Kesh
Cold iron had never felt heavier.
When the rush of water settled, I blinked into Safira’s obscenely bright colors and a hundred different but horribly beautiful sidhe faces, none I recognized. It was only a matter of time before the courts acted on what they’d see as a saru stealing power over them. I’d been expecting it, but with a crisis around every corner, I hadn’t seen the sidhe lords’ revenge coming.
Something dull and hard struck my lower back, driving me to my knees. I grabbed my whip and set the tails loose, but while I lashed out at one or two onlookers, others plunged in and tore the whip from my grip.
Smooth but hard fae hands grabbed my arms and yanked them behind my back, bringing my wrists together. Barbed vines sank into my skin and tightened. All this happened while the collar clamped off my burgeoning power. Ever since Eledan had woken me inside Arcon, that power had been growing, but now it was gone. The collar had choked it off, like a tourniquet. I had no magic to reach for.
Hands bound and whip gone, I snapped my teeth at the fae, like the wild thing they thought me to be. I wanted to crawl into a ball and hide. Everything I’d earned, everything I’d fought for, felt too big to carry or dream of. On my knees and powerless, subjected to the fae, I was a nothing girl again. Damn them all.
“The mortal saru who wanted to be queen.” A sidhe lord laughed. His tinkling laughter tickled the air, joined by a dozen others. Say what you would about unseelie, but at least they wore their ugly on the outside.
A nameless fae guard hauled me to my feet and shoved me through the jeering crowd. The pretty sidhe weren’t the only ones here. Wild Ones were peppered throughout the crowd, eager to see the Nightshade, or whatever I was to them, brought to her knees. After my run-in with Dagnu, I’d left them as their equal, but the sidhe had torn me down.
The crowd parted, creating a clearing in the center of their village. There stood a huge vertical oak column. The guard shoved me against it. More sidhe swept in, tying my wrists behind the column so tightly the wood grated my spine.
The small, winding streets brimmed with hundreds of fae. Some leaned from overhanging balconies to get a better view. Agitated wisps buzzed overhead, making colors dance. So many fae, so many colors, and the sickening taste of their magic rammed its way down my throat. Had Eledan died so I could be humiliated in front of a crowd while the Hunt grew ever stronger?
Ailish came through her people like a watery phantom. “One last show from the Wraithmaker,” she announced to the crowd’s glee.
There had to be a way out of this. I tried to swallow around the tightness of the collar.
I hadn’t come this far to die at the hands of a mob and a mad Water Witch. Eledan hadn’t died and given up his immortal life so she could use me. Kellee, Talen, Sota, and Sirius—they hadn’t joined this fight to see it end uselessly here.
“What do you want?” I asked, holding a snarl.
Her hand burned cold against my chin. Her fingernails dug in. “Now that the Mad Prince is dead, your soul—the polestar—belongs to the Wild Ones.”
I still had Eledan’s polestar piece safely in my pocket, but the iron collar prevented me from accessing the power running through my veins. “Not true.” I tore my head free from her grip. “His deal died with him. You don’t own me.”
She laughed. “You are saru. Of course you’re owned.”
“Why are you doing this? You told me we were all Faerie’s children. You said I would save Faerie.”
“You are, just not in the way you expected. I told you what you needed to hear.”
“We need to stop the Hunt.”
“The Hunt is chaos. Faerie began in chaos. She will be returned to chaos.”
“And Sol? Halow? What of them?”
“Ours to reclaim.”
Her sidhe crowed and her Wild Ones alike jeered and voiced their agreement.
Was there any good on Faerie? Talen believed there was. Sirius did too. I trusted them. And hadn’t Faerie chosen me, a mortal saru, to harbor the polestar? Surely Faerie knew how this should go, and it wasn’t so we could war with Sol all over again.
Despite the dire circumstances, a smile found its way to my lips. “You won’t win this.”
“How do you figure that?”
With hundreds of pairs of eyes on me, I raised my voice so they all heard, and so Faerie’s breeze could carry the words far. “I have the Dark Legion. I have the last vakaru war chief. I have a guardian and a wardrone with a grudge. I have the saru, and I have a lord who became the first Nightshade. The Dreamweaver, a fae you all fear, sacrificed his life so I may live.” My voice cracked at the reminder of Eledan’s sacrifice. He’d given me more than his life; he’d given me his immortality, something none here knew. “So ask yourselves, how long will it be before this parade of fools brings the weight of the dark legion down upon you?”
Her grin reminded me of a curved, serrated blade. “With that collar around your neck, you have nothing.”
She must still fear me, or I’d be dead already. “What do you have but some angry sidhe lords who are annoyed because their saru have left them?”
“I have Faerie, and that is all a fae needs.”
