t have the patience to do much more after the bath than to throw it up in a towel on my head and worry about it later. I sorely wished that I had any of my oils that I used to pull through my hair after every wash, but rummaging through the bathing room had produced nothing, it seemed that my father had tossed out anything that my mother may have used upon her death.

“This is a mess,” Mistra chuckled and gently tugged on the ends of my long hair, “it’s so knotted it’s a whole half foot shorter than it should be I think. How did you even manage this while it was up in braids? You must have scrubbed it to death and not thought about the consequences.”

“I know it’s bad, I didn’t think of what I was doing, I just couldn’t stand how dirty it felt and kept going until the water finally ran clear. Why do you think I just threw a towel around it and didn’t deal with it right away?”

“Because you knew your consort wouldn’t let you go to bed with a bird’s nest on your head. If you slept on this it might get bad enough to have to chop off some of it in the interest of my sanity and the pain it would cause you. That simply wouldn’t do, I don’t think a short haircut would suit you. You could pull it off, but it just wouldn’t match your personality the same way as the fierce image you portray with it swirling it rage around you before you unleash fury on someone.”

Her dexterous fingers began to pull and tug at the bottom of my hair, working carefully to untangle the mess without causing me too much discomfort. Sometimes it was unavoidable, but after every pull she thought might be too sharp she placed her hand on my scalp where it had tugged and pressed to counter the pain. Her movements were tender and thoughtful and melted part of my icy heart. It was hard to stay stressed, angry, or upset when she showed the level of care she did when she did my hair.

“You never answered the question earlier,” I asked cautiously.

I didn’t necessarily want to push too hard for an answer, but I did think if she offloaded some of her thoughts it might make her feel better. She tended to bottle things up too much and process tough things herself rather than share her burdens so others could help her.

“If I was worried about my family? I did, I said sort of.”

“That’s not a real answer and you know it,” I countered softly.

Her hands paused their gentle movements for a moment, then resumed. “It is better for me if something happened to them.”

“Will make it easier for you to take the throne for yourself I suppose. Though it might be hard for you to come to terms if your family is gone. I know I still sometimes miss my grandmother very much and the thought of Mari being gone too pains me as well.”

“I will miss my brothers if they are gone,” she said slowly as if she was carefully considering each word’s truth before she uttered it completely, “though I suppose Laric will likely be okay.” Mistra let out a soft, tinkling laugh. “Of course he would be the one safely out of harm’s way. I would almost think it was a little too convenient that he got himself exiled before all this happened, but I know he’s far too much of a short sighted person to have constructed any of this. Luck has always been on his side, obviously with all the idiotic things he’s said and done and yet he still survived childhood and adolescence.”

“He is living in the succubi lands you said?”

“Yes, what they want with him I don’t know though, usually they don’t care for having men around their kingdoms for anything other than pleasure. They keep them more like cattle than they do equals. I wonder if they stuck to their agreement and he is sitting as a king consort right now or if they tricked him into being a pleasure slave chained to the queen’s throne. Back during the succubi war against the demon lands having a demon chained to their thrones, especially a male demon, was very much a status symbol.” Her hands worked out a particularly painful knot and I winced before her hand quickly went to the back of my head and pressed. “I haven’t heard from him since I told him I’d contact him when I was ready with whatever plan I was cooking up. Maybe I should soon since no plan might be necessary soon.”

“You think your father is gone?”

“He’s too stubborn to back down, the fae have killed him by now.” She said it like it was a fact, no hint of doubt in her voice.

I was starting to understand what the looks between her and Feros might have been about. Now that I had arrived in my old kingdom and gotten my birthright back it was becoming more obvious and clear now that part of distractions were gone. He had told her things that he had yet to share with me. I felt a small pang of jealousy that I couldn’t place why I felt it. I had never seen a single tender glance or touch between the two of them, but I knew the fiend confided in almost no one. As quickly as the jealousy appeared I pushed it away, I trusted Mistra and she was acting tender with me, not him.

