Chapter 23
twenty-three
The sorceress was dying.
What the fuck-what the fuck-what the fuck did I do?!
I was on my knees before I knew it, hands on her face, trying to somehow suck in the silvery white magic that was slipping inside her mouth—and my God, it was in her eyes, too.
The thin tendrils of magic were touching her fucking eyeballs while I watched, and I couldn’t stop it.
The magic didn’t respond to me at all—it was consuming her, and she was choking, and I couldn’t take it back.
Hands on my shoulders. A scream got stuck in my throat when I was pulled back with too much strength. Even though my entire body felt numb, my legs still held me somehow, even when Maera let me go.
And I was going to tell her to get away from me, that I had to help this sorcerer before she fucking died for real—but before I screamed the words at the top of my lungs again, I realized that none of the sorcerers around that woman were screaming.
None of the sorcerers around her looked afraid or pissed off—on the contrary.
They were all smiling, and they’d all raised their hands to the sky, and they were all looking up at the canopy too.
All of them, together. The entire fucking forest full of sorcerers with their heads back and their hands up.
I paused. Looked back at Lyall, and he looked just as confused as me. Just as clueless.
Until the sorceress spoke.
“Where the moon’s eye watches and the bridge stands alone, the lost crown awaits in the court with no throne.”
Every word, every letter wrote itself in my mind, imprinted itself in my brain in big bright letters, and there it would remain for the rest of my life.
Just like the words of the Chronicler in Virlorn.
Just like the words of the Seer of Shadows in the Midnight Palace.
A reading.
Somebody screamed. Somebody laughed.
The sorceress who’d been about to choke on my magic suddenly breathed in like she’d just come out of water, and all the magic that had been covering her body moved inside her open mouth, disappeared down her throat right in front of our eyes.
Two sorcerers were beside her, holding her arms so she didn’t fall when she lowered her head, blinked, breathed, and looked at me.
I couldn’t move now if I tried.
The next moment, the woman passed out.
She passed out and fell against the sorceress to her side, who then slowly, gently, lowered her all the way to the ground. They all looked at me. They all smiled at me—they wouldn’t fucking stop.
“Nilah,” Maera whispered, her ice-cold fingers wrapping around my wrist.
“What the fuck,” I said breathlessly because I had no better words in mind, but she was looking behind us.
She was looking at Lyall.
He’d stepped back, eyes on me, his face pale, his eyes nearly empty.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” I said through gritted teeth, though I was terrified. The hole in the ground between us was still there, the silvery white magic now almost completely faded.
“That was a reading,” Lyall said.
My God, it was.
“Don’t try to run, Lyall,” I said and stepped closer. Maera let go of my wrist. “Don’t—”
“How did you do it?” Lyall cut me off, angry now, his voice shaking. “How would you or any sorcerer know about a lost heir?!”
The lost heir. The Unseelie royal.
Fucking hell, that sorceress was talking about the Unseelie royal.
“I told you before, I spoke to the Council,” I said, moving closer, hands up to show him that I wasn’t going to attack him, not unless he tried anything funny again. “Lyall, we need to talk. The curse is real, and we need to find the Unseelie heir together. Let’s just…let’s talk, okay?”
I said it as calmly as I could. I meant every word from the bottom of my heart. I was willing to overlook everything he’d done, everything he’d said, because this was bigger than us.
But even after everything, I was still surprised when his hands lit up and his magic shot toward me in the blink of an eye.
Lyall attacked me.
My magic raged, and I was going to explode in it once more, tear the ground apart, take his breath out of his lungs. At least I would try.
But I never got the chance.
The wall of shadows that rose from the crack on the ground between us stopped the bright golden ball of light coming for me. It was fast, too fast, and my hands were still lit up, and people screamed, but I was in control somehow. I held myself back because all my thoughts had come to a halt.
The darkness. The feel of it. The intensity—it was familiar. My instincts knew it. My skin felt it before the thought even occurred to me.
Rune was here. This was his magic, his shadows.
My heart slowed down the beating. My eyes refused to blink.
There were screams and there was movement, and I planned to jump headfirst into the shadows to get to the other side just when they disappeared.
The wall of darkness was gone like it had never been there to begin with, and Rune was on the other side of the hole, in his hand a silver sword, the tip of it against the golden blade of the one Lyall held.
