Chapter 30
I sat cross-legged on my bed the next afternoon, surrounded by scrolls.
At my request, Drustan and Hector had delivered thoughts on what to do with the aboveground territory now that Osric’s wards were down, and since the day was unusually calm, I was using the time to compare everything they’d sent.
Calm was a relative term, of course. Getting to know my new house members and setting expectations for our collective behavior had taken priority this morning, but none of the outside events were major, so I’d declined those invitations.
Tomorrow would have more than enough activity—a party in one of the libraries followed by the masquerade ball.
The ball marked the thirteenth night of the Accord, and I was determined to name a king by the end of the week. My indecision had lasted for far too long. I read and reread the letters, grappling with the magnitude of this responsibility.
Drustan was in favor of splitting the territory aboveground into equal segments by house, with areas of free passage between.
Hector was in favor of keeping the entire surface unaligned territory.
We do not need to break the entire world into pieces , he’d written in his scrawling hand, and I was inclined to agree.
Drustan made a good point, though, that providing a structure and setting expectations wherever we could would help the tradition-bound Fae navigate this period of regime change.
It had been like this on every issue. Each made good points.
Each said mostly the right things. If they were genuine in their promises, either would make a decent king.
And that was the major question: Would they live up to those promises?
If they tried and met resistance, which one would push through to force the needed change to happen?
Sometimes the right thing was also the unpopular thing, and of the two of them, I knew which one most enjoyed his popularity.
Another question was who would be a better figurehead when it came to gathering public support.
That was almost certainly Drustan, since Hector had spent less time at court and had a reputation for being unpredictable, reclusive, and occasionally violent.
The violent reputation wasn’t as much of a liability as one would think in Mistei, though, and Drustan had been losing ground when it came to public opinion.
My new house members told me he’d enraged much of Earth House by soliciting their support before betraying Selwyn.
Both wanted to end the barbaric changeling practice, but Hector had been actively working to save those lives for a long time, and that was heavily weighting my decision.
But there were thousands of lives at stake—would the larger populace trust him, especially if other faeries had heard the rumor about him being a predator?
There were personal questions that haunted me, too. If I chose Hector, would Lara’s budding romance with Gweneira come to an end? If I chose Drustan, would Kallen no longer want to train me?
I closed my eyes, cursing myself, because it wasn’t just his training I would miss.
There was an urgent knock at the door. “Come in,” I called, welcoming the distraction.
Triana nearly ran inside. “You have to come,” she signed, expression frantic.
Scrolls tumbled to the floor as I leapt out of bed. “What’s wrong?”
“Anya. She’s gone mad.”
Panic swept through me as I raced after Triana into the corridor and down the spiraling stairs to the fourth floor. The bedrooms on this level had been claimed by a mixed group of Noble Fae who were clustered in the hallway, staring at an open door.
“She barged into my room,” I heard Wilkin, the Earth faerie with the white flowering garden, tell someone. “Raving about the princess inviting faeries into the house.”
I heard a familiar shout, then the sound of something shattering. Cursing under my breath, I pushed past the gawkers.
The bedroom was decorated in shades of dove gray and burgundy. A scarlet-petaled rose lay in a puddle near the entrance, surrounded by the shards of the vase that had once housed it. Ornamental weapons hung on the walls, and the air smelled of fragrant woodsmoke.
Anya stood before the lit fireplace, yanking at the handle of an axe mounted above it.
“Anya!” I exclaimed. “What are you doing?”
The axe was bracketed to the wall, and she made a frustrated sound before letting go. “Get them out,” she snarled.
“Get who out?” I asked, heart pounding. “What’s wrong?”
“The faeries. There are faeries here.”
She didn’t sound entirely awake. Her eyes were reddened and lost-looking, and as she turned to face me, she staggered like she was about to fall over.
“The faeries here are good ones,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm despite the fear that hummed through me. “You’ve seen them before. Don’t you remember them arriving?”
She hadn’t attended last night’s dinner, which had been held in a banquet hall large enough to accommodate everyone, but I’d spotted her lurking in the doorway and listening as the new arrivals had introduced themselves and their hopes for the future.
