Prince of Dreams Read online

  ‘Prince of Dreams’

  4# Messenger Chronicles

  Pippa DaCosta

  Urban Fantasy & Science Fiction Author

  Subscribe to Pippa’s mailing list at pippadacosta.com & get free ebooks.

  Copyright © 2018 Pippa DaCosta.

  December 2018. US Edition. All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictions, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Edited in US English.

  Version 1.

  www.pippadacosta.com

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

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  Chapter 1

  Oh, what a tangled web we weave

  When first we practice to deceive

  ~ Old Earthen, Walter Scott

  * * *

  Kesh

  * * *

  Faerie was not how I remembered. Cloying magic hung thick in the air, its perfume intoxicating. Clouds swept across a daylight sky, their crisp whiteness peppered with the occasional flash of pixie wings. The long grasses in the palace gardens whispered secrets to one another. Together, it all worked so hard to be beautiful. But as I walked through the palace gardens, the enormous, brightly colored flowers leaning toward me, I saw only ugliness.

  Ironic, given that I had once thought Calicto ugly. During my years as a human messenger, living in Calicto’s B sector, breathing recycled air, surrounded by towers of tek and metal, I’d longed to be home again, to feel the rain on my face, to breathe the air. How blind I had been. Calicto was honest. Faerie was lies. Ironic, indeed, for a race who couldn’t lie. But they liked to bend their rules and none knew how to bend them better than Faerie’s new king.

  I looked up. Night was approaching. Sometimes, that meant days until the twinkling dark skies would pull across the canvas above, other times hours. When night came, Arran would be executed for a massacre he’d had no hand in. Unless I stopped it.

  I couldn’t let Arran die for me. Not again. Perhaps the piece of polestar inside me meant I was supposed to stop Oberon. Perhaps the ink marking my skin was part of a greater plan. But I didn’t yet have the answers or know the future. I just knew what had to be done.

  The path through the gardens changed around me, snaking off course to meet a stone wall. Trailing ivy parted like a curtain, and there, hidden behind, was a doorway. The gardens had led me straight here. During my years-long absence, they hadn’t forgotten the path.

  “Nashey,” I whispered, thank you, in saru.

  Waving grasses hissed in reply.

  Not all parts of the palace were made of glass, just the showy receiving rooms and façade. The palace foundation stood on glittering black bedrock. Strings of faelights hung high on the walls, lighting my way. I had always preferred the secret parts, the hidden parts, despite knowing where these corridors led.

  Venturing deeper inside the palace where daylight didn’t penetrate, I pushed open a door and entered a familiar chamber. Old panic tried to cinch my heart. My gaze fell to the large circles, symbols, and grooves carved into the stone floor. I knew every swirl, every gouge. I remembered how they’d felt beneath my fingertips as I’d clawed at them and clung to them as though they could save me.

  Lanterns on the walls flickered to life. My passing stirred up glittering dust. I crouched at the foot of the carved marks, staying outside the circular boundaries, and listened. No screams. Those were in my head.

  The first time Oberon marked me, I begged him to tell me what I’d done wrong. I could hear that girl now, sobbing as she begged a Faerie prince to forgive her.

  The second time he marked me, I cried in silence. By the third time, I welcomed the pain. The fourth, I ached for it. And on the fifth… I smiled, because I knew I belonged here, beneath Oberon’s hands.

  I touched a mark on the stone inside the circle. My sleeve climbed up my forearm, revealing the matching thorned ink lying silent and still on my forearm. Warfae markings. A declaration of service to Faerie. Rewards. Or so I had believed. But now I wasn’t so sure.

  “You should not be here.”

  Sirius stood in the open doorway, staying outside the threshold. His leathers of reds and browns painted him in autumnal colors. Green eyes shone like emeralds, and his red hair tumbled around his face, hacked at and unruly since I’d thrown razor-tek into those locks. The cloak sitting sideways on his right shoulder hid his tek arm. Did Oberon know he’d lost an arm? Probably. The king missed nothing.

  I straightened and brushed my hands together. It wasn’t so easy to brush off the past. “Over there, you remember… he cut open my skin and poured poison inside.”

  Sirius didn’t reply. I hadn’t expected him to. He had witnessed it all but had never spoken a single word of it.

  “Here, he painted the marks into my skin with hot nightbane talons. I almost didn’t survive the first time.”

  “Warfae marks are not meant for saru.”

  How right he was. But the way he said it, lofty and aloof, reminded me of the gulf between us. Him a Royal Guardian, and me a saru slave. The only thing missing was the collar around my neck.

  For hours, days, and sometimes weeks, Oberon would come and work to turn me into his tek-whisperer. His assassin. His Wraithmaker. And at the time, I loved him for it, because I was saru, and the prince could do anything to me, so long as he noticed me. The pain was the price I paid for his attention. I was a foolish thing, a broken thing. But today, now, I was no longer that thing. Today, I could make a difference.

