I wasn’t crying. I was furious.
“Cirevan,” I said. “A mount.”
At his call, a roan Sylvanwild stallion was brought around to the tent, wide nostrils flaring, eyes wide; it carried in its heart exactly the heat I wanted in a horse.
I gripped its mane and swung myself onto its back in one motion. I spun the horse toward the archers, the dagger in my right hand and my left hand tangled in the horse’s mane. “Get on your mounts and follow. On my mark, let loose.” I paused, and my horse danced under me. “Do not stop your charge. Whatever else you do, do not stop.”
The archers found their mounts, and I wheeled the horse toward the wall. It loomed high enough to blot the sky. Fae and humans fought below, small as the wooden figurines on the table in my tent. Trebuchets flung boulders—tiny stones, not even half as large as a single brick in the wall.
Our people were dying. They were dying outside that behemoth.
No more.
The archers massed behind me. With a breath out, I pressed my heels into the stallion’s sides. He burst into a trotand passed straight into a gallop, tearing up clods of earth. I leaned low over the horse’s head, wind clawing my hair back.
This was our best and final charge. We couldn’t fail.
The longer I’d been inside Carys’s mind, the more of her had passed into me. And now she thought of the long history. She thought of it like I would remember the past: in snippets, flashes, in bits of story.
For a thousand years we humans and fae had battled, been belittled, pushed back, enslaved…
I pushed it aside. Not now. We were closing in on the wall—passing bodies and burning boulders and broken-up earth—as fast as my eyes could process. We’d neared the battle itself, and I had to give the call.
Not yet. The moment had to be right.
The wall grew and grew like a living thing, and my heart stuttered. Fear entered me, spreading brambles through my chest. Maybe I wasn’t the queen they had wanted. Perhaps I didn’t have the courage, the will.
Then I saw her. The body of a young fae woman, her eyes open to the sky, glassy and wide. She had a hole where her heart should have been, the tamped grass visible through the other side.
Fuck that. Queens weren’t born. They were forged. Ihadto be her.
The wall grew, blotting out the horizon. My heart thundered, and I waited. Not yet. Not yet.
When we entered the shadow of the wall, out of the sun, the world cooled. Everything darkened. We were in its terrible shade, and this was my moment.
I raised the dagger, pointed it at the human kingdom, and the fae tongue came to my lips.
“Vrekh! Vrekh! Vrekh!”
I screamed the word until my voice went hoarse, and even then I screamed it.
A second passed. Then two. I wondered if my archers were still there, if they had lost their courage?—
The first arrows flew over my head, enormous and blinding. They cut through the air in streaks of vicious green, a trail of light racing straight for the wall. For a moment I was Eurydice again, seeing the sky over the southern district lit up. Except this time, I knew what it meant.
Destruction. Absolute and total.
The magic was so immense, the arrows themselves were lost in the comets they created. My eyes watered, the brilliance searing my retina.
This—this is what you asked for.
More arrows followed. Two dozen in all.
For a long, suspended second the world fell quiet as they arced and descended like falling stars. I was riveted, frozen. I had never understood the true power of the fae until this. We had lost so much. More than I had ever known.
Grief and rage filled me. The human kingdom deserved this—this and more.
When the arrows struck the wall, they flared so brightly I almost turned my eyes away. But I forced my gaze onto the sight. I had to see. I had to see the moment.
