Caffeine and Magix

(part 1) (part 2) (part 3). (Part 4) (part 5) (part 6) (part 7) (part 8)

Baron Ramsey knows a secret.

It is a very good position to be in, to be a noble and to know an important secret. The base of the aristocracy’s power comes from secrets after all and knowing one that many others don’t  means he holds a special power. A different power. An important power.

Baron Ramsey subtly pulls his collar away from his neck as he’s led down the long, ornate hall to the audience chamber. He can feel a bead of sweat just shy of his hairline and he hopes it doesn’t roll down his temple at the wrong moment. The knight leading him to the King and Queen has a hand on the silver hilt of his sword. He doesn’t look back at the Baron, but Baron Ramsey can feel his attention regardless. Like a flock of birds looking down from the trees as you pass underneath.

Knowing a secret is a very good thing, he reminds himself. He dabs away the bead of sweat a beat before the knight opens the doors the audience chamber. He most likely has only been called to discuss a new item the Queen wants. Something that he who spends so much time abroad could find for her. It is a common occurrence. That is why he takes pains to never let her find him at home.

“Baron David Ramsey,” the knight announces. He steps smartly to the side and bows without ever once looking at the occupants of the room. “Your majesties.”

Baron David Ramsey. His name curls inside of his chest and settles like a band around his lungs. When he was a boy, his father took him to meet the Queen and King. His father said it was only natural to feel anxious and frightened in their presence. Natural and right, even. But now he can feel the unnaturalness in it and he struggles to take the first step forward. He could be crushed by their attention alone.

For our Cinder, he thinks and watches his feet carry him forward to kneel before the King and Queen.

The heavy, wood doors swing shut, sealing him alone inside.

“Rise, Baron,” the Queen says. Her voice is like the ocean. Trickling and light until the syllables collide into each other like waves. Then he can hear the depth of it, the power in it.

He rises and finally looks up at the thrones.

The Queen is draped in purple. Ribbons of the finest silk are braided into her hair, ranging from violet to lilac. She is sitting upright, her hands placed carefully on the arms of the chair so he can see the length and sharpness of her lavender nails.

Baron Ramsey’s heart beats faster, like a rabbit, when he sees the Queen. But it stops in its tracks when he sees the King.

The King isn’t seated on his throne. He is standing a step behind the Queen, his hands resting on the hilt of a sheathed sword that he’s using like a cane. He is dressed entirely in black except for a single piece of amethyst embedded in his obsidian crown.

He is not pretending to be a co-ruler right now. He is showing what he really is. The Queen’s one and only personal knight.

They know, the Baron thinks. He sways on the spot. They know I know.

“Welcome home, Baron David Ramsey,” the Queen says. She smiles and her teeth are astonishingly sharp. The King seems out of proportion behind her, his limbs a little too long and his eyes a little too deep set. The Queen laughs and it sounds like bells. “Welcome home to the Unseelie Court.”

Knowing a secret is a very good thing…until it’s no longer a secret at all.

——–.

Baron Ramsey is not a clever man. He used to think he was. Oh! The folly of youth. He’d been determined to reclaim the noble prestige his father had lost and had spent many years searching for the right thing to leverage into a higher position. Trade deals, a new variety of crops, attempting to gain protection from one of the Kingdom’s three dukedoms. He tried it all to no avail.

Then he went into the West Mountains.

He went to find a diamond mine. Journals from his ancestors spoke of treasure to the West. The entries never specified where to the west, but David Ramsey did not have many options. They did not have land of their own to mine and he did not want to rent it from the dukedoms which had rejected his service. So he took some money and his father’s disappointment west.

He did not come back with sacks full of diamonds.

He came back with a wife.

“I will marry you,” she said the day he proposed. Her hair was so pale blonde that it nearly blended in with the snow swirling around them. Her eyes the blue of a clear winter sky seemed to see through him. “But it will cost you. There is always a cost when you meet someone like me.”

