Chapter Twenty-Nine
TWENTY-NINE
Not even the cicadas dare break the silence of the starry night.
The gardai lead the procession out from the castle gates, all of us still in the same finery from the banquet meant to mark the High Queen’s birthday.
There was no break, no moment to excuse anyone from the court to get ready to march. Instead, the High Queen snapped her fingers and the Lady of Shadows barked the order, waving the gardai to haul Eavan out of the room in shackles, and for the rest of the party to follow behind.
Not one person dared protest.
No one risked speaking up, not even to try to save one of their own from the horror I know—they must know—is waiting for her on the Black Quay.
Do the nobles know?
My heart is a hammer in my chest. The guilt rips at its shredded edges, seeking a firm enough hold to tear into. This isn’t what I thought would happen. No noble has ever been executed on the Black Quay. How could I have known?
It was meant to be Oona.
Oona, disgraced.
Oona, disappeared to face whatever happens to noble traitors. That violence always seems to be kept behind closed doors, where none of the rest of us can see it.
I breathe, one slow, shallow inhale after the next, and fight for control.
Above us, the stars barely flicker. The leaves barely skitter across the streets, and the only sound beneath the moon’s veiled face is the trudging of our feet over stone—and Eavan’s gut-wrenching wails.
With every step, I fight to picture the distance between here and the Black Quay as a battlefield. I try to replace her screams with all the ones I’ve heard from my friends, my neighbors, my family who met their ends just like this.
It doesn’t help. The Black Quay is not a death I would wish on my worst enemy. Somehow, I keep moving. There’s no sign of Talon near. No sign of Wolf, either.
Aoife is the only one who walks at my side, and I’m grateful she’s there. She shakes so hard, I can’t keep myself from looping an arm through hers. We lean on each other for each step across the stones that fade to dirt along the way.
She found me in the thick of the crowd, just as we watched Cash shoot daggers in the cold glare he leveled at the High Queen after she gave her order.
The whole damn court saw the way he looked at her.
Exactly as I’m sure he wanted—so that he’s seen on the right side of this, after the nobles understand what dying on the Black Quay truly means. Once they see the indignities of what the High Queen is willing to do, even to them.
The royals sit in a carriage at the front of our procession. From high up on the carriage bench facing back toward the nobles, the High Queen’s eyes are as cold and hard as diamonds. The absence of the High King is a scythe hanging in the air above us all.
Old Ones, where is he?
How the fuck am I going to find him and kill him before this contest is over?
Ice slips down my spine at the sight of Cashel, sitting opposite the High Queen.
He isn’t wearing his crown now. Where it went, I don’t know. But he’s taken it off, as if in protest, and I hear more than one noble in the procession around me remark on it.
He asked for mercy, the voices whisper, and head after head nods approvingly.
And she refused.
Hope does battle with the crushing threat of guilt raging in me.
We have to cleave the nobles. We have to make as many as we can turn on the High Queen. Supporting her, supporting annexation by Cymrea needs to feel not just difficult but unthinkable.
I tell myself that I can bear the guilt of what’s about to happen if it means Finn won’t ever have to trade her life for mine, like I did to save her. If Cash meant what he said about protecting magic, and letting the mages come back.
I’ll bear the guilt if it means we still have a chance.
I tell myself this again and again even as Eavan screams.
Each of her shrieks cuts to the quick of me. The nobles’ lips press into thin lines, their fingers clutching at the gems sparkling at their throats and wrists, as if they finally feel them for the shackles they are.
Only torchlight marks our path now. The eerie orange light glows against the mist hanging in the night air, tingling at the throbbing ache at my temple. Blood crusts over my cheeks from the gardai’s blow; I can feel where my dark hair sticks to my skin.
There’s no use trying to pull it away when I know I’m still bleeding.
The jagged horizon at the end of the lane rises up ahead. Only mangy dogs roam the edges of the Black Quay at this hour.
I catch the dying orange slivers of shuttering windows, the figures behind them vanishing as they snap closed, and remember—sometimes, it takes hours to die on the spikes.
