Not thirty feet away lay a section of blown-out wall, so enormous it had flattened a building; only wooden shards remained. Just like what happened to Isa the nurse. Just like what happened to my own mother.
But one thing remained true for both of us:
Killing these people was like killing my own family.
It was wrong. In that, Carys and I were of one mind. I felt her now, vibrating with desire to speak a single word aloud. Those dark eyes were still on her from the corner, watching. She longed, longed, longed to see those dark eyes again.
The whistle continued. The people closed in, sunlit iron at the ready.
I couldn’t. I couldn’t slaughter them.
Amidst this, one fact rose from all the things Dorian had taught me in his study:Carys died in a war of the four courts.Which meant she survived this day. She survived this battle, this place, to return to Feyreign.
So I allowed Carys to speak.
“Retreat,” I whispered.
I said it again, louder, and once more louder still.
But it was too late.
The fight was quick.My people were captured, all of them who didn’t die fighting. I was surrounded, and a woman stabbed my horse in the heart with a spear.
The stallion fell, and I was pulled off it as it died.
I was thrown to the ground, met with fists and boots. The blows came fast and merciless. My weapons were stripped from me, all of them. Even the dagger. Amidst the beating, my eyes opened, and through the legs of the people around me, Isaw a child squatting in the dirt, staring. A little brown-haired girl, wide-eyed and shocked.
And it was there, disarmed and beaten on the ground, that I retreated inside. So deep inside that Eurydice was subsumed by Carys.
I saw a memory from her life. Carys hovered at the edge of a building in this very square, waiting for her moment. When the street was empty, she ran along the cobblestones by moonlit night, her eyes on the high outer wall of the Kingdom of the Plains. She would climb that wall. She would climb it and she would see what lay beyond. Like me, her desire to see was greater than her fear. She wanted to be a guard, to be strong and protect her people.
Her people. These were her people.
Carys had grown up here. She had grown up where I had grown up, in what would become the southern district.
A steel-toed boot slammed into my belly, and the answer came to me in a starburst of pain. She truly was a changeling. A changeling like me. Carys had been placed here as a baby, like me. And she had loved this kingdom, like me.
It was as impossible to destroy that love as it was to remove every stone from a stream. You could work forever at it, but there would still be more stones. You could become a queen, and still.
Queen—a changeling had become a queen. The fact ricocheted through me as it never had before. How had a changeling become a queen?
Another blow to the belly. One to the spine.
“Enough,” a man’s voice called. “Enough!”
The blows subsided. The pain bloomed, and my eyes fluttered as I tried to hold on to consciousness. I clung to a question: How had a changeling girl from the Kingdom of the Plains become a queen of Feyreign?
But the pain was white-hot, and unconsciousness overtook me.
When I woke,sunlight scorched my face. Voices sounded around me. Pain flooded in, and I struggled to open just one eye. The left one didn’t respond, and the right opened only a sliver.
Cobblestone dug into my knees. My arms were pinched behind my back, and iron burned into my wrists. Sunlit iron. Every part of me felt like a wound, and Carys’s body felt like my own. The wheeze as I breathed was my own. The sharp pain of broken ribs was my pain. With this kind of pain, I could no longer distinguish between myself and Carys.
I had survived the beating. History had told me so, but words on the page of some old tome felt like a tenuous promise when you were the one who had to do the surviving.
“Queen of the fae,” a gravelly man’s voice said nearby. “More like queen of the cobblestone.”
Voices rang out. Angry, sharp.
