The Sword in my chest pulses once. Approving. Great, all she needs to do is utter the order.
“I want to destroy her.” Her voice breaks on the last word.
A reasonable person would be disturbed.
I check, just to be thorough. Nope. Turns out years of breakfast across the table from Amarantha—who described worse over soft-boiled eggs—has pretty much used up my disturbed budget for the century. The difference, and it’s a real one, is that Amarantha loved the planning and got bored with the doing.
Tiana isn’t going to get bored.
“But not kill her,” I say.
“I want to. By the gods, I want to.” She huffs out something that’s nearly a laugh. “I want her head on a spike. I want to watch her bleed out slow enough to count it.” She sighs, and the sigh has a crown in it. “But I have to become queen.”
“It’s a choice.” I look at the room. At the wreckage of a court. The Balance, gone. Fractured down some seam I can’t see and I’m not sure anyone can put back.
“Fuck it.” She kicks the chair. “Come on. I know a shortcut.”
“I assume you know where we’re going.” I fall in behind her.
“That bitch is going to run to daddy Moros.” She’s already moving. “She’s got a back door in here somewhere.”
The hallway smells like char and old roses, the same as everything else. The staircase she leads me down spirals the wrong way—counterclockwise, which is Unseelie architecture, but the masonry above the second landing turns Seelie at the joints, the two courts bleeding into each other where they share a wall.
My brain catalogues the structural detail because my brain catalogues structural detail while the world burns. It’s who I am and honestly, I want nothing more than to get back to the Fae I am.
Somewhere around the second landing I open my damn mouth. Because I need to tell her, this Fae who will be my queen by the end of the night, that I cannot go on like this.
“Tiana.”
“I know.” She kicks a door in.
“Tiana, I—” My mouth has gone dry somewhere on the staircase and I didn’t notice. “I don’t want to be the Summer Sword.” The words come out in a rush.
She doesn’t look at me. Instead, she keeps her eyes on the dark beyond the doorway.
“I gotta kill the bitch first,” she says.
“I know.” I lick my lips. “I plan to?—”
Renounce the Seelie Court.
“Don’t.” She lets out a breath. “Don’t say it. Not yet.”
I nod. She knows. She knew before I did, probably.
The Sword is hers—it’s hers in a way Amarantha’s never was.
The Crown was never anyone’s to give. It will find a new bearer.
I want neither.
“You sure?” Tiana asks, like she’s been reading along inside my skull the whole time.
“Yeah.” I can feel the frown settling into my face like it lives there. “I want nothing more than to spend the rest of my days curled up next to Ash with a good book. Maybe write one of the fall of the Balance. A historian if you will.” I chuckle because I can taste the excitement of that new life. It’s so damn close.
“Ew.” She jerks her head back. “Keep that lovey-dovey bullshit away from me.”
“Noted.”
