“So was Rhiannon, at one time.”
“They don’t listen because?—”
She jerked toward me. “Because you’re not strong.” Under the sunlight, her face took on an otherworldly quality. Brilliant, almost blinding, like a creature of pure, overwhelming radiance. I was left stunned.
She returned to herself in the next moment, all leathers and tight bun. My heart still beat a hard rhythm.
“You wear your lowborn discomfort like a mantle,” she said. “From the moment you stepped out of that carriage to breakfast to the instant you stepped onto this gravel. It makes you weak.”
By which she meantnot yet worthy of the key.
“Then why ally with me?”
The corner of her lip twitched. “You tell me.”
“A trick, maybe. To backstab me.”
“If you believed that, you wouldn’t show up here. You’re not that stupid.”
She was right; I didn’t believe it. I closed my eyes against the sunlight. I breathed out. “I’m a changeling who survived. I survived, and I survived. I summoned acid rain in a court whose magic I’m not even supposed to be able to wield. With it, I brought down a queen.”
But that wasn’t all. I opened my eyes. “And there’s a part of me, athinginside me.”
She stepped closer. “Yes.”
“It craves power.”
She stepped right up to me. Her hands came out, and she took mine in her own. “Not a thing. A queen. One born in my very own court, but the queen of another. Do you know what that means, Eurydice?”
I shook my head. I thought I knew, but I sensed I could only grasp the edges of Liora’s wisdom.
She leaned close, her voice a whisper. “It means you possess Seelie power. Do you want to touch the light, Eurydice?”
“Yes,” I breathed. “But only Carys could wield two magics.”
“Carys wielded two magicsat once,” Liora said. "Feralis and noxveil, braided together, fed through the dagger in the Convergence. That’s not what I’m offering you." She squeezed my hands. "You were born Seelie. Raised in a human kingdom, crowned in an Unseelie court. Your body learned feralis, which isn’t unprecedented.”
“It isn’t?”
“It’s rare, but not impossible. Unseelie magic is just the other side of the coin.” Her chin lowered. “But solaire is your birthright.”
"So I’d use one or the other."
"You’dchooseone or the other." She went still. "A queen who can wield feralis in the autumn court and solaire on Highmark soil—not at once, but as the moment demands—that’s not a Courtbreaker. That’s something far more useful.”
Useful to who?Not me alone.
But I couldn’t deny the offer I sensed coming. “I would have it.”
“Then ally with me. Let me show you the power of the dawn.” Before me, her Seelie radiance and straight back felt like their own prizes. “The ball will be the start. The Killing Fields will be the end.”
In the courtyard, Liora lifted her sword toward the sun. Its curved edge caught the light, a winding series of runes illuminated as the glow passed from tip to grip. “Unlike your autumn fae”—she stood with the sword raised high, a gleaming beacon—“we coat our weapons in magic.”
I stood in shade, by a rack of steel swords. “How?”
“Light clings. It heats. It dissipates slowly.”
“In my kingdom, we invented something called sunlit iron.”