Chapter Twenty
From over Bram’s shoulder, I spot Emmett and Rhion standing together. Emmett is doing a good job of playing loyal regent,
but his face is gray with worry. Rhion, on the other hand, has never looked happier, his handsome face lit up with a radiant
grin. When his eyes snag mine, though, they turn serious. He mouths Good luck.
“All right then.” I turn to my sister. “I love you. I’ll see you later.”
Bram frowns. “No trying to lose on purpose. I’ll know and it’ll hurt my feelings and then we’ll have to do the second trial
all over again.”
I reach up and press my palm to his cheek. His skin is rough with stubble and cool from the wind whipping up from the sea.
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
Lydia leans in and gives him a kiss on his other cheek. “I’ll see you soon, my love.” And then, without fear or hesitation,
she steps into the cave.
And so, I do what I’ve done my whole life and follow my sister.
The noises from outside go silent. The only sound is my ragged breathing and a rhythmic drip, drip, drip from the water running down the walls.
I clench my jaw and brace myself for a pain that doesn’t come. I feel entirely normal. Maybe the legends were just that—stories
parents tell children to keep them from wandering off into dangerous places. I nearly laugh at Bram’s stupidity. He got it
all wrong.
“Lydia?” I call into the darkness. I’ll find her, and once we’ve located Ferrinus we can sit for an hour or two, enough time
to satisfy Bram, and then emerge together, looking wan, with some fabricated story of torture.
My voice echoes from the back of the cave. Lydia, Lydia, Lydia.
“Do you feel fine? I feel fine,” I call. Still no answer. Fine, fine, fine.
With my hands out in front of me, I step a few feet farther into the cave.
There’s a glint on the ground a few paces back.
“Lydia?”
I walk deeper into the cave, still feeling nothing except the strange, hollow silence.
The toe of my silk slipper connects with something solid on the soft earth floor.
I bend and push my hands around in the dirt blindly. The heavy fur cuffs of my cloak get in the way, so I pull them up in
frustration and try again.
Sharp pain cuts into my palm and I yelp and yank my arm back.
I bend once more and feel around gingerly. My fingers close on a rough hilt. I rise and bring it as close to my eyes as I
am able.
I lick the blood away from my palm and laugh with relief. In my hand, I hold a rough-hewn dagger with an ornately jeweled
handle. I tripped directly over Ferrinus. The Redcaps must have stood at the mouth of the cave and tossed it in, just as Rhion suspected.
“Lydia, where are you? I found it!”
My heart rate picks up. This cave isn’t large. She should be able to hear me. “Lydia?” I call, properly worried now. “I’ll
let you win if you want, just tell me you’re all right.”
I take a few more steps, then smack directly into a wall. Not one of jagged stone but something smooth, like glass.
I whip my head around and see nothing but darkness. I can’t have walked more than twenty feet into the cave, but the ray of
light from the entrance has disappeared completely. Like I’ve been sealed inside.
“Lydia?” I call, so panicked it’s making me dizzy. My heart pounds in my ears; my limbs go ice cold.
Something deep within me lurches.
My head spins. My vision goes white.
I might be screaming, but everything has gone deadly silent, as if a thread has been snipped and I’m excised from my body
completely.
Am I dead? It was a painless but stupid way to die.
My heart longs for Emmett, then breaks that he’ll have to mourn me twice.
And where is Lydia? Did she die just before I did? Is that why she wasn’t answering me?
But then—I see it. The first flecks of warm light, prickling at the edges of my vision.
The blackness retreats like a fog and there they are. Lydia and Emmett. We’re back in the garden of the castle.
The opalescent towers of the castle glow in the bright sunshine and all around us the gardens are a riot of color. Pink roses
bloom as large as dinner plates, and sparkling violets trail along the tan gravel path. A fat green dragonfly buzzes by lazily.
“Lydia! Emmett!” I shout, but they don’t turn.
They’re sitting side by side on a stone bench. Lydia is crying into her hands, her shoulders heaving while Emmett lays a comforting
hand on her back, his face pained.
“Hello,” I shout again, now directly in front of them.
My stomach turns as the realization dawns. They can’t see me.
I take another look at the trees in full bloom.
It’s summer.
Lydia and Emmett look different, too. Their hair is only slightly longer than it was when they left England. Emmett has no
piercing in his ear.
I’m in a memory.
Emmett’s eyes are hollow and his doublet hangs off of him, exposing sharp bones. Lydia looks less gaunt, but similarly haunted.
She reaches into her bodice and pulls out a delicate gold chain. The charm on the end of it glints in the light. I take a
step closer, then gasp.