  “Does your arm hurt?” I asked.

  “Incessantly.”

  I had never learned why Oberon needed Sirius to watch him work. They had never spoken about it in my presence. Sirius had watched so silently without moving that I’d forgotten he was there at all. The silent sentinel, like a piece of furniture.

  “Good,” I told the fae now.

  “You would think so.” He sighed and added, “Night approaches.”

  Arran’s deadline. I hadn’t gone to him in the palace cells, afraid of what I might say. Afraid I might make promises I couldn’t keep or that I’d sling accusations at him. None of this was his fault, but I still wanted to rage at him over this foolish love for a woman he didn’t know and a king who had condemned him. Arran had done what any good saru would have. What I would have done… once.

  “Take me to Oberon,” I said.

  Sirius’s lips twisted in the way they always did when I tried to order him. “He is addressing his court.”

  I crossed the room and squared up to the proud Autumnlands fae, pushing onto my tiptoes. He peered down his perfect nose, refusing to give an inch. Hard masculine lines cut the picture
of a judgmental face. Straight, fae-tipped ears completed the unyielding picture of a sidhe in his prime. Proud. Untouchable. So very Faerie. “Have you told him yet how to save Faerie?”

  Sirius’s glare twitched away.

  I’d thought as much.

  The guardian had his doubts about the king. And if a Royal Guardian had doubts, others did as well, putting Oberon in a precarious position.

  “I can’t let Arran die for me,” I said. “He didn’t kill those fae, I did. Everyone knows it. If you love your king, you will take me to him, before he makes a mistake that will cost him his crown.” And maybe his life.

  Distrust turned Sirius’s returning glare brittle. “What can you do?”

  It was a good question, one that had many answers, but I could only tell him one: “Save a hero, like I should have done a long time ago.”

  My presence, by now, was well known among the fae. Gossip traveled fast on Faerie’s winds. But knowing the Wraithmaker had returned and seeing her beside the king were two very different things. I was ordered to keep to the miles of servants’ corridors, far away from the shining lordly guests and their keen, burrowing gazes.

  After navigating those back corridors, I rattled around a royal receiving chamber, alternating between watching the darkening sky through the window and pacing outside of the elaborately decorated suite. My boots thudded softly on the plush carpet, my hard presence muted by the drapes and cushions, by softness and light.

  For what I was about to do, Kellee would have called me a fool. I could hear him say in his high-and-mighty marshal tone, “Don’t be a martyr.” But he wasn’t here. Talen would have looked at me with all the answers in his eyes but none he could speak. He wasn’t here either.

  An empty ache yawned inside.

  I couldn’t think of them, left behind, battling monsters.

  I’d only been back on Faerie for a couple of days, but more time had passed since they’d taken me from them. Enough time for the battle to have been won or lost.

  Sirius entered the room, face grim. “This is unwise.”

  I assumed that meant the king was coming.

  I paced faster until a wall of rusty reds blocked my marching.

  “You’ll get yourself killed,” he added.

  Stepping around him, I continued pacing.

  “After all this time, after everything that has transpired, you would die for the gladiator?” he asked, words clipped.

  “You don’t understand. He tried to save me once, and I killed him for it. And even after forgetting our past, he tried to save me again. He believed he was doing the right thing. The saru… how they—how we think…” How could I explain what being a saru was like to a fae like him? We were animals to him, pets, playthings. “We can’t help the way we are. I can’t let him die again.”

  “You’re right, I don’t understand. Your life is worth more than his.”

  I stopped pacing and looked up at the guardian. So fae, so sure of his place in a world in which he belonged. “One life is not worth more than another. All lives are equal. All saru are equal. All fae are equal to saru—”

  He snorted. “You’re absurd.”

  He would think so. “I’m doing this.”

  “You’re not saru.”

  “I am.”

  “No, you’re not.” He approached, cloak flaring wide, making him seem bigger, and he wasn’t small to begin with. As he approached, that old saru part of me urged me to drop to my knees. I lifted my head and looked him in the eye. His steps faltered, and he halted outside my reach. “While I was not part of your harem and therefore not privy to its secrets, I saw enough. Saru are not Faerie touched.”

  I stood my ground and ignored the harem reference. Typical of a fae to assume I somehow owned the males around me when in fact, I no more owned them than I could own the stars in Faerie’s skies. What I’d had with Kellee, with Talen... harem was too light a word. “Whatever you think you saw changes nothing. I was born saru. I lived as saru. I am saru.”

  He turned his head away, teeth grinding, and then lowered his voice to a hissing whisper. “I saw you summon Light, a Faerie power few fae possess. It was minor and ill-directed, but I witnessed it. You cannot lie to me about this.” He spoke as though he were angry, like this was all my fault, but his whispering the words wasn’t for my benefit. He didn’t want Oberon to know what he’d seen.

