The village arrives the way the best things do. Before you’re ready for it.
Light first. Warm and gold and nothing like bioluminescence. Actual firelight, multiple sources, scattered through a space that opens between the trees like the forest exhaled and made room. Then sound—laughter, real and unguarded, rolling toward us through the dark.
I make Orion put me down before we enter.
He does, his hands slow to leave my waist.
Something with strings plays far above our heads. A voice singing in a language I don’t know but my blood does, its old, old in a way that makes my bare feet press harder into the soil. And I wiggle my toes, feeling the hum of the village beneath my feet.
Then the smell. Woodsmoke. Meat over fire. Something sweet and fermented and sharp. And underneath it all, earth. Living earth. The particular richness of soil that hasn’t been touched by court magic, that justis.
The village is built into the forest the way the forest wants to be built into.
Not imposed—integrated. Huts with walls of woven branches and dried moss, their roofs sprouting grass and small flowers that turn toward us as we pass. Treehouses connected by rope bridges that sway in a wind I can’t feel at ground level. Fires in clay pits, surrounded by people who look up as we enter with the specific calm of a community that has survived enough surprises to stop being startled by them.
Children.
There are children here. Running between the huts, chasing something small and luminescent that keeps changing direction. A little blue orb that looks suspiciously familiar. A little girl stops when she sees me, stares at my feet, then looks up at my face with enormous dark eyes.
I wiggle my toes at her.
She dissolves into giggles and disappears behind a hut.
The people here are Unseelie by blood. I can feel it—the particular cold intelligence in a lazy stare, the shadow-comfort all around us. But they wear it differently than any Unseelie I’ve met. It’s more natural. The darker magic isn’t expressed as darkness but in a look held a moment too long. Or in a side glance that screams these unseelie allow us to enter.
Jadeve speaks to someone at the village entrance. Word moves through the space the way Kestra said it would. Not announced, just known. Eyes find us. Not threatening. Assessing. Settling.
An older woman approaches. Silver-haired, small, oozing elder vibes. She looks at Kestra first. A long look, and I swear the older woman smirks like she knows her. Then she looks at Tiana. Then to me.
She puts her hand to her chest.
Jadeve’s people do the same. One by one. Not a bow.
Three true queens of Faerie.
None of them on a throne.
I’ve been called queen before. By courts who wanted to use me. By enemies who wanted to mock me. By men who wanted to claim me.
This is the first time it’s felt like something I might actually want to be.
The older woman says something in the old language, the one my blood knows even if my mind doesn’t, and I feel it in myfeet, in the soil beneath them, in the wild magic that has been trickling back in since I first touched the Dark Forest floor.
Welcome homeisn’t quite right.
Welcome backisn’t either.
It’s honestly more like,you finally showed up.
Kestra makes a small broken sound beside me. I reach for her hand without looking. She takes it.
Tiana stands very straight. Her chin up. Her eyes bright with something she’s not letting fall. Her hand finds mine on the opposite side.
I’m not crying. Okay, I’m crying again.
It just won’t fucking stop.
Luckily the moment breaks and chatter rises in the next breath and we three step away like the moment burned us.
