Chapter 44
Everly
Aripple of cold swept down my spine just as shouts erupted through the open window. My stomach dropped, panic tightening around my ribs like a vice.
How in the hells were they already here?
I pushed past my mother, heart hammering as I crossed the room in quick, uneven steps. My palms were damp against the window frame when I leaned out to see for myself.
Minutes. A handful of minutes was all it had taken for the world to shift on its axis.
Skaldwings floated in an eerie line above the trees, like a row of silent executioners. Beneath them, pockets of other Unseelie poured out beneath the trees, half- and fully-shifted Lupines and Shadeclaws and Thornharts already prepared for battle.
Before I could reach out to Draven, a spike of rage washed through the bond, intense enough to steal my breath.
Draven, I called toward him, pulse racing.
I’m handling it, Morta Mea, he replied, furious and focused as he sent an image of the Thornharts surrounding him.
He didn’t realize they were at the palace as well.
I pushed the scene outside my window toward him, letting him see the Skaldwings suspended outside the shimmering wards here, far too close. Far too confident.
A rare surge of panic flooded the bond.
The connection severed, and the next thing I felt was a blinding wave of pain. I stumbled back, barely hearing Lumen’s low whine outside the thundering of my heart.
“Everly,” my mother’s hands were on my shoulders, but Batty hissed at her.
I shook off her grip, panic paralyzing my lungs. The ring was pulsating with solid, unrelenting ice.
Draven! I reached for him, finding him after several stilted heartbeats.
They have a shards-damned barrier up, but I will break through it. Stay in our rooms.
I wanted to ask him about Wynnie, to tell him about my mother, but he couldn’t afford a distraction if they had him trapped. Over and over, I saw the memory of the arrow sailing into his skin.
Wynnie had the soldiers to protect her, but how many had gone? Had they reached the village?
Or had they run into the Unseelie, wherever in the shards-blasted-hells they had come from.
I swallowed my panic and sent Draven back an affirmation, focusing my entire furious gaze on my mother.
“What has Vaerin done to Draven?” I hissed.
A shadow passed over my mother’s features, digging like an icicle into my chest.
“They were waiting for him to leave the palace. That was their signal to come here.”
Somewhere beneath the frost that settled over my insides was an even deeper sense of unease. It didn’t make sense that they would find a way to trap Draven, then take the palace they couldn’t possibly want.
There was a reason that most fae kept to their borders, where their mana was strongest. Taking the palace after they slayed the king would gain them nothing.
There was something she wasn’t saying.
“Why would they bother to come here if they already have him trapped somewhere else?” I demanded, even as the fear curdling my insides formed a hazy answer.
She squeezed her eyes shut. “For the Heartstone.”
My stomach dropped so violently it felt like the world tilted beneath me. Shadows rippled under my skin, answering the fear before my mind could catch up.
Batty trilled in my ear, and Lumen leaned against my leg, but for once, they did nothing at all to comfort me.
If the Heartstone was destroyed… A choked sound escaped me, my mind refusing to finish the thought.
“Then take me to him. You can… overpower them, and then Draven can protect the palace.” It was a flimsy hope. I knew that even before she shook her head, but desperation made me ask anyway.
“Even I could not take on entire armies alone,” she said with all the calm I didn’t feel. “You cannot save him now, but I can still save you. I’ve seen enough to know that’s what he would want.”
Fury blossomed from somewhere deep in my soul, spreading like cracks in the ice of all the understanding I had tried to hold on to.
“No,” I spat. “You wouldn’t have had to take on entire armies if you hadn’t been so busy trying to play both sides. We might have had a real chance to prevent this war instead of just running from the destruction of it.”
I read the truth on her face before she could say it, the answer to all the questions I had asked myself. “But you didn’t care about that.”
“They are our enemy,” she said simply.
A huff of air escaped me. That was what it always came down to. They. Enemy.
“I am them!” I gestured to my navy locks and my pale blue eyes.
“No,” she shook her head for emphasis, panic widening her gaze. “You’re a Skaldwing, whether you try to hide from that or not.”
Skaldwing enough to live after the Heartstone died, she meant.
“And why did I have to hide, Mother?” I demanded. “For the sake of the Thane you still play stellari to, even after everything he’s done.”
“Dragons protect their own,” she said, her voice barely audible against the faraway roar of a Frostdrake circling just above the wards.
I let out a scoff. “Is that all it comes down to, time after time? All my life, you’ve pulled the strings, you faced down the Dragon, and sometimes… sometimes, I’m grateful. But you don’t know when to let go and accept that there are things more important than safety, like choices and honesty.”
“Those are things that we did not have the luxury of,” she shot back, “Just like we don’t have the luxury of this conversation right now.”
“No, we don’t.” I stepped back, making my intent clear, even as I realized I had no means to back it up.
Could I risk using my mana, knowing it might kill us both, if the only other option was letting her take me somewhere to wait for everyone I loved to die? Distantly, I felt the force of Draven’s power, raging against the barrier, but the ring had stopped burning for now.
There was still hope. There had to be.
That didn’t stop the bile from rising in my throat.
My mother took a step forward, her hand out in something between a plea and a warning, but I stood my ground. My power flared out, shadows racing across the ground while jagged shards of ice spun from my fingertips.