“You sound like you know they have invaded as a fact and not just an assumption, do you know something I don’t?” I asked. I tried to keep my tone gentle as I knew I was prone to sounding short and snippy if I didn’t mindfully control the delivery of my words.

“I was going to talk to you about it at some other point after your coronation when you didn’t have anything to worry about anymore, but I’m afraid this mess is going to take me a while to fix tonight.”

So there were things she was keeping from me. Anyone else would make me enraged, with her it just made me feel a little sad that she thought I had been too busy to have her trust in me with what was weighing on her mind.

“Ferros and I had a chance to talk when you took a long rest to recover from your wounds,” she continued. “Part of the reason he was so quick to get us out of the castle and moving away from the demon realm and the girl touched by the Spring fae was he could sense they would be coming. He estimated they were about a day or so out and we were running out of time to leave. He tried to make it sound to me like he worked out everything to give them a chance to survive, but I’m certain they were just soothing words to let me have hope for a bit longer. No, he knew the fae were coming and would slaughter everyone in their path.”

“And your father would have fought to raise an army or at least a small group of people to go with us and waste time, leaving us in that path,” I guessed.

“Something like that, yes. I also suspect he needed a reason to get us out of there that wouldn’t alert my father to the coming invasion so he wouldn’t have time to leave if he decided to find a sense of self preservation. He wanted my father to be there when the fae arrived and he wanted him to be caught flat footed.”

“He wanted your father to die?” I was surprised at that. Though Rafe and Feros did often butt heads, it always seemed like the fiend enjoyed having someone to antagonize and considered him a bit of a friend or at least a very good client. “That seems a bit extreme, even for that creature. He is strange in how he treats people he considers close to him to say the very least, but that’s a bit cruel, even for him.”

Mistra made a little laughing sound in her throat and tossed a now smoothed strand of my hair over the front of my shoulder. Judging by how long it had taken to smooth such a narrow strip, it was going to take far into the night for her to finish it all. I wouldn’t mind, I was enjoying the feeling of not having a third wheel around and having my consort all to myself in privacy.

“Feros wants me to be the queen for that kingdom and you know him well enough to guess that he has no problem using any means necessary. Most people he claims to care about, he has no qualms with throwing them into the fire if it benefits him, look at what he did to poor Ana.”

I nodded as much as I could with her still working on my hair. “I hated what he did to her. I understand he did it as a distraction, but I can think of little crueler than to twist the knife into her grief time and time again to accomplish that. I rather think she was far too kind to him, she should have employed more people to help torture him, I’m sure she could have found several others who would have jumped at the chance. As you said though, he will sacrifice anyone else for his own gains, so what does he gain from you being the monarch?”

Her hands went still and even though she often paused in thought before speaking, I could feel the tension and struggle in her silence. She was afraid to talk about something and that made me feel uneasy as well. There had not been many times before where she struggled to tell me something, that meant it was something much bigger and more important than normal.

“You can tell me anything,” I offered, “I know I am a terror to many, but I have tried to never be unreasonable to you. In fact I get teased all the time for being far too flexible and indulgent with your requests and whims.”

“I do not think you will be unreasonable to me,” she said finally. Then after another long pause she added, “I do think you’re going to want to be unreasonable to him, so I need you to make a promise before I expose everything. Please do not throw the baby out with the bathwater, do not make an enemy of someone who would be terrible to have working against you.”

My hackles were starting to raise, it sounded like Feros was blackmailing Mistra or holding something over her to make her owe him something. That had to be it, that would be why he was so interested in her taking the throne. It was always all about him and what strings of fate he wanted to pull to favor the outcome he wanted. No wonder my consort had been giving him strange looks and keeping him at even more of an arm’s length than normal.

“Toria, please promise or I will say no more,” she said a little sternly.

“Fine, I will not do anything rash unless you say I should,” I grumbled.

She was unfortunately correct that I shouldn’t make him an enemy, even if I didn’t trust him and he was doing something underhanded with Mistra. I had gotten a taste of his foul powers and they were far beyond my capabilities to deal with, but they would be an amazing weapon if harnessed for my own gains.

