Chapter 39 #2
“You return after three centuries, and will not even dismount. I often wondered what the mortal world would make of my brother. Now I see. It made him rude.”
Brother.
Her gaze moves over him. “Why must you be so difficult all the time?”
Cairn says nothing, and her gaze slides off him. It travels down the line of the Guard, stopping on Brael.
“And do you have nothing to say?”
“You look well, sister.”
Her lip curls, but her gaze moves on. “Therin. Still wearing my brother’s leash, I see.”
“Be thankful for it. Otherwise I’d have snapped your pretty neck already.” There’s nothing of the Therin I know in his tone.
“Hmm.” Her fingers tap on the bone of her seat.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
The sound sets my teeth on edge.
And then she looks at me, and her lips curve up.
“And what,” her voice is soft and delighted, “is this?”
The breath freezes in my lungs, and I’m suddenly horribly aware of what I am—a fragile, mortal girl sitting on a magical steed in the heart of an alien, predatory court.
Her eyes dissect me in a heartbeat, piercing straight through the ash-gray armor to the terror I am desperately trying to keep locked behind my wall of ice.
“You refuse your titles. You refuse your crown. Yet you bring a mortal pet into my sacred halls?”
A low murmur goes through the courtiers, and their attention snaps to me like a school of sharks scenting blood in the water.
“She is not a pet.” The lethal edge in his voice makes the hair on my arms rise. “She is Nightwild.”
“Is she?” She almost croons the words as she stands, her silk robes pooling around her feet.
She descends the steps, the warriors parting to let her through, her focus locked on me.
She looks at me with the bright, idle cruelty of someone who has found a delicate thing to break. Her intention is clear. She has just found the perfect way to make her brother bleed.
She stops a few paces from Nytheros, close enough that I have to look down to keep her in my view.
“Nightwild.” She purrs the word. “A mortal …” She leans closer and inhales through her nose.
“No ... a halfling … Whatever have you been doing in the mortal realm, brother? You brought a halfling into the Nightwild Guard? How perfectly novel.” Her head tilts.
“To hold such a position takes great power. I am sure she will not object to proving it.”
The change in the room is immediate. The courtiers go silent. The five warriors straighten. Even the water overhead seems to still, and down the line of the Nightwild threads, I feel something tighten.
Lysaena raises one pale hand, fingers spread, and her voice carries across the hall in that doubled, current-laced tone.
“By the old law and the deep law, I invoke the Right of Challenge.” Her voice rings through the cavernous hall. The lilting, bored tone is gone, replaced with malicious glee.
Cairn goes completely still. He radiates the terrifying, predatory tension he uses right before a kill. When I dare a glance at his face, it has turned to carved stone. His eyes are fixed on Lysaena with a fury so absolute, I’m surprised she hasn’t burned to ash.
But he doesn’t move and he doesn’t speak.
Lysaena turns toward him, lifting a hand to trail her fingers along Selveryn’s neck. The steed’s head turns, jaws snapping. The fae female throws back her head and laughs, then steps back to me.
“A formal challenge has been struck. Under the laws of the Ninth Tide, the challenged must stand alone. The First Sword knows the law.” She glances over her shoulder at Cairn.
‘Intervene, Brother, and her life is immediately forfeit. Move a single muscle to aid her, and I will have her throat cut on this floor.”
My heart hammers against my ribs in a frantic, trapped rhythm.
I look at Cairn. His jaw is locked so tight I can see the muscle jumping beneath his skin.
His golden eyes are burning, fixed on his sister with a lethal promise.
He is a warrior built to protect, and he is legally bound to sit there and do absolutely nothing.
“He cannot help you. Not a word. Not a finger. If the Eldráfn as much as breathes in your defense, he breaks the laws that bind us all.” Her smile widens. “So we’ll find out together, little mortal, what you are made of. You and no one else.”
Nytheros dissolves from beneath me, and I hit the floor hard. I open my mouth. To say what, I don’t know.
“Can you swim?” She lifts her hand, and presses her fingers to the center of my forehead.
The throne room vanishes. The floor. The Guard. Cairn. Everything is gone. There is only water—freezing, crushing, and endless—closing over my head. The cold drives the air from my lungs in a rush of silver bubbles. My chest seizes. My limbs turn heavy and useless, my hands clawing at nothing.
I am drowning.
I am drowning, and there’s nothing anyone can do to save me. I am going to die at the bottom of the sea.
My lungs burn. Every part of me claws toward the surface, demanding air, demanding I open my mouth and breathe.
If I open my mouth, I drown. And if I don’t, I’ll still drown.
The dark closes around me from every side. The last of my air is leaving me in a thin silver thread. My mouth is opening. I can feel it opening. I can’t stop it.
I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t—
My sight changes. Somehow I’m looking at two things at once.
The drowning sea still surges around me, but beneath it, through it, like a second image laid over the first, is dry stone polished enough to show my reflection.
I’m on my knees on the abalone floor. There is no water. The throne is exactly how it looked before Lysaena touched me.
Cairn is less than an arm’s length away from me. He’s still mounted, still carved from stone, his hands white-knuckled on the reins, and his whole body locked rigid. His eyes are on me. Not Lysaena. On me, drowning on dry land in front of him and unable to do anything to stop it.
The agony on his face is the most honest emotion I’ve ever seen him wear.
I snap my mouth closed. I push the panic down, inch by inch, and I anchor myself to the one true thing in the room—Cairn’s golden eyes fixed on mine—and let the tide wash over me.
The ocean shatters like spun glass. The freezing water, the silver bubbles, the crushing pressure—it all vanishes in a single heartbeat. I collapse forward onto my hands, my mouth flying open as I suck in gulps of air. My lungs expand painfully while I cough and choke on nothing.
But the lock that tumbled open in my mind and showed me the glamour stays open.
The pearl glow in the walls isn’t light anymore. It’s singing, a high cold tone that scrapes the inside of my skull.
The throne of bone is screaming, a thousand years of remembered dying packed into every curve of it.
The water overhead is full of voices.
The abalone floor pulses under my hands with its own heartbeat.
Every fae in the room is lit up, each one trailing threads and currents and colors that pour off them and tangle in the air.
Cairn burns brightest of all. The Guard's bonds knot him to all twelve of us, silver and certain, and one of those threads winds back to me—beside it, deeper and warmer, the blood bond we share.
But beneath them all run more, countless and fine as spider-silk, streaming away from him, past the walls and out of sight.
I force my head up, pulling my gaze away from Cairn, and look past him to Lysaena. The power of the Sea Court swirls around her in violently turbulent waves, yet it refuses to settle. It forms a jagged, fractured halo above her head.
My head snaps back. Sound and light crash into me all at once, and I collapse under the weight of it.
Somewhere very far away, someone is shouting my name.
“The crown bleeds.”
The words spill out of me.
“The blood still runs.” My head lolls. The glowing threads swim. “The darkness hungers.”
The door in my head slams shut.
The world goes dark.