by Bec McMaster
A troll found my act amusing and repeats it, with mead spraying across the crowd. A pair of hobgoblins take offense to being drenched, and suddenly a fight breaks out, knives flashing and the troll’s club rising in the air.
Blaedwyn laughs as half the dancers are swept aside in a sudden melee.
I dart forward, capturing Thalia’s attention.
“Sing,” I mouth.
Thalia grabs at the bars of her cage, staring at me desperately. From the draw of her brows, she has no idea what I want her to do.
I point to the sword, then to Blaedwyn, then to her. And then I pretend to sing.
A hobgoblin slams into me, spinning me out of the way. “Clear the path,” it snarls.
By the time I look back, Thalia is nodding.
The troll ends the fight with a sweep of its mighty club. Three of the Unseelie fall, and this time they don’t get up.
“Fight me,” it roars, huffing and snarling with rage, but the crowd is eyeing those broken bodies, and almost as one, the argument dies before its begun.
“Take it outside, Brutu,” Blaedwyn calls. “Before you break any more of my tables.”
Trolls have little intelligence, and this one is worked into a rage. But it takes one look at her, with her glittering, merciless eyes, and then it stomps away through the crowd.
“Queen Blaedwyn,” Thalia suddenly calls, rattling on her cage bars. “I warn you to let me go, or else see your court suffer.”
All eyes turn toward her.
Blaedwyn leans forward on her throne, her elbows resting on her knees. I need her to move away from the throne, but she merely smiles. “Why, the little bird has finally found its voice again. Pray tell, little bird, what shall you do if I deny you?”
Thalia visibly swallows. “I shall sing death down upon your people, and drive them mad.”
The entire crowd roars with laughter.
Blaedwyn pushes to her feet, sauntering toward the middle of the dais. “The only ones who can sing death are bound to the sea or locked away with the Father of Storms. The saltkissed cannot walk the earth, little bird.”
“But I am not wholly saltkissed,” Thalia says in a firm voice.
And then she starts to sing.
The first few notes are pure bliss. Her voice. Sweet Maia, her voice. But then the octave shifts, and suddenly every pane of glass left in the windows high above us shatter.
Unseelie scream and bellow, fleeing for the doors and finding themselves trapped. Glass shards rain down upon the crowd, and finally, Thalia stops, her song cutting off with a sharp note.
“Do you want to hear me go higher?” she suggests.
Blaedwyn alone stands unstunned. Her eyes narrow, as I slip behind the dais.
“It’s a lovely performance,” Blaedwyn calls, snapping her fingers for one of her servants as though she has no worries in the world. “Though I think I shall call your bluff. For that is what it is, is it not? If you could sing death, little bird, then you would have struck my riders down in the forest where you were captured. No saltkissed allows herself to be taken alive. No. I think you’re lying.”
She takes a goblet of mead from the server’s platter.
I slip from the shadows and crouch behind the throne, my back set to the bleached wood. Every inch of me is tense, waiting for the merest hint of an outcry, but none comes.
“Indeed,” the queen mocks, “I think I’m starting to remember a little rumor I once heard on the wind. Prince Thiago of Evernight has a cousin who was born a bastard of the sea, does he not? The girl could sing, or so it was said, until she made a pact with a mad witch who stole the power in her voice. And she never goes anywhere without her cousin. Grimsby, tell me…. Those two warriors you threw in the dungeon. Is one of them covered in tattoos?”
“I-I couldn’t say, my queen,” calls a lord to the right.
“Then find out.” Blaedwyn snarls.
A brief glimpse shows the sword, resting against the arm of the throne. Sweat drips down my spine. It’s now or never. I can’t afford for her to discover who her prisoners are.
I gather my muscles, prepared to grab for it, when a sudden cry goes through the room.
“My queen,” yells a loud voice. “I have found an intruder!”
Blaedwyn lowers the goblet from her lips. All across the room, heads turn, and the crowd parts.
My outstretched hand freezes.
