76. Rosalina
Rosalina
Ican’t move. Sira’s magic holds me fast, frozen like a doll in a nightmare. Her shadow knife is at my neck.
But I can see everything.
Caspian screams.
The sound tears through the air. His green fire flares, but it can’t protect him. A beam of light pours from my mother’s hands straight into his chest. Her face is soaked with tears, lips trembling, but she doesn’t stop. She can’t stop.
I want to scream. Want to claw free, run to her, run to him, do anything, but I’m trapped.
There has to be something I can do!
Caspian is shaking. His fingers dig into the earth like he’s trying to hold himself in this world, but I can see the light burning through him. I can feel it too. Like it’s ripping the faeness right out of him. His glow is dimming. His scream is breaking—
Kel lets out a mournful cry. He collapses to his knees. The bracelet on his wrist, his side of the bargain, splinters and falls. Caspian’s does too. It clatters to the ground, icy thorns melting away.
He clutches his wrist, a sob ripping out of him, sharp and strangled.
I know the words they said. And if ever there is no love between us, let this bargain melt away like snow under rain.
No.
No, it wasn’t that.
I shake my head, blinking past the tears. “It’s not that you don’t love each other,” I whisper. My voice trembles, but my heart is screaming.
I look at the melting bracelets, at my mates kneeling in ash and light, at the beam still pouring from my mother’s hands. Her sobs, his pain.
I feel my own fury.
And then the words fall from my lips, quiet and certain. “A human cannot make a bargain with a fae.”
Sira’s command echoes in my mind. Turn that wretch under my control into a human.
She didn’t say my son. She didn’t say Caspian.
That wretch under my control.
One of the first lessons I learned in the Vale. One the Prince of Thorns taught me. It pays to be specific in bargains.
My heart stutters.
If a fae is made human…
They can’t be bound anymore.
My breath catches.
We don’t have to stop my mother’s magic. We don’t even have to stop Sira.
We just have to stop the bargain.
I snap my gaze to her, my mother, Queen of the Vale, drowning in her own magic. She meets my eyes through the glow.
I scream the only truth that can save us. “A human cannot make a bargain with a fae!”
Her lips part. Her throat bobs.
All my life, we’ve been apart. But do we think the same? Understand. Please understand.
The queen closes her eyes.
And turns the magic on herself.
“No!” Sira screams, but it’s too late.
The light arcs, twisting and bending like a serpent devouring its own tail. It slams into my mother’s chest, and she jerks back, arms flung wide, mouth open in a silent cry.
And I take a moment to realize what a sacrifice this is. My mother, one of the few fae left of the Above, the most powerful fae in the Vale, sacrificing her magic to save us.
Her shining chestnut hair dulls to a mousy brown. The gold flecks in her eyes twinkle out. And her pointed, regal ears blur at the edges, curl in. The simple iron band wrapped around the ring finger of her right hand cracks in half, then plummets to the floor.
Her power vanishes. I feel it drain from the air as if someone’s stolen the moon.
She falls to the ground like a petal from a dying flower.