I laughed and enjoyed the freeing sensation. “No, you don’t. You told me Faerie loves all Her children, and that includes the saru and the humans of Sol and Halow. Billions of lives gone. Faerie’s children murdered. That was not Her wish. Sirius, one of the oldest fae, turned to me, and Faerie approves. Talen, from a time when unseelie and seelie were one stands beside me, and Faerie approves. The last vakaru, left alive by Oberon, commands the wraiths of his murdered kin, and Faerie approves!”
Murmurs rippled through the crowd, turning over their uncertainty. Ailish’s grip on the sidhe lords was tenuous, like her grip on the truth.
“I have the polestar in my soul, put there by Faerie to end this turmoil.” The wisps bobbing above the crowd glowed brighter. Strings of pulsing faerie-lights shone in every color. There were no stars in Safira, because all the light was down with us, and that light knew me; it knew my words, and it approved. The Wild Ones stirred, no longer sure of Ailish and her ways. Maybe I wasn’t queen just because Eledan had made it happen, they wondered. Maybe it was always meant to be this way.
I tugged on the wrist bindings. If Faerie truly were on my side, now would be the time for Her to help.
I know you and I haven’t seen eye to eye, but I need you now, I silently told Her.
Ailish saw her crowd falling apart, but the sidhe lords would not be deterred. One nodded her on. I didn’t know him, but it didn’t matter. They all believed I was owned and unworthy.
I pulled against the vines. C’mon, Faerie, cut me some slack here. You made me the polestar, now help me end this for you.
Ailish produced a bone-handled iron dagger from the folds of her silk dress. “It is a shame Eledan will not be here to see you fall.” She drifted closer. Colored light licked off the blade. “He was a talented creature we misguided.”
For all his mistakes, he’d died so that I got to live, and I wasn’t about to let his sacrifice end here.
You neglected your prince, your child. Do not neglect his final act. Help me, Faerie. Help your children do the right thing.
“Where is your precious Dark Legion now?” Ailish’s cool, hard fingers dug into my cheeks again. Her face pushed close, revealing both sides to her, the side I’d believed and the burnt ugliness that had festered in Faerie for millennia.
“At least Oberon believed what he was doing was right. You’re just a mad witch clawing at power she can never own—”
The blade punched into my chest, stealing my breath and spreading its ice-like cold through my veins. This couldn’t be right. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.
I’d been so sure I’d get free or Talen and Kellee would come… It didn’t seem possible that the dagger’s plunge was real. I had known I’d die—I had known I’d leave Talen, Kellee, Sirius, and Sota behind—but not before it was over. It wasn’t right. This wasn’t right. I hadn’t come this far for it to end now.
I clutched Eledan’s piece of polestar, willing it to do something, but the fragment that had fueled his heart for so long hummed uselessly in my fist. I searched the crowd for a face I knew, for anyone who might help me, but the sidhe had crowded in, creating a wall of sinister glares.
How could it all be for nothing? Whatever I’d become, the truth of me, Kesh Lasota didn’t fucking die here.
“When you die, as you will in these next, precious moments, you’ll turn to dust, and among your ashes, dear child”—her fingers sank into my hair and clutched the back of my head—“I’ll find the polestar. When your legion come for you, so distraught they will be to learn of your demise that I’ll take the remaining polestar fragments from them. Its power will finally be mine, and the Wild Ones will reign, lawless and chaotic, once more.”
Invisible ice had a hold of my legs and waist. Higher, it coiled, so cold I couldn’t breathe through it. I’d fought my entire life. There had to be a way to fight this too.
“Give in, child. Embrace death.”
“You’re… wrong.”
She stroked my face and smiled like I imagined a mother might.
By Faerie, this is not how it ends!
More ice needled across my skin, plucking and pinching over my chest, where my heart stuttered its final beats. The sound of pixies chirping faded. The whole world fell quiet, and then the light faded as each wisp blinked out, one after another. Ailish’s face fogged and blurred until there was nothing but darkness and the quiet of two beating hearts: mine, and the warm, pulsating beat of Eledan’s fragment locked in my fist. It wasn’t fading. I looked down. The fragment glowed through my fingers, the only bright thing I could see. Safira had gone. The fae had all gone. There was nothing but the quiet and that fragment feeding warmth up my arm. A dream… or something more?
A soft breeze touched my neck, no heavier than a wisp’s wings.
“A death for a life,” Eledan whispered, but I could not see him or anything beyond the glowing fragment locked in my hand. “A heart for a heart. A death for a life. What cannot be taken must be freely given.” He paused, and his sigh warmed my cold skin. “Perhaps a forgotten prince may be forgiven.”
Light.
Everywhere.
It burned through skin and bone, and scorched my soul. I screamed, but my voice was too small to hear inside the blazing brightness.
I fell into the light, and I remembered Eledan once telling me, “A monster among your kind, and a monster among ours. It must be a lonely life, Wraithmaker.”
Not lonely, just without a place. Until now.