My one good eye lifted. I knelt at the entry to an enormous square full of people with eyes on me and fingers curled into fists. They were waiting, all these humans whose wall had been destroyed. All these humans who had lost family, who had lost friends.
Their rage had a face now—mine.
Left of me, not a hundred feet off, stood a bone-white pillar, a behemoth. It was so wide, so bright, I had to squint. But I knew that pillar—it was one of the three spires of the Kingdom of Storms. It had stood four hundred years ago.
A hand grabbed my bicep and yanked. I bit back a cry as I was hauled upright.
“Walk,” a man’s voice said, low and terse. That was a guard, no doubt; the human military cadence had not changed in four hundred years.
I tested my weight and found my legs held. I took a step and swayed against his hold. That was just dizziness; my leg carried the weight. I took another step, and another, and soon I was crossing under the doorway and into the sunbathed square and its chorus of jeers.
At the center stood a wooden platform. Atop it stood two guard, and next to each guard knelt a prisoner, wrists bound with sunlit-iron shackles. I stilled. Despite my impairment, despite the sun’s brightness, despite standing behind the two prisoners, despite the skullcaps they wore, I knew them at once.
One was Cirevan, and one was Dorian.
The guard thrust me forward, and I stumbled before I walked. A wet smack against my cheek—fruit, maybe. Fresh, fragrant. Another splattered on my shoulder, another on my leg. The part of me that was Eury had the surging thought: Who were these people to waste fruit?
The guard barked a command that quelled the crowd.
I was guidedaround to the front of the platform, and I couldn’t help but seek out Dorian’s face. When I came into view, his eyes found mine; they were red and stricken. He still wore whatever device covered his head and kept his eyes pried open. His lips parted and he spoke, but I couldn’t hear him over all the noise.
All my anger toward Dorian, all my grief, burned away under a single aching truth: I longed to free him from those manacles, to pull that skullcap off his head.
No matter what he’d done, he didn’t deserve this.
I held his gaze until I couldn’t any longer. Until I was thrust beyond him and into the center of the square, where I was made to face a dais with a throne atop it. And on that throne sat the sunlit-iron-armored King Rhodric with his horned helm still on. White-bearded, rosy-cheeked, a sovereign who ate too heartily and beliedthe shrewdness of his blue eyes with the soft smile he wore as he looked upon me.
A hand slammed my shoulder and shoved me down. The cobblestones bit through my leathers into my kneecaps, and I held back a wince.
Across the king’s lap, atop a plum cushion, sat the dagger. My dagger, glittering cobalt in the sunlight. He couldn’t touch it. Couldn’t even set it directly on his armored lap.
“Welcome, Carys”—the horns of the helm angled forward as he looked upon me—“to the inner district.”
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
The king observed me,his eyes drifting down my body and back up to my swollen face. “You’re a bit of a runt for a queen.” His voice was loud, carrying—meant to be heard. And the crowd burst into laughter.
I just stared at him. This was not meant to be a two-way conversation.
“Must be the Unseelie are truly desperate, to set a diadem on the head of a woman no bigger than a child.” His gloved fingers tapped the arms of the throne. “And look what’s come of it. You conjure a little green flame and run straight into the heart of our kingdom. Right into a nest of swords. You’ve forgotten your place, haven’t you?”
He didn’t know who I was. He didn’t know I had grown up here.
The crowd went on jeering. My single functioning eye lowered to the dagger on his lap.
He followed my gaze. He dared not touch the dagger; I wondered who had delivered the pillow it sat on. “It’s a fine offering you’ve brought me, Carys. Will you now beg for your life and the lives of your consort and second?”
The sun beat down on my scalp, and my veins ran hotwith fire. Humans could not be cowed, and they so loved to gloat. My gaze lifted to him. “That dagger will be your death. And my hand will be around its grip.”
That was me speaking. It was also Carys. It was both of us.
A moment passed. Then his lip curled, a sneer revealing off-white teeth. He curled a hand beside his mouth. “The runt queen claims she will end me.”
Laughter bloomed across the square. Jeers followed.
“Your bluster far exceeds your competence, Carys.” The king’s chin lifted, eyes finding the sky. “Ah, but it is just that time. Phoros is in his prime.”
The jeers subsided, an almost reverent hush slipping over the crowd. And with the silence, ice water spread down my spine. Phoros? What was Rhodric planning?—
