Page 14 of Consort's Glory
Continuing in a low, hard voice, he said, “You were nearly killed tonight. If anything had gone differently, you would have died in that house. The threat against a healer is bad enough, but the insult to me is utterly unacceptable. If I can’t protect the healers in my territory, how can I be expected to protect anyone?”
The fine hair on the back of her neck prickled. Margot hadn’t considered the wider implications of the explosion, but he was right.
Theodore had only been the sovereign for eight months, after all. His power was far from settled.
Delilah Solbourne’s abdication had been shockingly smooth, considering how young her little brother was and the rumors of the Families opposition to his ascension. Even Margot held her breath for the first few weeks after the abdication. It felt like the whole world waited for a challenge, for blood to spill across the video feeds.
It didn’t occur to her that the explosion, if it was a bomb, might have been a targeted attack intended to shake the public’s confidence in the sovereign. It made a sick kind of sense. If healers were supposed to be sacred, their spaces open to all, Theodore’s inability to keep them safe would be a damning indication of his lack of control over his territory.
The fact that the healer in question was a Goode, even one intentionally kept out of the public eye, could escalate things even further.
In the UTA, perception of power was everything. If Theodore couldn’t prove to the world that he could hold his territory, someone else would.
Margot paled. “But we don’t know if it was a bomb, do we? This whole thing could just be one big coincidence.”
“Our squad picked up the trace scents of both accelerant and explosives.”
Kaz’s voice was a smooth glide against her senses, low and smoky. Orcs were renowned for their lovely voices, and Margot might have sighed with homesickness at the sound of such familiar richness if he hadn’t thrown cold water all over her paper-thin hopes.
Theodore’s eyes, the slitted pupils expanded to swallow nearly all of his dark irises, never wavered from her face. “This was done deliberately. Whether it was intended as a blow to my power or not is irrelevant. The outcome is the same.”
Margot swallowed around the lump in her throat. “And what will that be?”
“I’m going to hunt down the perpetrators until I have them under my claws.” The flash of headlights as another car passed illuminated the savage set of his handsome features. Steadily, with the conviction of a man unused to being told no, he continued, “And I am not letting you out of my sight.”
* * *
In theory, the Protectorate was a federation comprised of every prominent elvish family, each with their own sovereign territory and seat of power.
The elves controlled the west coast as well as Arizona and most of New Mexico. Working as a unit, the elves were a merciless, efficient machine — they invested heavily in finance and technology, meticulously maintained infrastructure, and kept their secrets locked up tight amongst themselves. What information about elvish private lives and anatomy existed was unreliable at best, leaving them plenty of room to craft an image that was as ruthless as it was outlandish.
In practice, of course, everyone knew that the Solbournes were at the top of the precipitous food chain. The Solbournes held the title of Sovereign for the past three generations and ran San Francisco from their fortified island just off of the coast, where the best and brightest technological and magical advancements were made. Rumor had it that they kept a stranglehold on power by maintaining control over the treasury and rarely seen Protectorate military.
No one outside of the elvish hierarchy could prove it, though. For all that the elves took good care of their citizens by granting them guaranteed basic income, housing, and food, the elves never, ever broke rank.
Which was why it was extraordinary in the extreme that Margot Goode, a witch, was about to step foot in Solbourne Tower.
A single road connected Treasure Island to the rest of the world. From her position in the backseat of the town car, Margot peered out the window as they passed through the heavily fortified gate that blocked that connection from unwanted visitors. She held her breath as the tires glided smoothly over the last feet of the bridge and then onto the island itself.
Her wide-eyed gaze held fast to the looming skyscraper she had only ever seen cutting a harsh shape against the horizon.
The Tower and the elvish-made island it sat on was iconic — more iconic than the Golden Gate. More than the UTA Congress. More than the brutal, haunting structure of the Dragon Roost on Drummond Island.
It stood as a monument to the entirety of elvish power, a building both brutal and beautiful that reminded all who saw it that elves were the masters of their domain.
Her eyes traced the familiar black stone of the skyscraper, the carved gold lines, illuminated by hidden lights, that ran like sigils through the darkness; the shape that hearkened back to the stone monoliths humans once carved for the elvish Sovereigns of old.
There were so many more of them then,she mused, chilled to her core, back when we bowed and scraped and hoped we wouldn’t end up on their feast tables.
Margot turned her head to glance back toward the jagged line of San Francisco’s twinkling skyline, now barred to her by a swath of blue-green water that was both ice-cold and filled with predators — only some of which she could name off-hand.
Even if she could swim that far, and even if the cold or the predators didn’t get her, Margot knew that the encroaching fog, thick as brushed wool, would obscure and confuse until she simply lost the ability to keep her head above water.
Trapped, her mind helpfully supplied her. You’re trapped.
She was without the security of her Coven, her protective layer of scent blockers wearing off by the minute, and about to enter an elvish stronghold from which there would be no escape.
Staring up at the rapidly approaching monolith, Margot was curiously calm despite the clear knowledge that she would probably not make it out of the Tower alive.
