Rumpel's Prize (22 page)

“Well, old man, and how goes it?”

He smirked. “How did you know I’d be needing someone to talk with this night?”

“I may look a fool, a ravishing one mind you…” She lifted a finger and winked. “But I promise you I’m not. I’m a godmother, or have you forgotten?”

Snorting, he took a sip.

She sniffed. “Are you drunk, imp? Since when?”

“Since the moment that siren stepped foot into my castle.”

“Oh.” She chortled, grabbing hold of her stomach and plopping herself into the burgundy-and-gray-striped divan in his study. “I knew it, I knew that girl would get under your skin. Proud and mighty Rumpelstiltskin, Prince of the Air and Darkness, brought to heel by a fiery beauty, a Caron no less.” Her wings buzzed. “You do know the blood of her father runs through her veins? You stood no chance against her.” Wearing a supremely satisfied smirk, she adjusted the baby’s-breath wreath resting upon her plaited chestnut hair. “This”—she waved a hand down his body—“do you know not what it is, mate?”

“If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say I’m well and truly sprung.”

Giggling, she shook her head. “Aye, that’s one way of putting it. Tell me, have you snogged her yet?”

Thinning his lips, he gave her a sharp look. “What do you think?”

“Bit prickly that one, eh? Touching her is a bit like trying to ride lightning, no?” She winked.

“Danika, is there a point to all this?” He shook the tumbler in his hand.

“Had sex yet? And not just the fun naughty kind you can do with your clothes on. I’m talking, skin on skin.” She crammed her palms together. “Done that yet? Shown her yer true self, the one we none get to see save your most beloved?”

He glowered.

“Oh, come on, we’re among friends.” She glanced around the room. “Well, we’re alone anyway. Come on then, be honest, I won’t tell her parents.”

Slouching further in his chair, he licked his front teeth. “I don’t see how that’s any of your business.”

“Ah.” Her eyes lit up. “That would be a no.” Fluffing up her petals, she nodded. “Good.” And then she pinned him with a hard stare, turning completely serious. “It goes well for you that you did not kiss and tell. See that you don’t.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“Aye.” Her burr came out fast and sharp. “She’s not unchaperoned now. Shayera Caron is officially under my charge and I’ll kill ya if ye hurt her.” Her wings buzzed furiously.

“And what if she wants it? She’s a woman, Danika.”

“Then you be completely honest with her or you let her go.”

“What?” He thinned his eyes.

“Oh,” she said and wagged her fingers, “you think you’re the only one in Kingdom with a network of spies? I have mine too, and I know what these
games
are really about. That is not love, imp, that is desperation and laziness. There are always ways.”

“If you know about the games, then you should know why I’m doing it, no?” He sipped from his drink, rolling the full-bodied whiskey around his mouth until it coated his tongue.

“I will not let you do it. I’ll hang back for a while, but mark my words, I will stop this charade the moment I even sniff one tiny hair on her head is in danger.”

She got to her feet, giving him a withering glare, and rather than be angry, Rumpel felt relief. Relief that Shayera had someone so powerful to battle for her. To care for her.

A pink rift in time tore before her.

“Fairy, how do you know when it’s really love?”

“If you love something, let it go. If it returns, it was always yours; if it doesn’t, it never was.”

He stared into the fire the rest of the night with the echo of her words ringing softly in his ears.

“Battleship,” Shayera cried and clapped her hands. “That’s it, isn’t it? I sank it! Ha!”

Laughing, because he still didn’t understand the ins and outs of this game, he shrugged. “I suppose you did.”

Sweeping all the pieces back into the box, he gazed at her. In the last few days they’d spent every waking moment together, eating, talking, laughing. In the mornings and at night he’d fed Euralis, and each time he did so, he felt more and more a traitor. Felt the dark gaze pierce his soul. Felt the silent accusation like a sting.

It was well past the witching hour, and they sat in his study. Well, she sat, he lounged beside her.

Her bare toes peeked out from the bottom edge of her nightgown. Wishing he could touch her, knowing he should not, he contented himself with grabbing the hem of her gown and dragging it through his fingers.

She took a deep breath.

“The final test is tomorrow.” His words were like the explosion of a cannon in the stillness of the room, rocketing through the languid silence and bringing with it all the nervous energy both had tried desperately to pretend away.

“I know. I can’t sleep.”

“Neither can I. But I think…” He sighed deeply, regretfully let her gown go, and shoved up to his feet. “We should at least try.”

She frowned, picked at an invisible thread in her dress, and with shoulders drooping, stood. “I want to go to the bowl.”

“Last time you saw a wolf, Shayera, which might I add, did not comfort you in the slightest. Why would you want to go back there tonight of all nights?”

She nibbled her lip and he sensed her strain. “Because after the test I am done, and this might be my final chance to decipher its meaning.”

“Do you really want to leave?” he asked with his heart on his sleeve.

“No,” she finally said after what felt like a horribly long pause. “But I fear what will happen if I stay.”

She had every right to fear that. Danika’s warning still rang in his ears. Not fear of the godmother, Rumpel was too powerful to be bothered by something so inconsequential, but rather fear of what would happen tomorrow.

The decision he knew in his heart he should make versus the one his intellect demanded.

Crossing his hands behind his back, he stood to the side. “Goodnight, Carrot.”

