Chapter 47
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
The first archer, a dark-haired woman, stood before me with a supplicant’s calloused palms. I lifted the dagger and set the tip to the thin crease of her fate line. The line of trajectory, of future course. I pressed the tip in, and the blade slid into her skin with terrible ease.
Blood welled. She didn’t wince.
I followed the fate line straight up from the base of her palm. The blood followed, pearling red under the sun, but that soon frosted over. The cut disappeared at the rate at which I’d created it. A cool mist rose between us, and she stared at me through it like she’d seen a god.
I repeated the cut on her other hand, then moved on to the next archer. And the next.
When the last palm was marked, I stepped back with the dagger gripped tight in my hand. At some point my heart had begun to pound. Words came to me I hadn’t expected.
“The magic of Feyreign has always flowed through us,” I said, low. “We are not weak—but we have long forgotten its power. Now I have cut a reminder into your skin. Ice and spite flow through you, now and forever.”
I raised the dagger to my own palm, drew the blade down my fate line. Sharp and sure, painful and glorious. Swirling numbness spiraled up into my wrist, my arm, my neck.
When it hit my head, I sucked in a breath. The numbness sharpened everything with skin-tightening ferocity. Around me, the world bloomed, magic in a thousand colors. The magic of nature—always there, waiting to be drawn.
When I spoke, my voice was guttural, feral.
“Do not fear them. We have always been stronger, always. When you draw the gutstrings of your bows, let fly with the anger of the fucking dead.”
I raised my cut palm and let out a cry that burned my throat raw. It felt like a natural sound, like the earth calling to the sky.
The archers answered, raising their bows, their same cry blending with mine until my vision of them was distorted by tears.
I wasn’t crying. I was furious.
“Cirevan,” I said. “A mount.”
At his call, a roan Sylvanwild stallion was brought around to the tent, wide nostrils flaring, eyes wide; it carried in its heart exactly the heat I wanted in a horse.
I gripped its mane and swung myself onto its back in one motion.
I spun the horse toward the archers, the dagger in my right hand and my left hand tangled in the horse’s mane.
“Get on your mounts and follow. On my mark, let loose.” I paused, and my horse danced under me.
“Do not stop your charge. Whatever else you do, do not stop.”
The archers found their mounts, and I wheeled the horse toward the wall. It loomed high enough to blot the sky. Fae and humans fought below, small as the wooden figurines on the table in my tent. Trebuchets flung boulders—tiny stones, not even half as large as a single brick in the wall.
Our people were dying. They were dying outside that behemoth.
No more.
The archers massed behind me. With a breath out, I pressed my heels into the stallion’s sides. He burst into a trot and passed straight into a gallop, tearing up clods of earth. I leaned low over the horse’s head, wind clawing my hair back.
This was our best and final charge. We couldn’t fail.
The longer I’d been inside Carys’s mind, the more of her had passed into me. And now she thought of the long history. She thought of it like I would remember the past: in snippets, flashes, in bits of story.
For a thousand years we humans and fae had battled, been belittled, pushed back, enslaved…
I pushed it aside. Not now. We were closing in on the wall—passing bodies and burning boulders and broken-up earth—as fast as my eyes could process. We’d neared the battle itself, and I had to give the call.
Not yet. The moment had to be right.
The wall grew and grew like a living thing, and my heart stuttered. Fear entered me, spreading brambles through my chest. Maybe I wasn’t the queen they had wanted. Perhaps I didn’t have the courage, the will.
Then I saw her. The body of a young fae woman, her eyes open to the sky, glassy and wide. She had a hole where her heart should have been, the tamped grass visible through the other side.
Fuck that. Queens weren’t born. They were forged. I had to be her.
The wall grew, blotting out the horizon. My heart thundered, and I waited. Not yet. Not yet.
When we entered the shadow of the wall, out of the sun, the world cooled. Everything darkened. We were in its terrible shade, and this was my moment.
I raised the dagger, pointed it at the human kingdom, and the fae tongue came to my lips.
“Vrekh! Vrekh! Vrekh!”
I screamed the word until my voice went hoarse, and even then I screamed it.
A second passed. Then two. I wondered if my archers were still there, if they had lost their courage—
The first arrows flew over my head, enormous and blinding. They cut through the air in streaks of vicious green, a trail of light racing straight for the wall. For a moment I was Eurydice again, seeing the sky over the southern district lit up. Except this time, I knew what it meant.
Destruction. Absolute and total.
The magic was so immense, the arrows themselves were lost in the comets they created. My eyes watered, the brilliance searing my retina.
This—this is what you asked for.
More arrows followed. Two dozen in all.
For a long, suspended second the world fell quiet as they arced and descended like falling stars. I was riveted, frozen. I had never understood the true power of the fae until this. We had lost so much. More than I had ever known.
Grief and rage filled me. The human kingdom deserved this—this and more.
When the arrows struck the wall, they flared so brightly I almost turned my eyes away. But I forced my gaze onto the sight. I had to see. I had to see the moment.
The wall exploded in green. It exploded in over a dozen spots, all those carefully stacked stones bursting and falling inward. It broke for us, flying and crumbling and revealing its soft innards.
Built by the gods? Their gods had soft hands.
I leaned low over the horse and regripped his mane. With another press of my heels and a scream, I pointed the way with the dagger I’d use to slit the king’s throat from carotid to jugular.
