Chapter 56
Kieran
The Unseelie Court is silent.
Not the careful silence of a court holding its breath. Not the political silence of people choosing their words. The silence of a place that’s been emptied deliberately, completely, the way you clear a room before you do something you don’t want witnessed.
“This is wrong.” Kestra’s voice is barely a whisper beside me. Her ice-blue eyes scan the empty corridor. “Where are the guards?”
“Gone.” I extend shadows through the hallway. Searching. Testing. Finding nothing. No heartbeats behind pillars. No breathing in alcoves. No sentient shadows reporting back to their master.
“Gone gone,” Whispen confirms, drifting ahead of us in a sullen violet glow that means he doesn’t like what he’s seeing. “Empty throne, empty halls. The king of nothing sits where nothing calls.”
“Helpful,” I mutter.
“I don’t do helpful. I do truth.”
Kestra and I move through corridors I walked for centuries.
Past the gallery where mother’s portrait used to hang before father had it burned.
Past the receiving hall where I knelt and accepted the terms that sold my life for my sister’s safety.
Past the war room where generations of Unseelie strategy were plotted on shadow-maps that shifted with the political winds.
All empty. All dark.
The sconces aren’t lit. The sentient shadows that usually patrol the walls have retreated into the stonework, pressed flat and trembling like animals during a storm. In three centuries of living in this court, the shadows have never been afraid of their own king.
“He felt it,” Kestra says quietly. She’s stopped walking. Her hand rests on the wall, fingers spread against black stone, reading something I can’t. “The Balance. When Amarantha burned the Seelie Court. He felt it break.”
He was right about the Balance—that’s the part that makes me want to put my fist through a wall. About its importance, about what happens when it fails, about every cruelty he justified in its name. Right about all of it.
He was also a monster. Both things are somehow simultaneously true and have been, for three hundred years.
“His chambers,” I say, because I already know. The shadows are retreating from one direction. Fleeing toward us. Away from whatever is happening in the king’s private rooms.
We find the door unlocked.
My father has never left his door unlocked. In three centuries, I have never once entered his chambers without a summons, without the shadow-link burning through my skull, without kneeling on marble while he decided how much of me to leave intact.
I push it open.
The room smells like jasmine and rot and something sharper underneath. Unseelie Fae mead. The kind that’s distilled from nightshade and shadow-bloom and tastes like regret if regret had a proof. He keeps it for political occasions. State dinners. Treaty negotiations.
It looks like he has been drinking it like water.
King Moros sits on a throne by the dead fireplace. A throne he must have dragged in here, the scrapes on the floor are the proof of that.
His hair is loose, falling around his face like a curtain he can’t be bothered to open.
The bottle is half empty. His hand around it is steady. The rest of him is not.
“Ah.” He doesn’t look up. “Took you long enough.”
I don’t move. Something in me remains locked at the threshold. Every preparation I made, every scenario I ran, every version of this confrontation I rehearsed of imagining the day I’d face him as an equal, none of them included this. None of them included him not caring that I was here.
“Father.” The word tastes like copper.
“Come to kill me?” He takes a drink, a long one. His voice conversational. My father doesn’t do conversational. “Or has your sister come to do it? She always had more conviction.”
Kestra steps past me. I reach for her arm and she shakes me off without looking. She walks into the room with confidence I admire. I spent a long time seeing her as my little sister to protect and not as the woman, the Fae, the queen she rightfully is.
She looks like our mother.
The thought hits me and Moros at the same time. The flinch crosses his face—just once, there and gone, is unmistakable.
He sees Mab in Kestra, too.
“The court is empty,” Kestra says. Not a question.
“Sent them away.” Another drink. “Didn’t see the point.”
“Of what?”
“Any of it.” He sets the bottle down. Picks it up again.
Sets it down. His hands can’t decide what to do with themselves, and that’s more terrifying than anything he’s ever done to me, because my father’s hands have never been uncertain about anything.
“The Seelie Court is ash. Did you know? Amarantha burned it herself. Her own court. Her own people. Because a stone she stole turned out to be a fake and she couldn’t bear the humiliation. ”
“We know,” I say from the doorway.
“The Balance is broken.” He says it like a diagnosis. Like a doctor naming the disease that’s already killed the patient. “Not strained. Not threatened. Broken. I’ve spent three hundred years holding it together and it took one woman with a grudge and a match to end it in an afternoon.”
“You didn’t hold it together.” Kestra’s voice is steady and cold. Her anger valid. “You held it hostage.”
Moros looks at his daughter. Really looks. And something shifts behind his eyes that I’ve never witnessed before.
He agrees with her.
“Yes,” he says. “I did.”
The silence that follows fills the room the way water fills a closed space—slowly, completely, until there’s no air left that isn’t saturated with it.
