Chapter 48
Everly
My sister was still too far from me.
A volley of arrows sailed through the air, each one heading directly for her. I scrambled for my mana again, but I didn’t even have time to raise my hands before an achingly familiar shape formed from mist and frost beside me.
Relief weakened my knees. Draven was free. And Draven was here.
His fingers trembled with rage, his features carved into Winter’s own wrath.
His midnight cloak clung to his broad shoulders, edges glinting with frost. An icy gale swept through the air, rustling the edges of his cloak and lifting the moonlit strands of his hair beneath the ruthless cut of his crown.
Each tip gleamed like a blade, sharp enough to draw blood from anyone foolish enough to challenge him.
He looked less like a fae and more like the promise of retribution incarnate.
The arrows froze mid-air, shattering on the ground just as power slammed through the ground in a violent, rolling wave that knocked the breath from my lungs and sent cracks racing through the snow like veins of lightning.
The battlefield was locked in place. Bodies froze mid-motion. Wings stalled. Shouts died on lips half-formed.
My mother stood with her arms outstretched as if she were physically holding the realm still through sheer will. Ancient mana coiled around her in heavy, suffocating layers, bright violet light sparking along her arm.
Her expression though, was carved tight with grief, the lines around her mouth deeper than I had ever seen. She didn’t look at the body crumpled in the snow behind Noerwyn. She didn’t look at the blood dripping from her old dagger in my sister’s hand. Her gaze fixed on me instead, unwavering.
“Go,” she hissed.
Wynnie didn’t hesitate. She sprinted toward me while my mana finally responded to my call, throwing a shield of sorts between my sister and the army at her back.
“You saved her,” I breathed to my mother.
“She’s your family.” Her words were quiet, even as they echoed across the battlefield.
She didn’t say the rest—that Vaerin had been hers. Her family. Her twin. She just took a breath, turning her attention to the clan that was still stunned into silence.
My heart lurched, disbelief tangling with relief and a thousand other emotions inside me.
I didn’t have time to sort through any of them before Wynnie collided with me, her body crashing into mine hard enough to knock the air from my lungs as she shoved me past the wardlines.
Lumen followed, his hackles still raised as he prowled around us in protective circles.
Wynnie’s legs gave out instantly, pain and shock finally overwhelming whatever fierce resolve had carried her this far. I wrapped my arms around her without thinking, wings folding tight around us both as if I could shield her from everything at once.
For one impossible moment, the world narrowed to just that.
Then my sister looked up, her gaze settling somewhere behind me. Her eyes widened in the fear she hadn’t shown even trapped in my uncle’s hold.
“Everly…”
That’s when I felt it. Draven’s rage, endless and potent.
“No one touches my wife,” he growled.
My husband stepped around me to place himself directly between me and the Winter court, a thick layer of frost coating his clenched fists. In my hurry to face the threat beyond the wards, I had forgotten about the Winter soldiers… and the fact that they had seen my wings.
They wore expressions that ranged from shock to scorn to blatant disgust, their eyes tracking me like I was something feral and contagious. Eryx stood with his hand—and his mana—outstretched, and I wondered how long the Lord General had been keeping them at bay while I was distracted with my uncle.
“She’s an abomination,” spat a broad-shouldered soldier near the front, his lip curling as though even the air around me offended him.
Batty hissed, and Lumen stepped beside me, teeth bared, but the soldiers were too furious to care.
“A traitor,” snarled another guard.
This one was younger, trembling with adrenaline, knuckles white around the hilt of his sword. His pupils were blown wide with fear masquerading as righteousness.
Eryx moved to stand beside Draven, jaw flexing as he assessed the crowd. Soren was nowhere to be seen.
“She is your queen, and you will treat her as such,” Draven commanded, frost thickening in the air around him.
One by one, he was joined by all four of his wolves, each radiating pure menace.
The line of soldiers stepped back, but they weren’t close to finished.
“You want us to die for the sake of that monster?” barked a stocky male with a jagged scar down his cheek, shuffling back as he side-eyed the furious wolves. “No wonder Winter is cursed.”
