Wynnie tensed to move, muscles bunching like she was preparing to launch herself at him, but I latched my handaround her arm before she could attempt to punch the fully trained soldier in the face. My mana surged unsteadily at the threat, a flicker of black frost snapping across my fingertips.
As it was, I didn’t see a way this would end well.
“You’re an idiot,” Wynnie hissed to the scarred male, voice shaking with rage. She looked even fiercer than usual with the blood that coated her skin, hers and my uncles melding together in indiscernible lines down her cheeks, her neck. “You all saw the Visionary get impaled in this very courtyard.”
“By the monsters her kind have found a way to control,” he shot back, spittle hitting the ground as he sneered.
My heart thudded painfully, the soldiers’ growing frenzy pressing against my skull like a tightening vice. Their hatred wasn’t drifting, it was taking shape. A tide I wasn’t sure any of us could hold back.
“I know you all feel betrayed, but we don’t have time for this,” I tried to explain. “I am not your enemy, and it’s not just the Unseelie at our gates. There are frostbeasts?—”
“Then let the monsters destroy one another. They’ll never stop coming unless we do something about this, all because we’ve let thatthingon the throne,” yet another soldier spat.
A second blast of frost took him out, and Eryx’s words rang in my mind.What will you do when they refuse? Kill every last one of the people we’ve spent our lives protecting until you rule over a kingdom of corpses?
He had been right. The kingdom was crumbling from within before the monsters or the Unseelie even had a chance to destroy it.
One whispered accusation had turned seasoned warriors into a mob, and now they were willing to risk their king’s wrath rather than chance offending the Shard Mother, choosing the punishment they understood over the one they dreaded.
Draven’s mana swelled, mana he couldn’t afford to waste when Batty was trilling urgently in my ear, a warning. The frostbeasts were coming.
One of the commanders stepped forward, jaw resolute. “If we get rid of her, the Shard Mother?—”
But he never got to finish his sentence. And not because of Draven, this time.
No, my husband had frozen midmotion, his gaze fixed on something behind the soldiers, a maelstrom of emotions I couldn’t read cascading through the bond.
The silence that swept over the soldiers had an entirely different cause. A soft, shimmering light spread from the palace gates, weighting down the air with a mana older than the Winter Court. Even the Unseelie had faded behind us.
Then, out of the peculiar hush came a familiar tapping sound, each tap followed by delicate, measured footsteps. The soldiers parted, but I couldn’t see over Draven’s massive form standing in front of me. Still, a wave of relief hit me so powerfully that it nearly sent me to my knees.
From my husband.
I knew who it was even before a low, ethereal voice cut into the silence.
“Do you speak for the Shard Mother now?”
Nevara had awoken at last.
Chapter 49
Draven
My Court was slipping from my grasp, just as we were fighting a war on every possible front.
After everything I had done to keep them safe, everything my wife had risked to make the land whole again, they were turning on us, one fracture at a time.
Then Nevara had appeared.
She cut through the chaos like a living beacon, starlight blooming beneath her skin as though the Shard Mother herself had reached down and marked her, had dragged her back from the claws of death itself.
For all the times I had cursed the goddess, I was tempted to fall to my knees and thank her now. Not just for my oldest friend, but for the soldiers suddenly frozen in place, shame written plainly across their faces. The same ones I was still considering feeding to my wolves.
They were afraid.
Even as Everly’s words reached through the bond, her voice hushed with something like reverence, her gaze kept drifting past me—toward Nevara, who moved through the crowd withunhurried grace, her small form carrying a presence no amount of mana could have explained.
Soren followed behind her, his usual smirk widened into something closer to a genuine smile, even in spite of the oncoming battle.
