“If the answer to the biggest mystery of Feyreign’s history lay in the pages of a book—” I went still with the apple halfway to my mouth.
Her gaze had drifted. Now it slipped over to me. “Did the scholar forget his words?”
I tossed her the apple. “Something like that.”
She caught it with a curled lip, teeth glinting. “Gross.” Then called out, “Hey, it’s rude to leave in the middle of breakfast.”
“You can tell me all about it when we match swords.” I’d already crossed to the doorway. “The scholar has somewhere to be.”
I took the shortest route up, up to the high floors of the citadel. Minutes later I strode into my study and made for the bookcase furthest from my desk—the one reserved for the oldest, least compelling tomes. The ancient catalogues of eons of nobles, or of insect species, or of…
“The Killing Fields.” I set my fingers around the spine of a fat book and slid it from the shelf. Dust rose, shimmering in the crystal light from the walls. I’d never read this one in full, just as referencematerial. Four hundred years of blood-soaked history lay inside; Ithacar of the spring court had spent most of his life obsessed with that small, circular patch of land.
I dropped it on my desk with a thud, sat down in my chair, and reached for my reading glasses. We fae might be immortal, but our eyes could still strain.
The title’s gold foil—A History of the Killing Fields—gleamed as I opened the hard cover. Years ago I had encountered a striking passage in this book, but it had long since sunk beneath the waves.
The story of Queen Carys, and how she died.
Master Ithacar had included the story near the book’s start, as an introduction to the Killing Fields. The spot had been chosen four hundred years ago by the gods because it was the central point where the four courts converged. Autumn, winter, spring, and summer’s magic met at one terrifying axis.
This was where the Queen’s Trial took place every hundred years. Where the surviving champions killed one another until only one stood. The gods watched, but could not intervene.
After the first trials took place, Carys had regretted forming them at all. She regretted the bloodshed, the suffering. But in Feyreign, rituals and rites are easier to implement than they are to dissolve.
The other three queens disagreed with Carys’s wish to stop the trials. Without them, the reins of power would never pass out of Carys’s hands. And so they started a subtle, brutal war—the War of Queens.
So much subterfuge. So many assassinations. Nobles poisoned, blades thrust into necks in the depths of night. After one of Carys’s granddaughters was murdered, she challenged the other three queens to a battle in the Killing Fields.
The four queens met there. It would be a dishonor not to.
The battle was three against one. They were armored, laden with weapons, and Carys only carried her dagger.
The other queens were skillful, strategic. They soon wounded Carys, and it looked as though the great queen would lose her head…
Until she stepped into the Convergence—the center of the Killing Fields, where all four magics swirled together—and harnessed feralis and noxveil. Two separate magics belonging to two Unseelie courts.
No fae could wield two types of magic at once—until her. Carys, the Courtbreaker.
She felled the other queens in one go. The sight was magnificent, terrible. And herveyrewas so horrified by what he saw—one fae wielding dual corrupting magics—that he knew what he must do.
Veyreembodied two words. Protector… and queenslayer.
I shut the book and pulled off my glasses. That was all I needed to know.
A knock came at my chamber door.
I stood and crossed into the bedroom. “Open.”
The door opened. A brown-haired boy of not more than seventeen stood on the other side. His hands were clasped tight, shoulders pitched a few degrees forward. “Good morning, ser.”
I grabbed my belt off the bed and slipped it around my waist. “Who are you?”
“Well, ser, I’m your squire. Finch.”
The boy was weedy; his pale green eyes were wide. “My what?”
“Haskel assigned me to be your squire, ser?—”