Not far off, almost invisible in the pillar’s shadow, the grass shifted from green to red. Bold, gleaming red. Bloody red.
The storybooks said that the convergence of magic made this place strange. An undying death lay over the land, every arterial spray as fresh as the moment it had occurred.
I didn’t blame the horse for refusing to enter. Yet the brand on my chest had warmed; I was meant to enter. The spiritstag wanted me here. It had taken me years to accept the fact that the Sylvanwild god wasn’t like Noctere’s black maw. The panther snarled its commands; the stag spoke only in veiled truths and riddles from afar.
I backtracked the horse thirty paces and dismounted near one of the few trees dotting these plains. I tied the reins to the trunk, and though he tugged at first—in the direction of green, lush Highmark—he finally gave in and grazed under the tree’s narrow shade.
With the back of one hand set against my nose, I approached. Before me, in a broad careening swath, the plains were coated in blood. Not old, dried blood, but gleaming-fresh.
Around me, feralis pressed against my skin. Urgent, almost suffocating. Stories said that every court’s magic was strongest here, where the gods buffeted against one another, vying for an inch. Which meant the miasma at the Convergence, where all four magics swirled together, must be hell.
I followed the line where green turned to red until the pillar’s shadow fell away and sunlight touched my face. For once, sunlight felt safer—cleansing. Lowering into a crouch, eyes warm and stinging,I touched my fingers to the blades of red grass. Wet. When I lifted my hand, my forefinger and thumb were coated.
And there, reflected in the gleaming droplets, the sight of a young man being scalped.
A death in miniature.
Instinct told me to rub the blood away. Yet this was why I had come.Iwas the one who could see.
A brown-haired woman sawed at his scalp with a short blade, and he knelt with eyes rolled back into his head until she had finished her work. Then he dropped into the grass with his crown laid bare, and she held his long white hair aloft with the scalp dripping at the end.
Here, right here, was the spot where it had happened.
Death still lived in the Killing Fields.
The rims of my eyes pulsed. If Gawain were here, the bastard, he would sayI told you so.His tutelage—the torture that had edged my eyes in red—now enabled me to perceive what almost no other fae could.
I swicked the blood away on my pants and lifted my gaze. The brand on my chest had warmed even more—I was closer to where the spiritstag wanted me.
No choice but to enter, to step on the living graves of all these fae.
Do it for Eury.
I rose and closed my eyes. With three quick breaths, I stepped into the Killing Fields—and into the bloody past.
Blades clanged; the earth shifted; the wind buffeted me. Screams, sawing—the scent of ozone a tang in my nose. The chaos of the trials. It all happened in front of me, behind me, left and right of me.
A yell sounded from my left. My eyes opened on the brown-haired changeling with scalp and blade both held aloft, her chin upturned to the sky. Her victim lay dead at her feet.
An arrow sailed before my eyes and delivered itself into the chest of a blond-haired woman to my right. She sank to her knees, the light dying in her eyes.
A longsword flashed with solaire. A summer fae leapt in front of me, armored in silver to the teeth, and came down on an unlucky Unseelie who wore the mark of the black maw on her pauldrons. The Seelie landed on her, and he and she went to the ground with his light-tipped sword in her chest.
Blood. So much blood, never to soak into the soil. The wetness I stood on now was the undrying lifeblood of these ancient fae.
Brutal. Barbaric. I’d spent my whole life hating the trials since I’d learned of them, and now my stomach clenched with the sight of dozens of young fae dying for queens they didn’t even know.
What good was immortality if we narrowed the lives of our best to killing or inconceivable deaths?
A brown-haired Sylvanwild fae in leathers emerged from the ancient murk of the fields. He pointed straight at me. “The stag! The stag will intervene!” No, I was the apparition here. He pointedbeyondme.
I twisted. There at the tree line, the stag watched on.
“He’s come to stop Queen Carys,” the fae said. “He’s come for the Courtbreaker.” He spun, disappeared again into the messy throng of history. Just before he disappeared, he ran toward the Convergence.
I followed. Ghosts of the past appeared and disappeared around me, screaming and swinging and running, until…
There at the center of it all, her black hair wild, a queen wreathed in a crown of water and a cloak of shadow.