Faerie churned and throbbed, suspended in the purplish starscape outside the panoramic window of Excalibur’s command deck. With only a skeleton crew manning the ship, I had the deck to myself. I’d told Sirius to gather the others in the obs room, where I’d tell them about our new plan to head to Calicto, for reasons I hadn’t yet figured out. Instead of following him, however, I’d veered off and found my way here, observing the living planet below us. Sentient. All-seeing. Like a goddess. I’d heard how Faerie loved all Her children, of how She had been torn asunder when the dark fae had been driven from Her surface. And those stars twinkling all round? I’d heard of how Faerie had given Her polestar up to return balance against the use of the Hunt—Eledan’s creation, crafted from his nightmares at the behest of the Wild Ones. One saru had been seeded and harvested, reared under the whip to kill her own, and shaped by a king as his key to securing the polestar. It seemed impossible that this person was me. If we were all Faerie’s children, why had I never felt like I belonged?
I pressed my hand to the thick glass, almost covering Faerie behind my palm.
“Beautiful, isn’t She?” Eledan asked.
Pulling my hand back, I turned away from the stars to watch him weave between the control consoles and ascend the steps onto the deck. I’d assumed he’d find me. There was nowhere I could go, no world far enough away, to escape him. The sight of him reawakened the strange push-and-pull feeling that told me to kill him, but also lured me toward him.
I expected his smug smile and horrible laugh, but he stopped beside me and gazed out at Faerie, his expression thoughtful.
Here we were, two parts of the polestar, once again in the sky above Faerie. Would Eledan and I simply cease to exist once all the pieces were back together?
“The polestar will kill me,” I said. I already knew the answer, but I wanted to hear it from him.
“Yes.”
“And you?”
“My death is… likely. Although, as I’m immortal, I have a higher chance of survival than you.” Faerie’s churning colors reflected in his ice-blue eyes.
“Did you know that when you had the Hapters people fix your heart with a fragment?”
“It was a risk I was willing to take.” His cheek pulsed. He kept his glare locked on Faerie and away from me. “I do not want to die.”
“Maybe if you hadn’t been such a dick your entire life, Faerie would have looked more favorably on you.”
He blinked, slowly turned his head, and softly laughed. “I could say the same about you.”
“Everything I’ve done I did to survive.”
“You killed thousands of fae at the Game of Lies.”
That aching knot tightened again. I shifted on my feet. “They were there to watch me die.”
His smile was on the move. “And so mass murder was a justifiable punishment?”
“Murder? Your brother wiped out the vakaru because they became too powerful. He would have wiped out the humans too. You let him back into Halow, so you don’t get to lecture me on murder.”
“Yes, my brother committed genocide,” he calmly replied. “Not me.”
So, Eledan was good now? “As Oberon’s general, you killed thousands of humans in the first war.”
“Yes, I did. That was war. I also spent much of my time teaching humans how to better their tek, and in some cases, like Hapters, I taught them how to combine tek with the magic sleeping on their planet, considerably enriching their lives.”
How could he stand there and justify himself to me? “Oh, please. You did that for yourself. Everything you do is for yourself. You admitted as much, so don’t try to convince me you’re something you’re not.”
He smirked like he’d won an argument I didn’t know we were having. “You still don’t see it.”
“See what?”
“We are so alike.”
Now I laughed. “We are nothing alike.”
He faced Faerie again. Humor glittered in his eyes and in the twitch of his lips. “We both do what we must to survive.”
“You’re fae. All you have to do to survive is show up.”
The ache in my chest thumped in time with my heart, growing hotter and heavier. I rubbed it again. “Why do you want to go to Calicto now? Is it the well below Arcon?”
“I have made mistakes—”
My laugh cut him off. Eledan admitting he’d made mistakes? What was next, Faerie freezing over? He arched an eyebrow at my outburst of hilarity. He truly was a piece of work.
Heat throbbed across my chest and cinched around my lungs. Laughter forgotten, I gasped, or tried to, but my lungs locked and my throat closed. My knees hit the floor. Pain jolted up my thighs. My thoughts raced to catch up and think around what was happening, but everything was too slow. A wall of blinding white hit, stealing my sight and feeling. The only thing left to cling on to was Eledan calling my name.