My knees crack as I slowly rise. I can feel eyes on me, watching from the shadows of this room, one that looks suspiciously like the Unseelie Court. Dark stone. Shadow-thick air. The cold that seeps into bones.
I don’t turn around. Mostly because I can’t. Amarantha has a hold on me that I cannot escape.
She steps forward, palm rising to touch my chest where my heart thunders against my ribs.
Then she looks away.
I try to move.
Nothing.
My muscles receive the command. I feel the signal fire from my brain, feel it race down my spine, feel it reach my limbs, and nothing. The connection severs somewhere between intention and action. I’m still here. Still aware. Still feeling everything.
I just can’t make my body respond.
Like screaming into a void. Like being buried alive in my own body while something else wears my skin.
I can’t move. Can’t speak. Can’t even turn my head to see Ash across the room.
All I can do is stand here, a prisoner in flesh that no longer belongs to me, while Amarantha’s palm presses against my chest and her pointed nails dig crescents into my skin.
The Crown pulses.Danger. Danger. Danger.
As if I needed the warning.
“Ask and you shall receive, Ashlynne.” Amarantha’s voice carries across the room. Her nails dig deeper as my heart rate spikes.
I can’t move. Sweat beads on my palms as confusion races through me in equal measure.
Ash is here? I want to look, to find her but I can’t. I hold no power over my own body. But I feel her, the wildness that blooms like roses in a room.
“Ashlynne here was just telling us how she needs someone to teach her Fae politics. History.” Moros sounds absolutely bored.
My eyes strain to the right, desperate for even a glimpse of her. But Amarantha has me facing the wall like a punished child.
That’s when her crystalline eyes flick to mine, and her heart-shaped face splits into a smile.
“I bet you’re wondering why you can’t move.” She bites her lip, savoring the moment. “Let’s start with the first history lesson, shall we?”
My brain races through centuries of accumulated knowledge, searching, cataloguing, coming up empty. My pulse hammers against my frozen throat. Until I tap into the power of the Crown itself.
The visions flood through me.
Flash.
I’m standing in a throne room that doesn’t exist anymore, three seats, three women, power humming through stone so ancient it predates language. Not three kings. Three queens. The original structure. Before the mad king tried to consolidate power and nearly destroyed everything.
Flash.
I see myself from outside my body, no, not myself. A man who looks like me, standing behind the Seelie throne. Not beside. Behind. The Summer Sword. Bound. Sworn. The Winter Shadow at the Unseelie Queen’s back. The Wild Flame at the?—
Flash.
Blood on marble. A queen falling. The system shattering. Roles forgotten.
Until now.
I understand what the Crown is trying to tell me. The Summer Sword isn’t just a title. It’s an ancient binding. A magical leash that predates the current court structure by millennia.
