My eyes closed. I was Eury and I was Carys, both at the same time. Daughters of scorn, changelings given over to the humans and then brought back around once we knew our birthrights.
It felt like a covenant between us: We were meant to take our power. To rip it from those who would steal, trick, betray.
Never again would I allow it to be taken from me.
All at once, the rain stopped. The screams stopped. The wind died.
The world changed, whispering around me like I had been transported. A sucking feeling pulled through me, like my stomach was pressed down and then yanked up. Nausea rose in me.
My eyes opened—both of them. Above me, purple crystals glinted with soft light, catching the lichen growing around them. They were set into the high curves of a wooden throne room built into a tree.
My breath sawed in and out of my lungs, and my balance left me.
I nearly fell, but caught myself with a hand. Around me, dozens of fae stared. I knelt on the floor of the throne room of the Sylvanwild citadel, and no dead king lay beneath me. No rain hissed around me.
I was back. I was out of the trial.
But…
My eyes scanned the room. Dorian.Dorian.Where was he? He’d been manacled, tortured?—
“Eury.”
My head snapped around, and my heart gave an overlarge beat. Perfectly framed by the closed double doors of the citadel stood Dorian. And he stared back at me with those dark, haunted eyes. I could see his pupils, his irises, the white of his sclera.
My breath left me. I rose to stand, wanting to throw myself into his arms and resisting in the same motion.Lover. Murderer.“Your eyes.”
He swallowed so hard I saw his whole throat move. His smile was a bitter twist. He was looking straight at me, seeing me.
“It wasn’t real,” I breathed.
“It was real,” came a dark voice from the head of the throne room. Rhiannon. “And it seems you survived it.”
If it was real, that meant… a lot of things. Bad things. More than I could process in the middle of all these staring fae. More than I might ever be able to process.
I turned slowly toward Rhiannon. She sat resplendent on her throne exactly as she had before I’d been sent into the trial. I had no idea how much time had elapsed. “What of the others?”
Rhiannon raised a sharp finger. “Just one other pair so far.” That finger gestured toward the far corner of the room.
Near one of the staircases stood Faun and her partner. Only she gazed back at me. His eyes were closed, his face angled toward the floor.
So she’d lived. I’d wanted them all to live, but if I were deep-down honest, she was the one I’d hoped I would see when I turnedaround. Faun, the servant fae. Faun, who was more like me than not.
My gaze sharpened on her partner. “What happened to him?”
“The girl made a difficult decision,” Rhiannon said. “Exactly the one I would have made. But that’s not the surprise here. Why is Dorian alive—with his eyesight?”
Pieces were assembling in my mind. Faun had gone through the same trial I had. She’d been forced to inhabit the body of Queen Carys, made to watch her partner stare into the sun. But she must have made a different choice. They had both survived, but her partner’s blindness had persisted.
That was the trial. Right there in that square, facing the king.
It wasn’t just a fantasy. It was persistent. And then there was the rain—the acid rain. I had called down that rain from the sky, made it fall in buckets over the Kingdom of the Plains.
…Or was it the Kingdom of Storms?
There’s no distinction,a quiet, knowing voice said inside me.
Which meant…
