The wall exploded in green. It exploded in over a dozen spots, all those carefully stacked stones bursting and falling inward. It broke for us, flying and crumbling and revealing its soft innards.
Built by the gods? Their gods had soft hands.
I leaned low over the horse and regripped his mane. With another press of my heels and a scream, I pointed the way with the dagger I’d use to slit the king’s throatfrom carotid to jugular.
We rodeover the rubble of the wall once called impenetrable. The archers thundered behind me on horseback, fae soldiers pouring in on foot. We came like the Unseelie we were, vicious and biting and unputdownable.
Inside, the human guard awaited with sunlit shields raised. Their eyes were round as coins under their iron helms. They were young, eighteen and nineteen and twenty. Children. That thought slid under the waves of my rage.
I led the way, dagger in hand. My legs gripped the stallion as I hewed the guard out of my way, dagger singing.Thiswas my child, sharp-edged and willing, merciless and unyielding. Shields were cloven in two. Shoulders were cleaved away. Heads flew from necks. Arterial blood sprayed red over my mount and armor.
Without their wall, humans were nothing but connective tissue.
As I fought, a low horror thrummed through me. I was still Eury, still the girl who’d grown up in the Kingdom of Storms. I recognized the general shape of things, the way paths curved around low buildings, the shape of people’s eyes. These were my people, and they weren’t. I was their murderer, and I wasn’t.
But the power… Carys and I were in agreement on how that felt.
It was glorious.
I had never felt this. Had never known it existed. People always said power was what other people agreed on, but this required no agreement. It was unignorable, ripped from nature with my own two hands. Itwasmy hands.
I pressed us forward, deeper into the breach. I would ride us straight to the middle wall, we would force them to open, and then to the innermost?—
My attention caught on the wall ahead. This wasn’t the middle wall; in the Kingdom of Storms, the middle wall had been as tall as the outer. The one before me was two-thirds as tall and half as sturdy. The stonework was crude.
My gaze drifted left and right. Where I had expected to see theside walls barricading this district from the others, there were none. Only the broken outer wall.
There were no districts in the Kingdom of the Plains. Or perhaps there were, but they had not been sectioned off from one another by a wall. Not yet, at least.
This kingdom was far more penetrable, far more vulnerable.Arrogant.It was the arrogance of a thousand years of sunlit iron and dominance that had led to this. One breach and every outer district was lost. So many innocents dead.
A strand of sympathy wove through both of us, Carys and me. I knew whyIfelt it, but I didn’t understand why she did. She hated humans.
“My queen.” Cirevan rode up beside me, helmet on, mace dripping. “Shall I call the archers to fire on the inner wall?”
The inner wall, not the middle wall. So they truly didn’t have a middle wall.
That sympathetic chord still thrummed inside me. I breathed hard, bloody dagger held tight at my side. Finally, I said, “We force the pig out. Push on to the gatehouse.”
So we pushed on. The first throng of interior guard had been mostly defeated, leaving us with a gap until reinforcements arrived, and only a few intrepid civilians dared fight us. I winced when a man with a hoe barred our path; he was a farmer like my almost-father.
These people were doing what anyone would do. They were protecting what they loved.
But the rage in Carys could not be quelled. Not until the king lay dead and her lover returned to her side. Not until the generations of fae that had been kidnapped, tortured, and killed by humans were spoken for.
So much death. Rivers of fae blood ran through the pages of strife between humans and fae. Feyreign was an isolationist kingdom, and yet the humans would never stop, would never let us be. They were parasitic, insatiable. And the fae had held the humans off until the bastards had discovered a weapon.
Sunlit iron.
They had iron deposits, tons of it. And they mined it into thousands of swords, spearheads, arrowheads, shields… then they laid those weapons under the sun and asked for Phoros’s blessing. And it was given.
My gaze sharpened on the battle, on the dead guard and the weapons still held in their hands. Sunlit iron, all of it. Their iron had terrorized us for generations.
Humans were parasitic, but they were also cunning. And we fae had grown complacent over eons, losing our touch with our own power. The greatest queen in the past hundred years could barely snuff a candle with her magic.
No more. The balance would change. Ithadchanged.
When we arrived at the gatehouse, I swicked my dagger clean and sheathed it. Letting go of the grip was a conscious effort, even if my hand felt cold, near-numb.
