The Darkness of Glengowyn (18 page)

“We would require their
real
names for that to work,” she said. “But I do think it’s possible. Gaining a Sorcerer’s real name is problematic.” More like impossible, but she didn’t think it wise to say so in that moment. “The real name of any being would be enough, based on my analysis of the spell.”

“How many of these weapons did you create?” The queen again.

She swallowed, not sure if this news would be greeted with approval or disappointment. “I created, in total, just short of three hundred individual arrows, and I have destroyed all but five.”

“Destroyed?” The king’s eyebrow lifted slightly, his only visible reaction.

“I dismantled the spell and took the arrows themselves apart.”

“Because?”

“I felt them too dangerous to leave with the Sinnale when they weren’t aware of their potential.”

The king drummed his fingers once on his armrest, and again Nuala thought she saw a hint of something like approval in his eyes.

He and the queen exchanged another long look, silent but intent. Nuala tried to stay calm, but her heartbeat hammered and her skin tingled from the nervous energy consuming her. When the royal couple faced them again, she had to force herself not to hold her breath.

“This news, this accomplishment of yours, will affect what we do with you going forward, Nuala,” the queen announced. “Your disobedience, and the disobedience of our own Darkness, cannot go unpunished.”

Nuala dipped her knee in a slight bow of acknowledgement.

“Darkness—” the queen turned just her gaze on Einar, “—how has the bonding affected your skills? The owls?”

“Still respond to me, Your Majesty. The way in which we communicate has…heightened, but that ability has not been destroyed.”

“Yet, I am not sure it’s enough to satisfy,” she said. “You were our most trusted guard. And you have publicly gone against our orders. This cannot be allowed to stand. Even though we will lose one of our most dangerous allies.”

Einar remained unmoving, taking her words in without comment or gesture, patient as always when standing before his king and queen.

“You two have left us in an untenable position.” The queen spoke quietly. “Banishment is no longer an option. Nuala’s newest ability is too dangerous to go unmonitored. But punishment is necessary.”

Her gaze lifted by the barest of flickers, and a moment later, Nuala and Einar were dragged apart by the rough hands of several guards.

Instinctively, Nuala resisted. “Einar…”

He allowed himself to be pulled away from her, but he kept his attention on her now, rather than the royal couple.

“Darkness,” the queen intoned. “Your willful disobedience to this Court requires a severe penalty. But which is best? Banishment, the
Or’roan
… Simple banishment would be unwise, given that Nuala will remain here in Glengowyn under our supervision. I do not think you would stay away.”

He didn’t say anything.

“The
Or’roan
and banishment together would, likewise, hardly concern you now that you have bonded with Nuala.”

While he didn’t confirm this statement, Nuala saw in his eyes that the queen spoke truthfully.

“You leave us with one option, Darkness. Banishment to the Unseen Plain—”

“No!” Nuala cried out, unable to stop her protest.

That was worse than even a simple death sentence. A punishment that had never been used in Nuala’s lifetime. In fact, she couldn’t recall any time in her parents’ or grandparents’ lifetimes when the punishment had been invoked. Nuala hadn’t even considered that her sovereigns might use it now.

It meant more than having Einar killed by a human assassin—to preserve the illusion that elves didn’t kill each other. Einar would suffer a horrendous, painful death as the
dargem
, those nightmare-inducing creatures that called the Unseen Plain their home, slowly ate and digested him. They weren’t just talking about taking his life. They spoke of inflicting one of the worst tortures possible on him before he died.

The queen ignored her outburst. “You will be sent under the
Or’roan
. Your disobedience cannot be forgiven. The punishment must be severe.”

“Please, Your Majesty, not that,” Nuala begged, facing her queen. “Killing Einar now could affect my magic more even than the bonding. Would you lose your most dangerous weapon?”

She settled her violet-eyed gaze on Nuala without even blinking. “We will be losing one of our most dangerous weapons already, Nuala. Because of your selfishness and inability to do what we have ordered.”

“Please, Your Majesty, not the Unseen Plain.”

“Would you take his place?” she asked very quietly.

“Yes,” Nuala said without hesitation. “I would take his place. Even under the
Or’roan
, I would suffer the Unseen Plain if Einar could live.”

“No,” Einar said, his voice deep and resonant, echoing in its quiet intensity.

The queen raised her brows, the first indication of any sort of emotion. “You have presented us with an interesting option, Nuala. This arrow you’ve created might be too dangerous to allow into the world. If you are no longer on this plane, you can no longer create such a threat.”

She swallowed but straightened her shoulders. The move did nothing to loosen the grip of the guards holding her arms. “Yes, Your Majesty. You could eliminate a possible threat, make the severity of disobeying your orders an example to the rest of Glengowyn, and retain your Darkness. Simply by allowing me to die in Einar’s place.”

“No,” Einar said again, his voice rising only slightly above a reverberating growl.

The queen continued to ignore him. “You make a very good point. Though we would hate to lose your value to us, Nuala, even you are not above our judgment. This would be a good lesson for the others.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

The queen turned on Einar, considering. “This would be a severe punishment for you too, I believe, Darkness. One that would also resonate with the others. We will strip you of that which you value most as punishment for your treachery.” She blinked slowly. “Yes. That is much more severe than even death for you, my warrior. An important lesson for the rest of Glengowyn. No matter your station, there will be consequences for disobeying our rule.”

Nuala watched Einar’s muscles flex against the hold of the two guards, and in an instant, four more surrounded him, their swords drawn and pointed at various vulnerable parts of his body, even as the first two continued to hold him in place. His expression shifted, and she saw the first stirrings of the madness that took him in battle coming over him.

