Chapter Twenty-Seven
Back in the throne room, the talk had gone in circles.
“Where could she be?” Eogan asked, meaning who they were all thinking – Zuri.
No one had an answer good enough to satisfy him.
“Literally anywhere,” Derran muttered, “as anything.”
Karai resisted the urge to roll his eyes again, mostly because the hour no longer deserved that kind of energy.
Eogan’s mouth turned down. “At least she no longer has the necklace.”
“Yes,” said Lugomir. “Thankfully, thanks to all of you, it’s safe with Jassie again. We owe you more than we can say. And I will personally make certain that when it’s repaired, when the missing diamonds are added back, it’s enchanted with even stronger protections.”
Karai looked at him carefully, as one approached an old bridge that might still collapse if addressed too directly. “Have you considered,” he asked airily, conversationally, “not repairing it? Perhaps storing it safely? Or removing your heart from within it entirely?”
Lugomir shook his head slowly, smiling. “Oh, no. I find it a beautiful tradition. Very meaningful. When Jassie mentioned it to me several weeks ago as a gift for the ball, I knew it was something I must do.”
He shrugged one shoulder, broad and too oblivious in the middle of his own danger.
“Unfortunate only that the mirage fairy and Achlys used it against us. But I don’t believe anyone else means us that sort of harm. We’re safe now, or will be once we find Zuri, and Jassie can wear the necklace freely.”
Derran and Karai looked at each other, mouths agape.
The same realization hit both of them at once.
In the canopy court healing room, Jasenka had told them, plainly, that she had not known the nature of the necklace until Lugo presented it to her before the court. That had been the shape of her fear, the excuse for not taking the first note seriously.
But if she had suggested the gift weeks in advance, then she had known all along.
Known it would be made.
Known when it would appear.
Known what it would contain.
Time enough to free Zuri.
Time enough to plan.
Time enough to arrange every step.
Both princes were on their feet before the thought had fully settled.
“Ina!” The gasp came out of them together.
Then they were running.
Lugomir swore and followed. Eogan did not waste time asking what they had realized. He came after them with just as much haste, Shayna close behind. The throne room overturned into motion in a blink, chairs knocked aside, rugs catching under hurried feet.
“This way!” Shayna cried, understanding what they were seeking, and turned down the corridor toward Jasenka’s chambers.
They reached the door together.
Derran hit it first, shoulder and hand both. Karai was half a breath behind him. The door burst inward under the force of them.
They came in just in time to see Zuri make the first cut into Ina’s chest.
Ina screamed.
Everything happened at once.
The moment the door burst open, Zuri struck them with mirage magic.
Derran and Karai saw it first. Or thought they did.
Some shapeless thing dropped on them out of the air, all claws and wings and tearing force, not a creature with one body so much as a blur of danger made solid.
It hit them before either could properly turn.
Claws tore through cloth and flesh alike.
Wings battered them sideways. Karai struck the wall hard enough to crack something wooden behind him.
Derran hit the bedpost and then the floor, rolling once, already bleeding from one arm.
Meanwhile Jasenka still had Ina’s legs pinned, and Zuri had not stopped cutting.
The knife bit again.
Ina screamed again.
“Sit still, queen,” Zuri said, and her voice was annoyingly calm. “You’ll damage the piece of your heart I need for the cavern if you don’t.”
Those were the words Ina needed to hear.
Pain frightened her. Being bound terrified her. But what rose in her then was anger, steely and formidable.
How dare they.
How dare they lay hands on her body as if it were theirs to use. How dare Jasenka kneel there helping. How dare Zuri speak of her heart like some trinket to be harvested.
Ina’s eyes went from green to black.
She could not move her hands. The vines and metal still pinned her too tightly to her own sides. She could not put her palms to the floor. Could not reach for Zuri. Could not do anything the way she had before.
So she closed her eyes.
And let the anger move through her instead, rushing through her veins, a necessary poison. She thought of the first shape in her mind that was large enough, violent enough, clear enough.
The giant snakes.
This transformation came nothing like the heron had at first. No fumbling. No false starts. No trying to picture knees and feathers and shoes. It came smooth and terrible, as though anger itself had made the path for her.
One instant she was Ina, bound and being cut.
The next she was a giant serpent rearing up in the bedchamber, the force of her body bursting through Zuri’s bindings and smashing the vines and metal apart as though they were dry twigs.
Someone screamed. Perhaps several people.
Snake-Ina struck furiously.
Her head snapped toward Zuri and her fangs sank into the mirage fairy’s side.
She shook her once, hard enough to tear her free of her place beside the bed, then flung her across the room.
Zuri hit a chair, shattered it, and rolled, healing herself from the bite in one swift movement that Ina did not see.
The mirage creature turned then from the princes still fighting it, toward Ina.
It came at her in a blur of claws and half-seen wings, but her snake jaw was huge now, built for larger prey than illusion.
She struck blind and true, clamping down on whatever body the thing had under the glamours.
Claws scraped her scales. Wings beat against her face.
She swung her head and threw it to the far side of the room.
Furniture broke. Glass burst. Someone shouted her name, but it came to her as though from very far away.
Then, as swiftly as she had changed, she turned back.
Ina stood there again, small by comparison to the destruction around her, eyes still black, breath harsh, chest bleeding where Zuri’s knife had opened it.
The mirage creature lunged for Ina again.
Derran shoved her down and out of the way, drawing it off with blue fire and the force of his own body.
Eogan raced to join him, pummeling the creature to keep its jaws from finding Derran’s throat.
Matilde’s form appeared between blows, as though the mirage was having trouble holding on to her corpse.
Ina pulled herself off the floor, her attention moving across the room. She didn’t see Zuri battling Karai, him barely able to keep his shield up, another scene catching her attention first.
