Chapter 12
Finnian
There’s an essence to Amarantha that didn’t exist before.
I catalogue it automatically, the way her magic tastes darker, the shadows that cling to her edges where light should live, the wrongness that makes the Crown pulse warnings against my temples.
And yet the essence is somehow familiar.
It’s how my cousin became Queen of the Seelie Court.
Murder. And something worse.
She killed for the throne. But this, this feels like she consumed something that’s now consuming her back.
“Stand, cousin.” Her voice lilts, harmonic and otherworldly. Off-key in a way that sets my teeth on edge.
My knees crack as I slowly rise. I can feel eyes on me, watching from the shadows of this room, one that looks suspiciously like the Unseelie Court. Dark stone. Shadow-thick air. The cold that seeps into bones.
I don’t turn around. Mostly because I can’t. Amarantha has a hold on me that I cannot escape.
She steps forward, palm rising to touch my chest where my heart thunders against my ribs.
Then she looks away.
I try to move.
Nothing.
My muscles receive the command. I feel the signal fire from my brain, feel it race down my spine, feel it reach my limbs, and nothing. The connection severs somewhere between intention and action. I’m still here. Still aware. Still feeling everything.
I just can’t make my body respond.
Like screaming into a void. Like being buried alive in my own body while something else wears my skin.
I can’t move. Can’t speak. Can’t even turn my head to see Ash across the room.
All I can do is stand here, a prisoner in flesh that no longer belongs to me, while Amarantha’s palm presses against my chest and her pointed nails dig crescents into my skin.
The Crown pulses. Danger. Danger. Danger.
As if I needed the warning.
“Ask and you shall receive, Ashlynne.” Amarantha’s voice carries across the room. Her nails dig deeper as my heart rate spikes.
I can’t move. Sweat beads on my palms as confusion races through me in equal measure.
Ash is here? I want to look, to find her but I can’t. I hold no power over my own body. But I feel her, the wildness that blooms like roses in a room.
“Ashlynne here was just telling us how she needs someone to teach her Fae politics. History.” Moros sounds absolutely bored.
My eyes strain to the right, desperate for even a glimpse of her. But Amarantha has me facing the wall like a punished child.
That’s when her crystalline eyes flick to mine, and her heart-shaped face splits into a smile.
“I bet you’re wondering why you can’t move.” She bites her lip, savoring the moment. “Let’s start with the first history lesson, shall we?”
My brain races through centuries of accumulated knowledge, searching, cataloguing, coming up empty. My pulse hammers against my frozen throat. Until I tap into the power of the Crown itself.
The visions flood through me.
Flash.
I’m standing in a throne room that doesn’t exist anymore, three seats, three women, power humming through stone so ancient it predates language. Not three kings. Three queens. The original structure. Before the mad king tried to consolidate power and nearly destroyed everything.
Flash.
I see myself from outside my body, no, not myself. A man who looks like me, standing behind the Seelie throne. Not beside. Behind. The Summer Sword. Bound. Sworn. The Winter Shadow at the Unseelie Queen’s back. The Wild Flame at the—
Flash.
Blood on marble. A queen falling. The system shattering. Roles forgotten.
Until now.
I understand what the Crown is trying to tell me. The Summer Sword isn’t just a title. It’s an ancient binding. A magical leash that predates the current court structure by millennia.
And Amarantha just put it around my throat.
“I invoke my right as Seelie Queen.” Her chin lifts with triumph.
“What does that even mean?” Ash’s voice grinds with fury from somewhere behind me.
Just hearing her, alive, angry, fighting, sends a spark through my chest. She’s okay. Furious, but okay.
“The Summer Sword.” Amarantha pronounces the words like they’re a death sentence. Because for me, they might be. “The Seelie Queen’s sworn protector. Bound to her will.”
“And?” Ash presses.
“The Summer Sword is the Seelie Queen’s bodyguard. For lack of a better word.” Moros sounds like he’d rather be anywhere else. “Bound to her in ways that make consort bonds look like suggestions.”
No. No, this is impossible.
“What did you do?” Ash’s voice could kill.
But whatever this means, whatever ancient magic Amarantha has invoked, it’s already enacted. Already rooted. The binding is firm and real and wrapped around my will like chains I can’t see.
I cannot move.
My eyes close. I think I’m going to be sick.
“I simply took back what was owed me.” Her nails break skin, blood welling around her fingertips. “All these years, I’ve built my court carefully. Deliberately.”
What she isn’t saying? She refused to allow what happened to Tatiana to happen to her.