The gardai’s marching feet slap to a stop.
The rattle of the royal carriage slows.
I hear the hinges of the prison cart creak, and Eavan’s screams fading to low moans, then abject cries. And as hard as she fought when the gardai forced her into that cart at the castle gates, she fights twice as hard against them as they try to get her out.
Silent fury ripples off the long lines of nobles.
I taste it, coating the air.
Cash’s expression is pure ice as he climbs down from the carriage.
His ringed fingers trace the hilt of his sword and settle at its base.
Sandy hair falls into his face, and there’s no hint of sapphire in his tight gaze.
No remorse, either. Just the cold fury he doesn’t try to hide—and fixes right on the High Queen for the entire court to see over the sound of Eavan’s panicked pleas.
There’s nowhere for her to run.
No one to help her now. The gardai lead Eavan up the low steps to the Black Quay, jutting out into the sea with a dozen different blackened spikes reaching up toward the stars.
Once, the table in the middle might’ve been wood.
But years of struggle and blood and filth have coated every inch of it into a hardened black—just like what’s on every one of the spikes.
Its edges are as jagged as broken teeth, with whole chunks clawed out of the old wood.
Four iron shackles wait for her, bolted on each corner. Two for the hands and two for the feet. A fifth one waits for her neck, a cruel metal collar that will lock her into place.
It only takes two gardai to haul Eavan up the steps—until she sees the table. Then her eyes roll back in wild terror, and her every muscle leaps to life. This is desperate, animal terror, lashing and shrieking and clawing at everyone around her.
Another three of the gardai come to hold her down.
A heavy regret wrenches in my gut.
I know the terror she must be feeling. I’ve felt it, the night the gardai hauled me from my bed and brought me in an identical cart up to the castle. I remember the blinding, desperate whirl of panic, the sureness of my coming death.
Battlefield, I force myself to remember.
This is a battlefield, and I’m the one who brought us here. This is war, no different from the violence they’ve waged on us for years. And no war is won without sacrifice.
The only sound then is shackles clanking into place and the final pleas of the girl beneath the last moonrise she will ever see.
Eavan strains against the shackles, bucking and screaming.
Begging.
In the market, when the gardai massacred innocents to appease the High King, I squeezed my eyes shut and let Finn lead me through.
But I don’t look away now.
I will bear witness, and I will remember.
The executioner heaves, and the sound of the spike…
Old Ones, forgive me.
There are no words.
Beside me, Aoife vomits silently. My hands find hers, tightening as she sags against me. Across from us, Cash’s cheeks are gray and sallow. Beside him, a woman in heavy chains of emeralds sways on her feet.
A shriek pierces the air. Then another. A mallet smacks wood, again and again, until Eavan jerks, jaw frozen wide in a dying scream—then, mercifully, she stills.
The woman at Cash’s side collapses. More than one man heaves up the contents of his stomach, retching violently beneath the moonlight.
I watch blood pooling beneath the executioner’s table, spreading along the dock, as if all the souls haunting this place are already seeking the next of us to join them.
And at the top of the customs building, almost blending in with the sharp arch of the roof, I swear I see the snap of a black cloak in the night before it vanishes over the rise.
Wolf was right, that very first night when he snuck into my room with Fang. To survive here, to be a part of this the way I want to be now that I know the truth, I needed to become more ruthless than the version of me he met when we first struck our bargain.
I am not who I once was before I came here.
I am who I need to be to face the war that is coming—the war that will make us all bleed.
And beneath the horror and the guilt…
I think I am stronger for it.
I see the horror, the loathing across every face with each silent step on the long walk back.
We pass without words under the gates, the royal carriage rattling over the cobblestones ahead. Cash still doesn’t wear his crown, and this time he is the one on the bench facing back toward the nobles, never taking his furious glare off his stepmother.
The sight sparks something in the nobles.
I can’t see who first whispers the words as we enter the castle again, but they are sharp and clear in the dark night—just like the murmur of agreement.
Savage, the nobles whisper.
The High Queen is savage.