Chapter 21
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Eurydice
As a girl I had imagined balls in the king’s castle.
Elisabet and I sometimes lay together on her narrow bed and we closed our eyes and spooled out our fantasies.
She was always resplendent in yellow, a noble from the inner district.
And I… I always hovered at the edges of the imagined room.
An onlooker, perhaps a guard. At best a servant offering food and drink.
Never begowned. Never a queen. And never with this many eyes on me.
I came through the double doors into a ballroom set beneath a night sky like an endless painting. I didn’t even know if it was real, only that it was the queerest, most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
Mirek’s words echoed: Eyes forward. Never drop your chin.
Haskel had advised me to bat my eyes at all the men.
Faun had told me to tuck a dagger into the bodice of my dress with the grip at my cleavage.
But it was Liora’s words from yesterday in the courtyard that rang loudest: Make the queens see you in front of the court. Make them doubt their own power.
At the end of the room sat the three queens: Liora, Iseris, and Maeronyx.
Only they mattered. Only they would face me in the Killing Fields.
So I didn’t cut around the edges of the ballroom. I didn’t veer toward the rest of my inner court, whom I glimpsed nursing goblets at the fringes.
I cut straight through the center, under the night sky.
Fae spread for me like fish in the spiritstag’s pond, their gowns flashing, their heels tapping. The musicians went on playing, and I approached the long table where the three queens sat.
They watched me like the Fates from the tale my mother used to tell as I fell asleep. Liora in yellow, Iseris in pink, and Maeronyx in black. Beautiful, straight-backed, their eyes and cheeks gleaming under their masks.
My mother used to say the Fates controlled the lives of humans, plucking and cutting strands like thread. Perhaps the Fates were, and always had been, Feyreign’s queens.
I arrived at the table, close enough that my gaze shifted down, and theirs up. I stood above each of them, and I didn’t hurry to speak. In politics, Liora had said, a queen never hurried.
I met each of their eyes—blue irises, green, and black. I spread my lips in a smile. “Queen Liora.” I nodded my head to her. “Queen Iseris.” Turn. Nod. “Queen Maeronyx.” Turn. Nod.
Each of them nodded back.
“A delight to see you all again.” I let my gaze settle on Maeronyx. “Lovely to be reunited. I’ve thought of little else since our tea.”
Her red lips parted, white teeth appearing on that pale face. She might have smiled or grimaced; it didn’t matter much which.
Her hand went out, the oxblood fingernails glinting above a sleeve of black lace. She touched fingers across the table. "We must do it again sometime."
“Sit.” Liora gestured to the empty chair next to Iseris. “Let us show our unity.”
I came around the table, and a handmaiden pulled out the high-backed chair for me. I stepped in front of it, and she pushed it behind me as I sat down beside Iseris. Why in the gods’ name must it always be Iseris?
Tonight her curly hair sat bountiful atop her head and spilled over her small shoulders.
She turned glinting eyes on me from behind a carnation-pink mask.
“You are exquisite.” Her gloved hand fell atop mine in my lap.
“I’m most envious. Do you know Mirek trained our court’s tailor?
Yet there are none like him. My kingdom for a proper blind hem. ”
Her kingdom for a blind hem. She actually had a kingdom to trade.
She tapped my hand. “You must lend me him soon.”
This was easy; this was banter. “Send me whoever did your hair and we’ll talk. Though I warn you, Mirek will weep when he sees what I look like without him.”
She let out a sparkling laugh and turned fully toward me the way Elisabet used to when we were girls. When we would gossip with one another on a pub’s stoop. “Deal. But if Mirek defects to my court willingly, that’s not my fault.”
How had this fae risen to the crown? But power didn’t always look the way you expected. My mother used to say it was the laughing ones you watched closest—the ones who made you forget they had teeth.
Iseris’s laugh tinkled on, but my attention had shifted. Across the table, Liora rose from her chair and lifted her glass. The crystal caught the light of a thousand candles as she tapped a spoon on it.
The musicians faltered. Conversations died in waves, spreading outward from the queens’ table until the whole of the ballroom had gone silent. Even the stars above seemed to dim their shine.
“My lords and ladies of the four courts.” Her voice carried without strain, that perfect melodic pitch. “We gather tonight not merely to dance and drink, but to honor an ancient tradition. The Queen’s Trial.”
She turned, and her gaze found mine.
“The newly crowned Queen Eurydice of Sylvanwild has declared herself her own champion on the Killing Fields.”
