The Unseelie Court is silent.
Not the careful silence of a court holding its breath. Not the political silence of people choosing their words. The silence of a place that’s been emptied deliberately, completely, the way you clear a room before you do something you don’t want witnessed.
“This is wrong.” Kestra’s voice is barely a whisper beside me. Her ice-blue eyes scan the empty corridor. “Where are the guards?”
“Gone.” I extend shadows through the hallway. Searching. Testing. Finding nothing. No heartbeats behind pillars. No breathing in alcoves. No sentient shadows reporting back to their master.
“Gone gone,” Whispen confirms, drifting ahead of us in a sullen violet glow that means he doesn’t like what he’s seeing. “Empty throne, empty halls. The king of nothing sits where nothing calls.”
“Helpful,” I mutter.
“I don’t do helpful. I do truth.”
Kestra and I move through corridors I walked for centuries. Past the gallery where mother’s portrait used to hang before father had it burned. Past the receiving hall where I knelt andaccepted the terms that sold my life for my sister’s safety. Past the war room where generations of Unseelie strategy were plotted on shadow-maps that shifted with the political winds.
All empty. All dark.
The sconces aren’t lit. The sentient shadows that usually patrol the walls have retreated into the stonework, pressed flat and trembling like animals during a storm. In three centuries of living in this court, the shadows have never been afraid of their own king.
“He felt it,” Kestra says quietly. She’s stopped walking. Her hand rests on the wall, fingers spread against black stone, reading something I can’t. “The Balance. When Amarantha burned the Seelie Court. He felt it break.”
He was right about the Balance—that’s the part that makes me want to put my fist through a wall. About its importance, about what happens when it fails, about every cruelty he justified in its name. Right about all of it.
He was also a monster. Both things are somehow simultaneously true and have been, for three hundred years.
“His chambers,” I say, because I already know. The shadows are retreating from one direction. Fleeing toward us. Away from whatever is happening in the king’s private rooms.
We find the door unlocked.
My father has never left his door unlocked. In three centuries, I have never once entered his chambers without a summons, without the shadow-link burning through my skull, without kneeling on marble while he decided how much of me to leave intact.
I push it open.
The room smells like jasmine and rot and something sharper underneath. Unseelie Fae mead. The kind that’s distilled from nightshade and shadow-bloom and tastes like regret if regrethad a proof. He keeps it for political occasions. State dinners. Treaty negotiations.
It looks like he has been drinking it like water.
King Moros sits on a throne by the dead fireplace. A throne he must have dragged in here, the scrapes on the floor are the proof of that.
His hair is loose, falling around his face like a curtain he can’t be bothered to open.
The bottle is half empty. His hand around it is steady. The rest of him is not.
“Ah.” He doesn’t look up. “Took you long enough.”
I don’t move. Something in me remains locked at the threshold. Every preparation I made, every scenario I ran, every version of this confrontation I rehearsed of imagining the day I’d face him as an equal, none of them included this. None of them included him not caring that I was here.
“Father.” The word tastes like copper.
“Come to kill me?” He takes a drink, a long one. His voice conversational. My father doesn’t do conversational. “Or has your sister come to do it? She always had more conviction.”
Kestra steps past me. I reach for her arm and she shakes me off without looking. She walks into the room with confidence I admire. I spent a long time seeing her as my little sister to protect and not as the woman, the Fae, the queen she rightfully is.
She looks like our mother.
The thought hits me and Moros at the same time. The flinch crosses his face—just once, there and gone, is unmistakable.
He sees Mab in Kestra, too.
