The Queen was kept in the same tower she’d kept prisoners in for years. She was pacing back and forth in front of the single window. Light flooded in around her.
Galatea destroyed all the remaining Black Glass in the Queendom.
The guards offered to lay down their arms, but Galatea insisted they keep them. That they use them to serve the Queendom. And now the Queendom was Galatea’s.
She ordered them to search out Cinderella and the prince.
“What are you going to do to the Queen?” I asked.
“What was done to us. Surely, you don’t object? This is what we worked for.”
“We should have a trial,” I said.
“Why would we do that?” Galatea asked, seemingly genuine.
“To show that we can be better.”
“We are better. And the Queen is right about one thing. They will never accept us. The only way to keep them down is to rule them. It’s that, or we would have to kill every single one of them.”
“You don’t mean that,” I protested.
“They will never think of us as equals. Because we aren’t equal. We are better. We have magic. We know things that they will never know. Or at least we know them first. And we can do things that they can never do. They will always fear us. They will always resent us. This is the only way. You know that she deserves it. You know that they all do.”
“I believe in justice. Not vengeance. It took me so much time to realize that.”
“You have feelings for that boy. Once they are removed, you will see that what I am saying is right.”
“Removed?”
“I am going to take the Crown. He has to be dead for me to do so.”
“No, Galatea!”
“Here, let me make this easier on you.”
She tapped her wand against my head. She was letting me in.
I could see what she wanted, what she wished for. It was each of us sisters, rising up, wearing crowns in each Queendom.
“I can’t watch this. This is not what the Entente is.”
“It is what they made us,” Galatea said.
“We have a choice,” I said.
“And I have made mine. And so have your sisters and South. What’s yours, Farrow?”
I gave Galatea a smile that was filled with sadness. I loved her and my sisters. But this was where we parted. She smiled back.
“You will return to us. I don’t need to see the Future to know that,” Galatea said.
“Can I have a few minutes with her?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Tell me, is there a way I could have done it differently? Was there a way I could have escaped this?” Magrit asked, surprising me.
I was expecting her to be thinking of her son. Of his future. Of the Queendom itself. But Magrit cared about herself and the Crown.
“I don’t know—only one person could know, and you killed her. If it’s any consolation, you could have lived if you’d given up the crown.”
Now Magrit laughed.
“Your Hecate told me that too. I changed everything else. I fortified the palace. I never had another child. I sent you all scurrying away like rats. I did everything I could to thwart you, and yet here I am about to ascend to the pyre,” she said as if she was still somehow surprised by this outcome. “I did everything else . . .”
“This was your own choosing. Every step of it, Magrit.”
“You asked for too much. What kind of life would I have had as a commoner?”
“One where you were a mother. One where you were not a murderer. One where you didn’t steal food out of the mouths of your own people. One where you were loved.”
She was a mother. She had the prince. She didn’t care. The Crown was all that mattered to her.
My heart clenched for Mather. She didn’t love him as much as she loved the Crown, and she did not regret one life that she took. She regretted only that she did not win.
“Oh, you poor thing, you may be Entente, but my boy got to you, didn’t he? Love is for the common people. It is not for us.”
“Us?”
“Entente and the Crown. On that we must agree.”
I looked at her a long beat. And then gave her a deep curtsy.
“Goodbye, Your Highness,” I said and turned and walked away.
The day had come.
South and I stood at the edge of the crowd. We looked up at the dais where the Queen and my sisters stood a few feet from the pyre. The Queen looked smaller than I had ever seen her as she looked to the pyre with understanding.
It was too much. I couldn’t stay. As I began to move away, South stopped me and grabbed my hand. I looked down at his hand around mine, I knew what a big deal it was for him to reach for me.
“You can’t go. This is the moment you have been waiting for, for years,” he said urgently.
“I thought it would be different. Feel different. It’s not right.”
“For her to pay for what she did?” South asked.
I felt more certain with every step I took away from the crowd.
“For me to be here to witness it. I thought I needed to see it, but I don’t,” I said.
“Where are you going?” he asked, following beside me.
“I have to find the prince and Cinderella and protect them. I have to find a way to stop Galatea and all of them.”
“Then I am coming with you,” he vowed.
“I need you to stay with our sisters. See what Galatea does next.”
“You can’t do everything alone, Farrow,” South insisted.
“I know that—but I need you to stay here. And I know you can see me and find me wherever I am,” I said firmly.
I gave him a quick kiss on the cheek and turned to walk away.
“No goodbye, child?” the Queen yelled after me, still sounding high and mighty even though she was on the pyre.
South, I need to talk to her, I thought, looking at him.
South shook his head.
She doesn’t deserve to talk to you. It won’t bring our mothers back, South responded in my head.
I nodded firmly. I need it for me. For Hecate. Please, South.
South nodded, but I could still see the concern on his face. He was worried that the Queen, even bound and on a pyre, still might find a few last drops of poison to hurt me. But he honored my desire, slipped his wand out of his sleeve, and whispered under his breath.
Give Farrow the time she needs . . .
Before the fire feeds . . .
On the one who started all our grief,
I pray Farrow finds some relief.
