Kaiden and Orken decided that four shadow walkers were enough and that if the witches had something sinister planned, the sheer number would not matter as they'd be prepared for an army. Nobody liked it but with the King dead, Halbrook had little reason to keep their grudge or to seek vengeance over peace and there was nothing on earth that could change Aurelie's mind. She was going.
They were on the guest balcony, preparing to leave while Daerious and Orken to feast on what they could scavenge from the wedding feast downstairs. It had turned into more of a memorial meal but they didn't mind that much either.
Orken had received another letter that morning and told her very little other than that he was confident everything would go over well. She tried to pry but he was having none of it and if she hadn't had so much to do, she'd force the information out of him but then Kaiden found her for the fifth time that morning and the conversation shifted toward her safety . . . again.
"If anything goes wrong," Kaiden said, "set the whole bloody place on fire and run toward the mountain."
Aurelie nodded. "Let's get going, shall we?" She looked the men, clenching her jaw. Since the crack of dawn, she'd had Kaiden chirping in her ear, saying the same damn thing over and over again. She'd grown tired of it and a swirl of irritation turned and twisted in her chest. "Do you mind, uncle?" she said as a hesitant shadow walker tried to find a place to stand near her.
He stepped back, wiped at his dry lips and took a deep breath, nodding to himself as if he had just come to an agreement in his head.
Aurelie extended her hand impatiently toward one of the shadow walkers and waited for him all to lock hands. They were quite young. Perhaps three or four years her senior. Only one looked like he had signed up for the job, the others looked like they were saying silent prayers.
The eager one started first. Aurelie felt the pull from his portal almost instantly. It all reminded her of Kirin quite terribly. She had kept her tears back over her father's funeral but the dark windy swirls of the portal caught her off guard. As the darkness engulfed her and she felt the edge of the drop tug at her stomach, she heard a faint scream come from the grounds below them.
"Aurelie!" Deborah screamed. "Princess Aurelie, we found Kirin."
"What?" Aurelie asked rhetorically, already trying to pry her hand out of the shadow walker's grip, only to have him hold tighter.
"We found him and they won't let us see you!"
Aurelie heart sank, whether from the final drop of the portal or the news she didn't know. "Let go," she said but her voice disappeared into the void of the portal
***
The shadow walker's dragged their feet as they followed behind her, exhausted from the travels.
They walked for hours and still had not found the compound. Aurelie's impatience grew stronger by the second. She thought about sending them straight back to the castle but there was no way that the four of them would handle another trip.
An abandoned hut stood awkwardly in the middle of a dry field of long grass. From afar, it had looked identical to a long-drop that they had at the cottage, but once Aurelie neared it, a small crescent moon appeared on the wall.
"Three knocks gets you an answer and four gets you the floor." Aurelie read aloud, and frowned, looking back at the shadow walkers who clearly had no idea what it meant either.
Aurelie knocked three times and waited. She had been stuck in her wedding dress throughout the whole ordeal.
"Yes," an old man's croaky voice sounded out of the gap created by the crescent moon carving on the door.
"I am Aurelie Dranoir," she said, deciding against asking him to direct her toward Halbrook and tell him what she came for instead. The shadow walkers knew vaguely where Halbrook was, but they all had a different idea of where exactly, and so they ended up in the middle of nowhere with no one around to ask for directions. "The Halbrook coven has my men."
An eye peeked through the gap of the hole. "Stand aside, please."
Aurelie moved and the man's eye slid from one side to the other. "Unless you've married three men, and Orken grew forty years younger, these men must step aside."
Aurelie nodded at his request and heard the stomp of their feet as they backed up. This is Halbrook? Surely not.
"Knock four times." His eye disappeared.
She hesitated for a second, unsure of what to do. The old man acted rather cryptically and made her nervous. There was nothing behind the sun-bleached, wooden building or to the side of it, as far as she could see.