I remember the stories. Amarantha was Tatiana’s handmaid. Her confidant. She turned the queen’s entire inner circle against her, one by one, poisoning loyalties until there was no one left to trust. Then she took the crown and killed them all.
After that, she never allowed an inner court to form around her. Never trusted anyone close enough to betray her.
Until now.
Why now, Amarantha? What changed?
“And I’ve decided to start with my sword.” Her voice lilts as her eyes flicker to mine, drinking in my helplessness.
Her nails dig deeper. Magic flares around us, cold and suffocating, and with the next breath we’re somewhere else entirely, torn through space and deposited in a new room.
Still in the Unseelie Court. Her private chambers.
I don’t stumble as we settle. Don’t react when she breaks her nails off inside my flesh, leaving them embedded in my chest like tiny knives.
The burn grounds me.
My hatred of this woman drives me.
She steps close. She’s always been a slip of a thing, small, dainty by Fae standards. Unassuming. Easy to underestimate.
That’s how she’s survived this long. That’s how she killed a queen.
All of the courts underestimated her. Including me.
“You may speak.” Her voice drips honey.
“What game are you playing?” My anger coats every syllable.
“Game?” She laughs, cold and merciless. “No game, my Summer Sword.” She bites her lip again, that nervous habit that used to seem innocent and now looks calculated. “Did you think defying me wouldn’t come with punishment?”
My stomach bottoms out. “Explain.”
“You don’t give me orders.” She palms my cheek, her touch making my skin crawl. “See, you had one job. Control Ash through your bond. Secure her loyalty. Bring her to heel.”
“This is because I didn’t do what you told me to?”
Her mask falls. The careful composure cracks, and underneath, something unhinged. Something starving.
“This is because you didn’t do what your queen told you to do!” She shouts it, voice breaking. “You are still bound to the Seelie Court, you foolish Fae. Still bound to me!”
“I was never bound to you.” The words are iron in my mouth. “I will never bind myself to you.”
“Why won’t you love me?”
The question comes out raw. Desperate. The voice of a woman who has clawed her way to a throne and still can’t have the one thing she actually wants.
I should feel pity. I don’t.
“You are my cousin,” I say simply. “And I wouldn’t have loved you even if you weren’t.”
She laughs, but it’s hollow. “Cousin. What an endearment.” She begins to circle me like a predator. “Your mother and mine were never related by blood. Nor our fathers. Cousins by binding, not by birth.”
She isn’t wrong. My mother bound to my father, whose brother met a Fae with a youngling. My uncle, who died under suspicious circumstances. And Amarantha, sent to live at the castle after.
I never questioned why. Never looked too closely at the convenient tragedy that brought her into our lives.
I regret that now. Deeply.
“Then you will remain my Summer Sword.” Her chin lifts as her broken nails drag down my chest, leaving trails of fire. “Eventually you’ll forget her. Your precious bond will wither.”
She grabs the gold bracelet at my wrist, Ash’s bond, Ash’s claim, the only thing keeping me tethered to something real, and yanks.
The magic flares. Warm. Defiant. Refusing to break.
“Eventually,” she snarls, “you will forget your precious Ash.”
The bond pulses against her grip. Stubborn. Alive. Fighting even when I can’t as she tries to rip it off of me. .
“Never.” I pour every ounce of certainty I possess into the word. “That bond was forged in truth. In choice. In something you will never understand because no one has ever chosen you, Amarantha. They’ve only ever feared you.”
Her hand cracks across my face.
Worth it.
The bond keeps pulsing. Warm. Steady. Ash is alive. Ash is fighting. And as long as that connection exists, Amarantha hasn’t won.
She yanks me forward by my shirt, unbothered by my defiance. “You could have just controlled her. Made this easy. Instead—” She shoves me to my knees, hovering over me, fingers twisting in my hair. “Instead you chose her over me.”
“Ash didn’t stand over my parents’ pyre and call it a lesson.”
She jerks as though I’ve slapped her back.
For a moment, just a moment, something flickers in Amarantha’s eyes. Not guilt. Something closer to confusion. Like she doesn’t understand why that would matter.
“You brought her handlers here,” I press. “Graves. His people. You tried to have her killed.”
Her eyes take on a hazy quality. Distant. Like part of her is somewhere else entirely.
“I had to.” Her voice goes monotone. “You didn’t listen.”
“And it didn’t work.”
“No.” Her grip on my hair tightens. “But I kept him. The human. As a pet.”
My stomach drops.
“Why do you hate her so much?”
“The Wild Courts are pets. Creatures. Beneath us.” Her voice is still that eerie monotone, her mind only partially present.