In Shadow and Death

002

A taunting month had leisurely excused itself through the affluent estate's warded gates, proving enervating and purposeless.

Merikh had hardly learned a thing, other than the obvious, as Tamlin coddled himself in the devastated gallery, roaring his treachery to the hollow room and defacing Feyre Archeron's imposing paintings with those abominable claws, inconsolable and savage as his loyal emissary mumbled his pity.

She had spent the bulk of her useless stay fluctuated between the charm of the manor's beguiling library and returning back to her irascible King twice a week, only to leave with the strident evidence of his disappointment.

She had poised herself elegantly upon a treen chair, a cavernous emptiness masticating internally, her iris' swelling with a deserted murk. Merikh refrained from wincing as the latest bruise surfaced along the curve of her lower back, yellow and suffocating, roaring it's defiance beneath her airless gown.

She shifted forward to evade the intolerable contact, her somber face an habitual garland of peril and her spine as hardened as steel, ever the epitome of jarring wrath.

Whatever sublime enhancement the High Priestess wore boastfully was significantly overshadowed by Merikh's intolerance to listen to a single word that came from that quaint, conniving mouth of hers.

With covetous hair that coursed like an addictive river of molten gold, streaming bewitchingly beneath her pale hood, Ianthe sat daintily across from a nettled Merikh, her ostentatious tattoos puckered as she furrowed a pair of primed brows.

Merikh all but rolled her eyes at the obvious Priestess, disinterestedly fading farther into the uncomfortable timber as she watched the woman bat her sultry lashes at the stone King once again, "Keep it up, Ianthe, we might actually get somewhere." Merikh droned irritably, shaped nails hollowing a tedious rhythm upon the chair arm, a melodic boredom encasing the congress.

The Priestess bristled nervously, deigning to ignore the impertinent remark. The king hummed, and Merikh merely raised a brow at the bold ignorance, "What do you mean to tell me, Ianthe." He inquired neutrally, vast hands encasing an emblazoned goblet to ground his dissatisfaction.

Merikh had took the liberty of wandering through Ianthe's slothful shields earlier, unsurprising to discover the utter disregard for Merikh yet the sycophantic requirement to satisfy her king. Though the Priestess' internal innuendo had painted Merikh as nothing but an incompetent whore, and not at all the lethal weapon she had been honed into.

Not that she cared, let the conspiring shrew think what she wanted.

Ianthe cleared a dainty throat, of some bullshit no doubt, and levelled her spine to bury the trepidation that charmingly filled Merikh's nose. "Feyre Archeron, your working alongside Tamlin as means to retrieve the lost bride?" She treaded, her hands delicately folded on her lap of pale silk.

The King's brows raised pryingly, and one glance into Ianthe's mind had Merikh fumbling straight back out, the obsequious need turning lecherous. "And I don't suppose you'll be going to fetch her for me, yourself?" He mused cynically, his erect brows the only indication of his heed.

The willowy Priestess chuckled a nervous sigh, slender fingers blundering over themselves for stability, "Not necessarily," She forbade, an anomalously blasphemous grin contorting her fair features as she countered the mediocre pair, "But you have the people and power to do as you will with my inside information."

The King waved a bored and exasperated hand for the brag to continue her particulars.

Ianthe squandered no time before she laid bare the very foundations of Feyre Archeron's private life, keeping that malevolent smirk on her face while she did it. From her life as a beggarly mortal, to the plight of her trauma from Under the Mountain, the Priestess stripped her lost friend bare before the King and his inferior.