“The only victim it would have claimed,” Lockwood said, ceasing his attack against Roseus and his guards, “would have been the truth.”
“The truth is a matter of perspective,” Calvor said, smiling thinly. He knew he had Lockwood, because he had me.
My face ached, my lips hurt, split open. Blood dribbled down my chin. I could see Orianna, also stopped in her fight, holding her weapon out defensively, the red-eyed soldier opposite her, waiting for Calvor’s command.
And he was waiting with me in his grip, ready to strike a killing blow if either of them resisted.
“The truth …” I said, staring up at him, utterly defeated, blood hot and tangy in my mouth, “… lies in the dark.”
Calvor cocked his head, looking down at me. “What did you say?”
“I said …” and tasted my own blood, “… the truth … lies …” on my lips, so warm and metallic …
Metallic?
“… in …”
Right. Because in science class, they taught you that human blood had …
“… the …”
Iron.
“… dark.”
I was an Iron Bearer.
Calvor opened his mouth to say something, but I didn’t wait to hear what it was. I summoned up the vision of every pro baseball game I’d ever seen my dad watch, and spat a very unladylike glob of blood right in Master Calvor’s face.
It caught him in the eyes, and he blinked in surprise. “What do—”
That was all he got out before the iron in my blood started to work on him.
Human blood couldn’t have had much iron content to it, but apparently faeries were incredibly sensitive to it, because steam started to pour from his face a second later, and he screamed to the heavens a moment after that.
Calvor stumbled away from me, dropping his sword, which I snatched up. He screamed and screamed, and finally hit his knees, writhing in agony. When he lifted his fingers up from his face …
I almost threw up.
It was … horrible.
Lockwood swept aside the weapons of three of the guards, planting his spear into Roseus’s chest. Roseus stared at him, silver oozing out between the general’s fingers, eyes wide and planted on Lockwood. “It would appear your ambitions have led you far astray, Roseus.”
Roseus clenched his hand over the wound as Lockwood pulled the weapon out. The soldiers who had been guarding him a moment earlier made no move to stop him, still riveted in horror by what I’d done to Calvor. Their eyes were wide with fear, frozen in place.
Calvor’s screams died a moment later, with him, and silence fell. I listened and realized that the noise of the battlefield, too, had faded.
I looked to my right, and where the armies had stood a moment before, the dais of the Winter Queen and King now lay, as though they’d emerged from some deep fog to simply appear. I stared at them, saw a flicker—
The Queen of Winter’s hands glowed blue …
Like the shield that had protected me from Ignes’s magical attacks.
Had they been there all along, listening? Watching?
Helping me?
“Is this matter settled to your satisfaction now, Queen of Summer?” Pruina asked. She truly did have a cold majesty to her, radiating off her like a chill. Something about it was far more reassuring to me at the moment than the glamour of the sunny skies overhead.
The Queen of Summer deigned to look down, her eyes still full and dark. “It is done. If not to my satisfaction, it has at least reached some end which will settle.” The scene flashed, and I caught a glimpse again of the dark-haired crone beneath her illusions. “Do not imagine me weak for this, Pruina—”
“Then do not act weak now,” the King of Summer said, loud enough to be heard by all present.
She quelled him with a look, then turned her attention back to the Queen of Winter. “Do we have an understanding? Or shall we continue?”
Pruina waited only a moment, long enough to convince me she was trying not to leap all over the offer the Summer Queen had made her. “For my part, I am quite done,” Pruina said, adjusting her crown.
“Then we are finished here,” the Queen of Summer said.
And with that, she stood, and the illusion of tall trees and greenery and the meadow seemed to fade as she receded into the distance, as though she—and the war—had never been here at all.
Chapter 41
The slow fade of Summer’s grip left me feeling a slight chill, but that, too, disappeared in a few seconds, and with the next flicker, I saw that the blue magic that had been coming off Queen Pruina’s hands had faded. She seemed closer to us, now, lingering at a short distance, her hands now at her sides, and one being held by her king.
“Well, that was an ordeal,” Orianna said, throwing down her spear and letting out a slow breath now that the Summer soldiers had disappeared. She ran a hand over the ruin of her own dress, then looked at mine, and I could almost see her deciding hers was in better shape, as though that was some sort of accomplishment.
“Yeah,” I said, dabbing at my still-bleeding lip. “I gotta be honest—this has not been my favorite vacation ever. This barely rises above that time I got a stomach flu in the Poconos, actually.”
“You’re hurt,” Lockwood said, coming over to me, all concern now that the threat was removed.
“Whoa,” I said, holding up a hand to keep him away, careful not to touch him. “I’ve got a real anti-faerie biohazard going on here, Lockwood. You don’t want to be too close to me right now. One good sneeze and you’ll end up like …” I waved a hand at the corpse of Calvor, which looked … I shuddered. Revolting was not a strong enough word for it. He’d lost his entire face, and there wasn’t a glamour in Faerie that could make that look right.
“Thank you,” Lockwood said, keeping a careful distance. “But your worries are unnecessary. Here.” He waved his hand, and a warm wash of liquid ran down my face like a summer rain. It made me blink a few times, and when it was finished …
I looked down. The grass was dead, and my blood was kind of … eating into the ground.
