Twiceborn Endgame (The Proving Book 3) (3 page)

I nodded. Kitsune were impossible to detect if they wanted to remain hidden. Not even their own mothers could have told them apart from whoever’s face they wore. It was a skill that had allowed me to defeat my mother, the reigning queen, and my sister, both of whom had a lot more resources than I did. Funny how a kitsune on your side tended to even up the odds.

Sadly, I’d also learned that their skills could be put to use in less positive ways, such as pretending to be someone else and then putting a knife through the heart of an unsuspecting victim and kidnapping their son. Definitely a mixed blessing.

However, dwelling on the past wasn’t going to get us anywhere. It certainly wasn’t going to bring Lachie back. I had to focus.

“Do you know of any way to unmask a kitsune?”

Luce had been bound to Alicia the whole time Kasumi was with us, so I hadn’t had the benefit of her considerable experience. I looked hopefully at her, but she shook her head.

“I’ve never had much to do with them. They rarely travel outside Japan. The goblins might know, but you know what goblins are.”

Yep. Unreliable, and liable to charge you a fortune just to tell you the time. After borrowing your watch.

“Well, never mind. We have a coronation to plan.”

One delicately arched eyebrow rose in surprise. “A coronation? What about your new sisters?”

That had been yesterday’s bombshell. Just when I’d thought the proving was over I’d discovered the existence of seven new sisters. Seven more people I’d have to kill if I wanted the throne. No, that wasn’t right. I couldn’t give a rat’s arse about the stupid dragon throne. I hadn’t even known it existed until recently. Seven more people I had to kill if I hoped to ever be left alone to live in peace with my son.

“What about them? As far as I’m concerned, Elizabeth had five queen daughters. We’ve fought it out to see who should succeed her like good little queenlings, and I’m the last one standing. Therefore, the throne is mine. If she chose to lay another clutch of queen eggs later and rear them in secret—and we only have the word of traitors on that; they could be imposters for all we know—then that was her choice. But since she’s dead, as far as I’m concerned any plans she might have had for them die with her.

“I hold the throne, and I refuse to recognise that they have any claim whatsoever.”

Luce’s gaze was cool. “They won’t care if you recognise them or not. You’ll still have to kill them.”

“Perhaps.” I hadn’t given up hope of finding another way. “But I don’t see the point in legitimising their claim by accepting a second proving. Let’s invite the overseas queens and get the damn crown on my head already, before they all decide they want to annex the place. I need to at least appear to be in control.”

“Even if you’re not,” said Dave, coming to remove my empty plate.

I smiled up at him. “
Especially
if I’m not.”

Luce and I spent the next hour going over the arrangements for the coronation. I could get Mac to handle the details for me. She was still feeling guilty about Kasumi impersonating her to attack me, though it was hardly her fault. Giving her something to do would keep her mind occupied. By the time Luce and I had finished, the sky had begun to lighten and the currawongs warbled in the trees.

“Give the prisoners some breakfast, then bring them to the throne room,” I said.

The throne room had had a thorough cleaning since the bloodletting yesterday. Elizabeth’s ostentatious throne had been removed and replaced with a more modest chair. I didn’t care for the dragon assumption of superiority over every other living being—and besides, it was impossible to get the blood completely out of the fabric. It would need to be reupholstered. Greeting guests while seated on the blood of your murdered mother just didn’t seem right, even if the old bitch had deserved it.

My own, very human, mother would probably do some bloodletting of her own if she found out that I’d been keeping Lachie’s miraculous return from the dead from her. I felt terrible that she and my sister both still mourned him, but the idea of making all the necessary explanations of the current situation seemed even more overwhelming than having to take on seven new sisters and the overseas queens combined. Besides, if I told them he was alive I’d have to tell them he was in Jason’s clutches. I wanted to wait until I had him back safe and we could celebrate properly.

Not that there weren’t plenty of other things clamouring for my attention. Like the matter of what to do with Elizabeth’s former household, now eating breakfast in my dungeons. In a normal proving, they would simply serve the new queen once the old one died, but there was nothing normal about what had happened here. Usually the incoming queen didn’t behead the old one. Nor were there usually seven extra claimants nobody had ever heard of before—although I knew some, at least, of Elizabeth’s staff had not only heard of them but had aided in keeping them secret. Loyalty was going to be hard to come by, but I had to know who I could trust.

