“West, Crowmere.” His voice carried the harsh bark of battles past; he didn’t even glance my way. “Your fight’s west.”
West of us, six ebony chargers bore down on our camp. Maeronyx’s cavalry, their black armor gleaming white where the light touched it.
Betrayal. Betrayal on every side.
The dawn hawk had violated the trial. Flown into the Killing Fields, wielded its own magic against a queen—that was forbidden. The gods observed,the gods did not act.
Truth hit me hard, fast, cruel:
Euryhad broken the oldest rule.No weapon that isn’t of the land.The dragon’s tooth wasn’t of the land. Dragons were creatures of sky and fire; they’d never belonged to the earth. And Liora had known. She’d handed Eury the sol key, helped her find the dagger, watched her carry it onto the Fields. She’d kept that knowledge tight to her pushed-up bosom and smiled the whole fucking time.
And now all rules were off, and the hawk had been the first to exploit that. Sunlight already lay over the Fields—it didn’t need to cross a border. The hawk had just angled the light that was already shining and blinded her.
At the tree line, the stag remained motionless, watching on. Its great antlered head tilted slightly, the way it had when it pressed its brand into my skin. When it had chosen me as the instrument of Eurydice’s death should the worst come to pass. It had looked at methe way you look at a blade you’re sharpening—not with affection or cruelty, but with patience.
It wore that same patience now.
The stag wouldn’t stop the hawk, wouldn’t challenge its transgression. It hadn’t intervened when Carys became the Courtbreaker. It hadn’t intervened when herveyrekilled her with her own dagger. It had watched a queen it chose descend into corruption and done nothing, because the experiment was more interesting than the subject.
Now it was doing it again. If Eury died, no matter—the dagger would pass to another hand, another test, another four centuries of waiting. If she lived, well… that was intriguing to a god.
The hawk wanted the dagger for Highmark. The stag wanted to see if Eurydice deserved to keep it. Both of them were willing to let her die to find out.
Fuck the gods. Fuck the trials. Fuck the courts.
Feyreign was, and always had been, diadems and boots on necks andgods. And I was sick of being a pawn.
I hobbled to the weapons rack, slid the strap of a round shield onto my forearm and unsheathed my bastard sword. It came free gleaming under the sun, no doubt sharpened by Haskel himself. One clean slice severed the arrow lodged into my calf. I turned toward the fighting.
Half my magic had been sapped during the ride. Half would have to be enough.
The first Highmark knight had nearly ridden Haskel down, sword ready. The old fae roared, pulled a torrent of feralis toward him, and pounded his booted foot on the ground. The earth kicked upward before him—broke like a buried giant punching its way toward the sky—and the horse’s eyes went wide as it was thrown off course. Haskel’s halberd swung down and sheared through the horse’s foreleg above the knee.
No one in this kingdom was better with a halberd than Haskel.No one in Sylvanwild was better at manipulating the earth. But he was one man on foot versus six mounted knights.
In the Killing Fields, a worse sight: Eury stood with one arm thrown up, her face shrouded. A darkness clung to her eyes like a living thing, too black and too deliberate to be cast by anything natural. The hawk had blinded her with light; the maw had finished the job with shadow.
I’d felt the first attack, and the second. The brand on my chest had pulsed hot and sick the moment the hawk’s light hit her—not pain exactly, but an echo of hers, theveyrebond carrying her distress to me in waves I couldn’t shut out. Whiteout. Panic. The disorientation of a body that had been robbed of its primary sense and hadn’t learned yet how to survive without it.
Now, the panther’s darkness. She might have been screaming. She might have been calling for help. In the roar of the Fields, I couldn’t hear her, and she couldn’t see me, and the distance between us might as well have been an ocean.
The blindness wouldn’t fade before the other three queens hacked her down.
She needed the dagger. She needed to use itnow.But if she could act at all after two gods had reached into her skull and turned out the lights, then she was a greater creature than any queen in the history books.
The vibrations under my feet intensified. Maeronyx’s chargers.
I pivoted toward the west. Their gallop carried them toward me hard, fast, their lances readying. Six soldiers of the winter court—the best in Feyreign. The horses thundered but the riders remained eerily still; a bad rider fought the gallop, but a good one had nothing to fight.
No time to say a single word to Eury; they’d be on me in seconds.
Ever since Gawain had taken me, he had wondered at the strength of my magic. How I was able to call on it so easily, with so much force. Our circumstances were the same: both of us changelings, both of us made orphans.
What he didn’t—perhaps couldn’t—understand was that death lived with me. It lived in my mind like a coiled snake, those slitted eyes always open, watching. I’d watched both my mothers bleed out—human and fae. My father. My sister. Everyone I’d loved.
For some, perhaps, death was an event. For me, death became my whole life. It consumed me. It became my beginning and my end, my everyday, my dreams and my waking.
And it meant I could call on magic like breathing. In, out—like air.