“Uh … guys?” I asked.
“I’ll take care of it,” Lockwood said, staring at it in mild concern. Another flourish of his fingers and there was a flash, and the ground stopped steaming and hissing at my feet.
“Did you actually take care of it?” I asked. “Or did you use a glamour to paper over it?” I set my hands on my hips. “Is that going to eat through the ground to Faerie China, surprising the hell out of some innocent farmer when his rice paddy turns violently acidic?”
“No,” Lockwood said. “I magicked your blood out of existence. It will not eat into the ground.” He shuffled his feet. “And there is no ‘Faerie China’ beneath us. This world is flat.”
“There’s a whole society on Earth who would be so jazzed to hear more about that,” I said. “Me? I’ve had about enough of Faerie, flat or otherwise.”
“I am sorry to hear this, Cassandra,” Queen Pruina said, making her way over to us with a flutter of her wings. The king and the court remained behind, circled around her dais under the grey sky. “You are the first human to come to our world in quite some time. I should like to have shown you our hospitality and the beauty of our world rather than having you become embroiled in seeing the worst of us.”
“I’m a teenager, so I’m not a big stranger to being introduced to the worst aspects of stuff,” I said. “I mean, mine is the Beanboozled generation, so …” I shrugged. “A magical war of fae involving treachery and near death? I’m getting used to this crazy stuff going on around me.” I looked down at my dress. “Besides, for like a minute there, it was almost fun.”
The queen seemed to get what I was saying, a little smile popping up on her lips. She waved her fingers—
And my dress was whole once more, with silvery highlights like she’d threaded winter snows into the fabric.
“Well, gosh, that kinda turns the disappointment around a little,” I
said, admiring my dress. “Nice shoes, too.” I looked down at my heels. Perfectly comfortable.
“I believe they might even last the transition back to your world,” the queen said, looking me over appraisingly. “It is … the least I can do, given what you have done for us.”
“Well, it wouldn’t have been possible if you hadn’t sent Orianna along to help,” I said.
Orianna grimaced. “You weren’t ever supposed to know that I was anything other than a ditzy tag-along.”
“You’ve done a marvelous job of playing ditzy and tagging along,” I said. “But let’s face it—under pressure, the truth was bound to come out. And we … definitely experienced some pressure, between the whole pilgrimage to Starvale, the craziness along the way, and … y’know prison and imminent execution. That tends to powder keg the truth of things right out.” I mimed an explosion.
The queen shook her head. “It would have been a shame if a war were to begin for no reason, and the only Seelie witness that knew and could speak the truth had been killed before he had the chance to bring it before his people.”
“I’m a little fuzzy on how you knew that, though,” I said, staring at her.
She raised an eyebrow at me. “Paladin Lockwood was hardly the only one who knew what happened in that alleyway on that eve. That Master Calvor took his bitterness and rage for his son’s own acts and turned them against my kingdom? Hardly surprising … if you knew Calvor.”
“I did not know Calvor,” Lockwood said quietly. “Not truly. Perhaps if I had confronted him, in the court, about this, after it happened—”
“You would have died on the way,” Pruina said, looking at him with absolute conviction. “He would not have allowed you to speak that truth, and you would not have seen your end coming. Indeed … there was no way, nor any reason for it to come out until now. Things between Winter and Summer have been unsteady, true—but until war was on its way—”
“Ohhhh,” I said, slapping my hand on my forehead. “It was you, wasn’t it?”
Pruina smiled slightly, though it was somewhere between a grimace and a smile.
“What?” Lockwood asked, his neck straight. “What was—?”
“The pixies,” I said, “the ones that attacked the car. You were the one who sent them.”
The queen’s eyes grew a little sad. “Yes. I regret any harm that might have befallen you, but … there was a war. People were dying. The truth needed to be told, and it could come from no one else.”
Lockwood nodded, though there was a weariness about him. “You forced me out of exile.”
“And sent help to make sure—as best I could—that you made it to your appointment with the Summer Court,” she said. “I am sorry I could not provide more, but … we were trying to ready for a war that looked all but impossible to stop.”
Lockwood let out a low sigh. “I have found, of late … that when one wants the impossible done, Lady Cassandra is the person to call.”
“I—what?” I turned on Lockwood. “I—did not do this. At least not most of it. This was you, Lockwood. I just … cleared a little bit of space for you to speak up.”
“And speak you did. You have made enemies in the Summer Court on this day,” Queen Pruina pointed out. “Though they will not say so.”
“It was the dyed hair comment, wasn’t it?” I asked. “That was probably a little over the top, I’ll admit.”
The queen’s stern face softened ever so slightly, and I could see the hint of laughter in her eyes for just a second, and then it disappeared. “You told the truth that they did not want to hear, and that is enough for them to hate you.” She reached out a hand across the feet between us, and I felt her cool fingers brush my cheek, just briefly. “You have done this land a great service, Cassandra. It will not be forgotten.”
With a subtle nod to Lockwood, she receded, just as the Summer Queen had, drifting away as Winter frost seemed to follow along behind her.
