Chapter Fifty-Seven
“WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?” Maxian screams. He grabs me by the shirt collar and yanks me up, my legs flailing. “WHY WOULD YOU—”
“Because you would not!” I yell back.
He slaps me, hard, and I realize this is him being good. Greater violence lurks in that mind and body, and the threat of it is what trapped me like a tree as a door, used against my will. But even when I did not have the strength to call out for help, it didn’t matter. My friends found me anyway.
“Why won’t you do as you’re told?” He shakes me, my head rattling.
Because I have taken down one High Fae, allied with another.
Because I have loved their lovers and killed halfling guards.
I will fight to the end, until Maxian bloodies his hands on the bones of my back, until I am nothing, and even then, I will not beg for forgiveness.
I will not submit. Ever. The last thing the king will see from me is the hatred he could never buy, bargain, or beat from my eyes.
As he yanks me up, screaming in my face, I do not treat him like a king, not even like a halfling.
I fight Maxian like a faerie.
I spit in his eye. He rears back, recoiling. I swing my knee up between his legs. We go down. I scrabble away, kicking him in his nose. It crunches. The plane shakes with his power, tumbling around me like a rockslide. His Reign power will take me soon.
I press my palms into Lucan’s Tree, my genius sparking once more as it connects to the veins of power, the root system that spreads under the entire palace of Versara.
My mind splinters into a million beings, feeding into the Illusion courtyards, the Healing gardens, each plant and plot that has been meticulously sculpted, pruned back, forced into unnatural shapes and confined sizes, all screaming to be free.
Where should I go? I ask.
Where we are, the voices reply.
The connection snaps, my body picked up and thrown. I tumble across the stump. Maxian stands above me, twitching, sniffing, like that day in the boxing ring, only now nothing familiar remains behind those dilating eyes. When was the last time he snorted Ashent?
“Stupid faerie cunt!” he seethes.
“Isn’t that what you want?” I snap back, scrambling to my feet. “Isn’t that what you need?”
He lunges, tackling me to the ground once more, and we roll, biting, ripping flesh, and smacking jaws.
“Halfling bastard,” I yell, raking bruised nails across his pretty face.
“I will—”
I bite his shoulder hard, incisors breaking flesh.
Blood floods my mouth. He screams, rips me off him.
Tumbling across the stump, grappling for a hold, I find a crevice, sticky with sap.
My genius soars along the underground magic, finding a cluster in the outermost building of the palace. Maxian rises.
“You could’ve made a great king, halfling,” I say. “You could’ve freed us all.”
The vein in his forehead throbs. “Why would I—”
I lick the sap off my fingers, energy exploding through me like food, like sugar and nature and life, the opposite of Ashent. It is the purity of Lucan’s Tree; it is the original state of faeries. It is a homecoming.
Hello again.
It is me, finally earning the title of my mother’s daughter.
“What are you doing?” he screams.
“Leaving you,” I reply.
My genius locks onto that bundle of nerves near the palace’s perimeter.
I let the plane transport me there.