He wore no helmet, his black hair braided over one shoulder and shot through with gold. Inis would have recognized the quill crest on his breastplate even if his face had been covered. He squinted, fighting to make sense of the scene before him.
Inis didn’t know what she looked like with Two draped over her, coating her, a living armor that covered every feature.
Inis stepped toward Faolan over a fallen Queensguard.
“You shouldn’t have come.” He hefted his weapon: a lean silver long sword. Inis wondered if it, like so much of the silver they’d come across, had been crafted from destroyed fae relics. “You shouldn’t have done this. I rather liked you, Inis Fraoch Ever-Loyal.”
Behind her, Shining Talon smashed another mirror. Armored footsteps marching in time broke through Inis’s fractured thoughts. More soldiers. Faolan’s personal Queensguard, perhaps, in addition to those stationed at the palace. Inis’s side couldn’t withstand a wave of reinforcements. They hadn’t secured the area, were simply buying time—
“Not too late to change sides,” Inis told Faolan.
He smiled. A strange expression. It wasn’t happy. It was downright bleak.
“My heart isn’t so easily swayed these days.” Faolan lifted his free hand to tap against his chest. “I believe you know what that’s like.”
Implying he’d been Morien’s unwilling puppet in this all along.
Blinding pain erupted beneath Inis’s ribs. She dropped to her knees in time to glimpse Morien stepping through one of the unbroken mirrors. Two snapped back into his old form, wrenched forcibly free. It felt like her skin was being flayed from her bones. She wasn’t alone, but they were separated again.
Inis was sure she was dying, except she continued to draw breath.
“Someone’s learned a new trick,” Morien commented.
“I could say the same for you.” Inis struggled to get the words out, her voice thin. “A hound putting the leash on his master. You must be very proud.”
“He is, actually,” Faolan said. His arm shook, but he kept his sword up and trained on Inis. She noticed he took a step away from the sorcerer, kept a wary eye on him at all times.
Morien’s hands moved in the air between them. He was drawing the signs he needed to call on his mirrorcraft and stop Inis’s heart. The next breath she drew would be her last, and she couldn’t even savor it. Rags cried out, feeling the same torture. Only Somhairle and Shining Talon were unaffected. Somhairle could continue helping the fae, continue dragging them one by one to safety, while Shining Talon continued to break the mirrors that held them captive.
Had they managed to free them all?
Where would the fae children go now that they were free? Would they even get to leave this horrible room?
Look after the children, Inis thought, not sure if Two could hear her. And don’t stay connected to me when the Lying One kills me. Don’t let him hurt you. Tear out his throat the moment you can.
No answer from Two. Inis did the only thing she could: she braced herself, faced Morien, drew in a breath, and spat on his boots. If this was the end, she wanted the sorcerer to know her exact estimation of his character.
But the end didn’t come.
She drew a second breath, which hurt like every inch of her was screaming, but alive, alive, you couldn’t ache this badly when you were dead. Then a third. Morien’s hands worked faster, fingers twisting, turning, drawing lines and glyphs and sigils too quickly for Inis to keep track, and with each one, a new flash of incapacitating pain shocked Inis’s body, branching outward from her chest. Pain, but not death.
Morien’s eyes glittered. Inis couldn’t see his mouth under the swaths of red fabric, but she guessed he was frowning, gritting his teeth, on the verge of cursing.
It had to be the little scrap of blindfold standing between them that kept him from killing her.
Granted, if this kept up much longer, she’d tear the blindfold off herself, would die rather than suffer more of this impossible agony.
With a grunt, Morien threw one gesture toward Faolan instead, and he started forward with a lurch, sword raised. The first time he hadn’t been graceful in their presence. The first sign he was completely under Morien’s control. “Sorry it came to this. Nothing personal. Although it’s incredibly unfair that you’re able to resist him when I can’t, eh?”
His long sword slashed, beautiful and precise and unstoppable, through the air. Inis’s arms hurt so badly that she couldn’t lift them to