And love-blind he said, “Whatever the cost, I will pay it. I love you and I want to be with you for the rest of our lives.”

Her lips thinned. She had already told him her years were numbered. Her lifespan slipped through an injury from the attack that had decimated her land. It would never fully heal. Did it make his love more shallow than hers that he knew how many years he must dedicate to her? She would be giving him the rest of her life. He would be giving her a mere years.

But, love-blind as well, she said, “The cost is this: you will never be a Duke or a Marquis or even nobility with land. You will stay a landless Baron. There will never be plenty in your coffers just as there will never be nothing in them. You must do nothing to attract attention to yourself or to me. We must live in solitude.”

“But we will live together,” he said. He felt the conviction in his heart and he got down onto one knee, uncaring of the ice on the ground. He held her hand between two of his. “My time with you will be all the treasure I need. If I have your attention, I need no other. Let me love you. Please.”

“You must never say please,” she chided gently. But she let him slip his mother’s ring onto her finger and she followed him down the mountain to the lush greenery below.

She gathered her power carefully in her chest when she stepped over the boundary between her land and this new one. Her Court lay dead behind her, but it did not mean the Unseelie Court would be forgiving enough to let her live. She wanted to live. She wanted to live with this human whose ancestors had once been her enemy and whose rulers were her enemy now. He did not hold their nature. He was human and perfect despite it.

For a while, they were happy. Truly they were. She supported him in finding new connections beyond the Kingdom to finance them. They soothed each other when his father passed. He had become like a father to her too. And when they had their daughter, she was still happy.

Something changed. She didn’t know what (or did not want to consider it). Her husband began to travel more and, having to take care of their child, she could not go with him. More than once she wondered if he still loved her. He had promised to let their time together be his treasure, but she did not feel treasured watching him disappear down the road alone. She spent hours staring in the direction he left, paralyzed by the fear of asking. Did he still love her? Did he still want to be with her?

Her daughter’s eyes were always on her. She had too much to lose.

She did not ask.

It wasn’t until she found their child killing ants in the garden with a sneer twisting her perfect face that she was confronted with the fact her absent husband might secretly hold part of her enemy’s nature after all. She felt it pulsing from their child like the night sky overtaking the horizon. It was only then that she realized what the Unseelie Court had become.

“They were dying like we were,” she told the Baron. He was coming home less and less. The cost he paid to be with her was driving a wedge between them. He wanted to provide more  for their daughter and her restrictions kept him from trading within the boundary of the Kingdom. “The Queen held less morals than I did when I ruled my lands. She did not keep the Court pure. She let her powers spread thin outside of the Inner Court in hopes that one kernel of it would spark and ignite stronger than ever.”

“What are you saying?” The Baron asked.

“Our Cinder,” she said in a trembling voice. She watched out the window as their daughter ran after butterflies in the garden. “She has a spark of the Unseelie Queen.” From you. “And she will inherit my powers as well. She will be everything they want, David, she will be beyond what they want—"

“We’re safe,” the Baron interrupted. Conversation about the Queen made him uncomfortable these days. He did not tell his wife, but he had taken a contract with the Queen who had noticed of his foreign trade. She paid better than other kingdoms for harmless things. Jewels and fabric in ever shade of purple he could find. He avoided his wife’s eyes lest she discover his duplicity. “Your barriers are strong. They won’t find us here. They won’t find our Cinder.”

“You’re not listening,” she cried.

“You are worrying over matters that can’t reach us,” he soothed and that was the end of that.

But she knew he was wrong. He was human and did not understand the nature of the fae as she did. She had already been teaching her daughter how to behave like a fae. Now, she knew, she needed to teach her daughter how to avoid becoming the sort of fae who would attract attention.

I must teach her to be kind, she thought, holding her daughter to her chest that night. Memories of her Court screaming crowded in from all side. The look on her daughter’s face while she killed the ants seemed darker in her memory. Kindness will thwart this darker nature. I only have three years left. Only three years.

It would not be enough time.

[——-

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