Tabitha
Mordecai doesn’t wait for me to reach the Palace to try to stop me. Of course he doesn’t. He’s felt me change, felt me decide, and a claimed Queen is the one thing that ends his three-hundred-year hope for good, so he throws everything he has left in the road between me and my throne.
Half a day out from the Palace, the wastes fill with his dark.
It comes at us in a tide, wraiths and shades and the shadow-bound beasts he’s been collecting for centuries, and it’s more than we’ve ever faced from him at once, because he’s not holding anything back now, there’s nothing left to hold back for.
This is his last stand before I take the thing that makes me untouchable.
“He’s frightened,” I say, watching the dark boil up across the road. And I realise, saying it, that I’m not. “Look at it. He’s throwing his whole self at us. That’s not a man who thinks he’s winning. That’s a man who knows he’s already lost and can’t stand to admit it.”
“Then let’s help him admit it,” Luka growls, and shifts.
We fight through it, and it’s the hardest fight of the whole road, and it’s also, strangely, the first one I’m not afraid in.
Because I know now. I know what I’m walking towards.
I know it’s mine. And a woman who knows the ground she’s standing on is hers fights differently than a woman clawing for a throne she thinks she’s borrowing.
I don’t hang back and I don’t hold back.
I let the HellCat run through me and I burn a road through the dark, gold fire cutting the shadow, and my men fight around me like the extension of my own will they’ve become.
The realm, my realm, helps. It helps openly now, the ground steadying, geysers erupting gold where I need them, the wastes themselves turning against the thing that’s kept them starving and leaderless for three centuries.
Even without the crown, the realm can feel me coming to claim it, and it wants me to win.
“Do you feel that?” Azaan shouts, delighted and fierce, riding the wind above the carnage. “The realm’s fighting with her! It’s never done that! Not for anyone since Tabeitha!”
“It’s doing it because she’s finally letting it,” Valerian calls back, and there’s something in his voice I’ve never heard, three centuries of grief cracking open into hope. “Keep going, little kitty. Take us home. Take your throne.”
We break Mordecai’s tide in the road, and the survivors flee back towards the Palace to make their master’s last stand with him, and we follow, bloody and burned and unbowed.
I feel Tabeitha go very quiet inside me, quieter than she’s been in weeks, because she can feel it too.
She can feel me stop borrowing. And for the first time in this whole nightmare, it’s not me who’s frightened.
It’s her.
Good, I think at her, marching on my Palace with my fire in my hands and my family at my back. Be frightened. You’ve had three hundred years of driving a body that was never yours. Your lease is up, love. I’m taking my house back.
She doesn’t answer. She hasn’t got an answer. And that, more than any fire or any prophecy, is how I know I’ve finally worked out how to win.