Now, death had never been more with me. My family’s deaths had tortured me; even the thought of Eury dying was unbearable. It couldn’t happen. Not while I lived.
A shadow passed over the sun. Not a cloud—not natural. The air chilled, and goosebumps rose on my body.
Maeronyx had made her move on the Killing Fields.
Out there, I could barely make out the shape of the great white pillar. Couldn’t even see Eury. Winter shadow was as potent as summer light. Even fae eyes couldn’t penetrate it.
Which meant Eury was in terrible, terrible danger.
“Veyre.” Haskel’s voice boomed like I’d never heard it. Desperate, full of gravel. “Protect your queen.”
His sword clanged in the shadows. A horse screamed.
Haskel fought on. He would fight until he couldn’t.
Everything pulled me toward Eury’s side—but necessity kept me in place. If I didn’t take down the chargers, they’d lance me in the back as I ran. I needed to be quick, efficient, merciless.
I dropped the shield and sword on the ground beside me. For this, I needed feralis.
The chargers galloped in winter court formation: in pairs under cover of Maeronyx’s shadow. Each rider held a sharpened lance, invisible in the darkness but no less real. I had seen those lances athousand times as a captive to the winter court. Twelve feet long, their points sharper than arrowheads.
Once, from my window high up in the citadel, I’d seen a man die by one. A slave had been brought out into the riding yards for practice. A rider drove his weapon through the man’s chest like he was made of butter instead of sinew and bone; the point appeared out the other side in a spray of blood. Took him off his feet and onto the lance, where he dangled as the charger galloped out of sight.
I’d vomited at that window until I gagged bile.
Now it was my turn. Black death… my adolescent nightmare.
The riders would come in waves; if the first pair failed to lance me down, the second pair would be ready. Then the third.
They had every advantage—except for one. The motherfuckers rode on my land.
Their hooves clopped loud over the earth, the vibrations rising through the soles of my boots. I had to wait, to be patient, to be sure. One error, and I was done.
I closed my eyes. Waited, waited—waited. Even as my heart wanted to beat itself to the rhythm of those hooves. Even as my knees shook. I pulled feralis toward me, a tornadic swirl of it. For this, I would need all I could hold. But feralis was wild magic, autumn magic—it answered to emotion the way a fire answers to air. Feed it calm and it gave you control. Feed it grief and it gave you nothing but rain.
Feed it spite, and it gave you everything.
So I fed it.
I fed it Finch’s blood drying on my armor. Fed it the weight of his body going slack against my chest, the way his fingers had uncurled one by one. I fed it the stag’s indifference, that ancient, patient tilt of its head while my court died. Fed it Gawain’s grim smile—the one he’d worn the night he’d killed my family, the one I still saw every time I closed my eyes. I fed it the sound of Eury’s name in my mouth all the times I’d said it wrong—as a weapon, as a wall, as anything other than what it was.
I fed it every rotten, bitter, vicious thing I had ever swallowed and held and carried because I was too spiteful to let any of it kill me.
The feralis screamed into me. Not a trickle, not a surge—a flood. More than I’d ever held. More than I should have been able to hold. It tore at the edges of me, looking for seams, and I let it look because I didn’t care. Let it crack me open. Let it unmake me. I’d stitch myself back together later or I wouldn’t. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except the six riders bearing down on me and the queen behind me who couldn’t see them coming.
The bellows of the lead horses’ breathing threaded into my ears, a sawing of air in and out through wide nostrils. My eyes opened. The whites of the horses’ eyes glowed in the shadow. Six in total, and the lead chargers only twenty paces away.
Death, I call on you.
I raised my foot, slammed it into the ground. Ahead of me, a ridge of hardened roots erupted from the earth, half as tall as me and four times as wide.
The lead horses couldn’t slow, couldn’t avoid, couldn’t leap in time. They crashed into the ridge, tumbled head-forward on their slender legs. The two riders dropped with them in a pile of screaming beasts and clanging metal.
Two down. Four more.
Already I felt the darkness spreading in me, the Unseelie magic working its way into my veins.
Didn’t matter; only Eury mattered.