Without hesitation, I called the aether to me, and imagined my favorite dagger. It appeared in my hand a heartbeat later, by far the easiest conjuring I’d ever created.
I smirked. “Alice the Dagger is back, baby.”
“You’ll need more than that to take me down,” the Red Queen sniped.
I tore my eyes from the blade to find dozens of small boulders swirling around her. Where she’d gotten them from, I wasn’t sure, because there definitely weren’t boulders in the gardens. However, their rapid appearance made one thing crystal clear. My aunt was strong with earth magic.
“We’ll see about that!” I dashed toward her.
One rock flew past me, then a second, and a third . . . after only a few seconds, I lost count as I dodged through the barrage of boulders. With each one, my aunt loosed a scream—perhaps trying to intimidate me.
If I wasn’t saving every ounce of my breath for a battle, I would have laughed. Didn’t this woman understand that silence was far more threatening?
The frenzied pace of her rock slinging increased as I got closer, but when I was fifteen feet away, there was a break. A chance. I took it.
I leapt. The Red Queen doubled her efforts, hurling the rest of the rocks in her arsenal, but to no avail. I had become more agile with my wings since our adventure in the Enchanted Forest.
I soared through the boulders without sustaining a scratch, flew right up to her, and swiped with my dagger.
She spun out of the way just in time, darting backward and dropping her rocks in the process.
“You want to do this with steel.” A gleaming sword appeared in her hand. “Come and get it.”
“With pleasure.”
Using aether magic, I pushed the tip of my dagger outward, lengthening it into a sword, and surged to meet her.
Our blades collided, eliciting cheers from the crowd with every attack and parry. It didn’t take me long to determine that I was more skilled with a blade, but she was better at incorporating magic when she fought.
She used earth, fire, and water against me—all of which I shielded against. However, one element had been absent from her arsenal: air, my specialty.
I tried to concoct a technique suited to someone who was relatively weak with air. All the while, my blade whistled through the air and clanged against hers.
The queen fended off my attacks, and fluidly responded with her own. It was almost as though we were dancers, the way we played off one another, the twirling, advancing, and receding.
Since the trial began, the crowd hadn’t stopped shouting their pleasure or grief, but we paid them no notice. In fact, I’d even begun to enjoy myself a little. My body felt alive in the fight—on fire. We were engrossed in each other, a whirlwind of elements and steel.
And then my aunt caught me off guard.
A vine burst from the floor of the amphitheater and slithered up my ankle, around my calf. I tried to kick it off, and for a brief second, took my eyes off the queen.
She thrust her sword at me and, flailing, I flung my body the opposite way and fell to the ground with anoomph. Another vine burst from the wooden stage to wrap around my arms.
I blinked, unable to believe where I was. What had happened? How had I not seen something like this coming? I’d been too caught up in the pleasure of the fight, and now she was towering over me, her sword descending slowly, painfully.
“It’s over. You’ve lost.” My aunt hovered her blade inches from my neck. “Surrender.”
“Never!” I spat on her.
“Do it!”
I grinned up at her, not about to give her what she wanted.
“Fine, if you insist that I resort to spilling your blood, I will. There’s no way you’ll get out of this.”
“Is that what you told my mother when you murdered her?”
She winced, and her sword drooped a half-inch.
