Chapter Forty-Five
The Nest jams up with day servants finishing their evening chores and night servants starting theirs.
I slip between the bodies. In the kitchens, I snag the two dessert pies under Kassandra’s name and push through the masses again.
Someone calls for me as I reach the stairs.
I take two steps at a time, my blood rushing, pulse thumping in my throat.
“Avery!”
Glenn.
I stumble, catch myself. “Yes?”
The faerie stands a few steps down from me, his wide face upturned and open. “I just want to apologize for—”
“It’s okay—”
“No, it’s not. I pushed you away and we should’ve grieved together—”
“That’s sweet to say, but I need to go.”
“Do you need help?”
“I can carry these, thank you.” I glance up the winding staircase.
“Is something happening?”
I open my mouth, then close it when the Illusion oath pricks along my tongue.
“If anything happens, you take care of Benji,” I say.
“What’s—”
“I mean it, Glenn. You protect him.”
“Of course.”
I glance down again at the dessert before me.
Peach pie. I huff a laugh.
That spoiled brat didn’t tell me she was doing this again. There is fight in us both yet.
“Thank you,” I say.
“Be safe!” Glenn calls.
In the Illusion apartments, the plane is plucked tight like the strings of a bow between two energies. The twinkling magic and the unfeeling one: fallen snow and an empty sky.
The two siblings swallow wine in silence, passing the decanter over the table on a magical wind. Kassandra beckons me, still not looking my way.
“Both, please,” she says, and I place the plates before her. I try to catch her eye, but she waves me off. “Depart.”
“Stay, little faerie.”
I linger, glancing between them. Two months ago, I hesitated as well, unsure of who was the top master. Now I battle within myself: To obey Kassandra would be to abandon her here, with her brother.
“It’s confused.” Dominik barks a laugh.
“Avery. Leave.”
My legs move despite my screaming thoughts. Coward, I think. Stay for this fight.
“Seems like disobedience is another trait you two share,” the heir jeers.
“I do not disobey, brother.”
A peach pie lifts from the table, floating across the room.
It drops in front of him, the plate cracking, the dessert crumbling.
His nostrils flare, pupils dilating. The chair flies across the room as the fae leaps to his feet, body heaving with rage.
The plane swirls around him, drains into him, as he siphons its power and lays it across his skin.
“Then what do you call this?” he screams. “What is this?”
Kassandra meets her brother’s gaze. “An act of war.”
“You declare war on your own House?”
“I am declaring war on you, Dominik. The title of Heir of Illusion belongs to me, and this is your last chance to hand it over peacefully.”
He slams the table, the dishware rattling, crashing to the floor. Yet he doesn’t reach forward with invisible hands, doesn’t strike out at her. There isn’t fear in his eyes, only fury. Something is off. More than usual. Something is missing.
My attention sweeps the room but can’t pick out any Illusions. But when have I ever been able to discern the sophisticated fantasies they spin? Bending over, I slip a shard of glass up my sleeve as pieces of wood splinter beneath Dominik’s grip.
“You’re a delusional cunt whose little rebellion has gone on too long,” he snarls.
“Avery, out,” Kassandra says. “Now.”
“Guards! It is time for my sister’s gift!”
Before I can move, Kassandra’s chamber door flings open.
A line of Illusion guards files in, clad in silver armor and bows.
Five, seven, ten march in, more than any number I’ve seen before outside of Illusion events.
As they form a straight line, the hairs on the back of my neck rise.
My genius panics, fluttering along the plane for a source of nature to call upon and finding nothing.
I could conjure flames along my arms, but to what avail?
The soldiers draw their bows, notching silver arrows, strings pulling taut. Ten Illusion archers aim at Kassandra.
“Excuse me!” she yells. “What is the purpose of this?”
“To remind you of your place,” Dominik says. “They will follow who they know will win.”
“Guards, I demand you lower your weapons.”