Aurelie smacked her palm against the door four times. Next thing she knew, a gloomy, blue floor shone beneath her feet as if the witches had flipped the sky around and put it at her feet, and four elderly people, three men, and a woman, sat in long crimson robes five feet away from her. The long-drop turned into a set of stairs upon which she had to climb to address the council.
"Princess Aurelie Dranoir, you have been summoned before the councilâ"
"I am no longer a princess."
The woman, who spoke, blinked slowly and turned toward the members of the council.
"We have heard no such news," a man, whose mustache was long enough to be braided down by the sides of his mouth, and interlace with his charcoal beard, said.
"The King is dead."
"Long may she reign." They nodded simultaneously and Aurelie returned a quick bow. Her thoughts trailed to whether a queen bowed, and then she realized that the rules were her own to make now, and it was for others to follow her example.
"You have my men."
"We are at war."
"We are not."
The woman folded her arms over her lap. Aurelie let them consider her answer over, and examine the room. A hand with its fingers cut off and a line that vined through the stumps marked the round walls of what looked to be some sort of tower.
"Protection against magic, we are on equal ground here, Your Majesty," a man to the right said. He had warm, brown eyes, and ridiculously frizzy hair that came down to his shoulders.
Aurelie smiled at him, and returned an honest observation, "Only there are four of you and one of me." Her magic grappled against the runes, but they did little to contain it. Heat climbed through her arms and a fire started in the palm of her hand. "It appears that not all magic can be contained by your runes."
The woman's brow jumped up, though Aurelie only noticed this by the stretch of her eye as her brows had very little hair on them and even then, rendered indistinguishable from her skin by how light they were. "Do you mean to frighten us into releasing your men?" she asked.
"My father died this afternoonâthe day of my wedding. Though it was a marriage of convenience, so I am not very fondly attached to the date." Aurelie began to pace. The dried grass that clung to her dress made a prickly, screeching noise against the smooth floors. "Still, it is a burden, and I would rather have a straight conversation with you now rather than having to listen to a play on words and wonder if they are threats, and then having to threaten you with my power and mention that I have two armies now on very convenient locations. They're on their way, just to move this along, and a carriage is coming too. When they arrive, I would very much like to go back with them and sleep. That is the only thing I look forward to these days, I must admit. But I would also like to go back with the witches and wizard of Halbrook being my allies. Give me your terms and I shall give you mine. Or shall you bring out the people that intend to kill me now? I'm up for either, killing or talking, as long as it ends quickly." Kirin was the only thing on her mind. Their alliance was important but she always did say, she'd died for him.
"And what can Highfire offer us?" the youngest of the four, frail with eyes sharp as leaves at their edges, asked.
"More land, fair trade, protections, independence. As you can see, there are a number of things."
The man with the braided mustache cleared his throat. "More importantly, what do you want us to do? We will certainly not partake in the conflict."
"I do not need passive alliances, sir. We've enough of those. They've attacked some of our biggest farms, and it is winter now, so food supply is low. If we were to create an alliance, I would need your people to be stationed in the bigger villages and with the guards. The witches know their herbs; we'll need them at the front to patch up the men. Those are among the things I need from you in return."
"And how do we trust you?" the woman asked. She and Sasha did not look very alike. For instance, Sasha was much younger and had the hair color of a ripening strawberry and her sister's was pale as a ghost's, but there was a resemblance in her eyes. Sasha had the same intense, yet kind gaze. It took a little while for Aurelie to realize, but when she did, her eyes threatened to well up with tears and she did not look at the woman again after that.
"She wrote to you about me, I'm sure of it. Was she a foolish woman, your sister?"
"Not until the day she died."
"Well, we were all foolish back then."
"My sister's word in a letter will not satisfy this council. They remember her running around this compound without her trousers, chasing around a one-eyed dog in a game of tag. That won't free your men today."
Aurelie intertwined her fingers. "Who says I'm here to free them? How many do you have, ten?" She shook her head. "No, that's not why I've come." Her finger jumped curiously with a new idea. "I've heard the people of Halbrook are well acquainted with the death pact. If I am satisfied with your requests and you with mine, then I shall make one with every member of this council and to ensure the safety of their kin."
