Chapter 4 #2
Only the red-haired Aurelian queen fought on. I had read about her, Queen Lysanthra and her whips of life. Whatever they touched grew with life, just as Unseelie feralis sucked it away.
She knew the dagger allowed Carys to hold the two magics. She knew it must go.
One of her whips shot out, viper-fast, and caught the dagger by the grip. Black smoke rose as Seelie magic met ancient power. She yanked the dagger away, and though it did not bloom with life, it did land near my feet.
Where it lay, the grass whistled and hissed as though burned.
Hateful thing, yet I would pick it up if I could.
The noxveil shadows around Carys’s body evaporated the instant the dagger left her grip. Without her weapon, she couldn’t hold the two magics together for even a moment.
No matter. She wrapped her fingers around Lysanthra’s whip and yanked her forward—straight into the tip of Carys’s waiting bastard sword. The blade entered Lysanthra’s throat and came out the other side.
Lysanthra’s violet eyes turned pale, and her body wilted into Carys’s grip.
Carys dropped her as though she’d been handed a sack of unwanted flour.
She stood breathing hard, her back to me, covered in viscera.
Her own skin still flaked off her, revealing muscle and sinew.
Where the skin remained, black streaks ran up her veins.
The corruption of holding two Unseelie magics at the same time. How did she still stand?
Around her, three queens lay dead in the span of a minute, their bodies still and dismembered on the grass.
The stag had not intervened. There it stood, still at the tree line, watching on like it wanted this.
A chill slid over me, even though I stood in the sun. This was the moment, the turning. For one brilliant second, Carys had ruled all of Feyreign. A single crown for a single queen.
The Courtbreaker. Unstoppable, brutal, terrifying.
With two magics, with that dagger, with her immortality… her reign would be endless.
Until—
A hand reached out, gripped the dagger at my feet. A dark-haired fae knelt before me; when he rose with the hilt in his cloak-wrapped hand, the smell of his burning skin pierced my nose. The cloak made little difference.
Yet he didn’t shake, didn’t scream, didn’t hesitate.
He approached Carys with the dagger low at his side, his footsteps silent in the grass.
He stepped over the upper half of the Noctere queen, slow, slow, then all at once.
His last six steps were so quick, the steel flashing upward so fast, I could have blinked and missed the piercing of her leathers.
The blade’s six inches slid into the center of her back, right up to the grip. Carys’s veyre held the weapon steady, his hand burning and hissing louder with the tightness of his grip.
And Carys didn’t fall, didn’t scream, didn’t even gasp—she just went rigid. Her sword fell to the grass. Her fingers splayed, chin lifting.
Then he jerked the dagger sideways.
She dropped. He yanked the dagger free and tossed it aside, caught her as she went down, gathering her against him like a lover, both hands around her bowed back as he lowered her to the ground. His mouth bent to her ear; I couldn’t make out the words, and I didn’t dare approach.
Whatever her veyre said, it wasn’t meant for me.
She didn’t live a minute, or even thirty seconds more. Carys died there in the grass among the other queens. A simple death, her last sight her veyre and the sky.
Did she feel rage? Remorse? Maybe—probably—both.
When she was gone, her veyre set his forehead to her breast. Not the cruel indifference of a murderer, but the visual language of a man who cared.
He stayed that way for a time, until finally he rose, his burned hand clutched to his body.
The dagger lay in the blackened grass. He crossed to it and without letting skin meet the metal, swept it up into the folds of his cloak.
Where did you take it, veyre?
He strode through me. I spun after him and stalked in his wake. I thought he would pass out of the Killing Fields entirely, but he stopped at the edge and spoke to a young, light-haired man.
A man whose face I knew. Bright blue eyes, a big beard—
Haskel.
Carys’s veyre whispered sharp words I couldn’t hear, and then he stepped out of the Killing Fields. He disappeared with the dagger still hidden in his cloak.
And Haskel strode after him. No, followed.
Stayed on his heel like he had done so a thousand times.
And though I had always imagined my mentor as the eight-hundred-year-old fae with wrinkles around his eyes and white in his beard, he wasn’t always so.
Of course he wasn’t, though he’d never shared this part of his history with me.
Haskel was once a squire. And he had watched Carys’s veyre murder her in the Killing Fields.
By the time I staggered back to the Andalusian by the tree, the sun had long since set. I didn’t know how much time had passed, only that the moon and stars shone above. My head swam, my vision blurry. I either had to sleep under the sky or fall off my horse on the way back to the citadel.
I slept the uneasiest sleep of my life. And I thought only of returning to her side.