“Einar,” she murmured.

He held her gaze, his entire body tensed, as they awaited the final proclamation.

Chapter Seventeen

Nuala once again found herself holding her breath, but she couldn’t look away from Einar, even when King Varim spoke.

“Do you offer an alternative, Darkness?” the king asked.

“My life, Your Majesty. My existence. Anything you would take from me. Only that you do not send Nuala to the kind of death she would meet on the Unseen Plain.”

Another long silence stretched Nuala’s nerves. She jerked against the two guards confining her because she had to do something physical or she might just scream.

Finally, the queen said, “For the sovereignty of this Court and the safety of Glengowyn, there is only one answer. Nuala of Glengowyn, you will be banished to the Unseen Plain at dawn, under the
Or’roan
. Einar, you will be witness to this punishment. Your life, your existence, doomed to continue long after you watch Nuala sent to her end.”

Nuala began to tremble and a single tear escaped the corner of her eye. Her knees weakened at the thought of what she was going to face, but she tightened the muscles in her thighs to keep upright. Einar couldn’t be allowed to see her fear. She would accept the punishment as stoically as she could manage, because it meant Einar would live.

More than any other regret, though, she regretted that she would never know Einar again. That they had had so very little time together.

“I love you,” she mouthed as the guards began to haul her away.

They’d barely moved two steps when the battle madness swept over Einar’s face.

“No!” His voice roared through the hall, shaking the leaves on the trees, making even Nuala jump in surprise.

He folded his body in tight, bringing the guards close. Swords began to poke into him, positioned to hurt and draw blood rather than kill. Before more than one could penetrate his skin, though, he cried out another denial and threw his arms wide. The elves surrounding him went flying in all directions, slamming hard into trees, smashing into limp heaps on the smooth stone covering the ground.

He turned to the guards holding her, his eyes blacker than she’d ever seen, and he shouted another denial. The two elves holding her catapulted backward, ripped from her side by invisible hands to be flattened to the ground at the edge of the clearing, their bodies unmoving.

Nuala barely had time to register what had happened before Einar closed the space between them and swung her behind his back as he faced the royal couple.

“You will not send Nuala to the Unseen Plain,” he ground out, his voice so deep it was almost unrecognizable.

He barely sounded like a man anymore, something so vicious and deadly crawled through his tone. The sound raised the hairs on Nuala’s arms and made her shiver despite herself. She couldn’t see his face well, but the all-consuming rage in his expression before he stepped in front of her had been one of the most awesome and terrifying things she’d ever witnessed. And she’d seen Einar at his battle-crazed worst. Without a weapon in hand, the man before her seemed more deadly even than the
dargem
she would face when banished.

The king raised his brows, his only outward reaction to the sudden and explosive chaos. But the queen… Nuala would have sworn she was seeing things. The queen smiled. A very slight lifting of the corners of her mouth, true, but it was, nonetheless, a smile. Her eyes narrowed and sparked. Nuala got the distinct and disconcerting feeling the queen was…pleased.

“I wondered what it would take, Darkness. You are so difficult to push to this state. I should have guessed earlier the answer would be so simple. You’ve only ever had but one weakness.”

“I don’t understand.” Nuala dug her fingers into Einar’s arm, fear for what he’d done, what he’d become, a tight band around her chest.

“What I am in battle,” he said, his voice sounding more normal, his attention still on the queen, “apparently it is part of my magic.”

“So much a part of him, even he couldn’t tell,” the queen affirmed. “And now… Now, my Darkness, you are a killing machine.”

“What does she mean?” Nuala asked, looking up at the side of his face. His jaw was stiff, his expression unmoving.

“I could have killed the guards,” he explained. “I did not. But I could have. Without using a weapon other than my own rage.”

She looked at the fallen guards then back up at him. “You can…explode your rage now, like my shrapnel arrows? Because of the bonding?”

He jerked his head in a single nod.

“But…”

“The melding of your magics,” the queen said. “His ability to communicate with the owls is not the only thing that was strengthened.” She stared at Einar, again with that pleased, small smile. “He can now level armies without having to remove his sword from its scabbard.”

“Very useful,” the king said, finally commenting aloud. “Very useful, I should think.”

The queen leaned back in her throne, looking for all the world as if she was quite satisfied with this outcome.

“I still don’t understand,” Nuala said. “What does this mean?”

Even as she asked, the Court began to fill. Not with elves but with owls. They perched on the surrounding trees, flittering but silent witnesses. As Nuala looked around at the descending birds, she realized that, outside of the king, queen, herself, Einar and the unconscious bodies of the guards Einar had attacked, there were no other elves in the Court. The remaining guards had vanished.

She looked back to the queen, who was fully smirking now as she considered the owls.

“Silly girl,” she said to Nuala. “Do you think we would have placed you and Einar in such close proximity, after all this time, if we did not have a plan?”

Einar straightened and some of the defensiveness went out of his body. “You intended for us to bond. Why?”

“Beyond growing tired of watching you two mope around this city for the last two centuries?” She snorted, an unusual show of irritated humor. “Let’s just say that the possibilities of your bonding were revealed to me. And the time for the change was now.”

The queen had mysterious ways of gathering information, sometimes even gaining knowledge of things that had not yet happened. She didn’t exercise the skill often, or so Nuala had thought, and the way in which she gathered the information was a mystery. Nuala wasn’t even sure if the king knew what the queen did to gain this future sight. But it wasn’t a flawless skill.

“You took a great risk,” she said as Einar finally allowed her to step out from behind the protection of his body.