Chapter 2 #2
“You sure the answer isn’t in one of your books?”
I rolled my eyes. “You don’t think I’d have remembered?”
“There are a lot of fucking books in that library of yours.”
“If the answer to the biggest mystery of Feyreign’s history lay in the pages of a book—” I went still with the apple halfway to my mouth.
Her gaze had drifted. Now it slipped over to me. “Did the scholar forget his words?”
I tossed her the apple. “Something like that.”
She caught it with a curled lip, teeth glinting. “Gross.” Then called out, “Hey, it’s rude to leave in the middle of breakfast.”
“You can tell me all about it when we match swords.” I’d already crossed to the doorway. “The scholar has somewhere to be.”
I took the shortest route up, up to the high floors of the citadel. Minutes later I strode into my study and made for the bookcase furthest from my desk—the one reserved for the oldest, least compelling tomes. The ancient catalogues of eons of nobles, or of insect species, or of…
“The Killing Fields.” I set my fingers around the spine of a fat book and slid it from the shelf.
Dust rose, shimmering in the crystal light from the walls.
I’d never read this one in full, just as reference material.
Four hundred years of blood-soaked history lay inside; Ithacar of the spring court had spent most of his life obsessed with that small, circular patch of land.
I dropped it on my desk with a thud, sat down in my chair, and reached for my reading glasses. We fae might be immortal, but our eyes could still strain.
The title’s gold foil—A History of the Killing Fields—gleamed as I opened the hard cover. Years ago I had encountered a striking passage in this book, but it had long since sunk beneath the waves.
The story of Queen Carys, and how she died.
Master Ithacar had included the story near the book’s start, as an introduction to the Killing Fields. The spot had been chosen four hundred years ago by the gods because it was the central point where the four courts converged. Autumn, winter, spring, and summer’s magic met at one terrifying axis.
This was where the Queen’s Trial took place every hundred years. Where the surviving champions killed one another until only one stood. The gods watched, but could not intervene.
After the first trials took place, Carys had regretted forming them at all. She regretted the bloodshed, the suffering. But in Feyreign, rituals and rites are easier to implement than they are to dissolve.
The other three queens disagreed with Carys’s wish to stop the trials. Without them, the reins of power would never pass out of Carys’s hands. And so they started a subtle, brutal war—the War of Queens.
So much subterfuge. So many assassinations. Nobles poisoned, blades thrust into necks in the depths of night. After one of Carys’s granddaughters was murdered, she challenged the other three queens to a battle in the Killing Fields.
The four queens met there. It would be a dishonor not to.
The battle was three against one. They were armored, laden with weapons, and Carys only carried her dagger.
The other queens were skillful, strategic. They soon wounded Carys, and it looked as though the great queen would lose her head…
Until she stepped into the Convergence—the center of the Killing Fields, where all four magics swirled together—and harnessed feralis and noxveil. Two separate magics belonging to two Unseelie courts.
No fae could wield two types of magic at once—until her. Carys, the Courtbreaker.
She felled the other queens in one go. The sight was magnificent, terrible. And her veyre was so horrified by what he saw—one fae wielding dual corrupting magics—that he knew what he must do.
Veyre embodied two words. Protector… and queenslayer.
I shut the book and pulled off my glasses. That was all I needed to know.
A knock came at my chamber door.
I stood and crossed into the bedroom. “Open.”
The door opened. A brown-haired boy of not more than seventeen stood on the other side. His hands were clasped tight, shoulders pitched a few degrees forward. “Good morning, ser.”
I grabbed my belt off the bed and slipped it around my waist. “Who are you?”
“Well, ser, I’m your squire. Finch.”
The boy was weedy; his pale green eyes were wide. “My what?”
“Haskel assigned me to be your squire, ser—”
“No he didn’t.”
He cleared his throat. “Just this morning.”
I swept my cloak off the hook stand and swung it around my shoulders. “I don’t have a squire.”
He hovered without speaking, eyebrows high.
I closed my eyes longer than a blink, opened them, and stepped toward him. “Let me be clear: I don’t want or need a squire. I’m sure you’d do just as well under Haskel’s tutelage—”
“Oh, but a veyre must have one, ser.” The certainty of adolescence had entered his voice. “Carys’s veyre did. Haskel said it’s tradition, and it’s written about in A History of the Killing Fields.”
I lowered my chin. “You’ve read A History of the Killing Fields?”
He nodded with vigor.
I eyed him. “It’s over a thousand pages long.”
“That’s why Haskel said I’d be the right fit for you.” He shrugged. “I like to read, much as I get slapped about the head for it.”
The truth was obvious: no other Sylvanwild noble would take him on. What good was a literate squire who preferred his nose in a book except to a man like me?
Fucking Haskel. The boy did have a little charm to him. “And what did Carys’s veyre teach his squire?”
His eyes lit. “Oh, many things. How to fight, how to be discerning, and most of all— Ser, where are you going?”
He turned after me as I slipped past him into the hall. Now his footsteps followed me.
“The first lesson of being my squire,” I said over my shoulder, “is that you should never ask me where I’m going.”
“How am I meant to know where you are?”
“You aren’t.”
His footsteps stopped. “I was asked to bring you a message.”
“And what message is that?”
“An invitation arrived from the summer court this morning. For a festival of some kind—”
I stopped hard, the breath going out of me. “The Festival of the First Light.”
“That’s the one. Queen Liora wants to celebrate the crowning of our new Sylvanwild queen, and there’s to be a two-week festival full of dancing and celebration.”
I closed my eyes and clenched my fists. Pulled in a breath, let it out, opened my eyes. We hadn’t even buried Rhiannon yet, and Liora was already pulling her silken runner out from underfoot.
When I turned on my heel back toward the boy, his footsteps started up again. “Where are you going now, ser?”
“To the queen’s chamber. Don’t follow me.”
He didn’t stop. “But she’s not in her chamber, ser.”
I spun on him. “Where is she?”
The boy stopped hard, eyes wide, form shrinking. “Haskel sent me to inform you that the queen’s second-in-command has requested your immediate presence in the formal dining room.”
Of course she has.
I thrust past him, back the way I’d originally been going. When his trot started up a third time, I didn’t hold back. “Don’t follow me.”
He went thankfully still. “What should I do, then?”
“Go into my study and start reading.”
“Reading what?” His voice was further away now.
I turned the corner and glanced back once at his confused, hopeful face. “Everything.”
Perhaps by the time I returned, he would have disappeared from the citadel entirely. He’d be better off with anyone but me.