The whole time that he’d been offering Jason easy advice and helping him pack he’d never intended to leave with him.
“That stupid son of a bitch,” Jason snapped.
“Oh yeah,” Gunther agreed. He crumpled his cigarette in his hand and then tossed its crushed remains into his mouth. “He could actually get himself killed this time. Damn him.”
“Princess can find him, though, can’t she?” Jason asked.
“Of course. She’s blood of his blood.” Gunther considered Falk’s familiar, then added, “No one at HQ is going to sign off on this, though. If they find out what Henry’s done…”
“No. They can’t know,” Jason agreed.
Gunther fished a phone out of his pocket and began to dial. His toothy expressions were difficult to read, but Jason thought he looked strained or perhaps furtive. Suspicious fear moved through Jason. He tried to sound casual as he asked, “Who are you calling?”
Gunther turned his attention back to Jason.
“My boyfriend. He hates it if I don’t call when I’m going to be late for dinner.” Gunther paused, looked Jason over, then added, “By the way, you’ll probably want to put some pants on.”
Chapter Nine
A stinging salt rain lashed Henry as he raced for the shelter of an overhang. The green-garbed assassins Cethur Greine had sent to retrieve Jason surrounded and led him as they had for the entire day’s journey through archaic portals, across the ragged sea cliffs, and now up through the dim twilight to the white walls of the high king’s citadel.
They sneered at the pelting rain. Their commander—a lustrous-skinned, dark-haired bastard who addressed Henry obsequiously in English but referred to him as miolra, vermin, in his own tongue—caught hold of Henry by the hood of his red sweat jacket.
“You cannot stop here, young prince,” the commander told him in thickly accented English. “We must climb to the parapet wall and cross over to the Hall of the Throne before the King’s Star rises.”
“Why?” Henry asked because Jason would have. He already knew the answer—not that these men would tell him the truth. They planned to murder him under cover of darkness, before word could spread across the Tuatha Dé Dannan Islands that the prince had returned to the sidhe realm.
His armed escorts played at polite only because it suited them not to have to drag him kicking and howling up the high walls before them. And Henry went along because every minute he kept them fooled meant a greater distance for Jason to put between himself and Greine.
Jason might have reached Atlantis by now. Princess would hate the water but love to chase the flying fish.
Overhead lightning cracked at the darkening sky and Henry heard storm waves breaking against the cliffs below.
“You must take part in the ceremony of your father’s coronation.” The commander raised his voice to carry over the sudden crash of thunder. His gaze moved over the glamour of Jason’s face as if he were sizing him up for sandwich meat.
“It would be easier for me to keep pace with you if you removed these bracelets.” Henry held out his wrists, displaying the iron manacles and engraved chains that linked them. The binding spells etched into the iron unnerved him. He’d seen them before, written on leather restraints and a bronze blade. Under any other circumstances Henry would never have submitted to the power of these iron manacles—but he’d needed Greine’s men to take him before Jason woke.
“They are necessary for the ceremony,” the commander informed him.
Yeah, Henry thought to himself. Necessary as a sack when you’re drowning kittens.
The man on Henry’s left—a scarred sidhe who Henry guessed was old enough to just remember the earthly realm—added, almost apologetically, “We couldn’t remove them in any case, my prince. Your father holds the key. You are his to bind or set free.”
“We must move,” the commander stated and he shoved Henry towards a tower of weathered white stairs. Henry climbed and his keepers followed like hungry dogs.
Flurries of wind pelted Henry with rain as he rose to the spectacular heights of the outer parapet. He shuddered in his soaking clothes and swore under his breath. But even so the view before him momentarily absorbed him.
The Tuatha Dé Dannan controlled only a string of verdant islands in all the vastness of the faerie realm, but their audacious defiance of the violent, black sea besieging them testified to the magic at their command.
The high king’s alabaster citadel rose from bare stones and jutted over jagged cliffs like the prow of an immense ship. Its towers shot up as straight as vast masts topped with turrets for crows’ nests. Above every tower the famous storm banners, emblazoned with the high king’s gold crest, billowed in the wind and traced trails through the dark clouds.
Forty years ago, when Henry had last stood on the citadel walls, the high king had held the throne and those storm banners had ensnared the rage of typhoons and hurricanes, raising the entire island so that it sailed across the seas. In the lee of the citadel, the island cities of the Tuatha Dé Dannan, with their exposed fields and golden orchards, had sheltered in perpetual summer.
But now the high king’s storm banners merely dragged wind and drizzle down upon their own towers while the stone galleon of the citadel steadily succumbed to gravity and the sea.
Through the rain and gloom, Henry took in the ocean’s conquests. Young mangroves sprouted up in flooded courtyards and the amphitheatres of the low-lying carnival district had become stagnant lagoons. Beyond the parapet, huge waves crashed and roared like conquering demons as they relentlessly eroded the citadel’s walls.
However, not all the kingdom’s magic foundered. Where plumes of sea spray reached the very heights of the white walls they broke into flights of doves.
“Now there’s a trick I wouldn’t want to see done with rabbits,” Henry commented as he leaned over the alabaster stonework of the parapet. He couldn’t be certain, but he thought for just a moment he’d seen figures down on the ragged rocks.
He edged further out for a better view and his six sidhe guards bristled like alarmed watchdogs. Their spears gleamed bright as lightning flashed over the dark sea. Again the commander caught the hood of Henry’s red sweat jacket.
“Young prince, you must come away from the edge. It is not safe.”
The impulse to show him just how unsafe it was flashed through Henry’s skull, but he resisted. Jason wasn’t likely to elbow a man off the parapet. So not only would it be a damn obvious giveaway but also it would probably result in Henry playing pincushion to five very long ivory spears. And that, in turn, would all too quickly end the entire charade.
“Sorry.” Henry met the commander’s stony gaze as if he were too guileless to recognize the disdain there. “I’ve just never seen anything so majestic,” Henry gushed.
Jason would have been furious at being played like such a chump, but there were advantages to being underestimated by men as well armed and experienced as these ones. And at this point Henry needed every advantage he could get.
The commander accepted his excuse, obviously expecting little of a youth raised by throwback humans too dim to master the simplest spells.
Thunder crashed through the sky.
“We must not keep your father waiting.” The commander nudged him onward. Henry went, shivering and working his frigid, stiff fingers against his shackles as inconspicuously as he could manage. He knew there wasn’t any point; he wasn’t going to get them off, but it wasn’t in his nature to quit. While he wore them he could not retreat into the shade lands; he was trapped here.
Despite Henry’s foot-dragging, they soon reached the broad stone staircase that led down to the wide courtyard of the Hall of the Throne. As they descended, Henry noted the large number of goblin mercenaries standing guard in the shadows of the ornamental flowering trees surrounding the hall.