A murmur rippled through the crowd. I kept my face still, my hands tight in my lap. Iseris’s fingers squeezed mine, her shoulder pressing, as though we would not stand opposite each other in the Fields. Or maybe because we would.
“For the first time in four hundred years,” Liora continued, “a queen will step onto the Killing Fields not to watch her champion fight, but to fight herself.”
Past Iseris, Maeronyx’s red lips curled.
“And so we three must answer.” Liora’s glass rose higher.
“As is our right. As is our duty. In a fortnight’s time, we four will meet on the Killing Fields.
There will be no champions. No seconds.” She paused.
“Only us. The defeated will kneel, and the victorious will reign for a hundred splendid years.”
The silence was absolute.
Liora’s gaze swept the room, then settled back on me. “To Queen Eurydice of Sylvanwild. The first queen since Carys to stand for herself on the Killing Fields. May we all prove worthy of the fight she has given us.”
Around the room, glasses rose, my name in the mouths of a hundred, two hundred fae. Some spoke with admiration, some with pity, some with hunger, as though they couldn’t wait to see me on my knees.
By now, Eurydice had sunk deep inside. I was Mirek’s teaching and only that. My movements were his; my smile was his instruction.
I rose from my chair. I lifted my own glass.
Liora’s eyes glittered, waiting.
“To the Killing Fields.” I held her gaze and didn’t blink. “May the strongest queen rule.”
I sat down, my pulse quick. The ballroom had resumed its chatter, the musicians picking up their cheerful tune as though Liora had toasted to health instead of battle.
Iseris leaned toward me, her gloved hand finding my arm. “A fine addition at the end.” Her eyes sparkled behind her mask. “Your boldness is quite the gambit. You might reign someday.”
“Someday?”
“Once you’ve grown into your crown. This time you shall kneel, but in the future…” Her slender shoulder rose, and she winked. “Every court has its turn at the wheel.”
As though I’d made a brazen move with no real consequence. Perhaps, to her, that was so. Maybe she didn’t intend to kill me at all.
“Iseris,” I said. “I haven’t asked your age.”
“Two hundred and nine by the next moon’s turn.” She inclined her head toward me. “You must come to my birthday celebration. My master of confections is unparalleled.”
Two hundred and nine. I sat back in my chair and finally understood: every voice, every eye, every beating heart in this room believed in its own eternal cadence, except—
The changelings. Three of them, besides me.
Young women, easy to spy in the crowd; they stood uneasily near the walls, holding goblets and “wearing lowborn all over them,” as Liora might say.
I didn’t recognize their faces—maybe they’d been plucked from the western or northern districts—but I knew their expressions.
Fear, torment, the wide-eyed knowledge of what they’d done or been made to do in the trials.
“What will happen”—I leaned toward Iseris—“to your changeling?”
She blinked at me, as though she didn’t understand. Then her face opened up. “Oh, my champion.” She picked up her drink and swirled it. “A fine home in Aurelia, with all the cheese and meat she can stand.”
She had spoken the words as they’d entered her head. An entire fate decided by Iseris’s imagination as she sat half-drunk next to me.
The musicians set off into a new song, and Iseris let out a delighted laugh, too bright, too easy. “I love a fast dance. Who should you like to take a turn with? You have your pick of noblemen, since you haven’t declared a consort. Oh, there’s Valerian; he’s the best dancer in Noctere.”
Her finger went out. The dancing had resumed, the room in lively motion. At least twenty couples danced, and I could barely differentiate one fae from another. Certainly not Valerian from Noctere. To me, each man was as dangerous as the next.
If I could help it, I wouldn’t even dance. I could imagine Mirek cringing from the corner of the room and drowning himself in drink if I took the floor. As it was, he’d stayed in his chamber so as not to horrify himself with all the poor lacework from the other courts.
When the dance had ended, the musicians went briefly silent. The fae parted from the center of the room, breathing fast.
“Oh, or perhaps Kane,” Iseris went on. “Now that I’ve pointed, he’s approaching. Put on your queen face.”
Queen face? Where I came from, a queen face was what you wore to ward off a man. I suspected Iseris meant something softer—regal, inviting, untouchable in the way that made men want to try. But I only had the one face, and it was made of ice.
My attention crystallized as a tall, slender man materialized from the crowd. He approached our table in a black suit with a pink kerchief tucked into the breast pocket and gave a low bow.
The other three queens nodded their heads at him.
His blue-eyed gaze locked on me.
No, no, no.
He began to approach—