No one moves. One exhale and ten arrows will rain upon her—could she survive it? One would pierce an organ. The arrows would reach her before I could. My broken piece of glass seems pathetic, but I grip it with everything I have.
Two Illusion halflings tramp in, each holding a fae in their grip.
A familiar sky-blue male and a sage-skinned female twist to free themselves, each sporting a black eye and scrapes along their shackled arms. I recognize the female fae from Hector’s bed all those weeks ago—his mistress.
And the male—Lord Tomas Roche—Illusion’s advisor, her husband.
The fae Kassandra had to tea. Clara Roche.
Something drops in my chest.
Lord Tomas’s gaze falls to Clara’s belly, and I spot it there, a faint but important detail. The swell of her abdomen. She is with child.
I take a step forward. Dominik’s eyes slide to me, a smile creeping along his thin lips. The monster took the time to lick his wounds, and now he is unleashed.
“Oh, little faerie,” he says. “You haven’t seen the best part yet.”
The last guard enters, a gruff, burly male whose large hands hold a faerie. Briar.
Kassandra stiffens at the same time I do. Neither of us moves as the guard raises a blade under Briar’s chin. She squeezes her eyes shut, lips moving in an unheard prayer. A knife also appears at the advisor’s throat, another poking at the pregnancy of his wife.
“Please,” the mother, Clara, whimpers.
“Please what?” Dominik says.
“Don’t hurt the baby. I’ll do anything.”
“Anything but stay loyal to your husband and the head of your House.”
A flash of movement, a gurgling sound. Kassandra jumps to her feet, but it’s too late.
The advisor collapses to his knees, clutching his neck, blood spurting between his fingers. He drops prostrate on the marble, a pool of crimson teeming beneath him.
Horror descends as the buzzing in the plane intensifies.
Dominik just executed the third most powerful fae in the Illusion House. Tonight, he’s not just merely stalking us. He is hunting.
My fingers tighten around the glass, its edges biting into my flesh.
I could throw it at Dominik, but it would need to hit the target directly, or else there’s no going back.
Even if I do succeed, there is no guarantee that his guards won’t let the arrows loose.
The act wouldn’t save anyone, not even Benji.
“A shame, really.” Dominik clicks his tongue. “He was so good with numbers. He even noticed the little inconsistencies in the reports as of late—the little debts forgiven here and there. He just wasn’t smart enough to realize that it was his wife’s doing. And yours.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Are you truly that foolish, Kass? Money is my domain, not yours.”
The advisor’s body twitches one last time, his skin clearing. Then four rings of debt snatch across the pregnant fae’s arms, like black shackles that weigh her down. She cries out in pain. Briar jerks forward, but the guard yanks her back. He slaps her hard across the face.
“Don’t move,” Kassandra says.
Still, Briar hisses with her canines and the guard slaps her again. The other guards shift on their feet, their arrows quivering.
“Briar!” Kassandra barks.
Briar flashes her teeth, cheek red. This is sliding sideways faster than I can blink. My best bet is to pick one path and pursue it: getting the guard off Briar and the pregnant fae.
“Dom,” Kass utters. “We can discuss this, just you and I.”
“Ah, did you forget, sister? A war is fought with bodies,” he says. “So you must be willing to sacrifice some.”
Shifting, I catch it—a translucent shimmering that surrounds me—and only me. A protective wall of hardened air, or the beginnings of an Illusion? I’m unsure. Yet with the way Dominik squints in my direction, head cocked, he’s deciding, too.
“Run, little faerie,” he grins. “This is your chance.”
A falter in the shimmering air despite Kassandra’s impassive face.
She extends magic toward Briar and the pregnant fae, but it’s not enough—ten arrows are trained on her, and Dominik hasn’t even touched his magic yet.
She cannot battle and protect us all and herself, and he knows this. We need to fight together, she and I.
Suddenly the hardened air falls away from my back, giving me an exit to the servants’ door but maintaining a shield before me. Now is the chance to run.
I turn inward for the pulsing pride she accuses me of—my insolence.
