She leapt with the speed of sunlight. Her sword swung through the air, cleaving toward me. She couldn’t blind me any longer; her connection to the light was half mine. And she couldn’t play her light tricks with the weapon.
Behind her, Iseris dropped to one knee. Her palm slammed into the ground, and vines erupted through the earth toward me. They shot up, grasped at my hands and slithered up my arms.
Maeronyx dissolved. Three of her appeared instead, much closer to me, all identical. Ice speared from all three directions toward my body.
A last stand. A pretty display. Magic swirled in me, waiting to be released.
The vines hissed and withered as soon as they touched my skin. The feralis in me was so strong, growth couldn’t touch death.
I turned the dagger and solaire burst from the flat of the blade—not a flare, not a spark, but a beam so potent it obliterated Maeronyx’s shadow apparitions and melted their ice. On the other side of that stood only Maeronyx, squinting and stumbling in the brightness.
Twice now I’d called magic through the blade. Once the cave, now on the Fields. The rest would have to be my own hand.
I raised my dagger-arm, caught Liora’s sword on the edge of it. The dagger sliced through her blade, and the end of it clattered to the grass with a hiss.
I ducked under her, spun toward the Dawnmaker. She landed with her back to me, the half-sword still in her grip.
Above us, the sky cracked. Not the soft bellow of thunder; it sounded like glass shattering.
The first drop fell on my hand. Liquid gold—gleaming acid. A strange light played over the land, half clouds and half sun.
More droplets fell, and the blood on the grass smoked. Liora turned toward me with a lowered brow. Her beautiful platemail hissed where the gleaming acid hit, and she tore off her helmet; a golden braid fell over her shoulder. Behind us, Iseris let out a sudden wail.
“What have you done?” Liora’s voice was soft, disturbed. “What monsterareyou?”
Fear shone naked in her eyes. She looked on at a stranger—a creature she couldn’t comprehend. She had hardened toward me. Now, forever.
I can’t let her live.
“Yourveyreshould have let you be dragged down to the underworld.” She began to crouch as though to kneel. As though to bend the knee. Her face lowered?—
She leapt. Half-sword raised. Mouth open, canines visible, eyes bugging. Not the Dawnmaker now, but a desperate woman. Her world had been reduced to two truths: death or life.
I could be the monster. I could be her.
I stepped into her leap. Feralis made me fast, moved my arm so quickly her eyes didn’t even register my motion. I raised the dagger like any other blade, sliced it through her exposed neck. Through skin, viscera, bone, all the way to the other side.
Liora’s body left the ground in one piece. It came down in two.
I caught her head by the braid as the rest of her slumped to the ground beside me. Her mouth hung slack, a twitching rictus, every part of her that had been Liora now dangling from my grip. Her insides dripped to the grass—more blood soaking into the earth.
Theo had once told me that a severed head could live for tenseconds. He claimed he’d seen it at a guillotine execution—the lips moving, making words.
I turned the head toward the other two queens until the beautiful blue eyes, still wide open, swung around.
Twenty paces away, Iseris had thrown her hands over her head. Acid ate through her pink hair. She hunched under the rain, still on one knee, barely cognizant of Maeronyx or me.
But Maeronyx knew pain—a great deal of it. She stood facing me, shoulders back, staring not at Liora’s head but into my eyes. Her fingers didn’t shake; her lips didn’t quiver as the rain hissed off her pauldrons and helmet. Like me, she knew pain was temporary.
Maeronyx’s true fear stood before her.
I stepped forward, and Liora’s head bobbed with me.
“Kneel.”
Maeronyx remained frozen, statue-still for so long I wondered if I would have to cut her down just as I had the summer queen.
Then, her armor clinked. The knee of her plate mail bent, and when it touched the earth every plate on her glorious ebony armor seemed to groan. She set down her sword. Her gloved fist touched the ground, and still she stared at me.