Jasenka had lunged for Lugomir. Not frightened now. Not pretending. Her face had gone strange and desperate and fixed, and she moved with the clear intention of finishing by hand what the necklace and the notes and Zuri’s failures had not yet managed.
He cried out as the first blast of her magic struck him from behind, falling to his knees, wheeling toward her. “Jassie! Why?”
“Did you really think I wanted to spend my whole life in your shadow, Lugo? Married to the biggest oaf in the entire marsh court, traipsing about like anyone respects your rule?”
She spat the words at him with such hatred that he flinched and seemed to shrivel into himself.
She gave him no mercy. “I should be princess of the marsh court. Me.”
“But… you are,” Lugomir whined.
Jasenka laughed at that. “In name only! You rule as though I do not exist. As though my words mean nothing. As though I’m your accessory, not your equal. No more, Lugo. The throne is mine!”
With a flick of her fingers, black cords, surrounded by glowing green light, sprang out of thin air and wrapped themselves around Lugomir’s neck, strangling him. He grabbed at them, trying to pull them away with his own magic, but Jasenka’s was too strong.
Ina did not hesitate then.
Her hand went into the velvet bag still hanging at her side. She pulled out one of the metal discs.
She threw.
The disc flew flat and silver. Wind woke its edge, and it grew to the length of her arm across, large spikes opening out of it.
It struck Jasenka and buried itself deep into her chest and neck.
She crumpled to the floor. No cry. No dramatic last word. Only a body hitting wood and staying there. The cords fell away from Lugomir’s neck instantly. With a gasp for air, he stared down at her as if he had forgotten how to move.
Ina turned away from him, to the other side of the room.
Now she saw Zuri by Karai, who had managed only halfway to his feet after her last attack.
His shield had shattered. Blood ran from his arm and smudged at the side of his mouth.
He was dazed enough that the room still had not fully settled in his eyes.
Zuri caught him with her magic and drove him back to the floor.
“Looks like I didn’t need to curse you after all, Karai. You promised you’d always be mine,” she said, grinning viciously. She raised the knife she still held over him. “You’ll be keeping that promise in death, since you couldn’t do it in life.”
Karai looked at the red blade, gleaming like steel wrath.
And this time, did nothing.
Ina saw it. Saw the stillness in him. Saw that he could not make himself strike first, not at her, not even now when every piece of sense in the room cried out for him to do it, to save himself.
Another scream tore out of Ina, this one all caustic rage. “He’s mine!”
She ran and hit Zuri hard enough to take them both to the ground.
They rolled once, struggling to gain the upper hand.
Ina grabbed Zuri’s hair and pulled hard.
Zuri scratched Ina’s arms and drew blood.
They rolled again, still grappling ferociously with each other by hand, magic only an afterthought.
Then Ina came up over her and pinned her there, fire gathering in her hands, hot and white at the center, a familiar feeling spurred by anger so violent she could not have stopped it if she tried.
She never felt the knife.
Zuri drove it into Ina’s side while they wrestled, just as she had done to Velor, but the pain did not reach Ina yet through the blinding fury.
Karai saw it.
His face changed with a horror worse than his own danger had called forth.
He had not felt fear of the battle, or the mirage creature, or even Zuri as they traded bolts of lightning and metal.
He had fought with numbness, some part of him still refusing to believe it was all happening.
Refusing to believe Zuri was free and wanted him dead.
Refusing to believe she had wanted him dead from the moment he had bound her to the stone at the bottom of the ocean.
Refusing to believe she didn’t have some love still left in her for him.
He had always been a romantic in that way, believing at times too strongly in the power of love.
He had been ready to accept his fate at the edge of her knife, because something in him still foolishly believed that edge would not come.
But it had come. Just not to him.
That was what moved him at last.
Not the knife raised over himself. Not Zuri’s threat to him. But seeing Ina stabbed, the long knife sticking so deep into her body he feared the worst, caused the terror to crash into him like ice.
“No!” he shouted desperately.
And then like fire coming on ice’s heels, it rose the dark fury in him too. He came at them in a burst of fire and metal so fierce the air itself seemed to crack. Bolts of heated metal-magic flashed from his hands toward Zuri.
Derran had seen the knife too. He shouted and moved at the same time as Karai, blue fire leaving his hands in the same direction.
Neither was needed.
Ina’s magic, driven by rabid anger, had already wrapped its own flames around Zuri.
She did to her what she had once done to Aikento. With a single blink of her black eyes, Ina pushed the fire into Zuri.
Into her with such power and fury that she could see Zuri’s skin glow incandescent red, as though the fire had ignited inside and was bursting outward.
The mirage fairy shrieked, a sound cut crisply short as she burned in a blink. Flesh and beauty and hatred all gone too fast for the scream to even echo. When Karai’s bolts and Derran’s fire hit, they struck only a smoldering collapse already turning to ash beneath Ina’s hands.
Then there was nothing left of Zuri at all but a blackened heap on the floor.
Ina rose, eyes still black with rage, softening back into green only when they met the terrified gaze of her princes across the room.
Only then did the pain arrive, hitting her from every angle. The knife in her side. The cuts in her chest. The blood already wet down her front. She looked down and saw the hilt protruding from her, saw the red spreading, and for one blank, ridiculous heartbeat thought only, that seems bad.
Then her knees gave way.
Karai and Derran reached her together. She did not know which one caught her first, because by then the room had begun to darken at the edges. Their voices came to her through water. Someone shouting. Someone else swearing. Hands under her shoulders. Hands at the knife, not pulling it yet.
The ceiling blurred.
The floor vanished.
Ina went down into blackness before she could feel anything else.