“Even if it means mass genocide?” I challenged.
He tilted his head, raising his voice so it carried. “Do you care so little for your own people that you want our children dying for the Winter King’s curse?”
Fury sliced through me. He lured the monsters to the Wilds, herded the Unseelie with the intent to be executed, then pretended he was backed into a corner.
“You know that isn’t true,” I hissed, and Batty hissed with me.
“What everyone knows—” He raised his voice for the surrounding armies to hear every word. “—is that the Frostgrave King kills our people on sight, even those who seek refuge from his own monsters.”
Angry muttering rolled through the ranks. Unseelie faces twisted with resentment.
Wynnie’s fingers twitched. My mother struggled soundlessly against the shadows. Draven’s battle in the distance grew louder, more frantic, the unsteady rhythm of the most powerful king in a millennium trying to claw his way back to his soulmate.
I squeezed my eyes shut. I could have bitten back at Vaerin about the reasons Draven had for his laws. Reminded him of the slavery he’d subjected Winter citizens to, or the attacks he had ordered, but I could already see that it would do no good.
Draven had killed innocents, yes. So had his soldiers. But that didn’t justify…this.
The tension on either side of the wardlines thickened until every breath felt like inhaling broken glass, and I was, as usual, caught between the two warring sides—the people I had been born to and the ones I had taken refuge with.
Dragons protect their own.
But my own were always, endlessly, on opposite sides of a battlefield like this one.
A familiar growl sounded at my back as Lumen raced from the palace gates to join me. He leaned into my side, his hackles raised as he bared his teeth at my uncle.
“Winter is a threat to everything that we are, and dragons protect their own. So choose your side,” he said, stretching out a hand. “Will you stand with the Court that is responsible for every curse that has plagued our people for thousands of years, or will you come home, to your family?”
I was out of time to stall.
Wynnie struggled against my uncle’s hold, and the shadows dug deeper until blood poured freely down her wounds. A sob lodged its way in my throat. This was wrong. All of it against the very fiber of who I was.
My mana raged inside me, infinitely at odds, just as Isren had predicted it would be. Just like this neverending war. Unseelie and Seelie raging against one another until there was nothing left to fight for anymore.
The land, the people, all of it swallowed up.
Batty trilled a warning in my ear as I felt my power swelling to agonizing intensity.
No. It would not end this way. Fate had taken so many things from me. It could not have Wynnie, too.
I looked at my mother, emerald eyes glinting with murder, and suddenly I saw a different image of her. In this one, her eyes were sparkling with laughter instead of rage, as she made shapes from shadows and light. A butterfly… edged with ice.
But my mother didn’t have shadow mana.
The butterfly had been crafted withmyshadows. Sharpened by my frost. Both of them, working in perfect symmetry. Why had they started warring? Because my power had grown too quickly?
Or because I had grown old enough to recognize all the enmity between the two sides of myself, even before I understood what I was?
You are them. But you are us, too.
I took a step forward, stumbling from the mana churning inside of me. But it wasn’t just raging now. It was twisting together, melding with itself.
I looked from my mother to Wynnie, hearing yet another boom in the distance. If I was wrong, if my mana was still broken, if I was still defective… I would pass out on this field.Even if I didn’t take my mother and my sister with me, I would sure as hells lose any chance to save Wynnie.
But I was out of options. I had to try.
“You’re right,” I said, forcing myself another step.
My mana surged up my spine in a blistering rush, cold and shadow coiling together in perfect, terrifying harmony.
