“He’s going tohaveto be alright,” she said, wincing at the unintended cruelty.
Ger scrambled to his feet.
“She’s coming?”
Mareda shook her head. “She’s summoning. Him. Us. Everyone, now.”
“Shit.”
Mareda’s lips folded inward, a flat line of agreement. “Yes. Shit.”
???
Kai could not even pretend as he sat at the queen’s side, eyes heavy and swollen, expression slack, shoulders sloping, and his clothes rumpled and askew from his fitful sleep. Adeline couldn’t pretend either—she stood with her hand in Ger’s and her gaze fixed on her Merrow King, unwavering. Ger was worried she’d draw blood if she bit her lip any harder. And, selfishly, a little worried that she’d fracture his fingers in her grip. Her hair and clothes were in just as much disarray as the King’s, her expression so tortured it would take only a glance at either of them to see that something was amiss. And therewereglances; Ger felt the eyes of several courtiers, the most brazen among them the Empress Vanjir, who watched her niece with her hands wrung out before her.
It mattered little, though.
Avette was preoccupied.
She perched on the edge of her throne like a child on New Winter’s Day, eyes alight and her hands curled around the armrests as though physically restraining herself from reaching for Imogen as she cut a path down the centre aisle of the throne room. As though in protest, the ice figures watched her every step with their wide, frightened eyes, frozen in eternal horror.
He felt that horror viscerally, but it was surprisingly easy to sit with, all things considered. It might have been the warm, slightly pinchy feel of Adeline’s hand in his, though it certainly didn’t hurt that Mareda had told him what to expect.
It’s going to look bad, she’d said.But you need to trust Imogen, alright?
Adeline agreed at once. Kai had just stared blankly. And Ger was … reserving judgement. She was, after all, incredibly convincing. Her hands held up in offering, a blue silk cushion beneath a shimmering white pearl. That serene smile on her face as she glided toward the queen, the beam of it so bright it nearly washed out the new rings of exhaustion beneath her dark eyes.
“Her hands,” Ade whispered.
Ger hadn’t noticed that either—the way they shook beneath the silk. Avette would take it for excitement, if she took it at all.
“Your Majesty,” said Imogen, her voice a reverent hush.
She swept a low curtsey, head bent and arms raised.
Avette’s pendant flashed, blue light gleaming from the black pits of her eyes for just a moment before she reached out.
And plucked the Pearl from Imogen’s hands.
The rise of the winds was so abrupt that half the watching courtiers cringed, their gasps a chorus to Aera’s vicious howl. Avette rose from her throne, standing—floating. Her pale feet, bare as ever, pointed like a dancer’s as she rose from the ground. Her white skirts billowed around her, her hair fanning out in a black halo, and her face alight with the Pearl’s white glow and a terrible awe all of her own. She was a perversion of the Goddess; beautiful, otherworldly, and intrinsicallywrong. Ger knew they all felt it as she hung suspended in her unfathomable new power, the wrongness of it all. The ancient, primal sense clawing up their spines at the sight. The very essence of their world, twisted and broken and bent. It made his head spin, his stomach roil. He was almost certain he heard Adeline retch at his side.
It might have been only a moment before she drifted slowly to the ground.
And as the winds died, and the glow of the Pearl absorbed into her skin, Avette’s face came alive. She beamed. Shelaughed. She clapped her hands around the Pearl and outright shrieked, more animated than Ger could ever remember seeing her.
“Where two fairytales meet,” she said, delicately dabbing away a single tear of sheer joy from beneath her long lashes. She stared down at the Pearl pinched between her long fingers and smiled a soft smile, a mother watching over her precious babe. “What a happy ending indeed.”
And it struck him, in that moment, that Mareda had been right.
This looked very fucking bad indeed.
???
“Fuck, fuck,fuck,” Adeline shrieked the moment Ger shut the door to her quarters.
She snatched up a cushion, dented with Ger’s own backside, and lobbed it at the wall, then slumped into the empty armchair. Ger shot a glance at the door.
“I thought you trusted Imogen,” he hissed. “What’s going on?”