“Whispen sees the shadow king uncrowned,” Whispen murmurs from somewhere near the ceiling, his light shifting to a deep blue I haven’t seen before. “Truths told too late. Truth on truth now found.”
Moros doesn’t even glance at the wisp. A year ago he would have killed anything that spoke to him uninvited.
“Your mother,” he says, and my spine goes rigid because he does not talk about her—not ever. “Your mother understood the Balance better than I did. She said it couldn’t be controlled. That it had to be...” He searches for the word in the bottom of his bottle. “Trusted.”
“So you killed her,” Kestra voice remains flat, unbothered. But I know her and she isn’t unbothered. She’s likely feeling the same anger and uncertainty I am.
Or not.
“She was going to dismantle the court structure. Open the borders. Let the Wild Court remnants return and the old gods to awaken.” He drinks. “I couldn’t allow it.”
“You mean you were afraid of it.”
His jaw works. For a moment he’s going to deny it, going to retreat into the cold, calculating king I’ve known my entire life, going to remind us that fear is a weakness and weakness is death and every other poisonous lesson he carved into our bones.
“Yes,” he says instead. “I was afraid.”
I don’t know what to do with that. The man before me isn’t the man that raised us. This one gave up.
I want to destroy him. My shadows lunge before I can stop them, three feet toward his chair before I drag them back.
The Spear burns behind my ribs like it’s offering.
I want to weep. My throat closes around something I will not give him.
Not here, not in this court, not in front of the chair where he sat when he ordered my mother’s death.
I do neither. I stand in the doorway and breathe.
“The Wild Court queen entered the Academy an hour ago.” Moros stares at the dead fireplace.
“I felt it. The foundations of Faerie shifted. The oldest magic in existence recognized her and the entire realm tilted on its axis.” He laughs, and it’s the worst sound I’ve ever heard from him.
“Three hundred years of control. And one girl with thorns under her skin undoes it by walking through a door.”
“She’s not a girl,” I remind him, my ire growing stronger. I feel frozen as I imagine his death in my head again and again. “She’s a queen.”
“She’s the end of everything I built.” He looks at me. His limp hair stringy and his cheeks flushed from the mead. “And you love her.”
I do.
“Good,” he states, no hesitation. It feels odd coming from him. “She’ll need someone who knows how to survive a throne.”
Kestra crosses the room. His nostrils flare, she’s done. With the act, with the posturing with the balance and just simply him.
“Give me the throne,” she says.
“It’s not that simple.”
“Then make it simple.”
Moros looks up at his daughter. Mab’s daughter. The child he tried to sell and leverage and imprison. The woman who came back anyway.
He reaches for the bottle, but stops.
“Kill me,” he says. “And take the Unseelie throne.”
What?
I search his face for the angle, the hidden play, the cruelty disguised as surrender. I’ve studied this man’s micro-expressions. I know every tell.
There is no tell.
He means it.
Kestra doesn’t move. Her hand rests on the blade at her hip.
Jadeve’s blade, the one the forest dweller gave her, the one she’s carried since the borderlands.
Her fingers rest on the hilt. She’s shaking, not from fear but from the specific fury of a woman who prepared to topple a tyrant and found a tired old man offering his throat.
“This isn’t how I wanted this,” she whispers.
“No.” Moros’s smile is a ruin. “I imagine you wanted a fight. I’m sorry to disappoint.”
“Don’t.” Her voice cracks. Just once. “Don’t you dare apologize now. Not now. Not after everything.”
“I’m not apologizing.” He meets her eyes. “I’m giving you what I should have given your mother. A choice.”
Kestra draws the blade.
I can’t breathe.
Kestra’s arm draws back.
“No.”
The voice comes from the doorway behind me. Not loud. Not desperate. Not pleading. Just a single syllable uttered from a woman who made it her personal challenge to destroy everyone around her.
I turn.
Amarantha stands in the corridor. Ash and blood on her silk dress. Her hair is undone, laying in knots around her bony shoulders. Her eyes hold that unhinged brightness that started when she burned her own court and hasn’t stopped since.
She looks like she ran here. Like she crawled through passages and shadow-walked through ruins and clawed her way across Faerie to reach this room at this exact moment.
“How touching,” she says, somehow with confidence she shouldn’t still hold. “The family reunion.”
Kestra’s blade remains raised. Moros’s throat is still bared. And Amarantha stands between the doorway and every plan we made.
I look at my sister. She looks at me.
And in the corridor behind Amarantha, the shadows shift. Not my shadows. Not father’s.
Hers, somehow hers, the ones she dragged in from the burned Seelie Court, her personal reserves, the last scraps of power that don’t depend on a throne.
Enough to kill.
“Well,” I say, and my hand goes to my chest where the Spear sleeps. “This just got interesting.”