The Queen's Opal: A Stone Bearers Novel (Book One)

  THE QUEEN’S OPAL

  A Stone Bearers Novel: Book One

  © 2017 Jacque Stevens

  sjacquebooks.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission.

  The Team

  Cover Art: Manthos Lappas

  Interior Art: Bethany Jerome

  Map: Maria Gandolfo | RenflowerGrapx

  Dev/Sub Edits: Mandi Diaz/ Mollie Traver

  Copy Edits: Suzi Retzlaff

  Final Proofreading: Judy Zweifel

  Formatting: Polgarus Studio

  A special thank you to my Beta Readers: JoLyn, Rachel, Jessica, Kendra, Caitlin, Dale, LeAnn, Michelle, Tamara, Josh, Ryan, Fred, Donna, Christine, Laura, Julie, David, Vickie, Bethany, Bridgette, Taylor, & Alex.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  To receive a free short story, early review copies of upcoming novels, and other extras, please visit me at sjacquebooks.com and join my email list.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This is my first book.

  Some very smart people in the crowd might protest and say that I have other books already published. They are correct (and I will totally let you go read those books first if you haven’t already), but I wrote this one first. Then I wrote another book and wrote this book again. Then I wrote another book and wrote this one again. I did that so many times and got so much help along the way that it’s impossible to thank them all (though I did try).

  I terrorized the masses with my darling elves until they finally won a few people over, but the first person I need to thank is my sister. Thank you for sharing your world with me. Thank you for stepping aside when your other responsibilities took over so I could share it with everyone else. And even more, thank you for loving it when the first book came out—a twisted version of your world that may have been nothing like you intended.

  The elves were always mine. The bearers were hers. But I think they are even better when you smash them all together.

  We’ll see if you agree.

  Table of Contents

  MAP

  PROLOGUE

  PART I: CURSED CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  PART II: HAUNTED CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  PART III: HEALED CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

  PROLOGUE

  FALBERAIN WAS CALLING.

  The pull of her ancestral home was so strong, Saylee could see its glittering mist surrounding her. The fairy realm of Falberain seemed just as her parents had described—a place so full of magic one could see it, breathe it in. A place where illness and death were so foreign that when her parents entered the human world and her father cut his finger, he exclaimed that he was “leaking,” and her mother called the blood “pretty.”

  Saylee laughed at the thought. Her own pretty, gorgeous blood stained the white rocks under her. Hilarious.

  But Alester wasn’t laughing. The human wizard pressed the green stone into her hand again, shaking her arm in a desperate attempt to rouse her from her fevered dreams. His violet eyes hovered over her like fresh berries in spring. They were gorgeous, too. Her hand brushed his cheek, feeling the stubble of his shaven face. A human face. Oh, how Marryll hated it. Did that make her love it more? She had always been such a spiteful little thing.

  Another giggle bubbled from her throat, coating her tongue with the tang of blood.

  That made Alester more upset. “Saylee, you have to heal yourself.”

  “Keet!” The phoenix, currently the size of a sparrow, squawked his agreement beside them.

  Saylee shook her head. She couldn’t heal herself, not here. Her brother had stabbed her after luring them into one of the only places where her magic wouldn’t work. Besides, her magic didn’t heal, it restored things to a former existence—what would that do to the life growing within her?

  The baby. Her focus sharpened at the thought. Mouikki, the seer, had promised her a strong son, but Saylee hadn’t felt the baby stir since the sword had pierced her through. Darkness and nonsense visions clouded her recent memory, detaching her from the pain.

  What if he . . . ?

  Her breath hitched. The chill of the wind and frozen ground swept through her veins. “Where is he?”

  “Who?” Alester glanced behind him before understanding dawned in his eyes. “The baby? He’s fine.” The wizard shifted so she could see the answer for herself. “Mouikki has him. We brought you both outside. You can heal yourself now.”

  “Oh.” Saylee settled back on the rock, watching the seer cradle her son a few yards away. The blue sky surrounding them and the green stone glowing in her hand confirmed Alester’s words, but she still didn’t try to heal herself. “It won’t do any good. I failed. I can’t kill my brother. Marryll will never let me near him again.” The demons he had summoned would destroy everything.

  The wind moaned and broke against the rocks. Alester hesitated long enough to confirm her words. “We’ll worry about that later. Right now—”

  “Right now, we need to protect our people.” They couldn’t waste time coming up with another plan. She looked at Alester through her amber hair, long curls matted with blood and sweat. “Will you do it?”

  Alester pulled away. His cloak fell around him, blocking him off like a wall.

