Carys’s thought came:I don’t know why I expected more from these people.
I felt it, her disappointment—her attendant fury. It ignited my own.
Anger always began as a seed deep in my belly. That became a blossom of flame, and from there it threaded its way upward. It wove itself into the fibers of my lungs, slipped into the ventricles of my heart. It seeped into my neck, rose into my cheeks. Before me, my fingers curved into my palms. My one good eye narrowed.
These had been my people. They had been my mother and father and brothers and sisters and nephews and nieces and cousins and neighbors and friends. I had grown up alongside them. I had guarded their high wall. I had loved them, but I never did belong to them.
I was a changeling, a fae.
And humans were a scourge, a parasite. They had encroached on our kingdom for generations. They had kidnapped my lover. They would not stop until they owned everything and everyone.
We fae were fools to allow them to multiply, to spread. We had become complacent in our kingdom, weak in our magic. No more. No more. They wanted to burn my people’s eyes out?
Fuck them. Fuck them all.
The wind wasgentle at first. Gentle enough to be a whisper. Gentle enough to be a touch.
It soon picked up.
My eye shut against Cirevan’s screams, against Dorian’s unnerving silence, against the crowd’s cheers and the king’s sneer. I thought only of nature.
The part of me that was Carys knew the Sylvanwild worship of nature. She knew how sacred it was, that it was our sustenance, our lifeblood. To defile nature was to defy the court.
And yet.
These fucking bastards had it coming.
Intent flitted through my head, Carys’s vision of what I could do. I had slit my own fate line, infused my body with the dagger’s magic. Power—so much power—vibrated at my fingertips.
The part of me that was Eurydice had lived despite nature. I had stood under acid day in and out, under hell on this earth. I had seen the worst of it. Nature had been my enemy, my master, my whip, and still I had held on. All of us had held on, clinging to the earth like we were on the edge of a precipice.
I didn’t believe in the sanctity of nature.
Not clean victory.
Not beautiful punishments.
Just survival. Ugly, dirty survival.
Behind me, my palms unclenched, opening toward the sky. It was Carys who felt the anger, but it was I who infused it with intent.
All my life, people had told me male rage was to be feared, soothed—or if not soothed, then avoided. And yet they had never told me the thought that seared through my mind. Carys’s thought, and also my own:
Male rage is anger. Female rage is power.
The wind picked up my hair, blowing it into my face. It took the jeers of the crowd and carried them high, high up toward the clouds.
The clouds were coming. Coming in fast.
Across the forest. Across the lush plains. Over the high wall like it was an inch tall. Thick cumulonimbus rolled toward the square from the cardinal directions, converging like rivers of ink spilling into one enormous cup.
The crowd’s noises changed. Confusion spread.
When the clouds arrived, it was already too late. The sky darkened. Even Phoros could not penetrate this shroud. The anger swelled, the clouds fat and tall and ready.
I raised my face, made a promise to the sky:
Give me this, and I will trust only in you.