Mistra let out a deep sigh and to my surprise leaned forward, pressing her body to my back, placing her head on my shoulder and her arms around my waist. It was a surprising amount of outward affection that was unprompted. We had relaxed enough during our time together to settle into sweet words of affection, but we both were still a bit stubborn to do such obvious physical displays commonly. It seemed silly but the both of us were still stoically trying to pretend our hearts were a selfish block of ice that hadn’t melted for each other and that the match was still all just about convenience. If she was reaching out like this, it meant she was worried I would feel differently about her or be angry with her. I don’t see how I could when it felt so good to have her taller form wrapped around me, making me feel both small and protected in her embrace. I didn’t normally like to feel like I was the one being coddled, but with her warm, freshly perfumed skin against me, I didn’t mind it so much.

“Feros admitted he is in love with me,” she murmured into my shoulder.

“He what?” I whispered in an attempt to control the bubbling rage from deep in my gut. Surely I had misheard.

She sighed deeply and thrummed her fingers over my stomach. “At first I planned to never tell you because I knew it would do nothing but eat at you for a while, but the more I thought on it, the more I didn’t like the idea of the fact coming out later or Feros deciding to use the fact I never told you as a bargaining chip against me. Instead, I decided I would eventually tell you when the time was right, but I didn’t want to bring it up until everything was done because I knew it would distract you.”

Now it was my turn to fall into silence filled with tension. She was right to make me promise beforehand that I would not immediately fly off the handle because all I could think of to say or do was thunder through the castle to find where the son of a bitch was hiding like the vermin he was and unleash whatever hell I could against him. I wanted him to feel the full brunt of my fury, to scratch the skin from his snarky face, and spit in the wounds. How dare he bring his burden onto Mistra, even if he did truly feel love for her, though that fact I still doubted, I wasn’t sure something like him could know what love felt like, he should have kept his mouth shut. This was just another ploy, he had planned for this ahead of time to trouble Mistra enough to get some outcome he wanted. I was truly getting to the end of my leash against figuring out something, anything to get rid of him from my presence. As long as he lingered around like a bad smell our lives would be full of strife and frustration and our destinies could not be our own.”

“You know I do not feel the same,” she said, giving me a squeeze like she was trying to hold me in place from running off to do whatever hate filled fantasy I was coming up with, “it is very much unrequited and he knows as much. I made it very clear that I have no interest and never have. In fact, I hate knowing that he does, makes everything strange and uncomfortable around him.”

That made things slightly better, even if I already knew there was no chance she felt the same, hearing her say it aloud abated some of the more intense spikes of anger rolling through me. All of her silence and uncomfortable looks made sense and I felt the need to protect her by any means necessary. I had been willing to put up with a lot from him in the name of having him on my side, but I would not allow him to trouble Mistra.

“We need to get rid of him,” I finally said, my voice small with controlled rage.

“That will be… difficult,” Mistra said with a pang of sadness in her voice. “He is not someone you can get rid of without it being on his terms. It has to align with what he wants to happen or he will keep coming back like an infestation of cockroaches in the pantry.”

“Then we will find a way to exterminate the infestation. Every pest has a poison and we will find his.”

“I may have ideas, though we need to tread carefully and consider the consequences,” she whispered. Lifting her head she looked toward the door and she went completely still like she was listening to see if anyone was outside the door eavesdropping. “If he catches wind of it he may get antsy and scorch the earth running away.”

“That would still get him away from us.”

“No, I think he might kill us to preserve his safety. Though he claims to love me, I am under no illusion that he loves himself, and continuing to live, much more.”

“That may be a risk we need to take, I cannot stomach him being around you much longer having this confession of love hanging over you at all times. It has made you very upset these past few days.”

“And makes you very upset now,” she pointed out and sat back up to return to working on my hair.

“Yes,” I admitted, “I hate the idea. He is trying to use your emotions against you, he probably thought you would not tell me and hoped that this would drive a wedge between us eventually.”

“I think you are correct about that. Thinking back to the rest of that conversation he made a big show about how I am trustworthy and pointed out that I did not give away his dirty secrets to my father and get him cast from the kingdom when I was younger. He has mistaken my being young and naive for trust in him or a desire to keep his secrets. I was not silly enough to dissolve that belief, so hopefully he still thinks that he is correct in his assumption.”