  The phoenix also shook his head, but arguing with the bird would be useless. Saylee focused solely on her human companion. “Alester, even if I wanted to heal myself, I’m not sure Atriea would let me.” Or rather, Saylee couldn’t bring herself to ask after all she had done to fail her goddess. Even Garrad, Alester’s cousin and the current leader of the Bearer Council, had seen things better than she. He had told her that Marryll could no longer be reasoned with. Just like she saw the past and Mouikki saw the future, Garrad had the irritating habit of being right about these kinds of things. “We must do this before my death means nothing,” she said. “Alester?”

  He nodded without looking at her.

  Saylee turned her head. “Mouikki?”

  “Right here.” The dark-skinned islander stepped up the rocks with the swaddled baby in his arms. A sleeping sea snake draped his shoulders and the bracer fastened to his left forearm holding a red stone marked him as the Bearer of Destiny. Bearers showed few signs of aging—his hair had thinned, but the rest of him was the same as the day she met him in the temple to their gods so many years ago. “The baby is fine and the drow have retreated. For now.”

  Saylee tried not to look at the child. Then she might lose her nerve entirely. Others woul
d have to raise her son, perhaps be called mother in her place. She only needed to know one thing.

  “Will it last long enough? Long enough for our people to unite and face him when I could not?” The words caught in a sharp tremor of pain, but there was no reason to explain more.

  They had discussed the spell already, a final resort if their other efforts to contain the threat failed.

  And failed, they had.

  Mouikki’s brown eyes flashed red to match the stone in his bracer, and he dropped his head with a shudder. Whatever he saw in the future, it wasn’t all pleasant. But he nodded. “Yes. If you do this, the magic will be held by your bloodline until your heir leaves the forest, ready to face him again.”

  That was a mercy, then. One last chance for redemption. “I’m ready.”

  And, strangely, she was. Her parents had longed to leave the peace of the fairy realm, have a grand adventure. That decision—reckless and naïve—brought them more pain than they could have possibly imagined, but also more joy. Saylee also enjoyed much of the human world in which she had been born, but as the mist of Falberain drew nearer, she felt almost excited.

  Who wouldn’t want to go to a place of fairies where things were called into being by a simple thought? A place where her father, the first of her family to die, was already waiting? And where she wouldn’t have to deal with the blood and death around her, confident she had done her part to bring it to an end.

  Really, her coming fate seemed an easier choice than others she had borne.

  Falberain was calling.

  Saylee reached for Alester, ready to embrace it all.

  PART I:

  CURSED

  CHAPTER 1

  A BOOK LAY open on the branch in front of Drynn. Its words spelled out a path to another world, another adventure far from his forest home. In the northern crags and mountain ranges, dorrans worked in their mines against a backdrop of foreign races. They fought off hosts of demons ranging from imps to ifrits. New treasures were discovered. Stable boys became kings. Magic and damsels and so much food their stomachs must burst—the dorran histories contained stories much more exciting than the elven ones.

  And the humans were so wild, so chaotic. The dorrans might have written this history, but every new adventure had a human at its head—eating and kissing and fighting in an endless spiral of heroes and villains. Nothing stopped them. Illnesses and injuries shortened their lives, but the humans kept finding new ways to survive. Healing, but not the kind Drynn knew.

  If an elf got hurt, they rested and got better. No one needed to help them to heal. At least, that was how it was supposed to work. That was how it worked for the elves in the forest except for one. But if a human could help another human to heal, maybe Drynn could help another elf.

  If only he could figure out how the humans had done it.

  In this history, a human character had fallen close to death. Drynn pulled the book toward his nose, waiting for the final pages to reveal the humans’ most effective healing agent. He flipped the page, then glared. There was that word again, mocking him, runes so old even the elders in the library didn’t seem to know what they meant. Maybe a stone? Dorrans loved talking about stones, but this word seemed different. Special.

  Drynn took out his graphite stick, nestled behind the long point of his ear, and copied the line onto his parchment. He would figure it out eventually. If he saw the same word enough times in context, he could—

  “Drynn!”

  Drynn jerked at the sound, inadvertently smudging the line, and a bird took flight.

  His elder brother, Tayvin, sprang to the branch next to him, landing in a crouch to scan the neighboring treetops. “What are you doing?”

  Drynn spared one final glance at his work before rolling up his parchment. “Nothing, I guess.” It had been ruined anyway. He would have to start over.

  “Come to the arena, then. Everyone’s there, and we can practice fencing.”

  Again? Tayvin had earned his blade as a forest ranger that morning after spending all week participating in the trials. It seemed even accomplishing his lifelong goal couldn’t slow Tayvin’s training regimen, or his insistence that Drynn and the rest of their friends train along with him. Couldn’t Tayvin spend his last week home resting like everyone else?

  “Andver’s not practicing with you?” Drynn asked instead.

  Tayvin shrugged and scratched at the nape of his neck. His copper hair had once brushed his shoulders, but it had been shaved up the sides with the remainder knotted in one bunch to designate him a man and a ranger, just as his blade did. His tunic and leggings also had the darker shades the rangers favored, the transformation so seamless it seemed he had worn them his whole life. “He’s still bitter about our last match. That, and he says it’s his duty to keep the visiting maids company—give them something to remember before all of us leave.”

