Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
Dorian
I left Eury and Faun at breakfast and rode from the stables on Rhiannon’s prized stallion under a gray sky.
The horse was a Highmark Andalusian, trained to obey the slightest heel-press, to listen for a single click of the tongue.
She had acquired him only a week before her death, ridden him just once.
Now she was dust, and the horse didn’t know the difference; he obeyed my cues like he belonged to me.
The invitation from Highmark was a taunt—a dare. Come, little queen, the invitation said, beneath the looping script. Come and show me your tiny claws.
We only had weeks until the festival.
I rode hard and fast toward the kingdom’s center.
Deep forest swept by, the horse weaving with ease between trees as wide around as three of him standing nose to ass.
Above, between the branches, the tree villages blurred past—lantern light, the creak of rope bridges, a child's voice calling out.
Perhaps the horse sensed my urgency, because when I let the reins out he pressed his head forward and straightened his neck into a full gallop.
Eurydice had no idea what she’d invited when she’d declared herself her own champion. She had even less idea how little time we had to obtain that dagger—or how crucial it was.
Her magic was fickle, uncertain. What she’d done in the meadow against Rhiannon was instinct.
It might be months, years before she could consciously replicate what she did that night.
In Feyreign, children were introduced to magic before they could walk, but years passed before they could reliably wield it.
Changelings learned faster. But not fast enough.
The Festival of the First Light waited on the other side of the green plains. Liora’s invitation had already arrived. It was a smart move; if I were the Dawnmaker, I would have done the same.
We rode for hours. I stopped the horse when he began to hack, and we rested by a pond. He drank deep, and I waited only until his breathing evened before I climbed on and rode again.
By midday we reached the outskirts of the autumn court.
The canopy thinned, sunlight streaming through in thicker bands.
Here at the forest’s edge the tree villages gave way to ground—proper villages of timber and thatch, smoke rising from chimneys, fae moving between market stalls.
A few stopped to watch me pass. Soon the forest gave way entirely, and I rode through the plains under unbroken sun.
Only a few trees grew out here, small and scraggly.
In the distance, the white pillar appeared like a terrible mirage, a straight chalky arrow into the sky. There lay the center of Feyreign—a stake the gods had set down to demarcate their territories.
I had hoped never to set eyes on it except in drawings.
The sun beat on my scalp, relentless and angry. We Sylvanwild fae were meant for shade; I lifted my hood and pulled the stallion back to a canter to save his energy.
As the day wore on, the pillar grew, fattened, yet it always seemed beyond reach. Until all at once it loomed so high, we rode in its shadow.
The world chilled. I lowered my hood.
Beneath me, the horse slowed to a walk, then a stop. I pressed my heels into his sides, but he wouldn’t move from the spot, tossing his head and whining a protest. And then the scents came to me—the copper tang of fresh blood and the stink of new death.
Not far off, almost invisible in the pillar’s shadow, the grass shifted from green to red. Bold, gleaming red. Bloody red.
The storybooks said that the convergence of magic made this place strange. An undying death lay over the land, every arterial spray as fresh as the moment it had occurred.
I didn’t blame the horse for refusing to enter.
Yet the brand on my chest had warmed; I was meant to enter.
The spiritstag wanted me here. It had taken me years to accept the fact that the Sylvanwild god wasn’t like Noctere’s black maw.
The panther snarled its commands; the stag spoke only in veiled truths and riddles from afar.
I backtracked the horse thirty paces and dismounted near one of the few trees dotting these plains. I tied the reins to the trunk, and though he tugged at first—in the direction of green, lush Highmark—he finally gave in and grazed under the tree’s narrow shade.
With the back of one hand set against my nose, I approached. Before me, in a broad careening swath, the plains were coated in blood. Not old, dried blood, but gleaming-fresh.
Around me, feralis pressed against my skin. Urgent, almost suffocating. Stories said that every court’s magic was strongest here, where the gods buffeted against one another, vying for an inch. Which meant the miasma at the Convergence, where all four magics swirled together, must be hell.
I followed the line where green turned to red until the pillar’s shadow fell away and sunlight touched my face.
For once, sunlight felt safer—cleansing.
Lowering into a crouch, eyes warm and stinging, I touched my fingers to the blades of red grass.