“You are dancing around now telling me about this poison.”

“I am.” She leaned forward and placed her lips against my ear so that she could talk as softly as possible. “If he is listening to me, then he will stop at nothing to stop me from revealing his secrets to you, so I am waiting to see he does not create a distraction.”

I nodded in understanding. My consort was always clever, careful, and calculating. If I didn’t feel true warmth in her embrace I would consider if she hadn’t been setting everything up for her to take my throne as well. She was certainly more clever and even headed than I had the capacity to be and it probably would have been easy for her if she ever so desired.

We sat in silence for over an hour while she worked and I think we both expected at any moment for there to be a sharp scream somewhere in the castle signaling the diversion to begin, but as time dragged on and nothing happened, the both of us started to relax.

“He is probably confident you would not tell me anything,” I said in a low voice.

“Most likely, if at any point we are interrupted, then we know that he was just buying time instead.”

She talked until the candles burned low in the room, divulging the entire conversation between Feros and herself that had taken place while I slept. By the time she was done my hair was perfectly smooth and silky and she put it in a simple braid for me to sleep in and she had moved on to her own hair, which was not quite as terrible as mine had been. For some reason the fiend’s torrid backstory did not surprise me all that much, I had always known him to be some kind of foul creature and assumed the worst of him. Some parts did alarm me, especially the part where he was over a millennia old, that spoke to a lot of time to plot and prepare and who knew the kinds of traps you could set when you had so much time to design and wait in the shadows.

“The fae are the key,” I said as soon as she signaled that she had told me everything. “We want him out of our lives, they want him dead, it’s a situation where we both win and he loses. That sounds like the ideal outcome to me.”

“Yes, but contacting them is stupid and dangerous. We might get brought down with him simply for knowing him. I don’t want to risk my life needlessly, there is so much left I want to do, even if I have to tread carefully around him for a while longer.”

“Do you know the fae would kill us for simply knowing of him for certain through your own knowledge or do you only assume that because that is what he told you?”

She pressed her lips into a thin line and shrugged. “You have a point, I think he told me that and I took it as fact, I do not pretend to be an expert on anything fae. Learning about them did not appeal to me before, I thought if I was careful enough I would never have to deal with them.”

“I think the first thing we need to do is start to consciously stop accepting everything he says as fact, he relies on us assuming he knows better. He can and has lied freely to influence the people around him to do what he wants. Look at how much manipulation and lies he had gotten away with from the situation with the little fae touched girl alone. He knew what he was bringing into our lives and what he was allowing to be a ticking bomb waiting to go off and destroy my kingdom. He could have prevented it all, he knew the path, yet he claimed that it was the only way and I simply let it go.”

“That is maybe easier said than done,” she stated. “Remember he has at least admitted to reading minds at will, I would think it’s likely he can control them as well.”

“Then we need to hold each other accountable, is it agreed?”

“I have no problem with that, of course.”

“That just leaves how we are to contact the fae. There must be some way to do it that is not just provoking them into paying us a visit.”

“I have been thinking about that a bit,” Mistra said, finishing her hair and getting up to slide beneath the covers. The night had dragged on to be almost dawn and her eyes were dark and sunken. She had gotten much less sleep on the journey that I had. “I have heard before that some ancient humans actually worked with the fae in some religious manner, perhaps treating them like gods to beseech for aid. Those transitions must still be practiced or the knowledge still passed on somehow for me to have heard about them. We might be able to follow that thread somewhere.”

I crawled into bed next to her and found her hand under the covers, wrapping mine around it possessively. I was still struggling with the idea that the rat of a fiend had confessed his love to her and had done so when I was ill and would not be there to do anything about it. It was despicable and still made me sick to think she had to sit through that alone, it obviously had upset her so much. I would have revenge for her and if I had anything to say about it I would hopefully have his head stuffed and mounted to hang above my throne as a reminder to everyone that even if the revenge must go cold, I will still get it in the end.