Eris is forced forward, her hands clasped behind her head and her eyes glittering with rage. A fae male wearing the same black robe and silver mask she disguised herself with, prods her forward with a sword to her spine. One of his irises is black, and the other a pearlescent silver that makes me queasy.
“This woman wears the bloodstained rags of my brethren,” the fae declares, his mismatched eyes locking on Blaedwyn. “Though she’s not of my clan.”
“Bloodstained rags,” Blaedwyn muses. “An intruder, by the look of it. A thief. Or is she here to rescue her prince?”
The crowd gasps.
It’s not the distraction I was hoping for—curse Eris—but the Unseelie queen has her back to me, and her sword is but an inch away from me.
Time to set the plan in motion.
“But who would rescue Thiago?” Blaedwyn mocks. “Oh, look at those black, soulless eyes. Yes. I’ve heard of you too, Devourer. I’ve long itched to match my sword against your own. They say you cannot be beaten by battle, yet here you stand, bested by the lowest of my guard.”
Eris stands still, her eyes locked on the queen, and I know she’s deliberately ignoring what I’m doing. “Do you consider me bested?” she asks, cocking her head. “What if this was the plan, in order to get close to you?”
I’ve almost missed hearing the disdain in that voice.
“Then you’re a fool,” Blaedwyn tells her.
She’s only three feet in front of me.
I crouch by the side of the throne, hoping no one in the crowd spots me. Eris is putting on a good show though, and there’s no outcry.
“I think that sword’s warped your brain,” Eris says with a faint shrug. She slowly lowers her hands. “I wonder, can you be beaten in battle without it?”
“You’ll never find out,” the queen promises.
“Won’t I?” There’s a sense of satisfaction in Eris’s voice as I make my move.
Lunging forward, I grab Blaedwyn and yank her back against me, holding a knife to her throat. “Don’t move.”
A collective gasp rolls around the room.
Blaedwyn freezes.
“I’m not having a good month,” I whisper in her ear. “I suggest you answer my questions. Or I’ll cut your throat with star-forged steel. Where are you keeping the prince and his man?”
“Oh my,” she whispers back. “Another little mouse, rustling in the shadows. What a treacherous plot I’ve discovered.”
“The prince,” I growl, letting her feel the sharp edge of the knife.
“The dungeons,” Blaedwyn replies. “Where else would I keep the Royal Prick?”
“Send someone to fetch them. If they don’t return unharmed, then I’ll do unto you what is done to them.”
“So bold,” she taunts. “I wonder…, could it be the prince’s wife? They say he’ll eat a thousand souls before he lets her go, but will she return the favor? Will she risk her own life for his when she can barely remember him?”
“I don’t know.” My grip in her hair tightens. “But I’m fairly certain I’ll risk yours. Send someone to fetch him.”
The bitch smiles and pushes into the blade. Blood weeps down her throat as my knife digs into her skin. “Do you know the problem with your little declaration?”
“What?”
“I’ve already walked in the shadows of the Gray. You can’t kill me,” she snarls, then drives her elbow back toward my face.
I turn at the last second and take the blow on my cheek instead of my nose. Pain ricochets through my face, but it’s not the blinding pain it could have been.
The floor rises up to meet me, and the breath slams from my lungs as I slide across the polished stone of the dais.
Blaedwyn stalks toward me, the hem of her cloak rasping along the floor. She reaches for the sword in her sheath, and then pauses as her hand finds nothing.
“Missing something?” I demand, crawling inelegantly to my feet. Casting my cloak out of the way, I reveal the sword strapped to my hip.
Pure, utter coldness turns her eyes dark. Her lip curls in a sneer. “You little fool. Go ahead. Draw it against me. No hand can touch it but mine, though I’ll enjoy watching your suffering.”
There is no going back. Only forward. I have no other chance than this.
Grabbing hold of the hilt, I draw the Sword of Mourning with a steely rasp. The second the last inch of iron clears the sheathe, the rasp turns into a high-pitched squeal and the weight of the sword drives the tip of it toward the cold slate floors.