“I did not expect that from her,” Lockwood said softly, watching her go. “Not after … all these years.”
“Because you always hated Winter?” I asked.
“They taught me to,” Lockwood said. “Taught me they were nothing but liars. Perhaps …” And here he turned to look at Orianna. “Perhaps … I have learned wrongly.”
“Let’s not push this any further than it needs to go,” Orianna said, rolling her eyes. “You’re Seelie, I’m Unseelie, but let’s be honest—we wouldn’t like each other even if we were the same. Because you’re a giant dullard, Lockwood, and so serious.”
I snickered under my breath.
“And you are entirely flippant and irritating,” he said, with a hint of a smile. “I shan’t miss you.”
“Nor I, you,” Orianna said brightly. “Fare thee well, paladin of Summer.”
“You as well, spy of Winter,” Lockwood said.
Orianna turned to me. “You, though … I might miss. Just a little.”
I raised an eyebrow at her. “Really?”
“Yes, really,” she said. “Are you done bleeding? Because I don’t want to die horribly.”
“I think so,” I said, feeling my face. “I mean, it seems like—”
She shot forward on flittering wings, wrapping her arms around my neck. “I didn’t know what to think of you at first, you know? I didn’t know you were human, because I couldn’t believe that Lockwood would be mad enough to bring someone over from Earth, but …” She raised up to look at me, taking her head off my shoulder. “Now I’m glad he was out of his head. Because otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to watch the villain’s face melt off, and if there was anyone who deserved that, it was scheming Calvor.”
“Uh … thanks, I guess.” I didn’t know what else to say to that.
Orianna laughed, and it sounded a little wicked. “Take care of yourself, little …” her eyes moved around as she reconsidered, “… human.”
“You too, Orianna,” I said, and she brushed my hand with hers as she pulled away.
And with a flutter of her wings, and the tiniest of winks, she, too, was gone, like the queen.
Chapter 42
The war was over. The truth was told. I’d insulted a queen’s natural hair color.
“Heck of a trip,” I muttered, just me and Lockwood left standing where there’d once been a tent, once been a battlefield, once been the courts of two opposing kingdoms. Now it just looked like a beaten-up meadow, all the glamour—in both senses of the word—gone out of it. It looked more like a campground after a festival back on earth than any of the magical scenery I’d come to expect from Faerie.
And honestly … that made it the best place I’d been since I’d gotten here.
“What are you thinking?” Lockwood asked. He did not meet my eyes.
“I think you just heard it,” I said, taking a breath of air, smelling the dirt lingering in it from all the fae who’d presumably flown through and disturbed it.
“That’s all?” Now Lockwood looked me in the eye. “After all this, the only thing you come up with is ‘Heck of a trip’?” He looked away again. “Nothing about … me, the one who drew you into this, who nearly got you killed, who …” He performed a very thorough examination of his muddied boots, “… Who didn’t trust you with the truth.”
“I’m kinda the last person who should be bagging on anyone for withholding the truth,” I said, easing over to him and plopping a hand on his shoulder. I tried to make it really casual.
He snapped his head up in surprise anyway. “Truly? You don’t think … less of me?”
“Lockwood, you’ve saved my life more times than I can count,” I said, “and up until now, you’ve never put it in peril. As long as you don’t make a habit of this … yeah, I don’t think any less of you. And even if I did, my opinion of you is so high that even you fae couldn’t reach it if you flapped your wings as hard as you could.” I winked.
He let out a long, slow breath, and I recognized his relief. “That is … very kind of yo
u.”
“Well, I’ve learned a lot while I’ve been here,” I said. “And the things I learned … I saw a lot of myself in the Court of Summer, and not in a good way.” I frowned. “I’ve been lying my whole life, and I thought Florida was my chance to start fresh with my parents. When the whole paranormal world came busting in on me, I used it as an excuse not to tell the truth to my parents because … well, I figured there was no way they’d believe me. Now, I don’t know what was going on in your head during this trip, but I suspect it was something similar—”
“It was,” Lockwood said. “My walking away from the truth in that alley felt like a grand departure from courage. It felt like cowardice, masked under the excuse that …” He bowed his head. “‘No one would believe me’.”
“So very familiar,” I said. “I would have believed you. I do … believe you.”
“I know you would,” he said. “I suppose I was trying to protect you. And also … that after keeping a secret for so very, very long … it becomes a bit difficult to part with it. The words do not come easily.”
“Well, I’m glad they showed up when they did,” I said, rubbing his shoulder. “Because I don’t think the queen was going to show us any mercy or even let us fight it out for ourselves until she heard what you said.”
“I expect not,” he said.
“So … what now?” I asked, looking around.
“Now … I should take you home,” Lockwood said, beckoning me forward. “This way, about thirty steps.”
I frowned, but followed. “Why thirty steps?”
“Earth does not seamlessly connect with Faerie,” he said. “There are certain areas where I simply cannot cross us back. The magic here is strong from the war, but a little farther.” He reached a spot of empty field, and seemed to brighten. “Ah, yes. Here.”
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