Cast in Faefire: An Urban Fantasy Romance (The Mage Craft Series Book 3) (23 page)

“I’m the Voice of God. I can’t stay away from the gods.”

“I’m a sidhe you’re asking not to have sex,” he said. “You’d have to be selfish to expect me to commit when you won’t do the same.”

“There’s a difference between selfishness and self-care,” Marion said. And right now, what she most needed to do to care for herself was walk away from Konig.

She left him holding vigil alone. One last moment with Nori before the earth took her body.

Marion wished she could have been angrier about it.

It would have been nice if she’d been angry at all, really.

Yet she was only exhausted.

She walked the empty wing of Myrkheimr for the first time as queen. Not steward, not “princess,” but
queen
. The wards didn’t speak to her at all. The Winter Court had reluctantly responded to Marion when she’d been the sole ruler, but the Autumn Court had no interest at all. Myrkheimr knew that its prince had risen to become king. It cherished Konig in the way that Marion couldn’t.

The throne room was emptier than Marion’s heart.

“Queen of nothing,” she said, stopping to stand in the burned circle where balefire had been.

“But a queen nonetheless,” said someone behind her.

She spun, bow leaping into her hands, an arrow instantly in her fingers.

Marion didn’t shoot.

There were two people in the throne room who hadn’t been there when she entered. Neither of them belonged, but Marion recognized both.

One of them was a curvaceous woman with mounds of chestnut curls that were streaked with gray near the roots. Her breasts were lifted by a tightly cinched corset dress. She cradled a large glass vessel in her arms, which was filled with some kind of glowing potion that tinted her flesh crimson.

Ariane Kavanagh looked much like Marion, in a way—the same hair, the same graceful way they wore their gowns, the same fierce mischief in their eyes.

And she was standing beside a child-sized demon wearing an orange cloak. When that creature pushed her hood back, she revealed the head of a goat, with large eyes marked by oval pupils. “My name is Onoskelis,” said the goat-headed demon. “Your names are Marion Garin, Marion Kavanagh, Queen of the Unseelie, and Voice of God. It’s finally time for us to talk again.”

* * *

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