The first is a male near the door. He’s lying on his side, eyes open but seeing nothing. His chest rises and falls in a rhythm too slow to be natural, each breath a shudder that shakes his entire frame. The collar wounds on his throat have festered—yellow pus crusted around edges that his magic should be working to heal. The fact that it isn’t, tells me everything. The magic inside him is dead. And without that, he won’t live anyway.
I crouch beside him and study his face.
“He was called Beanagh.” Vel’s voice comes from behind me. “He served under Fiacha.”
Fiacha. One of the generals sent by the Spring Court to join us in the battle to stop the human mages. He died at Therison Vale. I watched him fall, cut down by human blades while the mages still worked their ritual.
“Did you know Beanagh?”
“I knewofhim. He had a reputation for steadiness. The kind who held the line when others broke.”
I reach out and touch his shoulder. His skin is cold, the muscle beneath wasted to nothing. He doesn’t respond to my touch.
“Beanagh. You served well. You held firm. The iron may have taken everything else, but it didn’t take that.”
Nothing. Not even a flicker behind those eyes.
I meet Vel’s gaze. She nods.
With a single thought, one of my blades forms in my hand. My fingers curl around the hilt, stopping its growth at dagger length. I place one hand on Beanagh’s head, and tilt it forwardslightly. He doesn’t resist. The blade goes in at the base of his skull, angled upward. One precise thrust, the edge sliding between vertebrae and into the brain stem. His body shudders once, then goes still.
I withdraw the blade and lower his head gently back to the pallet.
One.
We move to the next. A female. Her hands are curled into claws, and her joints frozen in positions that must have been agony before her mind retreated too far to feel it. Vel doesn’t know her name, so I just place my hand on her head, find the spot at the base of her skull and give her the same death I gave Beanagh.
Two.
The third is a male so thin his ribs stand out like the bars of the cage that held him. The fourth is a female with scars crisscrossing her back.
The fifth. The sixth. The seventh.
By the eleventh, I’m numb.
By the thirteenth, I stop counting the bodies and start counting how many are left.
A couple look young, too young to have been alive at the Sealing. Born in captivity, bred for the cages, knowing nothing else. I stare at their faces the longest, trying to imagine what their lives might have been if the humans had never learned to collar us. I can’t.
I give them the same death I’ve given to the others. And when it’s done, I stand in the middle of the barracks with blood on my hands and my tunic, and the knife gripped in fingers that won’t unclench. The bodies are arranged neatly now, laid out in rows, arms crossed over chests. Vel did that, moving silently behind me, preparing them for burning.
“Cairn.” Vel’s voice cuts through the fog in my head. “Release the knife.”
I look down at my hand and will the dagger to disappear.
“You did what had to be done.” Her voice is steady, but not soft. Vel doesn’t do softness. But there is recognition and sorrow there. “They were already dead. You just freed them from the cage of their bodies.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
I meet her eyes. I’ve killed humans and fae over the years, watched them fall beneath my blades with nothing but satisfaction. This shouldn’t be any different.
But it is.
“I know.” I say it again. “But it … wasn’t easy.”
“No. But easy isn’t what we need. What we need is to survive long enough to make their deaths mean something.”
