The Faerie King Read online

  THE FAERIE KING

  * * *

  STRANGER MAGICS, BOOK TWO

  ASH FITZSIMMONS

  CONTENTS

  * * *

  Copyright

  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

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  COPYRIGHT

  * * *

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  THE FAERIE KING. Copyright © 2018 by Ash Fitzsimmons.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Cover design by BespokeBookCovers.com

  ISBN 978-1-949861-02-0

  www.ashfitzsimmons.com

  CHAPTER 1

  * * *

  Hindsight is a smug bastard.

  In retrospect, I see the contours of the puzzle, the sequential effect of each decision on the next like a chain of poor choices. But there’s no known method of scrying the future via enchantment, and that September, I saw only progress ahead. I’d survived my first six months as king of a faerie court that vacillated between indifferent and sullen toward me, I’d reconnected with the woman I adored, and I’d begun to adapt to the rhythms of governing the peculiar sort of asylum I’d inherited. My guards did my bidding, my daughter’s bind—and rewritten memory—appeared to be holding together…what more could I have wanted? True, I grumbled at the petty annoyances of court life and the constant complaints of my temperamental people, but I reassured myself that I’d bring their squabbles and griping under control. Another six months, I mused, and I’d have the court running like a fine pocket watch.

  In truth, it was as if I were hiking toward a lovely range of mountains in the distance, thinking I’d never have a problem more challenging than the occasional blister, and unaware that one of those snow-capped mountains was an active volcano days away from explosion.

  Had I known the lurking danger, I wouldn’t have rested until I’d ground it beneath my heel and burned the remains. But my foresight is no keener than a mortal’s, and so I slept the comfortable, self-congratulatory sleep of a fool.

  But then came the phone call in the wee hours, the beginning of the chaos of that autumn. I woke to see the aggravating little device sitting on the bedside table inches from my face, blinking its red notification light and blasting its snippet of fugue, and I made the mistake of flipping it open, holding it to my ear, and mumbling, “Yes?”

  “Hey, Colin,” said the soft voice on the other end—Joey, I realized, trying to sound confident but barely disguising the tension in his whisper. “Sorry to bother you, but, uh…do dragons exist?”

  The list of activities in which I enjoy partaking at two in the morning is short, and most of the items comprising it are some variant of “sleep” or “drink heavily.” Skulking around a tent on bare feet, holding my breath so as not to disturb a feeding dragon, is most definitely not on that list. But there I was, all the same: rumpled T-shirt and sweatpants, bed-mussed hair, and lurking backup with a twitchy sword hand—who, incidentally, was the reason I was wandering around the godforsaken backcountry of Faerie in the deep predawn in the first place.

  The dragon, nearly eye-deep in Joey’s ruined food bag, was too preoccupied with its prize to notice me as I crept closer, but still, I took my time, trying not to startle it. I was no expert on dragons—though I knew enough to understand that they were best left unprovoked, mind you—and until that night, I had yet to see one in the flesh. In the light of the blue flame I kept half-shielded in my hand, I could make out something black and scaly with a pair of folded wings, roughly the size of a Shetland pony, and with the table manners of a boar. It rooted, swallowed, and belched intermittently, and as it was fixated on its meal, it was oblivious to my dash behind a tree near its right flank.

  I leaned against the trunk, trying to formulate a plan, and silently berated myself. It was a dragon. Just a stupid little dragon. A hatchling, obviously, judging by the shell fragments in the weeds. Probably couldn’t even fly yet. Nothing to worry about. I could take it, easily.

  And yet…

  I cut my eyes back to Joey, who had slipped out of his tent to watch. He quietly unsheathed his sword and pointed it at the dragon, but I shook my head. There was no need to risk injury to him, no matter how loudly the small, dogged part of my mind that believed in the buddy system was begging me to set aside my pride and remember that I’d never actually fought a dragon before. Plenty of faeries, scores of wizards, and a troll or two, yes, but never an opponent that scored a bingo in my internal game of Should I Run Now? The sad truth of the matter was that I wanted Joey beside me—and if I were honest with myself, a tiny part of me wanted him there for the same reason that when faced with an angry bear, one desires nothing more than a paraplegic companion.

  Fortunately for my continued ability to look myself in the mirror, I pushed those thoughts aside. Joey was quick and reasonably skilled with a sword, but in the end, all he was holding was a pointy stick. I could take on a dragon by myself, especially a damn hatchling, but that knowledge did nothing to silence the voice that continued to remind me, with increasing fervor, that there’s a certain risk inherent in maintaining proximity to a giant lizard with correspondingly large teeth.

  “Damn it, Coileán,” I muttered to the night, “pull yourself together.”

  The frantic little internal voice was joined by a second one, which nagged instead of shouted but was no less irritating. I didn’t have to do this, it whispered. I could have sent someone else to take care of the problem. Hell, I could have just yanked Joey back through the rift to my bedroom and returned him to clean up what was left of his camp in the morning. But any of those options would have resulted in a certain loss of face, and I’d maintained hold of my mother’s vacated throne for a mere six months. I couldn’t afford to look weak.