The sound of that ringing is like a knife straight to the brain. All around me, the rest of Blaedwyn’s court stagger to their knees, their hands clapped over their ears, but I don’t dare take my hands off it.
I can’t anyway.
Pain roars through me, cleaving straight through my soul. I see armies rise and fall. I see throats cut and bodies dancing in the breeze as they jerk in the gibbet. I see Unseelie capering, their bodies fucking and grinding, and through it all, right back through a thousand flashing images of death, I see the shock of betrayal on a man’s snarling face as my hand drives the sword through his chest, and I sob out a whispered, “I’m sorry.”
It’s not me.
Nor do I recognize the stranger who falls, his enormous body slamming back onto the tiles of the Hallow, his blood spraying the stones.
The room explodes around me as power surges through me. I can hear the grumble of the ley line far, far beneath me.
Someone is screaming.
I think, perhaps, it might be me.
But images are flashing past my eyes. I see the creature fall a thousand times, his eyes wounded and surprisingly fae, as the woman whispers again and again, “I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry.”
We weep a thousand tears, and I fear I’ll never escape the weight of the sword.
Then darkness encroaches.
A woman walks out of the darkness, garbed in an endless black cloak. She shifts the cowl back from her face, her midnight-dark eyes warming as she beholds me.
“Ah,” she whispers as she closes my fingers around the Sword of Mourning, “There you are.”
The pain vanishes.
The knife is yanked from my brain.
I find myself standing on the dais, slowly lifting the tip of the sword as the weight of it lightens.
Blaedwyn gapes up at me from where she’s lying flat on her back at my feet. The entire crowd is down, and the walls crumble from the shock of detonation.
Then Eris is there, shoving Thalia ahead of her.
“Move!” she yells, shoving me toward the arch behind the throne.
Through the castle wall and into the labyrinth.
37
“We’re lost,” I say, hacking at a thorny tangle of vines with my old sword. It shears away from the wall of the labyrinth, but other vines hiss at me and take its place, knotting the wall into an even tighter array of greenery.
Behind us, the howls of rampaging Unseelie echo through the labyrinth. Blaedwyn unleashed her host upon us, and I can hear them growing ever closer. There’s no way we can survive an entire war host, though with the walls of the maze so close, they can only come at us two abreast.
And while I have the Sword of Mourning sheathed at my hip, I don’t dare use it.
“Eris.” Thalia turns to her with a pleading look in her eyes.
“No.” The word is hard, final.
“What other options do we have?” Thalia snaps. “If the Unseelie face you in your other form, they’ll scatter like scavengers.”
“It’s not the Unseelie who have to worry,” Eris bites out.
There’s a whole lot of undercurrent going on in this conversation. Maybe it has something to do with that Devourer comment. “What are you both talking about?”
Eris looks at me coldly. “I have something inside me, something that can terrorize the entire Unseelie host and send them fleeing. But it comes at a cost. The last time I let myself channel my other half, I slaughtered an entire battlefield.”
I don’t see the problem with that. “A few hundred less Unseelie in the world isn’t going to be a major problem.”
“An entire battlefield,” she repeats. “Enemy and ally alike. Friend and foe.” For a moment, horror darkens her eyes, as if she’s seeing it all over again. “I destroyed everyone who followed me onto that battlefield and when I walked out, I was the only thing living. I barely manage to cage it after all the glut of blood. I don’t know if I can come back to myself again. It’s been over a hundred years. Every day it pushes at the cage, I can feel it growing hungrier. There’s no point asking me to unleash my dark side, because if I do, then I’m going to be the only thing left alive in this entire kingdom. And even then, I might not be me.”
“They called her the Eater of Souls,” Thalia whispers.
The Devourer.
My mind suddenly trips over a long-forgotten memory. One of our tutors was obsessed with history, and I vaguely recall hearing of a battlefield where only one survivor walked away. Nevernight, they call it now, and even the ground lies fallow, as if the glut of blood drowned every blade of grass that stood there.
