Chapter Twenty Four #2
The queen stumbles back. Not from fear, but from weakness. Her certainty is thinning, her story wobbling. And I know with sudden, startling clarity that she is strong only while everyone else obeys.
I grin so wide my cheeks hurt. “You need the rules,” I declare.
She goes still. “No,” she whispers.
“Yes, you do.” I slide one leg over, and before anyone can stop me, I launch myself off Theo’s horse.
“Daphne!” four voices roar.
I hit the grass badly, roll, and come back up with leaves in my hair and absolutely no dignity, but I’m upright and still have my face, so who’s winning? Me.
Theo swears behind me. Nash is on the ground a heartbeat later, stalking toward me with murder in his eyes that is definitely not aimed at the queen.
“Back on the horse,” he growls.
“No.”
“Do not test me right now.”
“I’m rewriting a mad monarch. Give me a tempo before you go all alpha on me.”
He swipes a hand down his face.
The queen stares at me as if I’ve grown a second head instead of losing it as she wishes. “You dare come before me on foot?”
She’s beginning to not make sense, and that’s saying something given I exist in chaos. “Honestly, I fell with intention. Plus, I’m sure you’ll agree that my feet are favorable to the face-eating horses.”
I plant my boots and spread my hands. The air hums. The roses tremble. The soldiers stop.
“You are a role,” I say.
“I am the Queen of Hearts.”
“No, that’s a costume with a body count.”
Her face flushes scarlet. “I rule this game.”
“Then I’ll change the game.” And I do. I don’t know how. I have no idea which part of me reaches down into the roots of the field and yanks, but something gives.
The arches burst from the ground and whirl into the sky. The card soldiers flatten, then fold themselves into paper birds that flap wildly away. The flamingo mallet squawks and pecks the queen’s foot. She drops it with a yelp and it takes off over the walls in a riot of pink feathers.
The grass beneath us becomes a tiled red-and-white floor. Then a ballroom. Then a throne room. Then a lake reflecting stars. Every split tempo a new setting, every blink a different possibility, as if the story can’t settle because I won’t let it pin me down.
The queen presses her hands against her temples. “Stop this. Stop. Stop!” She shrinks. Not in height, but in presence. Red wisps escape her ears and nostrils. Her crown slips sideways. Her cheeks hollow. Her voice loses that horrible scraping edge and becomes thin.
The more I refuse her role, the less she can hold hers.
“New rule,” I say, and the world goes silent. “No more games where people lose their heads.” The queen gasps. “No more power built on fear.” She clutches her chest. “No more stories that demand blood to keep going.”
Something tears. Not cloth. Not flesh. The narrative. I feel the great ripping seam splitting wide beneath the skin of the world.
The queen staggers, her eyes wide. “What are you?”
That’s the question of the annus. I tilt my head. “Annoyed. Do you accept your new fate?”
She slices her hand through the air. “Never.”
“Then what follows is on you.”
She screams. Red light explodes from her body. Not blood. Not fire. Rose petals. Thousands of them bursting outward in a violent, beautiful storm. They lash across my face and hair, hot and perfumed.
Then she’s gone. No corpse. No crown. No dramatic final speech. Just a spinning column of red petals that lifts into the air and rains down over the ruined field.
For a tempo, no one moves. One petal lands on my nose, another on my tongue. I spit it out. “Well, that’s concerning.”
The world rushes back in. Nash is there first, hands gripping my arms hard enough to bruise. Hart at my right. Malachi to my left. Theo behind me a second later, his palm flattening between my shoulders like he’s checking if I’m solid and real and not about to blow away into decorative flora.
“What did you do?” Nash demands.
“I don’t know.”
“That isn’t a real answer.”
“It’s the only one I have.” My hands are shaking.
No, not shaking. Jittering. Power races under my skin in wild little sparks.
My teeth buzz. My heart pounds too fast, too hard, like it’s trying to outrun my body.
If I reached out right now, I think I could knock down the sky, turn the castle inside out, or convince the roses to sing flirty songs.
I swallow.
“Daphne?” Theo’s voice is lower. Closer. Worried.
“I feel weird.”
“That isn’t reassuring,” Hart says.
“It isn’t reassuring to be me either right now.”
Malachi brushes petals out of my hair, his face pale. “You rewrote her.”
“Or unraveled her,” Genie says faintly. He hovers upside down for some reason, spectacles crooked, like he’s forgotten how gravity works. “Hard to tell. It was spectacular either way.”
Around us, the last of the petals settle over the field. The card guards are gone. The hedgehogs are gone. Even the tiled madness of the croquet pitch fades, grass pushing back through the illusion until it looks like an ordinary stretch of lawn with entirely too many roses.
Hart turns slowly, scanning the walls, the gates, the shadows. “Tell me she’s dead.”
Genie winces. “That would be neat. This was not neat.”
Of course, it wasn’t. Nothing with me ever is.
Nash’s thumb presses to the inside of my wrist, checking my pulse. “Too fast.”
“I noticed.”
Theo bends to murmur in my ear, “Can you sit on the horse?”
I laugh. It comes out too sharp, too bright. “I could probably sit on the moon.”
No one laughs. Tough crowd. Also concerning.
I press a hand to my chest. Instead of dissipating, the power ricochets inside me, too big for my bones. The field. The queen. The rules. I changed them. I changed her. A thrill skates through me, wild and wrong and magnificent.
Oh, I understand now why people go power-mad. It hums like a second pulse.
“Daphne, look at me.” Nash’s voice cuts through the buzz. I do. His eyes are dark with worry, anger, and a touch of something almost fearful. “Stay with us.”
I tilt my head. “I am with you.”
“No. Here.” He taps my wrist, my throat, my chest. “Here.”
I inhale. Exhale. Try to gather myself back inside my skin. The petals lift an inch off the ground, then two, circling my boots in a red spiral.
“Oh no,” I whisper.
Malachi looks down. “That can’t be normal.”
“No kidding.”
Hart swears. Theo’s arm locks around my waist before my knees can buckle or I can accidentally ascend.
The petals whip faster. The torches lining the courtyard flare high enough to lick the night, and somewhere deep in the castle, a bell tolls. Once. Twice. Then over and over.
Genie pales. “You’ve been felt.”
That sounds rude. “By who?” I ask, though I suspect.
“The others.”
The Idols. Of course. Because apparently vaporizing a tyrannical queen into a floral weather event is not something one does quietly. “I guess the traveling actor cover isn’t going to work,” I mutter. Pity. I had plans for Hart in a tutu.
Nash looks toward the castle. “We move. Now.”
Theo scoops me up before I can protest and swings me back onto his horse. I’m too wired to be embarrassed by the ease of it, too jittery to do more than clutch the pommel and try not to vibrate off the saddle.
Hart mounts first, with blood on his boot and rose petals in his hair. Malachi follows, still looking at me like I might split open and reveal a second, worse Daphne. Nash lingers only long enough to catch my gaze.
“What?” I ask.
His jaw flexes. “Next time you decide to change the rules of existence, give me warning.”
“I didn’t have warning.”
“Then steal some.”
That almost makes me smile. Almost. Because the bells keep ringing, the castle doors are opening, and under my skin, power crackles like trapped lightning and I don’t know if it’s fading or building.
Theo gathers the reins. “Hold on.”
I twist to look back at the red petals scattered over the grass. At the place where the Queen of Hearts stood, certain and cruel until I told the story no. And the thought that comes next is not sensible or safe. It is bright and sharp and terrifyingly easy.
If I can do that to a queen… What else can I rewrite?