Queen Karasi’s slender form is lit with moonlight, her bejeweled dress swishing as she reaches the balustrade.
I tense when she lifts her hand, snaps her fingers, and a flame appears, licking at her fingertips. She quickly flicks it toward the lamp sitting against the wall beside the door.
“A little light for our conversation,” she says.
Gliss described Karasi as a Solstice fae, having power over heat and fire. Given the amount of moonlight, I take the Queen’s display as a demonstration of her power. Or rather, the tiniest hint of her power.
While keeping my distance from her, I step toward the balustrade. Beyond the railing, I can see for miles. It’s a breathtaking view, but not unlike the one I had from my tower.
“You can leave us, Elowynn,” Queen Karasi says to her champion. “Asha won’t harm me.”
Elowynn hesitates, then bows and disappears back into the room.
Karasi turns to me, her eyes twinkling. “Elowynn is fierce and unlikable, isn’t she? Vicious when I ask her to be. But our culture values strength and ambition. We thrive on power and control.”
Without waiting for my response, she cranes her neck to consider the revelers inside the room. “I’ve dulled their senses with vanilla candles and plied them with more food and drink than they’ve seen in months.” She beams at me, her smile luminous. “It’s a wonderful way to distract my people from the reality of their lives and encourage them to ignore the brutality of my decisions.”
I narrow my eyes at her, wondering how quickly the fae in the room will forget the way Dusana’s blood sprayed across the floor. “Why did you wish to speak with me?”
Her smile fades at my abrupt question, and all guile vanishes from her face. “You must think I’m heartless. Luring my own people to punishment. Leaving your wolf-man to die in front of you. Keeping your family from you for the past two days. Forcing you into a deal that will once again separate you from the ones you love.”
I incline my head. I can’t disagree. At least she’s confirmed she’s the reason my family hasn’t come to see me.
She tilts her head, her long, golden hair cascading to the side. “I learned very early on in my reign—as every leader learns—that keeping my people safe requires making harsh decisions.”
She turns to the moonlit landscape beyond the balcony, sweeping her hand across the view. “What do you see when you look upon this land, Asha Silverspun?”
Cautiously, I take my eyes off the Queen to consider the landscape around us. Directly below me, spread out across the plain, are tiny dots of flame—probably campfires—and what appear to be many, many tents.
To my right, farther west, the sky is lit up with streaks of lightning. It’s a struggle to stop the sight of the glittering energy from triggering my reflexes. For the last ten years, I’ve trained my body to react to lightning as a sign of another monster rising—the strongest and worst monsters.
To my far left, the landscape is darker. The contours of the land are harder to make out and it looks like a storm is brewing, the sky filled with clouds.
“I see an encampment,” I say, pointing to the plain below us. “Which surely consists of an army of fae.”
She nods. “A thousand fae warriors.”
“A formidable army, then.”
“What else do you see?” she asks.
“Thunderbirds protecting the sky on the encampment’s western perimeter. No doubt guarding it from your human enemies.” I turn to face the other direction, where the clouds rest. “But in the east…”
My voice trails off as the back of my neck prickles and the medallions on my hand make my skin tingle.
I peer more closely into darkness that lies far off to my left, taking in the way the dark clouds roil in the east. An inky pall lies over that land.
My heart beats faster, but I don’t have a logical reason for my body’s reactions. “You came from there.”
“Weescapedfrom the east,” Queen Karasi says quietly. “Or perhaps more accurately, we were driven from it by a darkness that kept growing and spreading, a blight that destroyed our crops and made our homes unlivable. Our Springtime fae fought valiantly against the spreading decay and we thought we could overcome it, but we soon discovered that the more we tried to fight it, the worse it got. It was as if our magic only fed it.”
Her expression hardens. “Soon, crimson clouds formed in our sky, making the land beneath it appear tainted with blood. That’s when monsters began rising from the sludge.”
I stiffen with shock. “What?”
She nods. “Yes, Asha Silverspun. Your city is not the only one that is now cursed. What the Blacksmiths did inVadlig Odemarkhas spread far beyond its origins. A vicious blight has caused our children to sicken and our animals to die and it drained the power from our strongest warriors. It poisoned our lakes and ponds so that anyone who drank from that water would die of thirst. We had no choice but to leave our once-beautiful country and push into the west.”
Damn.
