I’d dreamed it like a fool, just the same.
And I wasn’t ready to wake up, to give up on that dream, just yet—but the nightmare that greeted me when we came to the edge of the training grounds opened my eyes wider than ever.
This was where the worst of the battles and chaos seemed to have converged. And this was where we finally found Captain Voss: He was still alive, but holding his clearly-wounded side as he shouted orders at his exhausted soldiers, who were just barely standing their ground.
My brother ran to help him.
I strode forward as well, scanning the grounds, searching for Aleks. Desperately, I tried to settle the emotions erupting inside me. To not give in to the grief, the rage, the helplessness. Things that would pull me under if I let them latch on too tightly.
I knew the Order was creating carnage for the sole purpose of trying to drag me down, to give me no choice but to react with emotion. They had been baiting me from the moment they’d left those bodies outside my room. Making it impossible for me to walk away from their trap.
Because no one who called themselvesQueencould have walked away from this.
There were so many dead bodies.
My servants. My soldiers. My supporters. Enemy soldiers, too, but even they caused a painful twist in my gut, because their deaths felt like the death of something much bigger—snapping my plans of unity like a neck snapping at a gallows. The execution ofhope.
The worst trail of brokenness and blood led right through the center of the dusty training yard.
Aleks waited at the head of this trail, his back to me, his hands surrounded by flickering violet light.
How many of these bodies was he personally responsible for?
How could he have done this?
He turned as I approached. His gaze didn’t meet mine at first, staring instead at the tendrils of shadow that had started to lift like smoke from my skin. When he finally did meet my eyes, there was only the barest hint of recognition from him. Then came cold assessment, nothing more.
“Tell me you didn’t do any of this,” I said, my voice strangled as I swept a shaky hand toward the fallen bodies around us. “Pleasetell me you didn’t do any of this.”
He didn’t deny anything. He only said, “You shouldn’t have run from me.”
My breath caught. My shadows swarmed more violently, sensing my fear, my growing desperation.
Aleks followed their motions. The light around his hands intensified. He wasn’t even moving—he was barely breathing—but I could feel the pull against my magic already, the void he was creating. The emptiness. Impossibly cold and fathomless, like it could swallow both me and my magic up with no more than a nod from him.
Phantom and Thalia intervened before he could attack, both drawing from those shadows surrounding me, pulling them into something larger, more formidable. Phantom’s body shifted and grew, while Thalia wielded the darkness like whips, lashing at Aleks’s legs. They came at him from opposite sides, drawing him away from me, at least for a moment—at least until he aimed that violet-tinged magic at their shadows, ripping the darker magic apart and sending them both tumbling across the dirt.
Zayn rushed forward then, his sword gleaming in the early morning light. Aleks met him with a quick draw of his own blade. They circled each other, steel clashing again and again, while Phantom and Thalia continued to try and distract Aleks, to level the odds.
My brother was still rallying the soldiers alongside Captain Voss behind me. All around them, the battle was growing louder, deadlier.
And I stood like a statue in the middle of an earthquake, my foundation rocked, little fissures spreading through my composure.
Every possible move felt perilous.
“I told you it was a dangerous game you were playing,” came a low, satisfied voice.
I twisted around to find Severin approaching me.
“How did you do this to him?” My voice was low and shaking, a tremor of rage running through it. “Whatever tricks you’ve used, they won’t last. We will find a way to break them. And to breakyou.”
“Tricks.” He chuckled darkly. “You know, for a being capable of such impressive magic, your understanding of it—and the gods who grant it—is very poor.”
I gritted my teeth.
“But you just keep stumbling forward anyway, don’t you? Admirable in a tragic sort of way.”
I withdrew Grimnor from its sheath.
