The Fox’s Tale

Alastair led me into the throne room, where an anxious Ellery and an irate Esmeralda were waiting. Ellery ran to my side and hugged me.

“Are you hurt? What did they do to you?”

“I’m fine,” I muttered, brushing past her. “Come on, Alastair needs to tell us something.”

“Well?” Esmeralda demanded. “What is to be done, Alastair?”

Alastair rubbed his hands together as he watched me and Ellery settle ourselves on our thrones. Esmeralda gestured for him to speak once we were seated.

“Your majesty, I know you have expressed a desire for the Crown Princess to wait, but under the circumstances we really have no other recourse. I have consulted the texts and her marking ceremony will be held on the next full moon, which is the day after tomorrow.”

“What?” Ellery shot out of her throne. “You can’t be serious.”

“I’m deadly serious, your highness.” Alastair smirked at her. “For your safety, for the safety of the realm, and to secure the line of succession you will be marked and impregnated in front of the entire Court. In chains if necessary. After all, we don’t want any more mistakes do we?”

Ellery turned to me; frantic, but I ignored her. Instead I rose and went to stand next to Alastair.

“Even your Other is in agreement. His base instincts have made him an easily obtained ally. Don’t pout, it’s beneath you. Besides, we all know that he regularly fucks you. What difference does an audience make?”

I grinned, but didn’t say anything.

“Alexander,” she whimpered.

“Be quiet, Ellery,” Esmeralda admonished. “We all have to do things we don’t want to do for the good of the realm. You’ll survive.”

Alastair took a moment to crow. “You see?” He licked his lips. “You need to accept reality, little girl. You will obey, just as your grandmother does. Just how your Other does. Isn’t that right, Alexander?”

“Yes. I obey the true power in the Unseelie Realm.” With that I grabbed Alastair by his throat and slammed him into the ground. “But that power is not you.”

Alastair squirmed and flailed his hands trying to get free, but I just gripped his neck tighter. “How?” he gasped. “How did you break my spell?” I throttled him further.

“Which one? The one you placed on me as a kid or the one you tried to place on me earlier today?” I yanked some of his hair out by the roots and it turned to dust.

“I never placed a spell on you as a child!” he gasped.

“Oh really? We know that you are behind this Alastair. We know what you are. Give me one good reason I shouldn’t rip out your lying tongue right now.”

When all he did was gurgle I continued. “We know that Rowan wasn’t your Other. Ellery is exactly as the Divinities intended her to be. Show this fucker who you are, Princess!”

Ellery wore a grin on her face that would have scared me to death if it had been directed at me. Her wings were out and she reached towards him, closed her hands and began to pull them back towards her.

Alastair started to writhe, and then his body began to smoke as Ellery stripped him of all his stolen powers and glamours. I looked down expecting an ugly shriveled creature, but Alastair looked almost the same.

He was shorter of course, much shorter. Before he’d been just shy of six feet, but now he was only about 5’2”, if that. His skin had a waxy sheen to it, his eyes were smaller and sunken into his face, and his ears and nose were bigger, but not comically so. Aside from that he was unchanged. His scent, however, was strong enough to gag me.

“Not what you were expecting?” he snarled and I could see his teeth were all jagged points

“No, not exactly.” He tried to get up, but I pushed him down again.

“Alastair.” Esmeralda’s voice shook with emotion as she approached. “I trusted you.”

He winced. “Yes, well, we all have secrets don’t we?” he gasped out before averting his eyes from her.

“How?” she demanded. “Why?”

I relaxed my grip enough to allow him to speak.

“Why?” he asked, incredulous. “You stand there in your finery, infused with enough magic to choke the life out of half the creatures on this rock, surrounded by love, and you have the audacity to ask me why? Why?! Who wouldn’t risk everything for a taste of that? You have no clue about what our lives are like or what we endure. All you know is propaganda and lies.”

His voice had turned into a rasping whine, but I couldn’t tell if that was a result of my grip on his throat or how it naturally sounded.

“The books weren’t wrong about you being short,” I couldn’t resist pointing that out.

He hissed and tried to get up again, but I didn’t let him. “You would be short of stature too if your kind had been forced to live in the dark holes of the realms, hidden from everyone else because they hated you for no good reason.”

Ellery snorted. “No good reason? Do you or do you not steal your magic from other supernatural beings?”

“Yes, we steal magic, we steal a lot of things, but only from those who have some to spare. Rob from the overfed, not the starving. That is the goblin code.”

“Your kind used to eat your victims!”

Alastair chuckled. “Like my kind were the only ones! Like the Incorruptibles didn’t make meals of their victims for ages. Like there aren’t dozens of beings who kill and defile puny humans.”

Esmeralda shook her head in dismay and Alastair growled. “Don’t look at me like that. As if the Unseelie themselves haven’t committed untold horrors. As if the humans you’re so keen to protect don’t commit atrocities upon each other.”

Esmeralda dashed forward and grabbed him by his hair, forcing him to look up at her. “My daughter is dead because of you!”

“No!” Alastair’s eyes went wide with alarm. “No, my queen, no. I…I loved Rowan. I wanted to marry her. I confess, I did put the spells on her and Jones, because he was far too interested in her as a little boy, for all the good it did me, but I had nothing to do with her death!”

Tears filled his eyes and his lower lip trembled. “It, her death,” he gasped out as the tears began to stream down his face, “it almost destroyed me. I never would have harmed her or sent anyone to do it. I was in the temple that night, offering prayers and sacrifices to the Divinities so that she’d be safely delivered of her child!”

Esmeralda looked shaken by this piece of information and she let go of his hair. “For what purpose did you hide yourself in my palace, Alastair?”

“Can I be allowed to sit up while I tell you?”

“So you can scuttle away?” asked Ellery. “I don’t think so.”

“I think we can make that allowance.” Lucas appeared beside Esmeralda holding the shackles that they’d used to drag him away. The damage Tarquin had wrought earlier was already almost fully healed. Before I could process what was happening he’d secured them around Alastair’s wrists, ankles and neck, and then shoved him onto his butt.

“Talk.”

Alastair licked his lips and I wrinkled my nose. His tongue was a blackish blue. He sighed.

“My father and King Peregrine made a deal so that some of our kind could infiltrate the royal court and undermine it from within. We were to weaken the royal family and foster distrust throughout the realm so that he could either force House Thorn to break with the Incorruptibles, or so that he could overthrow the monarchy entirely.”

He snorted in derision. “But my father had a different idea. He set about corrupting your parents, to bring out their worst impulses and impair their judgment. Your brother, on the other hand, was already a sadistic brute. I was instructed to,” Alastair looked at the floor.

“I was supposed to seduce you, but by the time I had worked my way into a position at Court where I had that opportunity, you were already in love with someone else.” He glanced up at Lucas.

“I see.” Esmeralda’s voice was cold. “So your friendship was offered only as a ploy to do harm to me and my family.”

Alastair shook his head no so hard and fast I thought he’d pulverize his brain.

“No,” he croaked. “No, it wasn’t like that. When I first came here I thought you deserved it, deserved what was planned. I had been raised to believe that the Unseelie were vapid, spoiled, hedonistic creatures who hoarded power and wealth and abused everyone around them.”

He raised his face to meet Esmeralda’s gaze. “But then I met you, and I saw that while that might be true of some, it was not universally true of the Unseelie. I contemplated confessing everything to you, but I knew that as long as my father was alive and held your father’s confidence that it would be a death sentence for us both. Instead, I did my best to protect you from my father’s machinations.”

“And just who was your father?” she demanded.

“King Roland’s bodyguard.”