I look at the darkness under me. And there on my head sits a crown of thorns and a simple jewel the color of magenta in the center. “Holy shit,” I look up but he’s walking away.
I stand on legs that feel borrowed, wanting to reach him. But my whole-body aches.
“Aengus.” I turn back. He’s already fading. Galaxies swirling in his cape like he’s being swallowed by his own stars.
I almost say it. Almost thank him. The word sits right there on my tongue.
I swallow it. I know better now.
But I do remember the day he gave me a tour of the castle. The day he let me wager against my own survival along with the rest of the staff. “I believe you owe me a favor. Full survival. No elimination.”
His laugh echoes through the nothing. “I was wondering when you’d collect.”
I walk through the door as a queen with a pocket full of favors.
58
Finnian
The throne roomsmells like a bonfire someone tried to put out with perfume. Roses and char, and underneath it the thing I’ve been pretending isn’t blood for about ninety seconds now.
“Tiana.” My boots crunch over something I don’t look down at. “Tiana, wait.”
She isn’t waiting. She’s walking a slow circle around what used to be the throne, kicking rubble like it has personally offended her, which—fair. I try not to count the bodies on the way past.
And fail, I count them anyway. Thirty-one. The Crown logs the number somewhere behind my left ear and files it underthings Finnian gets to lie awake about, cross-referenced with three in the morning, every morning, forever.
It’s the only filing system my own head respects and it’s the one designed to ruin my sleep.
Tiana stops at one of the dead. Young. Seelie robes scorched black at the hem. Face turned up like he was looking for something when it happened.
I know him.
One of Amarantha’s archivists. Barely two hundred years old, which is barely out of diapers by Fae standards. He used to bringme tea when I worked the restricted stacks past midnight, and he never once got the honey right. Always too much. I told him once. He kept doing it anyway, because he thought I was joking, or because he wasn’t, and now I’m never going to find out which.
Tiana’s hand hovers over his chest. Her fingers shake for a moment before her hand drops.
“I cannot heal them.” The tears come without warning. Dripping down her dirty face, leaving wet trails.
“Let’s get Amarantha,” I say, because I don’t have anything better and standing still is going to break one of us. She still has to die.
“Why?” She throws her hands up. “I’m here now. This is my home. This is my throne. This is my court.”
“It is.” I step around her. Give her the space she hasn’t asked for and clearly needs.
“It’s fucking anticlimactic.”
I try not to smile, and I don’t entirely succeed. “Of course it is.”
She squints at me like she’s trying to decide whether to deck me. It takes a moment but she deflates.
“I want her to suffer.” She closes her eyes and lets her head fall back, and her voice drops into something quieter and worse. “I want to put her on a spike. Right here. In this room. And I want to spend a millennium teaching her every little thing she taught me.”
I stay quiet.
This woman in front of me is my queen. My actual queen. She isn’t happy. The Sword in my chest doesn’t know what to do with that. It’s hers now. It pulls toward her like a tide and finds her grief and sits down in it, dumb and loyal, waiting for instructions.
“I want to listen to her cry herself to sleep,” Tiana says, conversational now, the way you’d describe a recipe. “I want to collect the tears in something pretty. Use them to bind her.”