“What is it?” Emmett extends a bruised hand and takes it.
But I already know.
“It’s Ivy’s baby necklace. We left them at the base of a tree when we were little, trying to summon a faerie. It was a silly
childhood game. Mine was there the next morning—I’d planned to hide them both and keep up the fantasy for my sister—but Ivy’s
was gone. I figured maybe a magpie had snatched it, but then when I came back here after the wedding, I found it in my room.”
Emmett visibly shudders. “What do you think it means?”
Lydia frowns. “It means Bram has been watching us, and going back and forth to England, for longer than any of us have realized.”
She gestures to the garden surrounding us, and it’s only on a second look that I realize something about this place is wrong.
The tips of tender summer leaves curl into brown. In the tangle of roots below, fruit is split with rot, festering in the
noonday sun. Patches of grass have turned a sickly yellow, and the purple flowers lining the winding garden path are wilting.
“I think the land is sad when he’s not here,” Lydia says.
“Sad?” He rubs his hand, which is mottled with a yellow bruise.
Lydia blinks hard, and I know this look well. She’s about to start crying. Sure enough, her face goes red and Emmett gently
brushes away a tear. “That sounds stupid. I don’t know. I just feel it,” she says.
“I don’t think it’s stupid.”
A summer breeze floats by, brushing gently through her golden curls.
To anyone spying from afar, they’d look like lovers.
“I don’t know what to do,” Lydia cries.
“About what?”
She tosses up her hands. “Everything. Bram has just left me here. He hasn’t returned in a month and I’m trying my best to
keep his court together, but no one respects me. Lady Thalia petitioned to allow taking changelings again, Emmett. Changelings. When I tried to put an end to it, she muttered something about me having no real authority here. The worst part is, she’s
right. I’m trying my best to be queen, but I can’t seem to manage it.”
“You’re a wonderful queen,” Emmett says softly.
My ribs ache as I watch. I’m glad they had each other, truly, but it’s clear they have this unreachable thing together and I’m right back where I’ve always been—on the outside, in Lydia’s shadow.
And what’s worse is I hate myself for the jealousy when there are so many things that matter more.
I’m supposed to be saving England, and I can’t manage to be anything more than a heartbroken girl, forever jealous of her
older sister. Maybe I’ll never be anything but this.
I feel the tug of magic, of the cave asking to take me somewhere else.
“Show me more,” I say aloud.
The garden shifts and the memory blurs. Suddenly, I’m in the dark corner of a revel. Emmett is lounging, glassy-eyed, on a
silk love seat. He’s got streamers in his hair and a goblet slung lazily in one hand. The party swirls around him, a blur
of bright colors and drunken merriment.
A dark-haired woman, so beautiful it hurts to look at her, appears beside him. She’s got that carved-from-ice quality Faith
Fairchild has, but even more perfect, in the eerie way all faeries are. Her eyes are golden, unnatural in their beauty, and
they’re boring into Emmett.
“Prince Emmett,” she purrs.
His eyes lock onto hers. “Lady Thalia.” He’s doing a poor job disguising his loathing.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she sneers, and I recognize her as the girl who was sitting on his lap at the revel the first
night I arrived here. She was also the girl he was kissing against the wall the night we got into our big argument on the
terrace.
“Like what?” Emmett’s voice is a low drawl.
“Like I can’t help you.”
“What could you possibly help me with?”
“You need allies,” she answers curtly.
Emmett takes a sip of something dark from the goblet, ignoring her.
“You can act all aloof, but a regent with no allies is no regent at all.”
“What makes you think I want power?” Emmett tips his head back against the brocade wallpaper.
“I don’t think that at all. But I know one thing with certainty.” Lady Thalia extends her elegant hand and points to the front
of the room, where Lydia sits on a throne, surrounded by fawning courtiers. “You want to protect her. With Bram gone, the wolves have come out to play and her position is precarious. It’s easy to undermine her politically.
Even easier to arrange an accident for such a fragile, mortal, young queen. You’d do anything.”
“Is that a threat?” he snaps.
“It’s a warning. Without allies, neither of you will last long.”
Emmett takes another sip.
“Together, we’d be formidable,” Lady Thalia drawls.
“You proposed allowing the taking of changelings again in a council meeting this week. It upset the queen quite a bit. Why
would I want an ally like you?”
She sticks her nose up in the air, every inch the haughty aristocrat. “I have sway with the council of lords. I could easily
withdraw the proposal and push through your agenda instead. What is it you want? Increased protections for humans and the