Though she’d locked herself in her bedroom afterwards and ignored the pot of hot chocolate I’d placed outside her door, I’d taken it as a sign of progress—that if I left her alone like she clearly wanted me to, she would gradually begin opening up on her own terms.
“This is Wilkin’s room,” I said when she didn’t answer. “Do you remember him talking about planting a garden?”
Anya stared at me like she couldn’t comprehend the words. I wasn’t even sure if she was seeing me, or if her mind was somewhere far away. She swayed like a birch sapling caught in a strong wind, and her eyes drifted back to the axe.
“Were you sleepwalking?” I asked, taking a step closer. She’d done that a few times as a child.
She jerked her gaze away from the weapon, then looked down at her shaking hands. “I don’t remember sleeping.”
“When’s the last time you remember sleeping?”
“I can’t sleep. If I sleep, I dream. I can’t dream. It’s all drowning and fire and he’s there.”
She sounded delirious. The skin below her eyes was puffy and purpled—she looked more tired than I’d ever seen her. More tired than I’d ever seen anyone except my mother during the final brutal nights of her illness.
Guilt swamped me. I hadn’t been hearing her nightmares lately, and I’d thought it was because they’d been getting better. Now it was clear she’d been staying awake to avoid them.
There was a purple stain down the front of her shapeless gray dress.
“Were you drinking?” I asked. The servants said she hadn’t taken wine upstairs with her dinner trays these past few nights, so I’d thought that issue was improving, too.
But maybe she’d found an abandoned wine cellar, or maybe the house was providing her with alcohol—it was as Fae as anything down here, and the Fae didn’t deny even their most destructive cravings.
“If I drink, I don’t dream,” she said, words slurring.
So she’d been staying awake to avoid nightmares of Osric, and because her body would always eventually give in, she’d tried to drug her mind until it couldn’t produce dreams. And this was the result—Anya rampaging delirious and drunk into someone’s bedroom, trying to pull an axe off the wall.
“What were you going to do with that axe?” I asked, dreading the answer.
“He needs to die.”
Prickles raced down my arms. “Anya, you know Osric isn’t here, right?”
“You invited them in,” she said, sounding like a lost child. “My mother says you should never invite the faeries in. If you let them in, they’ll steal everything you love.”
My heart felt like it had been wrapped in the same brambles that were consuming Mistei’s catacombs.
Osric had broken Anya. He’d twisted her mind until she couldn’t tell what was real and what wasn’t, and even in death, he was stealing her sleep and her sanity.
And I’d let her fall deeper into this hole, so consumed by my myriad responsibilities that I hadn’t realized how bad it had gotten.
I’d thought giving her space would help, but I’d given her enough space to get lost in.
Anya made an anguished sound, then smacked her head with her palms again and again, like she was trying to knock something out of her mind.
“Stop hurting yourself!” When she didn’t, I ran forward and grabbed her wrists.
“Don’t touch me!” she shrieked. She threw her weight into me, knocking me backwards.
My heel struck the low stone ledge in front of the fireplace, and my skull cracked hard against the mantelpiece.
I collapsed, planting one hand in the flaming logs in an attempt to catch myself.
Burning pain ripped across my palm, and heat licked up my sleeve as the gauzy fabric went up in flames.
Wilkin sprinted into the room, then dragged me up and away from the fire. He summoned water and poured it over my sleeve, and the flames sizzled and went out. “Are you all right?” he asked, gripping my shoulders when I staggered and nearly fell again.
No, I wasn’t.
The smell of burnt fabric filled the air. I held my seared hand against my stomach like a wounded animal, gaping at Anya. Her hands were clapped to her mouth, and her eyes were wide with horror.
“Leave her,” Wilkin was telling me. “We need to get you somewhere safe.”
But Anya had always been my safe place.
Faeries gawked from the doorway. I couldn’t imagine what they thought. Attacking the Blood princess…in any other house, that would likely be a death sentence.
“Thank you,” I told Wilkin. My voice was shaking. “That won’t be necessary. Please leave and close the door behind you. I’ll send word when you can return to your room.”
He hesitated. “Someone should stay nearby.”
Because Anya might hurt me. She had hurt me, regardless of whether she’d meant to, because she was no longer in control of herself. “Very well,” I murmured. “But keep the door closed, and please ask everyone else to leave.”