Garth and Luce joined me as I settled myself on the “throne”, standing one on either side of me like a pair of mismatched bookends. The room was long, enormous by any standards, but big even for this mansion. It had been designed to impress, funnelling guests down its imposing length to cower before the queen on her dais. One side was floor-to-ceiling glass, with French doors opening onto a paved terrace nearly as big as the throne room itself, and offering a view of sparkling blue ocean and a curve of white sand below.

“Ready?” asked Luce.

I nodded, and she signalled a thrall to throw wide the double doors at the far end of the room.

In marched an odd assortment of shifters, their auras glowing in many colours, from the blue of a lone griffin through the greens of the water shifters to the many earth tones of the goblins and other earth shifters. Alicia’s two leshies were among this last group. Dragon red was conspicuously absent.

I looked them over. Some I’d seen before, like Bear, the leshy who’d freed Gideon Thorne yesterday. He scowled in my general direction but didn’t meet my eyes, probably afraid I’d capture his will again. He was lucky I didn’t do worse: Thorne was a powerful dragon, the spymaster of the previous queen. Now, thanks to Bear, he was free to continue his scheming against me.

Others were household staff who hadn’t been involved in the fighting yesterday, several humans among them. In all there were about forty people under the watchful eye of all my new thralls. The shifters wore silver handcuffs to prevent them accessing their powers, and the guards had the whole group covered with assault rifles. The fear in the room was palpable.

I’d be scared too, in their position. Any other dragon would probably fix the problem by telling the guards to open fire. Luckily for them I wasn’t any other dragon.

I rose, drawing every frightened eye in the room. “By right of proving, I am now your queen.” In spite of myself, the words touched something deep within me. Leandra had waited so long to say them. But this wasn’t how she’d dreamed this scene would play out, with her original body lost and her soul twinned to mine.

A few of the prisoners stirred, but no one dared argue.

“I need loyal subjects, not backstabbing traitors.” And definitely no double agents. The battle ahead was going to be hard enough. “Therefore I have an offer for you
.” Special introductory offer! Hurry, last days!
It was Elizabeth’s money I was spending, so I had no problem being generous. “Anyone who wishes to leave my service is free to do so. You will be given a plane ticket to any other domain you name. My servants will see you aboard the plane.”

The expressions on the faces in front of me ranged from incredulous through darkest suspicion all the way to the first glimmerings of hope. The leshy Bear looked frankly disbelieving.

“You’ll let us go?” he said. “Just like that?”

“But my family’s here,” said a voice from the crowd.

“In that case, you face a difficult choice,” I said. “You can arrange for your family to join you overseas, of course, but this domain will be forever off-limits to you. I won’t have you running off to support Thorne and his pretenders to the throne. If you want to oppose me, you’ll have to do it long-distance. Anyone who is found in this domain again will be put to death.”

I put some power into that threat, so it resonated with them. I sure as hell didn’t want to ever make good on it, but they had to believe I’d do it.

“What’s to stop you killing us the minute we say we don’t want to work for you?” Bear objected. Naturally he wouldn’t consider working for me. His head was way too far up Thorne’s backside to change sides now.

I crossed my legs and smiled sweetly. “Nothing, of course. I’m the queen; I can do what I like.”

At least that’s the way it had always worked, with very few exceptions. No wonder dragons were so unpopular. Pack of bloody tyrants.

“Nevertheless, the offer is genuine. You can choose not to believe me, but I warn you, anyone who stays will have to submit to questioning under a compulsion, so I’ll soon find out if you’re lying. And in that case I may not be so lenient. So choose wisely.”

“Well, I’m not staying,” said Bear. He drew himself up to his full willowy height and thrust his chin out, as if daring me to smite him on the spot. For him I could almost wish I was the smiting type. I’d be in a much better position if he hadn’t engineered Thorne’s escape.

