Azar shot a look of such incendiary rage the meticulously sculpted icicles adorning her gown began melting, dripping to her slippered feet. “Do you have it?” he snarled, hands fisting.
“Am I behaving as if I have it?” she snarled back. “Use your power against me again, Azar—if only upon my gown—and I’ll finish the war you start!”
“Had I the faintest idea where the Elixir was I would have drunk it instantly then rained it down upon my kingdom! And fuck your ugly gown! You think you can finish a war against me, princess?” he sneered. “Try.”
By D’Anu, they were behaving little better than their lust-enraged courts. Ixcythe pressed a hand to her breast, beckoning the ice of her kingdom, restoring the frozen accoutrements of her dress, cooling her temper.
Eyes blazing, shuddering with the effort of subduing his rage, Azar said tightly, “Send a bit of that this way. If you would be so kind.”
She wanted to ice the bastard, case him entirely in a glacial block. Slice the slab into tiny frozen pieces and feed him to her court. But she needed allies. Piercing her palms with her nails, she gusted a chilling breeze in his direction then did him the honor of graciously swirling it around him.
After a few moments, the heat Azar was throwing off abated and his burning gaze dimmed to banked embers. “My apologies, Ixcythe. The gowns of Winter are the epitome of loveliness.”
“And the grandeur of your Autumn lands beyond compare,” she rejoined, not meaning a word of it. Then she turned to glare at Severina, who snapped, “Well, I don’t have the blasted Elixir. Have you searched the royal bower?”
Ixcythe snapped back, “Yes, and clearly I wasn’t the first to do so.” She’d feared one of them had found it first. But their volatile tempers were proof enough they hadn’t. “The chest is nowhere to be found. Aoibheal must have moved it before she was interred in the Unseelie prison by Cruce, divining some inkling of her fate.” Prophecy, a gift possessed by the queen alone, the limited ability to foresee events as they might unfold, now belonged to MacKayla Lane. Assuming the mortal ever discovered and learned to use it.
Severina shrugged dismissively. “What’s the use? Even if we find it, the Song has been sung. It will nullify the effects of the Elixir again.”
Azar snorted contemptuously. “Have the suns of summer cooked your brains? The Song destroys what it deems imperfect only while being sung. It doesn’t continuously eradicate imperfections. If it did, nothing imperfect could ever exist. It would have been impossible for the king to create the Shadow Court!”
Ixcythe said, “Azar is correct. Though the effects settle into the planet’s core, restoring ancient magic, the Song balances the scales a single time.” Leaving sentient beings the free will to do as they wished—which was precisely as it should be. Gods such as the Fae answered to no gods. And gods were another of their problems—the Song had reawakened their old enemies. Should they learn the Fae were handicapped, becoming mortal…She shuddered, unable to complete the thought.
Azar said, “Which means the Elixir will mute emotion, restore immortality, yet do nothing to diminish the power we’ve regained.”
Ixcythe inclined her head. “Precisely. MacKayla Lane possesses Aoibheal’s knowledge and will know where the Elixir is.”
Severina rolled her eyes. “What good does that do? We tried to kill her repeatedly and failed. That beast stands in our way, and she has the spear!”
“We sought her demise rashly. Before our memories were regained,” Ixcythe said coolly. “Before we recalled this place.”
“And we have a powerful advantage,” Azar purred, with a smile. “Our memories have been restored, but she has only the knowledge of a queen who abdicated power before the Song was sung; a queen far younger than we are. We know more about our history and the powers we possess than she does, recall magic she never learned.”
“But she’s vanished,” Severina argued. “None know where to find her.”
“We send a message and make her come to us. Here. Where our lifeblood can’t be shed by her or the beast with whom she consorts.”
Comprehension dawned in Severina’s eyes. “And we tell her if she gives us the Elixir, we’ll stop trying to kill her. A splendid plan!” She added with a sneer, “Mortals always hunger for an end to war.” While the Fae hungered for the exquisite pleasures of it, so long as they weren’t in the fray.
For a moment, Ixcythe couldn’t even speak, she was so stupefied by Summer’s idiocy. “We tell her nothing, you bloody fool! An end to war for our ‘queen’ would best be achieved by watching us all die. She blames us for the death of billions of mortals! She despises us.”
Severina huffed, “A queen isn’t supposed to despise her own people!”
“Oh, by the blessed D’Anu, we’re not her people! She’s mortal! She doesn’t want us any more than we want her. She wants to use our power for her people, not ours!” Ixcythe practically screamed. “Yet you think we should say, ‘Oh, great queen, please help us because we’re regressing and becoming mortal again and if you don’t give us the Elixir, we’re all going to die, leaving your world in peace, granting you the ultimate vengeance against us!’ What is wrong with you?”
“It wasn’t even us. It was the bloody Unseelie!” Azar said, his eyes blazing with fire and fury. “We scarce killed any humans at all compared to the Shadow Court! Who knows to what heights we might have risen by now had we not been twice deceived, twice enslaved to a human queen!”
“Precisely,” Ixcythe spat savagely. “Hundreds of thousands of years wasted, obeying a queen we believed was one of us, only to have that traitorous bitch pass our power to another human who was born and bred to hunt and kill us. If MacKayla Lane catches even the faintest whiff that we are becoming mortal again—” Ixcythe couldn’t bring herself to finish the sentence. Their own queen would destroy them. The idea of Fae being hunted by humans, helpless foxes scattering, terrified, on a reverse Wild Hunt, to be slaughtered like lesser beasts—how their “queen” would enjoy that! Never! “She must never know what’s happening to us. That we’ve regained our memories, and we’re reverting. No one can.”
“If we do become—” Severina broke off, shivering, before managing to grind out the detested word. “—mortal, we could always move our courts to this sacred place.”
Ixcythe fisted her hands so tightly the sharp tips of her nails slid through her flesh, puncturing the backs of her hands. That was it. At the appointed hour, when they met with the queen, the princess of Summer would no longer be speaking. “So that in our madness, rendered unkillable by the Grove, we could torture each other until we finally died of natural causes? Have you forgotten how many centuries that would be?” She soothed herself a moment, envisioning the sunny warmth leaching from Severina’s skin, as she iced her blue and pale, forever frozen yet fully aware of her imprisonment, erecting her as yet another statue in one of her many glacial gardens where she was wont to store those she despised. “And that’s assuming countless stolen eons don’t instantly catch up with us once we reach a critical point in devolution, and we crumble into piles of ash!”