Chapter 58
Finnian
The throne room smells like a bonfire someone tried to put out with perfume. Roses and char, and underneath it the thing I’ve been pretending isn’t blood for about ninety seconds now.
“Tiana.” My boots crunch over something I don’t look down at. “Tiana, wait.”
She isn’t waiting. She’s walking a slow circle around what used to be the throne, kicking rubble like it has personally offended her, which—fair. I try not to count the bodies on the way past.
And fail, I count them anyway. Thirty-one. The Crown logs the number somewhere behind my left ear and files it under things Finnian gets to lie awake about, cross-referenced with three in the morning, every morning, forever.
It’s the only filing system my own head respects and it’s the one designed to ruin my sleep.
Tiana stops at one of the dead. Young. Seelie robes scorched black at the hem. Face turned up like he was looking for something when it happened.
I know him.
One of Amarantha’s archivists. Barely two hundred years old, which is barely out of diapers by Fae standards.
He used to bring me tea when I worked the restricted stacks past midnight, and he never once got the honey right.
Always too much. I told him once. He kept doing it anyway, because he thought I was joking, or because he wasn’t, and now I’m never going to find out which.
Tiana’s hand hovers over his chest. Her fingers shake for a moment before her hand drops.
“I cannot heal them.” The tears come without warning. Dripping down her dirty face, leaving wet trails.
“Let’s get Amarantha,” I say, because I don’t have anything better and standing still is going to break one of us. She still has to die.
“Why?” She throws her hands up. “I’m here now. This is my home. This is my throne. This is my court.”
“It is.” I step around her. Give her the space she hasn’t asked for and clearly needs.
“It’s fucking anticlimactic.”
I try not to smile, and I don’t entirely succeed. “Of course it is.”
She squints at me like she’s trying to decide whether to deck me. It takes a moment but she deflates.
“I want her to suffer.” She closes her eyes and lets her head fall back, and her voice drops into something quieter and worse. “I want to put her on a spike. Right here. In this room. And I want to spend a millennium teaching her every little thing she taught me.”
I stay quiet.
This woman in front of me is my queen. My actual queen. She isn’t happy. The Sword in my chest doesn’t know what to do with that. It’s hers now. It pulls toward her like a tide and finds her grief and sits down in it, dumb and loyal, waiting for instructions.
“I want to listen to her cry herself to sleep,” Tiana says, conversational now, the way you’d describe a recipe. “I want to collect the tears in something pretty. Use them to bind her.”
The Sword in my chest pulses once. Approving. Great, all she needs to do is utter the order.
“I want to destroy her.” Her voice breaks on the last word.
A reasonable person would be disturbed.
I check, just to be thorough. Nope. Turns out years of breakfast across the table from Amarantha—who described worse over soft-boiled eggs—has pretty much used up my disturbed budget for the century.
The difference, and it’s a real one, is that Amarantha loved the planning and got bored with the doing.
Tiana isn’t going to get bored.
“But not kill her,” I say.
“I want to. By the gods, I want to.” She huffs out something that’s nearly a laugh. “I want her head on a spike. I want to watch her bleed out slow enough to count it.” She sighs, and the sigh has a crown in it. “But I have to become queen.”
“It’s a choice.” I look at the room. At the wreckage of a court. The Balance, gone. Fractured down some seam I can’t see and I’m not sure anyone can put back.
“Fuck it.” She kicks the chair. “Come on. I know a shortcut.”
“I assume you know where we’re going.” I fall in behind her.
“That bitch is going to run to daddy Moros.” She’s already moving. “She’s got a back door in here somewhere.”
The hallway smells like char and old roses, the same as everything else.
The staircase she leads me down spirals the wrong way—counterclockwise, which is Unseelie architecture, but the masonry above the second landing turns Seelie at the joints, the two courts bleeding into each other where they share a wall.
My brain catalogues the structural detail because my brain catalogues structural detail while the world burns. It’s who I am and honestly, I want nothing more than to get back to the Fae I am.
Somewhere around the second landing I open my damn mouth. Because I need to tell her, this Fae who will be my queen by the end of the night, that I cannot go on like this.
“Tiana.”
“I know.” She kicks a door in.
“Tiana, I—” My mouth has gone dry somewhere on the staircase and I didn’t notice. “I don’t want to be the Summer Sword.” The words come out in a rush.
She doesn’t look at me. Instead, she keeps her eyes on the dark beyond the doorway.
“I gotta kill the bitch first,” she says.
“I know.” I lick my lips. “I plan to—”
Renounce the Seelie Court.
“Don’t.” She lets out a breath. “Don’t say it. Not yet.”
I nod. She knows. She knew before I did, probably.
The Sword is hers—it’s hers in a way Amarantha’s never was.
The Crown was never anyone’s to give. It will find a new bearer.
I want neither.
“You sure?” Tiana asks, like she’s been reading along inside my skull the whole time.
“Yeah.” I can feel the frown settling into my face like it lives there.
“I want nothing more than to spend the rest of my days curled up next to Ash with a good book. Maybe write one of the fall of the Balance. A historian if you will.” I chuckle because I can taste the excitement of that new life. It’s so damn close.
“Ew.” She jerks her head back. “Keep that lovey-dovey bullshit away from me.”
“Noted.”
“I made a deal, Finnian. I’ll stand by it.” She nods at the dark. “Now let’s go get this cunt.”
“Language.”
“I said what I said.” She laughs, and for a second she sounds like herself again. “Let’s go.”