The dirt wasdense with roots and nearly impossible to get a shovel through. Every time I struck the point in, I gritted my teeth to lift a shovelful. Hours had passed, and I’d dug myself a hole so deep under the massive old tree, the sun no longer heated my back.
I’d been offered help—many times—by several servants. I’d refused.
Only Eury had understood. Only Eury had stayed with me the whole time I’d dug Haskel and Finch’s grave.
He would want to be buried under this stubborn old tree and nowhere else. Not burned, not sent off on a boat of kindling as they often did in Highmark. No one else would understand that but me, because I was his son.
He’d never called me that. He was gruff and gnarled and he was the only one who’d truly cared about me in this court, besides myown mother. And though he and I had never spoken of death, I’d always lived with the secret belief that one day we would be parted. Everyone in my life had eventually been taken from me, even if they could live forever.
And Finch. Finch was his son, too. The boy did not deserve to lie alone under the earth.
“Hole’s deeper than Haskel was tall,” Eury said from above me. “If you go much longer, you’ll need help out.”
I stuck the shovel in the dirt, leaned on it as I turned my face up. Above me, she was invisible in the slanting afternoon light. I’d nearly lost her, too—but I’d refused, and so had she. “Do you know what he told me once, years ago?”
“To keep your arm aligned with your nose when you pull the gutstring of a bow?”
My lips kicked up. Her irreverence eased the knot in my chest. “Oh, a thousand times.” Here—before Haskel and Finch’s bodies had even been lowered in, when it was just me and Eury standing alone—thisfelt like the eulogy. Of everyone in this court in the past fifty years, Haskel had only allowed the two of us into his fold.
“He’d told me that one day I would step into the path of a woman who would arrest me so completely, I’d wonder if I could ever move my feet again.”
Above me, Eury made an amused noise. “Haskel gave you advice of the heart?”
“He did more than that. Much more.” I gripped the shovel hard. “And he was always right, especially about the heart.”
He’d been right in his last words, too.Protect your queen.Protecting her would always be the only choice, and always the right one.
“Seems to me you had no trouble lifting your sword to me and demanding I pray to my gods.” A creature of light and shadow, her face shrouded, her voice clear.
“You don’t know how long I stood behind you, rabbit, or how much effort it took me to lift that sword.”
She stepped around to the end of the grave. “You were arrested by the sight of my back?”
“If I answered that, your head would be too big to fit through the hallways of the citadel.” I tossed the shovel up onto the ground. With two hands set on the edge of the hole, I pulled myself up and out. “Though it would still be nothing compared to the enormous bloody stones of my squire.”
Finch, the greatest heart to bless this court.
Haskel and Finch lay on simple thatch mats, wrapped in their cloaks. A hundred of us citadel fae gathered under the massive tree beside the training grounds as the two fae were carried to their resting place by late afternoon sunlight. Before they were lowered in, I laid Haskel’s broadsword over his chest, and the bastard sword Finch had been wearing at the Fields.
Goodbye, elder and younger soldier.
If it were true that the worst fae passed down to the underworld and the best rose to the Gossamer Drifts, I expected in either case they’d want to have their swords with them. As for Haskel, was it possible to know the truth of a man’s heart when he’d lived eight hundred years? I’d seen only his better deeds, his later truth.
Eury, clothed in a dress of mourning black and with the bramble diadem on her head, spoke as a queen as the dirt was shoveled over him. The court heeded her with lowered faces and clasped hands. No longer an accident of a monarch—she was the Courtbreaker, and all knew it. Faun stood on her left, and I on her right.
The procession moved to the gardens surrounding the citadel, where Mirek’s body lay waiting under a forest-green drape. Alongside lay the bodies of the handmaidens who’d been slain at the Killing Fields. A grave waited for each.
Eury knelt beside each body, placed a carmine blossom on each chest. Beside Mirek, she whispered words I couldn’t hear. If Haskelwere the shield, then Mirek had been the silk of this court. And where a sword held obvious power, a fine piece of clothing was like its own armor.
Eury rose, nodded once. The bodies were lifted one by one, lowered into their graves.
She turned to the court as the dirt was laid over their bodies. “None of them should be dead now. Not one.”
Her gaze passed over us, sometimes lingering. The hairs on my arms rose; earlier today she’d been Eury, but she could change at will. She now carried the mark of a queen on her brow, that terrible, almost frightening eye. An invisible mark, one forged by pain and hardship.
“Sylvanwild will not forget the betrayal at the Killing Fields.” Her voice was thick with anger, but sorrow, too. “Every time you pass these stones—every time you sit in the silence of this garden—I bid you remember the ruthlessness of the summer, winter, and spring courts. I will not forget, and I will carry each of these faces with me for the rest of my days.”
When Rhiannon gave such a speech, she’d receive silence. The court feared her more than anything. And though Eurydice should be the most frightening creature of all, I found my heart rising to her.