Chapter 431 A Queen Saves Herself. Obviously.

Onyx’s head emerged from the blanket. He chirped once, bright and questioning, checking on his person.

“I am fine,” Bellatrix said. She picked him up. Settled him on her lap. His purring resumed immediately, the relief of a dragon whose person had returned and whose person smelled like violence and victory. “There was a man. There was smoke. The man is asleep now. We are leaving.”

Avalon emerged from his blanket, looked at Bellatrix, and climbed into her lap beside Onyx.

The dragon who had been too shy to approach the orphan children without a palm introduction had just voluntarily climbed into the lap of a woman who smelled like she had recently mauled a person, and the climbing was the climbing of a creature who had chosen his pack and his pack was a queen and a tuxedoed dragon and an attendant with blankets.

Bellatrix looked down at two baby dragons in her lap.

“Petra.”

“Your Grace.”

“When we return to the castle, we are having a very large glass of wine and we are telling no one about this. The mage, the shifting, the clawing. None of it.”

“Of course, Your Grace.”

“If Tiberon asks why we are late, the road was muddy.”

“Understood, Your Grace.”

The carriage began to move.

Her wolf settled back into her chest. Satisfied. Ready to wait another few years.

Bellatrix patted Onyx’s head.

“I still have it,” she said to the carriage.

Petra did not argue. Petra had just watched a queen tackle a dark mage and knock him unconscious in under four seconds. Petra was never going to argue with Bellatrix Drakenfell again.

✦✦✦

TEN MINUTES LATER

Behind the carriage, a portal tore open on the eastern road and Archibald came through it at a speed that his knees were going to invoice him for tomorrow.

Archibald was too old for emergency portal deployments. He was too old for combat formations. He was too old for every goddamn thing happening today, and yet here he was, because the Crown Prince had said “find her” with a face that made “no” a career-ending answer, and Archibald’s career was the only thing his knees hadn’t fucking quit on yet.

Four mages followed. Combat-ready. Wards up. Hands lit with gold light that painted the tree line in sharp, moving shadows. They fanned out in a tactical spread that covered the road in both directions, scanning for threats, scanning for dark magic, scanning for the queen whose absence had put fear on the face of a king who did not do fear.

Archibald adjusted his spectacles. Scanned the road. Processed the scene.

The dark smoke had dissipated to a thin haze that clung to the ground like morning fog with commitment issues.

Someone had deployed a dark Fae mage screen on the king’s road, and the someone was either the bravest son of a bitch on the continent or the stupidest. Archibald was leaning toward stupid, because anyone who set a trap on Bellatrix Drakenfell’s route home had clearly never met the woman.

The residual mage signature was fading, its anchor points collapsed, the screen that had been deployed already degrading into ambient noise that his wards registered as spent rather than active.

He looked left. Empty road. Fading haze. No carriage.

He looked right.

A man was lying face-down on the road.

Archibald approached. The four mages closed formation around him, hands still lit, eyes still scanning, because the man on the ground could have been bait and the bait could have been attached to a trap and the trap could have been attached to something worse.

The man was alive. Unconscious. His cloak was pooled around him in the specific configuration of fabric that had lost its dramatic properties when its owner lost consciousness. His face was turned to the side, and the face had four parallel claw marks running from his forehead to his jaw, deep enough to bleed, precise enough to scar, and carrying the unmistakable signature of a wolf’s front paw applied at velocity.

He had been mauled recently. The blood was fresh. The swelling was active. The expression frozen on the unconscious face was the expression of a man who had been in the middle of saying something and had been interrupted by a wolf who did not care what the something was.

Archibald knelt. Examined the wounds. Examined the residual dark magic clinging to the man’s cloak. Examined the road around the body for tracks.

Wolf prints. Large. Heading toward the body from the west, which was the direction of the Eastmoor Orphanage road. The prints arrived, stopped at the body, and did not continue, which meant the wolf had shifted back to human form at this location, which meant the wolf had shifted specifically to deal with this man and had shifted back when the dealing was complete.

The prints were large.

Archibald looked at the prints. Looked at the unconscious mage. Looked at the road, where carriage tracks continued westward toward Drakenfell at a pace that the wheel spacing suggested was considerably faster than the pace of arrival.

He stood. Adjusted his spectacles again, because the spectacles needed adjusting when his brain needed processing time, and his brain was currently processing the conclusion that the Queen of Drakenfell had encountered a dark mage on a forest road and had handled the encounter personally, physically, and with her claws.

No distress signal. No call for help. No waiting for the rescue party that four mages and one wheezing senior mage had scrambled through a portal to provide. She had handled her shit.

He turned to the nearest mage. “Bind him. Full suppression wards. Transport him to the castle for interrogation.”

“And the queen, sir?”

Archibald looked west. The carriage tracks were heading home. The pace was brisk. The queen was alive, unharmed, and approximately ten minutes ahead of them, which meant she had dealt with the threat, returned to her carriage, and resumed her journey without waiting for the rescue that had been dispatched to save her.

“The queen,” Archibald said, removing his spectacles and cleaning them on his robe, “does not appear to require our assistance.”

The understatement of the century. The queen had not required their assistance the way a hurricane does not require a gentle breeze.

He put his spectacles back on.

“Bind the mage. Search the road for additional hostiles. I will report to the king.”

The report was going to be interesting. Archibald had delivered hundreds of intelligence briefings to Tiberon Drakenfell over the course of his career. He had reported troop movements, enemy positions, assassination attempts, and diplomatic crises. He had never reported that the king’s wife had clawed a dark mage unconscious on a forest road.

He was going to need to adjust his spectacles several more times before delivering this one.