We rode over the rubble of the wall once called impenetrable. The archers thundered behind me on horseback, fae soldiers pouring in on foot. We came like the Unseelie we were, vicious and biting and unputdownable.
Inside, the human guard awaited with sunlit shields raised. Their eyes were round as coins under their iron helms. They were young, eighteen and nineteen and twenty. Children. That thought slid under the waves of my rage.
I led the way, dagger in hand. My legs gripped the stallion as I hewed the guard out of my way, dagger singing.
This was my child, sharp-edged and willing, merciless and unyielding.
Shields were cloven in two. Shoulders were cleaved away.
Heads flew from necks. Arterial blood sprayed red over my mount and armor.
Without their wall, humans were nothing but connective tissue.
As I fought, a low horror thrummed through me.
I was still Eury, still the girl who’d grown up in the Kingdom of Storms. I recognized the general shape of things, the way paths curved around low buildings, the shape of people’s eyes.
These were my people, and they weren’t. I was their murderer, and I wasn’t.
But the power… Carys and I were in agreement on how that felt.
It was glorious.
I had never felt this. Had never known it existed. People always said power was what other people agreed on, but this required no agreement. It was unignorable, ripped from nature with my own two hands. It was my hands.
I pressed us forward, deeper into the breach. I would ride us straight to the middle wall, we would force them to open, and then to the innermost—
My attention caught on the wall ahead. This wasn’t the middle wall; in the Kingdom of Storms, the middle wall had been as tall as the outer. The one before me was two-thirds as tall and half as sturdy. The stonework was crude.
My gaze drifted left and right. Where I had expected to see the side walls barricading this district from the others, there were none. Only the broken outer wall.
There were no districts in the Kingdom of the Plains. Or perhaps there were, but they had not been sectioned off from one another by a wall. Not yet, at least.
This kingdom was far more penetrable, far more vulnerable. Arrogant. It was the arrogance of a thousand years of sunlit iron and dominance that had led to this. One breach and every outer district was lost. So many innocents dead.
A strand of sympathy wove through both of us, Carys and me. I knew why I felt it, but I didn’t understand why she did. She hated humans.
“My queen.” Cirevan rode up beside me, helmet on, mace dripping. “Shall I call the archers to fire on the inner wall?”
The inner wall, not the middle wall. So they truly didn’t have a middle wall.
That sympathetic chord still thrummed inside me. I breathed hard, bloody dagger held tight at my side. Finally, I said, “We force the pig out. Push on to the gatehouse.”
So we pushed on. The first throng of interior guard had been mostly defeated, leaving us with a gap until reinforcements arrived, and only a few intrepid civilians dared fight us. I winced when a man with a hoe barred our path; he was a farmer like my almost-father.
These people were doing what anyone would do. They were protecting what they loved.
But the rage in Carys could not be quelled. Not until the king lay dead and her lover returned to her side. Not until the generations of fae that had been kidnapped, tortured, and killed by humans were spoken for.
So much death. Rivers of fae blood ran through the pages of strife between humans and fae.
Feyreign was an isolationist kingdom, and yet the humans would never stop, would never let us be.
They were parasitic, insatiable. And the fae had held the humans off until the bastards had discovered a weapon.
Sunlit iron.
They had iron deposits, tons of it. And they mined it into thousands of swords, spearheads, arrowheads, shields… then they laid those weapons under the sun and asked for Phoros’s blessing. And it was given.
My gaze sharpened on the battle, on the dead guard and the weapons still held in their hands. Sunlit iron, all of it. Their iron had terrorized us for generations.
Humans were parasitic, but they were also cunning. And we fae had grown complacent over eons, losing our touch with our own power. The greatest queen in the past hundred years could barely snuff a candle with her magic.
No more. The balance would change. It had changed.
When we arrived at the gatehouse, I swicked my dagger clean and sheathed it. Letting go of the grip was a conscious effort, even if my hand felt cold, near-numb.
Cirevan said, “Shall I bring forth the herald?”
I nodded. The herald—a young fae—came forward, and I asked him to extend his bone horn. He did so with uncertain eyes, and I took it up from him. I set the horn to my lips and I rode my horse in a large, restless loop before the gatehouse.
My rage coursed. But I didn’t want more of these people to die.
“King Rhodric,” I said, the horn amplifying my voice until it caromed off the buildings and walls. “Come forth, set your sword against mine. Come forth, defend your people. Come forth, show your face. Or are you too craven to look upon a queen?”
I repeated the words—again, again, again. I trotted my horse outside the gatehouse and declared the king’s cowardice to their sun god until I was certain even the smallest child was embarrassed for his sovereign.
Finally, two shadowed forms appeared atop the wall, one standing and one kneeling. The sun lay behind them, and I squinted up from my horse. I could not make them out, could not…
A cloud passed over the sun. The two forms became clear.
One of the men was the king, his familiar horned iron helmet atop his head and his sunlit iron armor glinting. In his hand an iron chain dangled. I followed the links to the kneeling figure beside him, whose hands were manacled in front of him.
He wore his own iron helm, but this one was different, more like a skullcap. A cruel mechanical device circled his eyes, which were prized so far open they looked perfectly round.
But I knew that form, those hands, those shoulders under the filthy shirt he wore. I knew that jaw, those lips.
It was my lover.
It was Dorian.