  I glanced at the closed door. Sirius had told Oberon none of this. Not Talen’s words on how to save Faerie, and nothing of the Nightshade or freeing the unseelie. He was a Royal Guardian, the crown’s stalwart servant, and he was keeping secrets from his king. His silence, should Oberon learn of it, would see him executed alongside Arran. One word in Oberon’s ear and I could see it done.

  Sirius lifted his tek hand. The cloak fell back, revealing the smooth beauty of working metal fused with flesh. My finest work. He despised it.

  Cold, metal fingers touched my shoulder.

  There was more in his eyes than stubborn denials, more emotion than I’d seen from him in all the years I’d known him. More than these last few weeks he’d spent in my company could account for. Why did any of this matter to him?

  “And that is why I must do this.” I closed my hand around his metal touch and lowered it back to his side. “I am nothing in Oberon’s shadow, but in death, I can show Faerie the truth. I will die for one worthless saru, but my death will change everything.” My words were lies, but here, in Faerie, the fae thought themselves immune to untruths. They forgot my greatest strength. I had no wish to die, but I would save Arran, and in a palace made of mirrors, I had to tread carefully.

  The chamber door swung open and Oberon strode inside in a storm of royal blues and golden thread, his night-black hair tightly braided. His crown snagged my attention. It suited him. He wore it well. Eledan had fashioned himself an oak one that had looked just as good, although it had been an illusion.

  I dropped to a knee. “My king.”

  The guardian failed to kneel. Realizing his mistake a second too late, he dropped and bowed his head low, but in his haste, he had failed to cover his arm. His tek hand gleamed, fingers spread. In the seat of fae power, human tek was an affront to all things Faerie. Belatedly, Sirius curled his hand closed and hid it behind his back.

  “Sirius, at ease,” the king ordered, a dangerous note ringing in his voice.

  The guardian straightened and stepped back to the edge of the room, blending with the shadows.

  “Do not think to petition for the life of the gladiator,” Oberon told me. “My decision is final. Preparations are underway. I will not be persuaded to spare him.”

  I stood, carefully reworking the words in my head, and regarded my king in the same cool, studious way he regarded me.

  He checked the door, now closed, and narrowed his eyes at me once more. Finished assessing me, he looked around him, reading the small, informal room with its quilted furniture and flowing drapes as though it were the first time he’d seen it. Perhaps it was. The palace contained dozens such rooms, and they all looked the same. Sometimes the palace birthed new rooms from nowhere and for no reason, just because it could.

  Satisfied, he unbuckled his cloak and tossed it over a daybed, then loosened his waistcoat, inlaid with gold. “My Wraithmaker,” he murmured, thoughts wandering.

  With the waistcoat hanging open and loose, he rolled his sleeves up past his elbows. Warfae markings snaked up his forearms. He’d discarded his lithe, courtly softness with the pretty attire. Beneath was a warfae general, a male of power and prowess, a king-in-waiting. This was the Oberon I’d always known. I’d been alarmed when I’d first seen Eledan, his brother, outside of Faerie, and how he had been built for combat. Oberon was the same, but he deliberately hid his warrior’s physique beneath his kingly robes at court. The brothers had the same features, but where Eledan’s appearance had been honed by years of tek exposure, which had hewn his softer edges, Oberon still had something softer about him. The king was no less st
riking, but in a different, smoother way.

  His stiff demeanor melted away, and the fluid, relaxed sidhe came to the fore. I wondered if anyone at court saw this side of him, the truth of him. At least, this truth of him. He likely had many.

  “I often thought of you,” he said.

  He had?

  “I hadn’t realized…” He trailed off as he came to the window, the inky darkness pushing against the daylight’s fringes entrancing him. “It is a dangerous thing to wish for the dark. It answers.”

  Sirius stood behind me, mutely watching the exchange. The guardian knew much of my past but not everything. How would he handle the truth?

  “I killed those fae on Calicto,” I said, imagining Sirius’s cheek ticking. He’d already known, but would hate to hear it. Triumphant defiance brought a smile to my lips. I hid it again before the king could turn and see. “I programmed the drones to attack. It was a slaughter. They didn’t stand a chance.”

  “Oh, I know.” Oberon turned his back to the window, and his lips ticked up in a devastating smile. I’d seen Eledan wear the same seductive smile a thousand times before. Eledan’s had twitched like a living thing. Oberon’s was swift and light but no less dangerous. They were more alike than I’d realized. “Sjora was looking for a fight and a way to prove herself,” he said. “You gave her exactly what she wanted and eliminated her treasonous followers. I could not have hoped for a better outcome.”

  So, my massacring all those fae was… acceptable? I hadn’t expected that smile or this reaction. I might be the Wraithmaker, but I’d always followed Oberon’s orders to kill. The Game of Lies had been different. I’d had no orders then, and I’d killed Faerie’s people. His people. “I should be the one to pay.”