Deviant (An Iron Fey Fanfiction)

Chapter 3

The glass fell to the table, dark red wine spilling out, the glass rolling off the table and crashing to the ground to shatter into a hundred pieces. The wine that touched the tablecloth bubbled and sizzled, slow columns of steam rising from it. The color suddenly turned a deep black, the consistency looking more like tar than anything else.

Mab had froze in her seat, staring in disbelief at the poisoned liquid. Oberon had much of the same look on his face, though his was borderline absolute rage. Sage and Rowan both looked as if they didn't know quite what to do next. Titania stood, and Lille instinctively turned toward the sound.

She felt the slap like a force of nature, her head snapping to the side so hard she almost fell to the ground. But she held her footing and placed a hand to her cheek, turning to glare at Titania. Her rage finally boiled over and she was speaking before she knew what was happening.

"You want me to go apologize to a satyr who would have raped one of your maidservants had I not stepped in, and now you try to poison one of the Winter Princes at Elysium!"

Titania gave Lille a look that promised the worst torture for her. "Where is the proof that I have poisoned the prince?"

"You wanted him to drink it even though he probably knew it was poisoned!" Lille shot back.

"Do not speak for me, whelp, although I did have a strange feeling about the wine," Ash spoke up.

Lille shrank inside at the tone he used with her. She had just saved his life, and he knew it. He knew he now owed her his life because she'd just saved his, and he hated her for it. Perhaps she should have just let him drink the damn stuff. But that would make her somehow worse than Titania, and Lille was no murderer.

"You will be silent, girl," Titania said darkly, her eyes full of a thousand summer storms.

"Is it true?" Queen Mab's icy voice, quiet so that only those standing near her could hear yet the quietness of it spoke volumes. "Did you try to poison my son?"

Titania was silent. Her jaw worked as if to deny it, but the fey cannot lie. It was enough for Mab. Frost immediately covered every inch of the table, the ground and even the leaves of the trees around them.

"This is Elysium, Titania!" Oberon seethed, seeing his wife's plain answer in her silence and smug look. "Violence is forbidden!"

"Poisoning is not violence, not the usual definition for it. It is a quick and clean way to die," was the Summer Queen's response. Lille could not believe what she was hearing. Had Titania gone mad?

The temperature dropped nearly twenty degrees in the span of five seconds and even Mab's son's looked apprehensive. "I will ask one more time," Mab said, her voice going even quieter. "Did you. Try to poison. My son."

The entire room was silent as the dead and seemed to hold its breath. Titania waited a beat, dramatically staring down Mab with an arrogant look plastered all over her evilly beautiful face. "Yes."

The room exploded in an icy blast of cold. Ice covered the ground, the trees, the walls, the table, even a few of the courtiers. Summer citizens shrieked and fled for cover, most of them slipping on the ice. Lille covered her face to shield it from the blast but lost her footing and slipped, banging her elbow hard on the ice.

Pain shot up her arm and into her shoulder as she looked around frantically, scooting away from the two faery queens. The Winter princes had stepped back, giving their mother space, their hands resting on their swords.

"Titania, you have made an act of war on the Winter Court and all of the Unseelie! You will prepare your army by tomorrow morning and meet us at the Reaping Fields or Winter will storm these lands and decimate everything in it!" Queen Mab roared, making even some denizens of her own court cower.

Lille scooted even farther away, feeling a warm liquid drip down her arm, not needing to look to know it was blood. Movement from her periphery caught her attention and she looked, seeing Prince Sage staring at her. A question flitted across his face and she quickly looked away, bowing her head.

She had saved the life of a Winter prince, which, in most cases would be an act of treason against Summer. But this was Elysium, and at Elysium, violence was forbidden, and since Titania had just admitted she had tried to kill Mab's favorite son, she had ultimately enacted the violence.

Why had she done it? Lille wondered furiously. Why cause another war between Summer and Winter? It had not even been two years since the last one, the one that had taken her father from her. Tears pricked the edges of Lille's vision at the thought of her father. He had been a brave soldier in the Queen's army, yet war had overcome him, in the end.

"Really, Mab, there is no reason to act so irrationally!" Titania was yelling back. "Your son did not drink the wine, so therefore he did not die. There is no need for instant war!"

"You will prepare your army or we will tarnish Summer and turn it to ice," Mab promised. She did not say the two words but the implication was there nonetheless. Turning on a heel, she marched out of the courtyard, her guards and denizens following behind her.