Sorcerers behind Rune, hands raised, whispers leaving their lips.
Seelie soldiers with their golden weapons drawn, ready to attack.
Rune’s eyes locked on mine for just a second before he looked at Lyall again, and I breathed deeply.
He was really here. Alive and well and pissed the hell off—but he was here.
So many things ran through my mind at once. “Rune, no,” I said, hands raised as I stepped forward, because he couldn’t kill Lyall. He couldn’t—we’d all be doomed.
But the magic came at him before Rune could even look at me again.
Sorcerers attacked, three at the same time, one throwing liquid at Rune’s back, others raw magic, invisible to my eyes—until it crashed onto the darkness that rose around Rune’s side, attached still to the shadows slipping out of his fingertips.
He still held his sword in his other hand, a shield of shadows with the other, and the sorcerers were chanting louder.
I couldn’t even remember how I ran, how I jumped, just that I was in front of those sorcerers before they threw their spells and their potions at Rune again, screaming, “Stop!”
They did.
My hands were raised, palms burning with the light of my magic, and it hurt, but I was getting used to it, I thought. Behind me, the wall of darkness that had risen around Rune disappeared, and now we were back to back, him facing Lyall, and me facing the sorcerers.
The sorcerers who were livid all of the sudden. They still had their hands up and looked at me like I was the one who’d lost it.
“Stop it! Do not attack,” I said—both to them and to Rune.
“The Midnight King is not welcome in Mysthaven,” a sorceress said, looking down at me with a sneer as she was at least a head taller than me.
“We keep our end of the treaty—we stay off their land, and they stay off ours,” said the man behind her, his blue eyes wild as he looked behind me, probably at Rune’s head.
“The Midnight army cannot cross into Mysthaven! This is an attack!” a woman called from the crowd of sorcerers, and I couldn’t even see her face from the one standing in front of me.
“He’s here for me,” I said, and before any of them could reply, Rune spoke.
“No Midnight soldier has crossed your border, sorcerer.”
The sound of his voice sent shivers up and down my body.
“I’m not here as a king—only as a fae,” he added, and the sorcerers seemed confused as they exchanged looks.
“If you attack, I will stop you,” I said, and the magic burned bright in my hands. They saw it, but I didn’t think they were afraid.
Even so, they stepped back. Lowered their arms. Looked at me like they were expecting me to go on, give them a better answer or explanation.
“Not as a king, you say, huh, bastard?”
Lyall’s voice, on the other hand, made me flinch.
“Rune, do not kill him,” I said, moving until my back was pressed to his.
My God, just to feel the heat of him there brought me back to life. Just to know that we were touching erased everything that had been weighing me down since I last saw him. My knees were stronger, my magic more intense. Simply because he was there.
“I’m not going to kill him,” Rune said, and I could have sworn he was smiling. I heard it in his voice.
Laughter—Lyall. “You’re a bastard. You’re no king, Rune. You don’t look like a king and you don’t behave like a king,” he spit.
“And yet the Midnight throne submitted to me,” Rune calmly said. “Just because I won’t kill you, Lyall, it doesn’t mean I won’t hurt you. I will—and I will take great pleasure in it.”
“Rune,” I whispered, slowly turning to the side to better see him—and all the other sorcerers surrounding us.
Fucking hell, how did we get to this point again? Because I had enraged sorcerers on my left, Rune and Lyall, followed by a small army on the right, and ahead was Maera with four shifted wolves beside her, watching us, waiting…
“There’s no need to attack anyone,” I said, my mouth dry as a desert. “We can sit down and we can talk. We need to talk—calmly, all of us.”
Lyall and Rune didn’t move an inch, the tips of their swords still touching, silver on gold.
For a second there, the entire forest held its breath with us.
Then Lyall said, “Until next time, bastard.” He had never said that word with more hatred than he did now.
He’d never moved faster—that I’d seen—than when he turned around and sheathed his sword, and his red cape moved all about him like a living thing rushing to shield him.
His soldiers stepped to the sides to make way for him, then moved in perfect formation backward to shield his back while they kept their eyes on us and their swords raised still.
They were leaving.
My God, Lyall was leaving, and even though a part of me thought I should try to stop him, get him to sit down and talk about the curse and the Unseelie heir, I bit my tongue and let them walk away, retreat deeper into the forest until they were nothing but shadows in the distance.