  And there was the matter of Joey to consider. I couldn’t, in good conscience, let anything happen to the kid. He had balls of titanium to be exploring the realm on his own, and he had been calling daily with his findings, trying to help me get the lay of the land as I dealt with matters closer to home. But Joey had made camp late that evening, and he must have either missed the egg or mistaken it for a boulder in the dark. I couldn’t be too angry with him for camping by a nest—he’d been in the realm barely a season, after all, and that night was the first time he’d called me with an emergency.

  I glanced around the tree again, but the dragon was too busy trying to bite through a tin of SpaghettiOs to pay me any heed. As it fumbled with the can in the darkness, I played through possible scenarios. The best option, I mused, would be to run out, stun it, and if necessary, dispatch it…or I could stun it, give Joey time to pack his gear, and take us out of there before the beast recovered…

  I was still mulling over strategy when I noticed that Joey had le
ft the shelter of the tent and was crawling through the low grass on his elbows toward the dragon, sword in his right fist, flashlight in his left. I froze, trying to add this new variable to my computations, but before I could push Joey out of danger, the dragon pulled its nose from his shredded knapsack and turned its oversized head toward the light on the ground.

  Joey lay still, poised to spring, and I readied a ball of fire in my fist.

  To my surprise, the dragon flopped to its belly and fixated on Joey. It inched forward hesitantly, and when he held his ground, the dragon let loose a psychic outburst of rapturous joy: MAMA!

  By the time Joey scrambled to his feet and sheathed his blade, the dragon was upon him. It knocked him to his back and nuzzled him in the gut with the force of a prizefighter’s first-round blow. Extinguishing the fireball for safety, I ran from my hiding place before my resident quasi-knight could be crushed under three hundred pounds of excited lizard. “No sudden moves!” I yelled. “Just stay still, I’m coming!”

  The dragon continued to rub its face against Joey like an oversized kitten, and he awkwardly reached up to pat its snout. “What’s it doing?” he asked, keeping his eyes on the dragon and his voice calm.

  I crouched at his side and lit my flame once more, but I stayed out of the preoccupied dragon’s line of sight. “That’s a hatchling,” I said. “You’re looking at a newborn.”

  Joey’s dark eyes widened. “Newborn?”

  “Shell fragments twenty feet behind me. It probably hatched while you were sleeping.” I slid aside a pace, giving the dragon’s flailing tail a wider berth. “No sign of the mother or the rest of the clutch, so we’re in luck.”

  He continued to rub the hatchling’s nose, eliciting from the beast a sound somewhere between a purr and a growl, with overtones of garbage disposal. “So what do we do?”

  “I don’t know, man, you seem to have this well in hand—”

  “Colin.”

  “I’m serious.” The dragon’s pleased rumble increased in volume as Joey’s hand moved toward its horn buds. “You’ve heard of imprinting?”

  “Like…birds?” he asked, raising his voice to be heard over the hatchling.

  “Exactly.” I stood and took in the scene—the dragon wasn’t crushing Joey, but it had him pinned. “I’d guess that this one hatched late. Mom and the others must have moved on. Wait there, I’ll check.”

  A quick jog back to the nest site told me all I needed to know, and I rejoined Joey after a moment. “Yeah, this was a late hatch. The fresh fragments are still damp, but the shells around them are bone-dry. This one’s a few days behind, maybe a week.” I paused and peered at his inscrutable expression. “Are you hurt? I could blast it now, but I’d rather get you out from underneath first, just in case.”

  Joey kept rubbing the dragon. “Don’t leave me, okay? You ran off, there.”

  His voice was steady, but his eyes betrayed his fear, and I kicked myself. Joey was resourceful and surprisingly tough for a seminary dropout—and that still left him grossly outclassed by everything around him. Sure, the steel he carried would do decent damage against any faerie, but dragons weren’t native to the realm, and as this one was making perfectly clear by its proximity to Joey’s sword, it was insensitive to iron. Unless he could skewer it, he was defenseless, and given that there was a mass of very happy dragon between his free hand and his sheathed sword, the odds of skewering seemed slim.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” I reassured him, crouching beside him again. “I’m not leaving you, Joey. Stay calm, all right?”

  A degree of tension left his face as he nodded. “Okay. So you’re telling me we’ve got an abandoned baby, yeah? Can we get it back to its mother?”

  The dragon closed its red eyes and snuggled against Joey’s T-shirt, pressing the air from his lungs with its bulk.

  “Bad idea,” I said. “Those things grow incredibly fast. If its siblings have a week on it—”

  “It’ll never catch up?” he gasped.

  “It’ll never get the chance. Mom will reject it, siblings will eat it. Cannibalism isn’t unheard of among dragons. Kinder to put it down now.”

  Joey’s hand continued to stroke the cuddling hatchling. “It thinks I’m its mom.”

  “Well, yes, it saw you first and imprinted—”

  His voice was strained. “Colin, it thinks I’m its mom.”

