Chapter 26 #2
He does, his hands slow to leave my waist.
Something with strings plays far above our heads. A voice singing in a language I don’t know but my blood does, its old, old in a way that makes my bare feet press harder into the soil. And I wiggle my toes, feeling the hum of the village beneath my feet.
Then the smell. Woodsmoke. Meat over fire. Something sweet and fermented and sharp. And underneath it all, earth. Living earth. The particular richness of soil that hasn’t been touched by court magic, that just is.
The village is built into the forest the way the forest wants to be built into.
Not imposed—integrated. Huts with walls of woven branches and dried moss, their roofs sprouting grass and small flowers that turn toward us as we pass.
Treehouses connected by rope bridges that sway in a wind I can’t feel at ground level.
Fires in clay pits, surrounded by people who look up as we enter with the specific calm of a community that has survived enough surprises to stop being startled by them.
Children.
There are children here. Running between the huts, chasing something small and luminescent that keeps changing direction. A little blue orb that looks suspiciously familiar. A little girl stops when she sees me, stares at my feet, then looks up at my face with enormous dark eyes.
I wiggle my toes at her.
She dissolves into giggles and disappears behind a hut.
The people here are Unseelie by blood. I can feel it—the particular cold intelligence in a lazy stare, the shadow-comfort all around us.
But they wear it differently than any Unseelie I’ve met.
It’s more natural. The darker magic isn’t expressed as darkness but in a look held a moment too long.
Or in a side glance that screams these unseelie allow us to enter.
Jadeve speaks to someone at the village entrance. Word moves through the space the way Kestra said it would. Not announced, just known. Eyes find us. Not threatening. Assessing. Settling.
An older woman approaches. Silver-haired, small, oozing elder vibes. She looks at Kestra first. A long look, and I swear the older woman smirks like she knows her. Then she looks at Tiana. Then to me.
She puts her hand to her chest.
Jadeve’s people do the same. One by one. Not a bow.
Three true queens of Faerie.
None of them on a throne.
I’ve been called queen before. By courts who wanted to use me. By enemies who wanted to mock me. By men who wanted to claim me.
This is the first time it’s felt like something I might actually want to be.
The older woman says something in the old language, the one my blood knows even if my mind doesn’t, and I feel it in my feet, in the soil beneath them, in the wild magic that has been trickling back in since I first touched the Dark Forest floor.
Welcome home isn’t quite right.
Welcome back isn’t either.
It’s honestly more like, you finally showed up.
Kestra makes a small broken sound beside me. I reach for her hand without looking. She takes it.
Tiana stands very straight. Her chin up. Her eyes bright with something she’s not letting fall. Her hand finds mine on the opposite side.
I’m not crying. Okay, I’m crying again.
It just won’t fucking stop.
Luckily the moment breaks and chatter rises in the next breath and we three step away like the moment burned us.
I gravitate toward the fire that is the center of everything.
Someone puts a cup in my hand. Ceramic, rough-made, warm. Whatever is inside it is amber.
I know now isn’t the time to drink and be merry. But fuck it. I toss it back.
It’s strong and tastes like honey and something that burns clean on the way down. I take another sip before I’ve finished processing the first.
Orion drops beside me at the fire, close enough that his arm presses against mine. Not reaching for me. Just there. Present. The conversation from the walk sits between us like something we’ve set down carefully, knowing we’ll pick it back up.
I don’t want to pick it back up. I want to chase my buzz.
Whispen has already made seventeen friends.
I don’t know how. I looked away for four minutes and he’s now sitting on the shoulder of a man twice Orion’s size, apparently teaching him something that involves a lot of hand gestures.
The man looks equal parts terrified and delighted.
“He’s going to cause a diplomatic incident,” Finnian says, settling on my other side.
“He causes diplomatic incidents in empty rooms,” I say. “At least here there are witnesses.”
Finnian makes a sound that is almost a laugh. His shoulder finds mine. On my left Orion’s warmth, on my right Finnian’s.
His hand finds my knee under the firelight. Not holding. Just resting there, his thumb traces once across the fabric.
A lump forms in my throat. I can’t help it. It’s the presence that matters the most to me.
The fire burns in front of us and the village breathes around us and somewhere above that stringed instrument still plays, joined now by percussive, the music building into something with bones in it.
A woman near the fire starts to dance.
Then two more.
Then the little girl who stared at my feet appears from behind a hut, grabs the hand of a boy approximately her size, and drags him into the dancing whether he wants to be there or not.
I watch them. The way she moves, completely unself-conscious, her whole body committed to the music, her face the specific joy of a child who has not yet learned to be embarrassed by wanting things.
I used to be like that.
The soil pulses under my feet. Faint. Warm. Like something checking in.
Against my hip, the ruby pulses in answer. I’d almost forgotten it was there. Almost. It’s been quiet since I pocketed it in Kieran’s room, but now it hums, resonant, like it recognizes the magic rising through my feet.
I don’t take it out. Don’t examine it. Just note that it’s awake now. I could find Kieran but I don’t want to. Not yet.
I press my toes into the earth and the pulse answers, stronger this time, moving up through my feet and into my legs and settling somewhere alongside the wild magic that has been waking up in pieces since I first touched the Dark Forest floor.
There you are, it says.
I close my eyes for just a moment.
I know, I think back. I’m here.
“You’re glowing,” Orion says quietly.
I open my eyes. Look at my hands. The faintest blue-green at my fingertips, the thorn-patterns moving under my skin in slow spirals, lit from within, responding to the soil and the fire and the magic woven through this place.
“Huh, look at that,” I say automatically.
“You’re beautiful.” Orion’s voice is rough at the edges.
When he looks at me I can feel it in my toes. Zipping up, and up to send tingles all through my body.
Kieran appears from the direction of the treehouses.
He’s been talking to Jadeve’s people—I’ve been tracking him without meaning to, the silver-blue bond doing its quiet work at my wrist. He stops at the edge of the firelight. Takes in the scene. Me between Orion and Finnian, glowing faintly, the cup in my hand, the village alive around us.
I can’t tell if there’s longing in that look or peace. He doesn’t let me look at it too long anyway.
He sits. Not close. Not across the fire either. Somewhere in between. Somewhere that is its own kind of answer to a question neither of us has asked yet.
He accepts a cup from a passing elder without looking at it. Takes a long drink.
The music builds. The dancing expands. Whispen has now apparently organized some kind of competition involving the large terrified-delighted man, two children, and rules that seem to shift every thirty seconds.
“What are the rules?” the large man asks.
“There are no rules,” Whispen says serenely. “That is the first rule.”
“That doesn’t—”
“Second rule: the queen of the Wild Court must participate.”
Every head turns to me.
I look at Orion.
He’s already grinning. The full one. The one that takes up his whole face and has absolutely no dignity in it whatsoever.
“Don’t you dare,” I say.
He dares.
He stands, takes my cup from my hand, pulls me to my feet in one motion. The village cheers—actually cheers, like they’ve been waiting for exactly this—and the little girl who stared at my feet appears from nowhere and grabs my other hand, and I am outnumbered on all sides.
The soil pulses under my feet.
The magic trickling in becomes a current.
I let it.
It feels like something I didn’t know I’d been holding my breath for.