Chapter 49
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
The king observed me, his eyes drifting down my body and back up to my swollen face. “You’re a bit of a runt for a queen.” His voice was loud, carrying—meant to be heard. And the crowd burst into laughter.
I just stared at him. This was not meant to be a two-way conversation.
“Must be the Unseelie are truly desperate, to set a diadem on the head of a woman no bigger than a child.” His gloved fingers tapped the arms of the throne.
“And look what’s come of it. You conjure a little green flame and run straight into the heart of our kingdom.
Right into a nest of swords. You’ve forgotten your place, haven’t you? ”
He didn’t know who I was. He didn’t know I had grown up here.
The crowd went on jeering. My single functioning eye lowered to the dagger on his lap.
He followed my gaze. He dared not touch the dagger; I wondered who had delivered the pillow it sat on. “It’s a fine offering you’ve brought me, Carys. Will you now beg for your life and the lives of your consort and second?”
The sun beat down on my scalp, and my veins ran hot with fire. Humans could not be cowed, and they so loved to gloat. My gaze lifted to him. “That dagger will be your death. And my hand will be around its grip.”
That was me speaking. It was also Carys. It was both of us.
A moment passed. Then his lip curled, a sneer revealing off-white teeth. He curled a hand beside his mouth. “The runt queen claims she will end me.”
Laughter bloomed across the square. Jeers followed.
“Your bluster far exceeds your competence, Carys.” The king’s chin lifted, eyes finding the sky. “Ah, but it is just that time. Phoros is in his prime.”
The jeers subsided, an almost reverent hush slipping over the crowd. And with the silence, ice water spread down my spine. Phoros? What was Rhodric planning—
The guard beside me jerked me upright. He spun me toward the platform where Dorian and Cirevan knelt. The two of them came into sudden view, and a wrenching premonition overcame me. Something terrible was about to be done, and I was going to be made to watch.
The king’s armor clinked as he stood. He stepped off the dais and his boots struck the cobblestones of the square. “After all she has done this day, the runt queen refuses to plead. She refuses to beg for forgiveness, or even for the lives of her closest.”
The crowd’s shouting pressed in like a physical thing, like my ears were being prodded by a hundred fingers. And all I could do was stare at Dorian.
Was it only last night we’d made love?
I turned my face aside. Rough hands clamped my cheeks, forcing me to look. Dorian wrenched at his manacles, and a wild desire to escape this nightmare surged through me. This wasn’t us. It wasn’t our reality.
But those fingers on my face were real. Sobering and real.
“Savagery only begets savagery, Queen Carys,” the king said from somewhere behind me. “Today, you will learn that.”
A gesture must have followed, because the guards standing beside Dorian and Cirevan stepped behind them. Their hands went around their prisoners’ heads, one below the jaw and one flat over the skullcap.
Then they angled their heads up. Up, up, up, until they stared into the sky.
Not just the sky.
The sun.
The sun that sat directly above us.
They couldn’t blink. Their eyes were clamped open by sunlit iron.
“No,” I breathed. I thrashed, but another guard seized my arms. He was twice as big as me, but still I fought.
I had to get to them. How long did they have before their eyes were forever gone? Thirty seconds? How long could a man stare into the sun before he went blind?
A minute, maybe. Perhaps a little longer for a fae.
This was a cruelty I had never conceived of. A fate I couldn’t fathom.
It obliterated pride. It moved my lips before I knew what I was saying.
“Stop, Rhodric.” My voice was ragged, pitiful. “I bend the knee. I bend.”
My words were half lost beneath someone’s screaming. Cirevan. It was Cirevan.
“What is that? She bends?” came the king’s voice. “Louder, please, for all to hear.”
I squeezed my good eye shut and swallowed a sob. I gathered a breath and lifted my chin. “I bend. For gods’ sake, I bend.”
A second passed. Then a chuckle. “She bends. Should we then spare the queen’s lover and her second-in-command?” I heard the clinking of armor as the king turned a half circle. “Will the people show benevolence to the fae murderers?”
Please. Please.
“No,” came the return from the throng. No, and no, and no, again and again like a cacophonous chorus to a badly composed ballad.
Cirevan went on screaming, mouth wide.
But Dorian didn’t move. He didn’t make a noise. He remained like a kneeling statue up there, his perfect throat a column toward the sun.
“The people say no,” King Rhodric said. “And so it is decided.”
No. The answer was no.
No benevolence, no mercy.
Carys’s thought came: I don’t know why I expected more from these people.
I felt it, her disappointment—her attendant fury. It ignited my own.
Anger always began as a seed deep in my belly.
That became a blossom of flame, and from there it threaded its way upward.
It wove itself into the fibers of my lungs, slipped into the ventricles of my heart.
It seeped into my neck, rose into my cheeks.
Before me, my fingers curved into my palms. My one good eye narrowed.
These had been my people. They had been my mother and father and brothers and sisters and nephews and nieces and cousins and neighbors and friends. I had grown up alongside them. I had guarded their high wall. I had loved them, but I never did belong to them.
I was a changeling, a fae.
And humans were a scourge, a parasite. They had encroached on our kingdom for generations. They had kidnapped my lover. They would not stop until they owned everything and everyone.