I mouthed a thank-you to South before I walked up the steps to the Queen’s place on the dais. My sisters, the crowd, and the guard remained frozen around her. I felt almost frozen myself when I looked at her. The words would not come.
“Tell me how you did it. How did you pass as human when we first met? Grant a dying Queen’s wish . . .”
“This is exactly what you deserve, but the people deserve better than what you’ve done to them. To us.”
“Don’t pretend to care about the people—you only care about one in particular. My son.”
I didn’t answer. She was wrong. I did care for them. And since I had begun to hear their wishes, I cared more . . . understood more. But she was right too. I did care for Mather even more.
“If you want the Queendom to succeed—if you want him to succeed—you can take his side over these witches. You can save him. The other Entente want to kill him and take the Crown. You don’t. You’re not like them. I can see it,” she said, changing tactics.
“Why should I believe that you suddenly want what’s best for your son or for the Queendom?”
“Because I’m already dead. You’re the Queendom’s best chance for survival. I put his and its life in your hands.”
“What do you want?” I demanded.
“Spare me the pain of the fire,” she said.
I was surprised again, even though I shouldn’t have been. She put her own fear of the fire over everything else.
“Tell me how you know about magic,” I insisted, but the Queen kept her lips sealed. “I won’t spare you the pain. But I will do everything in my power to save your son and the Queendom—though we may have very different ideas of what that means.”
“It takes magic to find magic,” she countered.
“What does that mean? Are you saying you have magic yourself?” I demanded.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Amantha begin to flicker. They were waking up from South’s spell.
“Magrit . . .”
While Magrit remained silent, my sisters shook off the spell and continued on, oblivious to the time they had lost.
“It’s time,” Bari said as she and Amantha dropped their disguised faces. They knew the Queen would never bear witness to their true faces because she was, as she had proclaimed, already dead.
“I just need one more minute,” I begged.
“Time’s up, Your Highness,” Amantha quipped.
The Queen looked to the pyre beneath her with understanding. Galatea registered her resignation and seemed annoyed by it. She wanted a bigger reaction.
Despite her initial objection, Galatea took my advice. The trial would not be formal; rather, Galatea invited all the Queendom to decide the Queen’s Fate.
“When our sister Hecate was taken from us, the charges were read for her, but no one was allowed to give testimony. We will give the people and the Queen the chance that our sister was never afforded.”
Galatea asked for people to step forward and testify for or against their Queen.
There were countless tales of her atrocities: mothers whose daughters had been burned on the pyre, families who were going hungry after their parents had been sent off to the guard. And it went on and on.
“Her obsession with magic destroyed us all. Why could she not have been content with the peace we struck long ago? Now we must forge a new peace. But the Entente no longer serve humans. Does no one have a kind word to save their Queen?” Galatea asked, surveying the crowd.
Hark stepped forward finally. “Everything she did, she did for the Crown. She loved us the way she loved herself—selfishly and fearfully . . . the only way she knew how.”
The Queen smiled at Hark as if she could not see the insult in his words.
She looked around again, perhaps expecting her son. But no one stepped forward.
“The word of the Queen’s Hand is not enough to save her. Queen Magrit, I charge you with crimes against the Entente and humanity.”
Galatea produced an opaque screen in front of the Queen, and the Queen was stripped of her Black Glass gown by Amantha and Bari. Burning Magrit in it would hurt us almost as much as it would hurt her. Galatea herself removed the shiny black crown.
Magrit kept her head high. But before she said her final words, I could hear her thoughts, her wishes.
I don’t want to die. I want to live. I don’t want the pain . . .
“I still wish you were with my son,” she said finally.
She was using the pyre as another pitch for me to save her son. I assumed it was a tactic to gain my sympathy, but for Mather’s sake, I wondered if some part of him would be comforted by her at least thinking of him before her death.
But something else happened at that moment. The air around Hark began to flicker, and he stepped back and disappeared into it, in the same way the Entente did when they traveled.
Hark was magical.
I thought back on that moment on the grounds where I couldn’t read his thoughts or heart.
Hark had been somehow tied to the Queen all along. But before I could make sense of him and his role in all that had transpired, I heard the Queen’s voice in my head again. It was a wish, and it was not meant for me. It was meant for Hark: I wish for vengeance; I wish for you to give it to me, and when it is done, I wish you free—
Hark had flickered away because of the Queen’s wish.
It wasn’t a wish; it was a curse—and he wasn’t a Right Hand; he was a Rook. Perhaps the Queen had one last move after all.
I took South’s hand and made sure he understood what had transpired. He read my Present and nodded. He knew I would have to find Cinderella and Mather before they found the Rooks.
Galatea spoke again. “The Entente sentences you to death for crimes against them and against your own kind and Fate itself. May this fire bring back some peace for all that you have taken.”
I felt my insides clench. The moment had come. Magrit deserved the fire for all she had done. But fire had a way of destroying more than the person on the pyre. Galatea, me, South, Amantha, everyone who had been in the square that day, and everyone in the Hinter had been changed by that first fire.
And it was happening all over again. I looked at the cold anticipation in Galatea’s eyes as the fire began lapping up toward Magrit.
I had to go.
I could not stay to watch the light expire in Magrit, as much as I had wanted it so very long. I had something else to do—something I finally was ready to do, something perhaps I should have done before.