It tastes bitter and sharp. Instead of letting it spill onto the plane in a poor attempt to ignore it, I embrace that bitterness and focus it down my arm and into the piece of glass in my hand.
Wrap it with my obstinance, my pride in her.
Then I press that broken shard of glass against the shimmering air to my right, willing my message to transpire through the plane.
I am here, I think. I will fight with you.
Kassandra straightens. “Is this your true desire, Avery?”
“Yes,” I say.
“I wish you well.”
Footsteps. The clopping of my own boots, an echo of the sound. The false creaking of the servants’ door, the slamming of its hinges.
An Illusion.
An Illusion in which I have left her.
Briar begins to cry, and despite the cracking in her voice, I am grateful. It seals the deal. Dominik throws his head back, laughing. He sees what he wants.
“You fool!” he shrieks. “Did you really think your favorite toy would stay? After everything you and I have done to break it so that the other could not have it?”
“I don’t know,” she says.
As I creep across the room, her magic glimmers around me, mimicking the view from all around, an apartment that Kassandra knows in meticulous detail—she has been jailed in it for years. She must also quiet my footsteps, for as I approach the guards with drawn bows, they do not budge.
I slip behind their line, pausing. I could nick the neck in front of me, but it would draw immediate attention. So it can only be one neck. The halfling twitches; I hold my breath. Dominik is too preoccupied to notice. Instead, he just crosses his arms.
“You have options, Kass,” he says. “Carry the king’s child, married or not. If you refuse to be his wife, then you can at least be his whore. With Maxian’s family madness and Reign growing more restless by the day, they may even welcome a bastard to secure the line.”
I am halfway down the line of guards.
“Speaking of bastards—guard?”
A high-pitched keening. Clara falls to her knees, an animalistic wail ripping from her. She clutches her abdomen as it gushes blood.
Even the other guards flinch.
Bile rises in my throat, the air in the room thin. I take tiny, shallow breaths, my heart bursting against my chest, demanding more, but if I concede, I will gasp, I will cry, and we will be found out.
The wailing blooms in the space, the fae mercilessly alive. All color drains from Kassandra’s face, and Briar bites her captor’s arm once more. He rips her back by her hair.
“End this,” Kassandra pleads, grabbing the table for support.
“I ended your competition,” Dominik says. “It’s important you remember the sound of disobedience. And she may live yet, even if her Reign bastard doesn’t.”
The Illusion around me flickers, falls for just a moment. A guard turns his head, and the shimmering air snaps up again. I inch behind the guard holding Briar, the mother howling on the ground before us.
“And my other option?” Kassandra asks. “You said I had some.”
“If you cannot convince Maxian to put a baby in your belly, then I will put one there myself.”
The Illusion around me drops.
Clara spots me first from her fetal position on the ground. She shrieks in shock.
“You!” she screams.
Guards whip around, mouths dropping open. Someone releases an arrow.
“What the—”
I yank Briar’s guard down by his collar, slicing the shard across his neck. He goes limp in my hands, dropping before me. There is no time to dwell on my first kill.
Someone tackles me into the blood.
I think of fire. Of the deepest fury a male could never know.
It stretches before me, around me, back generations: my mother losing her life to young motherhood, my grandmother shouldering the failure of the fields on her back.
The endless experience of big hands grabbing little girls and the malice that adult males inflict on adolescents—oh, that hatred had to go somewhere, did they ever consider that?
Did they think we’d just absorb it like how they want us on our backs, passively?
No, it is in me. Compacted down into my core, for there is so much of it, and now, finally, I get to draw up that ferocity from its fathomless, yawning pit.
It is either the halflings or me, like starving rats in a bucket with no food but one another. And I will not be eaten. Not today, not ever.
So when the guards grab me, I let them.
Multiple sets of hands, a male body, then another, yank at me, punch me, a boot lands into my stomach. There are at least three bruising me. Only then do I let the heat and wrath and anguish loose.
Flames explode, consuming everything in their path.