We fae were fools to allow them to multiply, to spread. We had become complacent in our kingdom, weak in our magic. No more. No more. They wanted to burn my people’s eyes out?
Fuck them. Fuck them all.
The wind was gentle at first. Gentle enough to be a whisper. Gentle enough to be a touch.
It soon picked up.
My eye shut against Cirevan’s screams, against Dorian’s unnerving silence, against the crowd’s cheers and the king’s sneer. I thought only of nature.
The part of me that was Carys knew the Sylvanwild worship of nature. She knew how sacred it was, that it was our sustenance, our lifeblood. To defile nature was to defy the court.
And yet.
These fucking bastards had it coming.
Intent flitted through my head, Carys’s vision of what I could do. I had slit my own fate line, infused my body with the dagger’s magic. Power—so much power—vibrated at my fingertips.
The part of me that was Eurydice had lived despite nature.
I had stood under acid day in and out, under hell on this earth.
I had seen the worst of it. Nature had been my enemy, my master, my whip, and still I had held on.
All of us had held on, clinging to the earth like we were on the edge of a precipice.
I didn’t believe in the sanctity of nature.
Not clean victory.
Not beautiful punishments.
Just survival. Ugly, dirty survival.
Behind me, my palms unclenched, opening toward the sky. It was Carys who felt the anger, but it was I who infused it with intent.
All my life, people had told me male rage was to be feared, soothed—or if not soothed, then avoided. And yet they had never told me the thought that seared through my mind. Carys’s thought, and also my own:
Male rage is anger. Female rage is power.
The wind picked up my hair, blowing it into my face. It took the jeers of the crowd and carried them high, high up toward the clouds.
The clouds were coming. Coming in fast.
Across the forest. Across the lush plains. Over the high wall like it was an inch tall. Thick cumulonimbus rolled toward the square from the cardinal directions, converging like rivers of ink spilling into one enormous cup.
The crowd’s noises changed. Confusion spread.
When the clouds arrived, it was already too late. The sky darkened. Even Phoros could not penetrate this shroud. The anger swelled, the clouds fat and tall and ready.
I raised my face, made a promise to the sky:
Give me this, and I will trust only in you.
Only in nature’s power. Only in my own.
My hands clenched, sudden and tight. The sky opened and rain fell on the Kingdom of the Plains like no rain had ever fallen or would ever fall.
The first drops hit the cobblestone with a hiss. All around the stones hissed, and so did the iron binding my wrists.
Iron, even sunlit iron, could not stand up to acid.
The screams began. My eye opened, and above me I glimpsed endless roil. The clouds seemed to fight, to press against one another as they released their endless bounty.
The rain hit my face, and my lips curled. It stung, but it didn’t yet bite. Sylvanwild skin had always been less fragile.
My face lowered. With one jerk of my wrists, I separated the hissing, eroding chain binding my manacles.
Around me, chaos had overtaken the square. People ran. My eye sought out the dais. The king was surrounded by guard, but that didn’t matter. All that mattered was—
The dagger. It lay on the stones, toppled off its pillow, abandoned. It shone brighter now than it had under the sunlight. A faint blue mist rose from it.
I stood. The guard who’d been at my back had long ago disappeared into the crowd. The acid poured around me, a deluge, but I kept my eyes on the king.
Five guard had lifted their shields above them in a makeshift metal covering and were hustling him out of the square with quick, short steps.
I ran, boots skidding over the stones, and I slid to the ground where the dagger lay. I snatched it up, fingers tightening over its grip. I thrust myself up, boots seeking purchase until I was upright and running.
The screams around me had become pure agony: a man stumbling past, shielding his head with hands flaying to the inner layers of skin; another crouched under a stone awning, the rain kicking up from the stones beneath him and shredding his clothing.
I avoided the platform; if I looked at Dorian, I might lose my will. I might see his eyes, burned and blind. I might crumple to his side and not rise again. But I, Eury, would never again crumple.
I trust only in you.
Now that the dagger was in my hand, it had only one true home. Ice and spite pooled in my palm, and I fixed my eye on King Rhodric.
The entourage did not move fast; keeping up the shield wall to the sky was not easy when the king himself had devolved into screaming. They passed beneath the square’s arch just as I closed the distance.
I slid my dagger into the gap between the first guard’s armor and helmet.
Blade met sinew and artery. He wavered, then dropped.
The second guard went down the same way.
The third and the fourth I hamstrung, the dagger sliding through the backs of their knees.
They fell, as did their shields. The fifth turned toward me in time for me to shove the dagger’s point up under his chin.
He fell, and I turned.
The king had grabbed up one of the shields and lifted it over his head. Already the acid had created grooves in his shining sunlit armor. He unsheathed his sword with his free hand and held it pointed at me. “Away, fucking witch!”
I stood under the rain, dagger in hand. Finally, he’d called me a fitting name.
I came forward, knocking the sword aside. I leapt on him, and we hit the ground together. He lost his hold on the sword, and I thrust his shield arm aside. I straddled him, breathing hard.
His eyes were wide, the sclera bright white.
I gripped his horned helm and pulled it off his head. The rain hissed against his bald scalp, eager to do its work.
I leaned close as he screamed, struggled, movement that meant nothing. I leveled the dagger, watching the panic on his face.
“Your kingdom will remember this day until the end of its days.”
With one stroke, I slit his throat.