Luce gestured him out of the pack, and he marched to one side like Joan of Arc heading for her funeral pyre. I fully expected him, at least, to try sneaking back into the country. His devotion to Thorne’s scheme was strong.

But that was a problem for a future date.

“Who else is joining Bear? Come on, don’t be shy.”

No one moved for a long moment. Finally a goblin crossed to the other side of the room, and his defection set off a chain reaction. Soon there was barely half left, all human except for the two leshies that had been Alicia’s, and a lone selkie woman.

“Corinne!” Bear said to her. “What are you doing?”

She stared straight ahead and said nothing, her cheeks flushed with bright colour, her aura pale and trembling.

“You’ll be sorry when we take this bitch down.”

Garth crossed the floor in quick strides and backhanded him across the face. Bear staggered and threw me a venomous look. Shame looks couldn’t kill. I would have been a lump of dead meat and all his worries would have been over.

“You might have trouble taking anyone down from the other side of the world,” I said mildly. “All of you can give your intended destinations to my security officer. You’ll be locked up until your flights can be arranged.”

I motioned to Garth to take them away.

“You’re lying!” Bear shrieked as he was herded towards the doors. “You’re going to keep us in chains forever.”

Garth hit him again, just for good measure. I probably should have objected, but my dragon side was rather enjoying watching the leshy suffer. Dragons made bad enemies.

When the doors had closed behind them, I turned to the remaining people. It was a smaller group than the one that had left. It didn’t look like I was ever going to win any popularity contests in the domain, at least while there were still any other options for shifters to cling to. Was it really that bad that I was half-human? Clearly other humans didn’t think so. I found it telling that all the humans among Elizabeth’s staff had chosen to stay on. I guess it didn’t make much difference to them which dragon butt sat on the throne. Maybe they even liked the idea that the shifter world was getting so shaken up.

I sent two thralls to bring chairs for my new guests, and waited until they were settled comfortably. Well, “comfortably” probably wasn’t the right word. I could almost smell the fear in the room. They sat rigid in their chairs, bodies stiff with tension, as if they expected me to turn dragon any minute and devour them.

Trying to appear non-threatening, I slumped down in my own chair. “Don’t look so worried. I hardly ever eat people.” All I got were a few sickly smiles. “Okay, let’s get this over with, and then you can all relax. It’s not too late to join the others if you’ve changed your mind.”

Nobody moved, so I called forward the first of the two leshies who’d come with Alicia and Luce yesterday. “Let’s start with you. What’s your name?”

“Yarrow.” His eyes were the green of new grass in spring, and they held my gaze unwaveringly, even as he felt my will invading him.

“That’s an unusual name.”

It was harder to compel a shifter than a human, and the stronger the shifter, the more difficult it became, which was why I’d chosen to leave the humans until last, and start with the shifters while I was still relatively fresh. Plus I wasn’t exactly in top condition after the events of the last few days.

“My mother was an unusual woman.”

Well, there were a few of us around.

“Yesterday I killed your mistress, Alicia. How do you feel about that?”

“Guilty.” His fabulous green eyes stared adoringly at me, completely under my spell. His aura, which was a muddy green like khaki, throbbed in time with my own heartbeat. That wasn’t disconcerting
at all.
He was a very easy subject for compulsion, as if he were eager to join with me.

“Guilty? Why? You couldn’t have saved her.”

He shook his head. “Guilty because I don’t feel bad that she’s dead.”

“Oh? Why’s that?”

“I didn’t like the way she hid behind us and let us take the hits meant for her. As if her life was worth more than ours.”

She’d been a shocking coward, that was true, but such disregard for anyone else’s safety or comfort was hardly peculiar to Alicia—it was pretty standard dragon operating procedure.
I’m all right, Jack, and bugger the lot of you
.

“So why did you work for her?”

“Most of our clan did. We liked the living conditions.”

She’d had an estate in the Blue Mountains that backed onto the bush. Terrible fire hazard, as it turned out, but the wilderness and seclusion were leshy catnip. Up there the only sounds were bellbirds in the trees, the only smells the citrus tang of lemon-scented gum, or the fresh aroma of moist earth after rain. For a forest-loving species like leshies, it was heaven on earth.