"That satisfies the council," the younger one said, the rest of them breathed a small sigh of relief and Aurelie wondered if they were going to bring up the pact if she had not. "But we have other terms." He looked to his right and appeared to be waiting for something.
Aurelie frowned at what appeared to be an empty wall. A few seconds later, a door opened and Leila stepped out. Her hips had grown and her face appears rounder. She looked healthier than she ever had at the inn or even in her own home. Mr. Holver stepped out after her.
Through the door, Aurelie saw evergreen grass and a stone road. Carts went up and down the streets, filled with fruits and vegetables, but there was no merchant near them, and people simple roamed past and picked whatever they needed. The door closed, and her eyes focused on Leila.
"So, you run to another one of my enemies," Aurelie said, her fiery eyes following Leila's every move even though she had not looked up toward Aurelie since her entry. Mr. Holver looked dapper as well, beard neatly trimmed and hiding half of the scar that dragged along his face.
"Dear Aurelie," his hands reached out for her, but she disregarded the gestured and glanced away. Mr. Holver stood halfway between the door and the podium upon which Aurelie sat.
"Go on," Sasha's sister gestured for Leila to speak, but for once, Leila kept her mouth shut.
"She won't sway my mind. I'm surprised you've brought her out after everything she's done."
Leila remained stoned in place. Her father stepped over and held a hand around her shoulder.
"Oh, don't you worry. That's all just for show. She has no feelings only an instinct to survive."
Mr. Holver stiffened at her comment and gave her a dirty look. Aurelie shrugged it off.
"Your Majesty," the man with the braided beard started, "this young lady is the only reason that we've agreed to see you this evening. She has told us a lot about you and thought it may seem like a betrayal now, we were only willing to open up negotiations because of this."
"Do you know that she is the one who betrayed us that evening your sister died?" Aurelie turned her head toward Sasha's sister. "You have been housing a traitor."
"She told us this." She nodded. "She also told us that you wanted to part with your magic. That you saw the danger in it."
"I didâbut that's not your concern. I was naive."
"You will have us to protect it, along with your army and your husband's army. Immortality might seem grand right now, Your Majesty, but it is a dangerous thing to have. It is a dangerous thing that others will want to possess, and it will help you during the war but will leave you a target forever.
Aurelie doubled back at the revelation. "You can't be sure that I am . . . no. It's just magic."
The council exchanged a confused glance between the lot of them. "Well, it is not entirely immortality, you can most certainly die, but it will take hundreds and hundreds of years. The magic you gained from the dragons, it passed along more than just the ability to communicate with her. Surely, looking at the scales on your arms, you've come to understand what you've been given."
Aurelie did not want to live for a hundred years. She did not want to rule that long or find out what the use of her power will do to her soul. Madness crawled around her mind every single time she used it, and more so now that the combined powers of the first Dragon King and her grandfather lived within her. That is why she had been so cautious to use it.
"I'm sorry about Kirin," Leila said.
Aurelie's eyes shot up toward her. The council members looked between the two of them uncomfortable. Sasha's sister moved to the edge of her chair, ready to jump between the two of them had the situation required it.
"Don't you speak his name," Aurelie place emphasis on every word. Unable to even look at Aurelie, she still managed to try to manipulate her by putting Kirin in the middle of this decision.
"You won't have my magic. Unless," she gave them a weak smile, "you'll sacrifice your magic too. If not, then, I'm afraid this whole ordeal is a little hypocritical to me. The best I'll do is bind you to my bloodline so that my kin cannot hurt you. I have also come to offer a member of your council a permanent seat on mine. That way, you will always have a say in our affairs and know about any decisions we make. I don't have time to negotiate, that's all I offer."
"Then we agree," the youngest members said, and the other's twitched their heads toward him.
"I want to see my men now." Aurelie stood and wiped at imaginary dust off of her lap. "Take this traitor away. If I see her anywhere but here, I'll have her head."