Wet. When I lifted my hand, my forefinger and thumb were coated.
And there, reflected in the gleaming droplets, the sight of a young man being scalped.
A death in miniature.
Instinct told me to rub the blood away. Yet this was why I had come. I was the one who could see.
A brown-haired woman sawed at his scalp with a short blade, and he knelt with eyes rolled back into his head until she had finished her work. Then he dropped into the grass with his crown laid bare, and she held his long white hair aloft with the scalp dripping at the end.
Here, right here, was the spot where it had happened.
Death still lived in the Killing Fields.
The rims of my eyes pulsed. If Gawain were here, the bastard, he would say I told you so. His tutelage—the torture that had edged my eyes in red—now enabled me to perceive what almost no other fae could.
I swicked the blood away on my pants and lifted my gaze. The brand on my chest had warmed even more—I was closer to where the spiritstag wanted me.
No choice but to enter, to step on the living graves of all these fae.
Do it for Eury.
I rose and closed my eyes. With three quick breaths, I stepped into the Killing Fields—and into the bloody past.
Blades clanged; the earth shifted; the wind buffeted me. Screams, sawing—the scent of ozone a tang in my nose. The chaos of the trials. It all happened in front of me, behind me, left and right of me.
A yell sounded from my left. My eyes opened on the brown-haired changeling with scalp and blade both held aloft, her chin upturned to the sky. Her victim lay dead at her feet.
An arrow sailed before my eyes and delivered itself into the chest of a blond-haired woman to my right. She sank to her knees, the light dying in her eyes.
A longsword flashed with solaire. A summer fae leapt in front of me, armored in silver to the teeth, and came down on an unlucky Unseelie who wore the mark of the black maw on her pauldrons. The Seelie landed on her, and he and she went to the ground with his light-tipped sword in her chest.
Blood. So much blood, never to soak into the soil. The wetness I stood on now was the undrying lifeblood of these ancient fae.
Brutal. Barbaric. I’d spent my whole life hating the trials since I’d learned of them, and now my stomach clenched with the sight of dozens of young fae dying for queens they didn’t even know.
What good was immortality if we narrowed the lives of our best to killing or inconceivable deaths?
A brown-haired Sylvanwild fae in leathers emerged from the ancient murk of the fields. He pointed straight at me. “The stag! The stag will intervene!” No, I was the apparition here. He pointed beyond me.
I twisted. There at the tree line, the stag watched on.
“He’s come to stop Queen Carys,” the fae said. “He’s come for the Courtbreaker.” He spun, disappeared again into the messy throng of history. Just before he disappeared, he ran toward the Convergence.
I followed. Ghosts of the past appeared and disappeared around me, screaming and swinging and running, until…
There at the center of it all, her black hair wild, a queen wreathed in a crown of water and a cloak of shadow.
Carys, the Courtbreaker.
She fought like a banshee, short sword in one hand and that dagger in the other. Ice, spite—a blue dagger of smoke and cruel history. Eury had carried it in the third Sylvanwild trial, had slit the throat of King Rhodric with its edge.
Its blade flashed before me, not forty paces away. Reachable, but not.
I needed it. Eury needed it.
Where the fuck did you hide it, Carys?
Two dueling magics rolled over the length of Carys’s body—feralis and noxveil—an unholy Unseelie union. They held together like biting wolves, water and shadow roiling and snapping in an infinity snake around her.
And yet she commanded the two magics, barely. Blackened flakes rose from her as though her skin were disintegrating. Maybe it was. The sight was enspelling, one I’d only imagined. Worse than I’d imagined—living destruction.
How badly did it hurt? How intoxicating must it feel?
With those blades and that magic, Carys held off three queens. Noctere, Highmark, Aurelia.
A tentacle of Carys’s shadow magic swept across the grass, wrapped around the neck of the flaxen-haired Highmark queen, whose body burst with light. The shadow slipped over her breast, her arms, her face, encompassed her. Her light died as she slumped to the ground.
A jet of water lashed toward the white-haired Noctere queen. The blade-edge sliced up through the armpit of the Unseelie queen as she raised her flail. Up, up it went, through her collarbone and out the other side.
The flail dropped to the grass, still in her hands. As did the top of her body.
All this time, the history books had told me Carys had “held her own” against the three queens. That was far from true: Carys had won.