There is nothing but silence where the binding used to hum. A ringing, a weightless silence. The absence of something that’s been there so long I’d mistaken it for a part of myself.
My arm drops. The Sword stays in my hand.Myhand. I open my fingers. Close them. Open them again, just to feel them obey me and no one else.
My lungs pull deeper than they have in years.
For a long moment I kneel here, in a charred court, holding a Sword that is finally and only mine, and I don’t try to name what that feels like. Some things resist cataloging. This is one of them.
Amarantha’s face twists into an ugly sneer, her eyes scanning the court.
“That’s not possible.”
“You sure about that?” The voice comes from the servant’s entrance in the eastern wall. The one Amarantha sealed decades ago. The one she didn’t build. “Crazy you never once checked if the lock still worked on that door.”
Relief steals all the blood from my head and for a moment the world swims. I really thought I was alone. Stuck.
Tiana walks in slowly. Her chin high and excitement on her face. She showed up.
Traveling leathers stained with someone else’s blood stretch across her skin. Dark skin catches the guttering light from sconces that should be dead. The court she’s walking through should have been hers.
The walls know it.
What’s left of the Seelie magic, the deep foundation, the oldest wards, the ones Amarantha didn’t build and couldn’t burn, flickers. Sconces that died when she torched her own court gutter back to life. Barely, but it’s just enough.
“No.” Amarantha’s voice has lost its silk. “You’re dead. You’ve been dead for?—”
“Thirty years in your walls. Your passages. Your servant entrances. I built half your wards, Amarantha.” Tiana stops far enough away from her but not because she fears her. “Did you really think I didn’t leave myself doors?”
Amarantha reaches for the court’s defenses. The desperate grab for magic that should answer a queen’s call. I can feel it like static in the air.
Nothing answers.
Because she burned it. All of it.
And it never even belonged to her in the first place.
“Davis.” Shrill now. “Kill?—”
Davis is already running. Not toward Tiana. Toward the far corridor. The survival instinct of a gazelle, that one.
Tiana doesn’t stop him. Her eyes never leave Amarantha.
Amarantha’s gaze flicks between us. Me with the Sword she can’t command. Tiana with the blood she can’t outrank. The charred court that won’t protect her.
I’ve studied this woman for years. Every expression. Every calculation. Every micro-adjustment of her features when she’s changing strategy.
This one I’ve never seen before.
Not defeat. Amarantha doesn’t do defeat.
Reassessment.
She moves.
Not toward Tiana. Not toward me. Toward the wall behind the throne. Her hand finds something I can’t see, a seam in the charred stone, and part of the wall pivots inward.
A freaking hidden door. One that never existed before, I’d have found it, and by the look on Tiana’s face she didn’t know either.
Tiana lunges.