  That reaction gave me pause. My plan had been to stun and run, but Joey—who, I reminded myself, had grown up with a horse under him and didn’t automatically expect every animal he encountered to try to bite his head off—was, dare I say it, bonding with the thing crushing his ribcage with its love. I mean, true, the thing in question was a massive lizard—low-scoring in terms of cute and fuzzy—but it was still a hatchling, and it had thrown itself at Joey. A lucky choice, all things considered. Sure, Joey had faced down two faerie queens with an augmented nail gun, but he was, at heart, somewhat tender.

  The look he was giving me at that moment could only be interpreted as a modified version of Can I keep it?

  I sighed and rubbed the corners of my eyes. “It’s going to grow.”

  “It’s all alone, and I think it’s hungry,” he protested between shallow breaths.

  I began to counter that, but I realized it was a lost cause and began to draw upon the magic around me. The dragon, which had fallen asleep on top of Joey, levitated with my enchantment, and I pulled Joey to his feet before moving underneath the hatchling for a closer inspection. “Female. Definitely female.”

  “Good to know,” he said, brushing wet grass off his back.

  “Females go into heat.”

  “Been there, handled that.”

  I tried another tactic. “She’s going to be enormous, kid. Two hundred feet, easily.”

  He didn’t flinch. “I’m guessing there’s somewhere around here that she could be housed, hmm?”

  “I…suppose I could work something up,” I reluctantly admitted.

  “And fed?”

  “Sheep are easy.”

  I dropped the dragon back onto the grass, and Joey folded his arms. “She’s telepathic?”

  “It’s a dragon thing. They’re intelligent, but their mouths aren’t formed for speech. Hey, did I mention the fire breathing? Because that could turn into an adorable little fire-breathing bundle of trouble.”

  “And I can’t just leave her,” he murmured, kneeling beside the beast’s head and resuming his horn rub. “She’ll starve.” He looked up at me and frowned. “Can she understand us?”

  “No,” I replied, squatting on the other side of the dragon. “And I’m going to assume that you haven’t been hiding telepathy from me, yes?” He grunted, and I rested my free hand on the dragon’s head. “This should work, but I make no guarantees.”

  As the new enchantment hit it, the creature’s eyes flew open—in shock, I hoped, not pain—and Joey made shushing noises until its eyes focused on him. “It’s okay, little girl, you’re safe,” he soothed in his drawled version of Fae, stroking her face.

  The dragon, to whom everything was still new, seemed nonplussed by his words. Mama?

  Joey paused, then slowly exhaled. “I’m sorry, girl, but your mama’s not here. She’s gone. I don’t know where she is.”

  I didn’t know it was possible to read anguish in a dragon’s face.

  Mama? she asked again. The thought was tinged with panic, and her eyes bored into Joey’s, as if waiting for an explanation that made sense.

  “Don’t you worry,” he assured the hatchling, and wrapped his arms around her head and neck. “I’m going to take care of you. You can come home with me, and I’ll get you a nice bed—”

  The dragon’s rumbling stomach silenced him, and she whimpered.

  “It’s okay, you’re hungry,” he said, trying to console her. “We’ll fix that.” He looked at me expectantly, and a dead, skinned sheep appeared at his feet.

  “Pre-cooked,” I said, watching him examine the corpse. “See
if she’ll take it.”

  The dragon looked around at the sudden smell of charred meat, then spied the sheep in the dirt and dove for it. Joey jumped back in time to avoid the juice splatter as the dragon attacked its meal with inch-long teeth, and I shrugged. “And that answers that.”

  He stayed within the dragon’s sight as she ate. When the sheep was little more than bones, she wiped her face on the damp grass, burped, and rubbed up against him. Mama?

  “Joey?” he suggested.

  The dragon looked at him and snorted contentedly. Joey.

  “My lord? Are you…well?”

  I groaned, rolled over, and found a dark blob blocking the sunlight that was streaming annoyingly through the windows to the left of my bed. Two blinks resolved the blob into Valerius, the captain of my guard, who was staring down at me with concern. “I’m fine,” I muttered, darkening the windows to near-opacity. “Long night. What time—”

  “About an hour after dawn, my lord.”

  I ran back the clock. “Then I went to sleep an hour ago. Is anything pressing?”

  He offered a one-shouldered shrug. “Nothing that can’t be rescheduled. Your brother—”

  “Which one?” I mumbled through a yawn, pushing the blankets back.

  Valerius had the grace to say nothing about the grass clinging to my feet or littering the bed. “Lord Doran, my lord. He sent a messenger to beg an audience.”

  “He can rot.” I scratched my ribs, felt something askance, and plucked a leaf off my shirt. “Anything else?”

  “Not yet, to my knowledge. I could check,” he offered, but I waved it away.

  “Save it. I’ll eat first. Bathe, maybe.” I caught a whiff of my shirt. “No, bathe first. Definitely a bath. Hold down the fort, will you?” I said, heading for the door.

  “Consider it…held?”

  I looked back at Valerius, whose smooth, glamourless face belied his youth in Rome—a senator’s faerie bastard who had made his way over the border long before my time. That was the extent of what he’d told me of his history before Faerie—he hadn’t even offered me his full name—but I did him the courtesy of not prying. I knew too well the parts of my own past best left unvisited. “Idiomatic. Just make sure no one sneaks in to stab me, hmm?”