Chapter 47 #2
The heat rose as the great ball sat atop the high point, and dawn became day. The sun had crested the pillar.
Now, now, now.
I stepped into the bloody grass.
My foot passed through a veil of power as tangible as gauze and into a morass of feralis. Here, magic surged, sparked, swirled. I had thought I could feel it in the air in Sylvanwild, but this…
This was ferocious. Almost suffocating.
It begged to be tapped into. Longed for it. I took another step, another, each one bringing me deeper into the deep end of magic in Sylvanwild.
To my right, Liora had stepped into the Fields. To my left, Maeronyx had done the same.
Iseris stood somewhere out of view. I still couldn’t see her from here—the pillar rose between us like a stone spine, ancient and milk-white, at the place where all four magics bled together.
The dagger hummed against my back. A low, greedy thrum that answered the surge around us, as if this place remembered what the blade was, what it had drunk from. I pressed my palm flat against its hilt through the leather; it shuddered beneath my touch. Not yet.
Four queens in four quadrants. The Killing Fields stretched between us like a sea of death.
Without turning my head, I searched for Liora. Found her in my periphery—golden armor, chin high, solaire rippling around her like a second skin. She was supposed to look at me. A nod. A signal. Now, it would say, and the whole terrible business would end without bloodshed.
But she wasn’t looking at me.
She was looking at the sky.
Something cold slithered through my chest. Not magic—something older than magic. The instinct that had told me when to duck and when to run and when to put my back against a wall. The instinct that had kept me alive.
She was just watching her god, I told myself. Steadying herself. This was the Killing Fields; everyone was afraid.
But Liora hadn’t looked afraid once since I’d met her.
I readied my hand over the dagger. Waited for the signal.
A cry broke the stillness—sudden, sharp. Not from a fae, but high up. The dawn hawk.
My gaze lifted to the sky, found it circling above its queen. It banked, angled so that its wing caught the light—
And directed it into my eyes.
My hand went up as I twisted away. I had seen solaire before, had watched Liora wield it over a blade, a queen’s bright promise. But that had been solaire filtered through a fae—borrowed, shaped, tamed.
This was solaire through a god.
The light hit me like a physical thing. Not warmth but force, a white so total it had weight, had teeth, had a sound like the ringing of a struck bell that wouldn’t stop.
My hands flew to my face but the light was already behind my eyes, already burrowing, already replacing every image I’d ever held with its blank and screaming nothing.
I stumbled. My knees buckled. The feralis around me recoiled as if even the magic of my court knew better than to touch what a god had thrown.
A fae cried out, screamed, a single guttural syllable echoing over the Killing Fields.
“Vrekh.”
I’d heard the word before. A Faerish word, one that had come from my throat over and over again. I had yelled it as I’d ridden toward the high wall of the Kingdom of the Plains. I had felt its power as my tongue formed the sound.
Vrekh, vrekh, vrekh.
Attack.
But this time, it had come from Liora’s throat.
I rubbed at my eyes as the world came back in pieces.
Wrong pieces. Smears of color where shapes should have been, the ground tilting under me.
I blinked and blinked and blinked and every blink gave me something different—a flash of sky, a blur of gold, the dark smudge of the pillar listing sideways in my vision like a drunk.
My eyes watered so hard I couldn’t tell if I was crying.
I wasn’t crying.
Sounds hit me before sight did. The neighing of horses and the pounding of hooves. A whistle—thin, familiar, the sound a thing makes when it cuts air with purpose. Then another. Then a dozen, a hundred, so many they stopped being individual sounds and became a single hiss, like rain.
Not rain. Arrows.
A yelp sounded, sudden and terrified, from behind me.
I forced my eyes open. Turned toward my camp.
The world was still wrong, still washed in white at the edges, still swimming, but I could see enough. I could see too much.
An arrow had pierced Eleyrie right in the center of her chest. She folded to the ground in a pool of soft cloth.
More arrows flew, from left and right—the winter and summer courts. Their arcs converged on my camp, tore into the tent, stabbing into the grass like a terrible, sudden rain.
One found Mirek’s skull. Drove him straight to the ground, eyes open, the arrow’s point emerging from one ear.
Alive—
—then dead.
Another buried itself in Haskel’s thigh.
Another speared Faun’s shoulder, sending her spiraling toward the ground.
Dorian. Where was Dorian? He’d been standing there right at the edge of the Fields.
Hooves vibrated the ground. Riders poured in from both sides, half a dozen from the summer court and the same from the winter court. Swords glinted under sunlight, ready to swing.
And my court was dying.
I could hear it. Even half-blind, even with the white still eating at the edges of my vision, I could hear the sounds a body makes when an arrow finds it.
The wet, punched exhale. The clatter of armor hitting dirt.
Someone was calling my name—my queen, my queen—and I couldn’t tell who it was because the voice kept breaking apart, kept dissolving into the roar of hoofbeats and steel and the thick, rhythmic thud of cavalry hitting a line that had never been built to hold.
Time dilated. Seconds had passed, but also an eternity. My court was gone. The attack had been so quick, so efficient, so planned. The truth sank in like a stone: this was an ambush. A slaughter.
Liora. This was Liora.
The Dawnmaker. The pragmatist.
She had never intended to ally. She didn’t intend to make me bend the knee. She intended to destroy me and my entire court.
I’d been betrayed before I’d even touched the dagger. Maybe before I’d even left Highmark.
Despair flowed in. It came like water through a broken dam, cold and fast, flooding my chest until I couldn’t breathe.
I had brought them here. Faun. Haskel. Finch.
Mirek. Eleyrie. The handmaidens who had braided their hair this morning like it was a ceremony and not a grave.
Every one of them was here because of me, because I had stood before them and said follow me and they had, they had, and now—
Shadow fell over me like a hand across my eyes. Cold, thick, absolute. Not the absence of light—heavier, alive. The last scraps of shape and movement I’d been clinging to vanished.
The hawk had taken my sight; the black maw took what was left.