  Tayvin laughed at his friend’s antics, and a dozen more excuses occurred to Drynn to avoid the tiresome sport. It was getting late, and they hadn’t visited their mother for hours. More importantly, Drynn didn’t want to, and now that Tayvin had earned his blade, Drynn shouldn’t have to. But he stowed his things in his pack and followed after his brother without a word.

  The two elves swung from the branch toward the ground, lightly touching the surrounding tree trunks to break up the thirty-foot drop. Their boots silently sank into the soft dirt.

  The smell of rain filled the air. Shadows lengthened in the waning light as they circled through the crowds of elves and ribbon-topped trees—decorated for the Spring Celebration.

  Andver leaned against the fence encircling the practice arena, his red hair tied like a ranger and a new sword on his back, laughing with a gaggle of young elven maidens. He turned at Tayvin and Drynn’s approach. “You found him, then? Where was he hiding this time?”

  “I wasn’t hiding.” Drynn said the words, but he didn’t think anyone heard him as the girls greeted Tayvin in a great chorus, and Andver continued talking.

  “I’ll bet after we leave that kid becomes a complete recluse, buried in his books and whatever else. It’s just not natural, and I don’t think it’s healthy, either.” Andver had a habit of speaking as if Drynn wasn’t there—or as if he was too young and stupid to understand.

  Practicing his own habit of pretending Andver didn’t exist in return, Drynn turned his back and set his bag by the wood-paneled fence to climb into the arena after Tayvin.

  “Leave it alone, Andver.” Tayvin flipped a practice sword in the air, catching the wooden blade and handing it to Drynn hilt first. “He’s out here now, isn’t he? Now you can sit back and gossip with the maids all you want.”

  “What else am I going to do? It’s a holiday, I’m tired, and I already got my sword. Also, you’re insane! Completely out of your tree!” Andver’s green eyes tightened into a glare. “I think you broke my arm in the last bout. Of course I want to talk to the maids who are nice to me.”

  Tayvin laughed. “You love me!”

  “Bah!” Andver waved them off with his clearly unbroken arm and returned his attention without a bit of shame to the young maids with their long skirts and free-hanging curls.

  Andver never had a filter, but Tayvin seemed to prefer it that way. Everyone else was too nice, too quick to agree with their High Prince.

  Maybe Drynn was too. He still didn’t want to be here, but yet here he was.

  Drynn pushed back his shoulder-length hair and fixed his stance, holding out the sword with both hands to face his brother, boots digging into the wood chips at his feet.

  “One of you count us off, all right?” Tayvin glanced over his shoulder.

  Several of the girls obliged him at once. “One, two . . .” They set off giggling again.

  Drynn’s eyes shifted after the sound. Didn’t the maids get bored standing there? None of them seemed the type to practice fencing themselves. Still, a group of them became instantly available whenever his brother did something impressive, gi
ggling away.

  The maids hunted after Tayvin’s title and good looks as if it were some sport. Andver happily sorted through the leftovers, but Drynn hated it. The maids were always forcing him into awkward conversations and asking questions he had no answers for. How should he know if Tayvin liked this girl or that girl? Brunettes or redheads? Blue eyes or green?

  It wasn’t like Drynn cared to ask Tayvin those questions himself.

  Thwack!

  Drynn fumbled his sword, barely blocking Tayvin’s opening thrust. Gray paint chipped off the wooden blade. Why did they bother to paint the wood? The paint came off so quickly and he wasn’t sure where it came from in the first place.

  Another thing he would have to look up—

  Air rushed by Drynn’s ear as Tayvin’s sword swept past. Drynn jumped back, landing perched on the fence post behind him. Tayvin frowned.

  Drynn tried to concentrate, fixing his eyes on Tayvin’s blade. It swung from the right, going for Drynn’s feet. He leapt over his brother, but Tayvin arced around to meet him.

  Drynn jerked back his sword to block the blow. Too late. Wood dug into his chest as Tayvin pressed forward. Drynn stumbled and his knee hit the dirt and wood chips.

  The girls screamed Tayvin’s praises, but he shook his head as he lowered his wooden sword. “Dr-ynn.” His exasperated tone made it seem more than one syllable. “You’re not paying attention. And you’re so stiff. Doing a drill is one thing, but in a match, you have to loosen up and take a few risks—adapt to whatever happens and have fun with it.”

  Drynn stood and studied the half-crescent indentions on the ground. Fencing was not fun, the matches just as repetitive and dull as the drills. Drynn went through the motions, let Tayvin hit him repeatedly. His well-rehearsed body found ways to respond without his notice at times, but he could never muster any enthusiasm for the sport. Indifference veered closer and closer toward loathing with every forced encounter.