Brushing a stray curl out of her face, she smiled sweetly at him. “Goodnight, my dark prince.”

It was the first time she’d ever called him such and as he watched her walk away, he whispered, “Forgive me, Euralis, for I am too weak.”

Shayera settled herself beside the bowl, tucking her gown beneath her legs. She was a strange combination of exhausted and alert. Her body ached for rest, but her brain refused to allow it. She needed any sort of distraction, not only from the thought of the final game tomorrow and whatever it might entail, but also the fact that she and Rumpel had somehow managed to find and build a true friendship.

Dipping her finger into the cool water, she waited for the image to appear. The key to unlocking her happiness supposedly rested within its vision. A wolf made no sense, and if she was to go home, she wanted at least to know what it meant. Was she to find love with a shape-shifter? Was that it?

But even as she thought it, she rejected the notion. The thought of entangling her heart with someone she did not know when it was already obsessed with another felt wrong.

Sighing, she looked down and immediately an image formed. Just like last time, it was black that quickly coalesced into a knot of color, gray and red and dark blues.

But that image quickly shifted like fog over a moor, reforming and reshaping, and it was no longer a wolf staring back at her but a little boy with hair of ebony, snow-white skin, and lips as red as blood. He sat within a cage, holding its bars and staring out into darkness. Eyes the shade of heated magma glowed into the night and a lump formed in the back of her throat.

Shayera reached for him, forgetting this was only a mirage. The moment her finger touched the water, he was gone.

“No, little boy, who are you?” She gripped the edge of the bowl, silently pleading for his image to return. She’d never seen the boy before in her life, but it was the defeated, sorrowful look about him that tore at her soul.

Another image was forming. Stairs, a spiraling staircase that led up from the boy’s dungeon and out into a larder she’d seen before.

“Can this be?” She licked her lips as her pulse sped in the vein at her throat. Was Rumpel holding a captive in his dungeon? A demone boy?

And if so, why?

The images were gone now, the water was just water, but it didn’t matter because she’d seen all she needed to see.

Who was the boy? If he really did exist, if this wasn’t just a magic mirror that showed nothing, then who was he? Why was he kept so secluded, so apart from the rest of this world?

Was he a danger to himself, to others? To Rumpel?

Did the boy have anything to do with the games?

The moment she thought it, she knew it had to be. Because the child might be caged, but he was clean. Fed. Well cared for, all signs that he mattered, he was of some value to Rumpelstiltskin, but how?

Why?

She glanced back down at the bowl; there would be no more help from that direction. She couldn’t very well go exploring the castle. Rumpel was too powerful, and though she couldn’t see them, there were servants everywhere. If there really was a boy hidden deep within the bowels of this place, she’d never get close enough on her own.

But maybe, just maybe, she could find out the truth someplace else.

Gathering her skirts, she ran from the study and back to her room. She was within the last hundred pages of the final tome. She’d never sleep tonight anyway, not with the kind of adrenaline pumping through her.

The thrill of discovery, of at least fitting the pieces together, gave her energy. Turning down the corridor, she sped to her room and breathlessly shoved the door open the second her hand landed on the knob.

Jumping onto the center of the bed, she latched on to the book, trembling fingers practically tearing it open, and she began to read.

It was in the last fifty pages that she finally discovered the truth.

“In the year 9 BC, King Dionysis devised the games. A demone male is extraordinarily vulnerable in their first year of life, especially those born of royal parentage.” She flipped the page with fingers grown numb from cold. “It is only through the feeding of the mother’s soul to her kin that the male child will develop a sliver of soul and conscience. Demone are a warring and brooding race, but without souls, they would utterly destroy themselves. Legend states that King Dionysis’s own mother was brutally slaughtered before he reached the age of one. Knowing of his affliction early on, he believed that by inhaling the soul of a pure creature, he could attain that which was denied him.”

Her stomach ached, suddenly hurt as the awful, terrible truth of what she was reading made itself known. Swallowing hard, she looked up at the room which she’d grown to love. At the brilliantly painted clouds on the ceiling, the enormous bay window that let her stare into the heavens, the four-poster bed she’d dreamed of Rumpel taking her on night after night.

“This is why I’m here. Why you brought me here. Oh my gods…” Touching her cheek, she thought about every challenge, the warnings Dalia had given her over and over to lose.

But she was losing, right? That tiny sliver of hope was all she had. She’d not won one game yet. Not that she really understood what he was testing her on, but the baby had died, and her father had been cross, surely she’d failed. And if she failed she was not pure enough.

“Oh gods.” She began hyperventilating. But like watching a catastrophe unfold in front of her eyes—knowing she should look away, but unable to—she finished the book.

The book went on to highlight in great detail the king’s spiraling madness as none within demone was pure enough, why all believed in the end that that was the true reason why he called down war on the lands. To try to find his cure.

“…the sad fact is, there is no clear evidence of a soul being devoured curing our species. It’s not been done yet, and I, Atarxerxes the V, author of this great book of Delerium, do not believe in the tale’s veracity. Rumors abound of a cure in truth. A chalice buried deep in the heart of Boiling Mountain. It is said that a single drop of blood drank from the golden cup would cure the infection of the soul. But, as with all legends, the chalice of hope is steeped in half-truths and pure lies. I fear that should the king not find his soul, we are all doomed to the eternal pit.”