Thalia hesitates. “Thiago—”
“Is at half strength,” Eris replies calmly, “and we both know it. He’s no match for me, not right now. He’s also still trapped in the dungeon.”
“And I’m useless,” Thalia says bitterly, “after that bitch stole my voice.”
I make a small circular gesture in the air. “Let’s pretend you haven’t told me all of these stories before. Blaedwyn said a witch stole your voice. What does that even mean?”
“Long story,” Thalia replies, “and not enough time to tell it. If we get out of this, you and I shall raid Thiago’s wine cellars and dwell on the bad old times.”
“Use the sword,” Eris says. “They won’t hunt us if you stand against them with that”—she nods uneasily toward my hip—“in your hand.”
I can’t explain the shiver of fear I felt when that mysterious woman put the sword in my hand in that vision. “It drove Blaedwyn mad. I think it best if I don’t touch it.”
A troll suddenly bellows behind us, and then it’s lumbering around the corner of the maze. It lifts its head and howls, as if to alert the host.
“Erlking’s hairy balls.”
We are dead.
Eris shoves me behind her and turns to leap forward, her sword flashing in the dim light. I grab the hilt of my own sword, but a hand grabs my wrist.
“No!” Thalia says. “She can handle it. We’ll just get in her way.”
It’s a struggle to stay out of the fight, but it soon becomes clear she’s right. Eris isn’t just fighting the troll, she’s destroying him. She moves like a flash of lightning, ducking and weaving the massive swings of its ironbound club before sliding to her knees beneath a dangerous swing and slashing her blade through the tendon behind its ankle.
The troll bellows in pain and smashes into the thorny wall of the labyrinth, crushing it. An opening suddenly appears, just as its friends come around the corner.
“This way!” I yell, hauling Thalia through the opening.
A pair of startled hobgoblins glance our way, but I sweep their axes aside. The clang of steel echoes behind me, and I know Eris is covering our backs.
A horn suddenly cuts through the air, and everything goes quiet. One second the maze is full of snarls and angry voices, and the next you could hear a mouse creeping.
“That’s very creepy,” I mutter.
The labyrinth quivers,
leaves rustling and thorny vines lashing angrily as they subside. Ravens take flight, cawing wildly. Even the wind seems to conspire against us, hissing through the leaves as if it’s suddenly part of the hunt.
We all stare in the direction of the horn, and I can hear my heartbeat racing in my ears.
“What do you think that means?” Thalia asks.
“Death to all who enter here?” It’s a guess, but I could be wrong.
“It’s Blaedwyn’s horn,” Eris said, then curses under her breath. She glances about wildly, but there’s seemingly no escape. “If she’s entered the maze, then we’re done for. Unless you use the sword.”
“How many times do I have to say no?”
We scramble through the lashing maze, thorny whips scourging the skin from my arms and face. Around the next corner, we find ourselves in a dead end and slide to a halt.
Behind us, the horn rings again, and this time a cheer goes up.
“So, Eris has the power to destroy all of our enemies, but can’t let herself do that,” I gasp, “and you could sing them into submission if you still had your powers. But you don’t.”
And I’m about as useful as a snowball in the wake of a volcano.
Thiago and Finn are locked up.
A raging queen is on our trail, along with a pack of bloodthirsty Unseelie, and we have no way of fending her off—
A horrible thought occurs to me.
We have no means to defeat Blaedwyn.
“I have an idea.” The words just blurt out of me. “It’s a horrible idea, and I need the two of you to convince me not to do it.”
“What?” Thalia asks.
“If I tell you, then you have to talk me out of it,” I yell as we skid into a thorny corner of the maze.
“No promises!” Thalia yells. “You weren’t locked in a cage! I’ll let you do anything.”
I tell them.
Thalia’s eyes nearly pop out of her head. “You think he’s a solution?”
“You said anything,” I point out.
“Thiago will kill you. Blaedwyn will kill you. It’s a terrible idea!” Thalia says.
It’s Eris who surprises me though. A horrible, horrible smile crosses her mouth. “And it just might work.”