“Stubborn old fool,” Lyric whispered, putting a hand on her father’s cheek. “When the Huntress calls…you do not refuse…” Her eyes fluttered closed, and her hand dropped, coming to rest on the child in Oberon’s arms. Overcome by unfathomable pain, he bent forward and let out a bellow of despair. The harder I fought against the memory, however, the tighter it held me, and so I gave in, reliving every moment of my grandfather’s grief with him until I could bear no more.
Please, I begged silently.Please, make it stop…before it kills me…
“My lord,” came a thin, frightened voice through the cloud of shadows surrounding Oberon’s body. He straightened and swept them aside, searching the gloom of night until his eyes fell on the form of a young child, standing half-hidden behind the weeping willow.
“Boy.” He choked the disdainful word out, and I realized the child must be Devil. He did not appear older than seven in this memory, even though I knew he could only be months older than myself—built to serve a purpose, rather than born. “Where is Titania?”
“She has met the human army, my lord,” Devil said, his anxious, mismatched eyes pinned on the baby—on me.
“Then may their gods have mercy on them,” Oberon muttered, a new wave of sadness mingling with his soul-searing grief. “You must find Henry before she does, and bring him to me. Go.”
“What will happen to her?” Devil asked, jerking his chin at me.
“If her father is gone too…then I must give her over to the human world.”
“But then she won’t—”
“It is not your place to question, Puck!” Oberon snarled. “Your place is to obey! Now, get out of my sight.” Before Devil could reply, I was torn from the memory, left gasping as the Rot surrounded my magyk again, stabbing and ripping, testing my defenses from every angle before throwing me into another scene.
This time, I shared Titania’s body, and it was all I could do not to vomit. My hand—her hand—held a magyk flame to the face of a human soldier, searing the skin from his bones as he screamed, unable to claw his way free due to the vines binding his wrists. One of his eyeballs ruptured, spewing bile, and his body went limp. Titania just dropped it to the forest floor and quickly moved on to another man cowering nearby, guarded by a faerie soldier, taking me with her even as I tried to free myself from the horrifying tableau. Seizing her new victim’s arms, she wrenched them back, and his cry of anguish did not quite drown out the sound of snapping bones and tendons. This man, she left alive, discarded and sobbing on the grass, before she stopped to take in the sight of the clearing she was standing in. What I saw through her eyes was the stuff of nightmares: human bodies torn apart, scattered with impunity, or impaled on sharpened tree limbs, their blood painting a blanket of pale blue wildflowers dark and gruesome. A few of her victims were still relatively whole, attempting to crawl away on shattered limbs or bloody stumps, begging for mercy from the fay guards surrounding them.But Titania’s heart was hardened against them already—hatred and bloodlust shielding her from the all-consuming grief of her daughter’s death.
“Find more and bring them to me,” she rasped at her soldiers. They obeyed, and the memory snapped away, allowing a series of brief images to flash across my vision: Oberon’s view of the granite slab as he pulled it over Lyric’s cold, gray body and used his magyk to form the relief on top. His shadows cradling me, a tiny, green-eyed baby, while he blunted the tips of my ears, concealed my magyk gift, and turned a lock of my dark hair snow white. I felt his pain like my own when he kissed me for the last time and left me on Locksley’s steps. Then, I was back with Titania as she discovered Lyric’s tomb and nearly burned the willow tree to ash before collapsing on top of the stone box. Next, I watched Oberon and Titania engaged in an argument that nearly leveled the entire Arden, which only ended when Hippolyta pulled the queen away and Oberon vanished.
And then there was darkness. Years of it.
Cold, empty loneliness stretching out and chilling me to the bone. It was worse than the grief, worse than the anger and bitter hatred, worse than the betrayal and pain. Instead of burning through me quickly, it suffocated at an unbearably slow pace, making me long for the end;anyend, at anyone’s hand, even my own. But I knew I could not give up now. Not when I had come this far, and not when I was this close. I held my shield of magyk and pushed back, forcing the foul disease to retreat. Oberon and Titania’s power acted as a steadying bulwark at my back, and together, we fought. Titania’s fire meshed with my own, burning through the Arden’s veins and cauterizing the Rot wherever we found it, while Oberon’s shadows became a balm, clearing any shred of darkness we left behind. The more of it we burned away, the harder it fought, overwhelming me with memories and feelings I knew would haunt me the rest of my days. I did not let go, did not allow myself to stop until my magyk started to falter, to weaken, and I collapsed sideways onto the forest floor. But two pairs of hands were there to pull me back up, comforting me and brushing hair from my face.
“Marina! Can you hear me?” The man’s voice was calm, with an undercurrent of worry, and I opened my eyes to see Oberon.
“You did everything you could,” I told him, unsure where the words came from. His face fell and he pulled me into a crushing embrace. Weak and exhausted, but strangely satisfied, I shifted my eyes to Titania, kneeling beside us, one hand on my back and one covering her own mouth. Tear tracks decorated her cheeks, and I saw dirt on her fingertips, matching my own.
“You were screaming,” she whispered. “What did you see?”
I squeezed my eyes closed and shook my head. “It doesn’t matter right now. The Rot?”
“We cannot say how much, but ithasretreated,” Oberon murmured as he released me. “Hippolyta and Simeon have gone up to scout the forest.” Just as he pointed to the sky, a shadow passed over us. It was not Hippolyta, nor Simeon in his owl form, that landed in the center of the grove, however. It was Devil, his face strained with panic.
“Mayhem,” he breathed, rushing forward and dropping to his knees in front of me. Oberon and Titania stood back, allowing us to hold each other for nearly a full minute. His comforting scent and warmth brought me an immeasurable, almost medicinal, relief that I never wanted to let go of.
His body shook as he murmured into my hair. “Gods above, I thought I’d lost you. I could feel it…here.” He tapped his chest.
“I’m alright,” I assured him. “Or I will be. How is the Hollow?”
He grinned. “The Rot is banished. Gone. I knew you would do it.”
“Not entirely,” said Hippolyta, landing behind us and tucking her own wings. “It is still there, at the very edge of the forest, but it has changed. Gray and frozen, instead of a living darkness. We can see no signs of spread, but Simeon has gone to place sentries along its border.” I shifted forward to sit on my knees and looked at Oberon, whose mouth was set in a hard line.
“Marina needs time to recover before we try again,” he said, but I shook my head.
“No,” I said slowly. “My healing gift…it always leaves behind scars. If the Rot was made up of anger and sorrow and grief, those things will never completely fade. Maybe it will no longer threaten the Arden from within, but the scar will always be there as a reminder of what we’ve lost.”
Oberon put his arms around Titania again and placed a tender kiss on the side of her head. “A reminder of what we lost,” he repeated, then they both looked down at Devil and I, sitting beside each other in the grass. “Before the Arden is thrown into inevitable celebration, Marina, I think…you owe us an explanation.”
Devil stood and moved in front of me. “She owes you nothing. Without her, the Arden would be lost, and so would you.”
“A point I will not refute,” Oberon said patiently, “but her new power is unlike anything I’ve ever seen, and I only wish to help. To do that, I must know where it came from.” Shakily, I took Devil’s hand and pulled myself up so we could face Oberon and Titania. I had no idea how they would react to our blood bond, but was fully prepared to tell them to go fuck themselves.
“I think we can both see now where it came from,” Titania said before I could speak, “and this is absolutely beyond the pale, Puck.”
