The connection snaps, my body picked up and thrown. I tumble across the stump. Maxian stands above me, twitching, sniffing, like that day in the boxing ring, only now nothing familiar remains behind those dilating eyes.When was the last time he snorted Ashent?
“Stupid faerie cunt!” he seethes.
“Isn’t that what you want?” I snap back, scrambling to my feet. “Isn’t that what you need?”
He lunges, tackling me to the ground once more, and we roll, biting, ripping flesh, and smacking jaws.
“Halfling bastard,” I yell, raking bruised nails across his pretty face.
“I will—”
I bite his shoulder hard, incisors breaking flesh. Blood floods my mouth. He screams, rips me off him. Tumbling across the stump, grappling for a hold, I find a crevice, sticky with sap. My genius soars along the underground magic, finding a cluster in the outermost building of the palace. Maxian rises.
“You could’ve made a great king, halfling,” I say. “You could’ve freed us all.”
The vein in his forehead throbs. “Why would I—”
I lick the sap off my fingers, energy exploding through me like food, like sugar and nature andlife,the opposite of Ashent. It isthe purity of Lucan’s Tree; it is the original state of faeries. It is a homecoming.
Hello again.
It is me, finally earning the title of my mother’s daughter.
“What are you doing?” he screams.
“Leaving you,” I reply.
My genius locks onto that bundle of nerves near the palace’s perimeter.
I let the plane transport me there.
Chapter Fifty-eight
I slam into wood, heart pounding,mouth dry. Blinking, I take in my surroundings, a grand, cavernous hall with gilded columns and a painting of Lucan’s Tree across the ceiling. I have been here before, knelt here during the coronation.
My blood freezes as I realize what I am sitting on.
The throne.
Made from the trunk of Lucan’s Tree.
I leap forward, jumping off the seat. A figure melts from the side of a column, and I jump.
“Death!”
“Faerie.” The figure approaches, dark cloak trailing behind him. “What happened to you?”
I glance down at the sopping wet shirt, the cuts and bruises that mar my skin. The palace rumbles, deep and violent, as if the very earth it’s built upon is splitting. I grip the back of the throne for support, then rip my hand away as if stung.
Because it hums.
The throne hums with power from Lucan’s Tree, and I think of the hours Maxian spent lounging on it right before his testament during the coronation, when he made every attendant bow to him.
“The king,” Death says. “What has happened?”
What has happened?I laugh, shivering. The palace shakes again.What has happened?
Everything. The fae king isn’t a fae. The myth of Lucan’s Tree is real, and it is severed, used for the chair on which I sat.
