No wonder spite was the only language he had left. It was the only thing they hadn’t been able to take from him.
I felt him stir behind my eyes. Not in words—just a low, resonant hum, like a tuning fork finding its pitch. He knew. And for one moment, shared recognition between fae and dragon. The quiet, terrible solidarity of two creatures who’d spent a lifetime feeling unseen.
Yes, the hum seemed to say.Now you see.
The arrow in my lung shifted when I breathed. Blood filled my mouth, hot and copper-bright. My court was dying. I was dying.
But Caustrix hadn’t died in a thousand years of darkness. He had waited. He had held his spite like a coal in his jaws and he had refused to let it go out, and when I had walked into his fire, he had been ready.
I could be ready, too.
The dagger. My fingers had barely found the grip when something closed around my ankle and I was moving—dragged hard across the wet grass before I could close my hand around it. I opened my seared eyes, still with haloes of Liora’s light in them, and at the edges of my vision could see my arms scraping across the ground. Fast, faster, away from the sounds of battle. Away from the Sylvanwild ambush.
I was being pulled toward the pillar. Toward the center of the Killing Fields. The one place I wasn’t supposed to go.
The Convergence.
They would kill me there, all three of them. Rid themselves of the changeling queen, the upstart who’d forced them into the trials. No matter that I had feralis; it was still three against one, and I with an arrow through the lung.
I raised my head. There, wrapped three times around my ankle, a slick, vibrant green vine. Not one from the autumn court; this was Iseris’s spring magic. Verdant, potent, terribly alive.
The vine had sprouted from the earth in the Convergence. There stood the spring queen, bedecked in gleaming, iridescent armor, beckoning me in with the same slender fingersshe’d set atop my hand. And behind her, the white pillar loomed so wide I couldn’t find the edges.
So this was their plan—all four of us meeting at the Convergence. But one of us wouldn’t be leaving.
The vine jerked hard. Grass tore beneath my fingers as I was dragged, faster, faster, until I was whipped out of the autumn court’s lands and sent skidding over the ground toward the spire.
I passed through the thick veil, viscous as jelly, and into the convergence. The four magics pooled over me at once—feralis and noxveil and viridine and solaire swimming together, cloying in my mouth and nose.
I slid hard, fast toward the pillar, fingers grasping. Close, closer, the white wall growing. I threw my shoulder forward just before impact. I slammed up against it, shoulder then hip.
Pain radiated through me; my vision went white. Not with light, but with the hurt. Hurt everywhere, like my body was one great open wound. There was nothing else, just the cold stone of the pillar against my back and the sound of my own breathing—shallow, wet, wrong. Here, pressed against the heart of the Convergence, the magic seemed too dense for sound to carry. The world felt still, muted.
Footsteps on the grass. Several pairs.
When I opened my eyes, there they were. Three queens, each of them wreathed in magic.
Liora, Iseris, Maeronyx. Summer, spring, winter, and my coming death.
They didn’t speak, didn’t laugh or scream. Speaking was a waste of time when you were delivering death, and these three women weren’t wasteful.
They were efficient. They were fighters. They were queens.
They descended on me not one at a time, not politely, but all three at once. First, solaire—a blast so intense the world went whiteall over again. Everything disappeared, and I was thrown back into blindness.
I hadn’t realized how much sight was life, how much I’d relied on it until it was stolen from me again and again. No wonder Liora had survived six hundred years. No wonder she and Maeronyx had led the ambush. Between light and shadow, they could strip away your best sense before the fight even began.
Yet all my other senses remained—the slide of metal from sheath, the movement of their boots over the grass, the astringent smell of magic in my nose, the metallic tang of blood in my mouth, pain beating like a second heart inside me—and the certainty of my own body still existing in the world.
I was alive, for now. But I wouldn’t be in ten seconds. Iseris’s vine tightened on my ankle, keeping me bound. No running away.
They'd gone to all this trouble, and still they fought like it was already done.
Anger flared in me, hot and startling. I had always been underestimated. Frail, a weakling. A rabbit, a pettifey. Forced into this kingdom. Forced into trials. Forced to fight Rhiannon. And never on equal footing, always at a disadvantage. Yet I had survived, found a way every time, and still it was fucking three on one.
Eight seconds until they were on me.
I couldn’t fight them, not even one at a time. Maeronyx had already gotten a kill-shot with her arrow; now it was only to finish their work.