Draven encased him in frost up to the chest, but for once, the other soldiers didn’t fall in line. A ripple of unease pulsed through me. This wasn’t just fear. It was mutiny.
“That’s why she couldn’t do the Heartstone Ceremony,” muttered an archer near the barracks wall, his voice tight with bitter certainty. “The land has rejected her.”
“The monsters have been worse since she took the throne,” added another, a tall male with ice-burn scars around his wrists, his tone bordering on hysteria.
“You know perfectly well the monsters have ravaged our kingdom for far longer than she has been here,” Draven bit out, but their hostility only grew thicker.
Morta Mea, get somewhere safe this time.
Draven’s voice was vibrating with fury inside my mind, the faintest hint of fear threading beneath it.
And leave you to face this alone? Like hells, I shot back, fingers cold despite the heat of adrenaline. Besides, there was nowhere safe for me. Hadn’t that always been the problem?
“But the Shard Mother has turned against us now,” another soldier shouted, a gaunt male whose armor hung too loose on his frame, eyes wild with desperation. “She’s taken our Visionary.”
“Or the skaldwing has been poisoning her and blaming the monsters,” said a male with midnight hair and a face full of battle scars, his glare fixed directly on me.
Wynnie tensed to move, muscles bunching like she was preparing to launch herself at him, but I latched my hand around her arm before she could attempt to punch the fully trained soldier in the face. My mana surged unsteadily at the threat, a flicker of black frost snapping across my fingertips.
As it was, I didn’t see a way this would end well.
“You’re an idiot,” Wynnie hissed to the scarred male, voice shaking with rage.
She looked even fiercer than usual with the blood that coated her skin, hers and my uncles melding together in indiscernible lines down her cheeks, her neck.
“You all saw the Visionary get impaled in this very courtyard.”
“By the monsters her kind have found a way to control,” he shot back, spittle hitting the ground as he sneered.
My heart thudded painfully, the soldiers’ growing frenzy pressing against my skull like a tightening vice. Their hatred wasn’t drifting, it was taking shape. A tide I wasn’t sure any of us could hold back.
“I know you all feel betrayed, but we don’t have time for this,” I tried to explain. “I am not your enemy, and it’s not just the Unseelie at our gates. There are frostbeasts—”
“Then let the monsters destroy one another. They’ll never stop coming unless we do something about this, all because we’ve let that thing on the throne,” yet another soldier spat.
A second blast of frost took him out, and Eryx’s words rang in my mind. What will you do when they refuse? Kill every last one of the people we’ve spent our lives protecting until you rule over a kingdom of corpses?
He had been right. The kingdom was crumbling from within before the monsters or the Unseelie even had a chance to destroy it.
One whispered accusation had turned seasoned warriors into a mob, and now they were willing to risk their king’s wrath rather than chance offending the Shard Mother, choosing the punishment they understood over the one they dreaded.
Draven’s mana swelled, mana he couldn’t afford to waste when Batty was trilling urgently in my ear, a warning. The frostbeasts were coming.
One of the commanders stepped forward, jaw resolute. “If we get rid of her, the Shard Mother—”
But he never got to finish his sentence. And not because of Draven, this time.
No, my husband had frozen midmotion, his gaze fixed on something behind the soldiers, a maelstrom of emotions I couldn’t read cascading through the bond.
The silence that swept over the soldiers had an entirely different cause. A soft, shimmering light spread from the palace gates, weighting down the air with a mana older than the Winter Court. Even the Unseelie had faded behind us.
Then, out of the peculiar hush came a familiar tapping sound, each tap followed by delicate, measured footsteps. The soldiers parted, but I couldn’t see over Draven’s massive form standing in front of me. Still, a wave of relief hit me so powerfully that it nearly sent me to my knees.
From my husband.
I knew who it was even before a low, ethereal voice cut into the silence.
“Do you speak for the Shard Mother now?”
Nevara had awoken at last.