My knees trembled, but I forced myself to stay standing even as Batty’s jolt surged through my veins. My mother reached out to steady me, but I once again danced out of her reach.
“Maybe you can overpower me, Mother, but to what end?” I challenged her. “Do you think that I would ever forgive you?”
“I think that you would be alive,” she countered.
One by one, images flitted through my head.
Nevara’s dry, knowing smile as she guided me through the palace.
Soren smirking as he dropped yet another stack of books onto my infirmary table, pretending he wasn’t worried.
Mirelda’s stubborn, begrudging concern as she fussed over my blankets, muttering about drafts and impractical gowns.
I heard Wynnie’s brash laughter, so at odds with her gentle hands as she cared for all the wounds I gave myself. Then there was Draven—always Draven—standing steady beside the wreckage of everything I had been, his protection as relentless as Winter itself.
“And what kind of a life would that be? Do you think that I would ever stop fighting to get back to them? Or that I would even want to survive this battle when my family didn’t?” I finished in a whisper.
“I’m your family.” Her voice was more broken than I had ever heard it, but I didn’t waver. I couldn’t.
“Family doesn’t keep one another in cages.” I took another step back. And Lumen backed away with me. “You’ve made your choices, and I’m making mine. Someone will come for me soon, so go if you need to go, but I will be right here with my people.”
I spun on my heel, heading to my former suites. I wasn’t sure yet what I could do, but I sure as hells couldn’t do it in my flannel shards-damned nightgown.
I half expected to feel the weight of her mana pinning me to the spot, but she didn’t so much as twitch while I stormed past her into the adjacent suites.
I walked into the closet, fully prepared to fight for something other than a shards-damned gauzy dress, only to freeze in my tracks. An outfit was already waiting for me, hovering in the air just within reach as though the wardrobe itself sensed what was coming.
The tunic was crafted in layered shades of white, soft-pearl, moonlit frost, and the faintest shimmer of silver thread that caught the light like it was woven from Winter’s first breath.
A criss-crossed harness overlaid it, forged from pale silvery leather that gleamed like frozen rivers. The straps wrapped with precise symmetry, built for weapons and movement rather than ornamentation, its buckles carved in delicate frost patterns that looked deceptively fragile.
Beneath it were fitted pants of winter-white suedes, reinforced along the seams with silvery stitching. A flowing overskirt fell from the harness in soft, weightless panels, each one slit and angled to swirl around me rather than hinder me, like drifting sheets of snow that could part at my will.
Hovering below, a pair of silvery leather boots awaited, the color of polished ice, the shins reinforced with thin overlays of Winter-forged metal brushed so pale they were almost invisible.
It was an outfit for a warrior. For a queen, and not one who was forced into the shadows.
It didn’t make sense that Closet had given it to me, but I didn’t have time to argue. I didn’t hesitate before I worked my way into the clothes.
Just as I pulled my hair into a hasty braid, Closet presented me with one final item. A low silver circlet, all sharp frost-shards and one clear crystal point, practical and deadly. After only a moment’s hesitation, I picked it up.
Batty settled back on my shoulder, and I whistled for Lumen. Maybe it was a risk to be seen in the palace, but there was someone who could help—who had to help—and I already knew the back way to her rooms.
When I emerged from the closet with my crown in hand and my skathryn perched on my shoulder, my mother was waiting for me. I stopped, barely daring to breathe. Would this be it?
But her bright green eyes were glassy as she looked me over, sparkling with the tears I never saw her shed.
She looked like she was staring at the ghost of all the time we might have had together, like she was already grieving me, but somewhere deep underneath it all was the smallest, barest hint of pride.
Or maybe I just imagined that because it was what I needed to see.
Wordlessly, I moved to walk past her, but she held out a single hand to stop me. Lumen let out a low growl that she ignored, instead, reaching down to unclasp the midnight sheath at her thigh—the one that held the twin dagger to the blade I had given Wynnie.
The gesture froze me as surely as her mana could.
She offered me the sheathed weapon hilt-first, her silver-carved ring glinting in the low light.
“You were right, and you were wrong,” she said quietly.
Tears burned behind my eyes, unbidden and unwanted, as grief twisted in my chest, not just for what awaited in the world outside, but also for what had already been lost.
The time I had lost with her, the father who had died a broken shell of a person, the horrors my sister had endured, the battle that had orphaned my husband.
For the child I had once been—the one who thought family meant safety.
And for the truth that my mother, in all her contradictions, was preparing me to walk toward the very thing she had spent her life trying to shield me from.
“You are them,” she said, meeting my eyes with a depth that pinned me in place. “But you’re us, too.”
The words hit harder than any blade. I took the weapon with fingers that trembled despite my effort to steel them, hastily buckling the sheath around my thigh before I turned to go.
My mother’s arms twitched. Did she want to hug me? To tackle me to the ground and stop me?
Either way, it hardly mattered now. She seemed to sense the same thing because she backed away into Draven’s rooms, drinking in the sight of me like it was the last time she could.
I didn’t try to stop her, or ask where she was going, because for all her misguided words, she had been right about one thing.
We had lost the luxury of time, if we’d ever even had it at all.