The Queen's Secret (The Queen's Secret #2) - Melissa de la Cruz Page 0,86

When I shove the window, it swings open with a crack.

“King Phras!” I shout down to the courtyard. “It’s me—the queen!”

The demon stretches his giant neck and glares up at me, his yellow eyes glowing.

“I’m a Dellafiore!” I shout. “The last and greatest of my line! You killed my father, but you can’t kill me!”

The towering demon opens his mouth, his face contorted with rage.

“We’re back in power!” I bellow. “We’re uniting the kingdoms again! Your legacy will be defeated and destroyed!”

Hansen passes me the flaming arrow, and I swing the bow up and out the window.

“Now,” he says. “Now.”

I take aim, and the arrow springs from my bow. It arcs toward the demon like a shooting star, sizzling with light. King Phras reaches out a hand veined with obsidian, trying to grab it, but a cloud of black feathers drifts past his face, obscuring his vision. The arrow soars into him, striking him in the heart with its burning tip.

With a mighty roar, he buckles, then shatters into a heap of obsidian, the sound as loud as the ice on a lake giving way. The pieces clatter onto the stones of the yard, and I can hear people shouting and scattering. Charcoal dust billows into the air, shooting high into the sky.

“Not a bad shot,” Hansen tells me, relief in his voice. “It was my idea, of course.”

“Of course,” I say, my heart still pounding. I bend over, trying to catch my breath. “Can you see anything?”

“Too much dust. Come on!” Hansen bolts toward the door, the guards scuttling to catch up. We have to get down there to make sure everyone has survived the shattered black glass.

I have to find Cal.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Lilac

This time we can’t make a mistake. Tonight, the members of the Guild were called to cleanse the place of black magic. When the mess of black feathers are cleared in the courtyard and they picked through the shattered obsidian, they found a body, wizened and elderly, but completely unmarked. Daffran. The last body that Tyrant King Phras would occupy. Something for us to burn in the fire of Deia, at last, after all these centuries.

The urn of ashes in front of his tomb down in the catacombs was empty, as it turned out. The Guild knew that his dark spirit moved from body to body, possessing them and extending his demonic stranglehold on Avantine.

Outside the walls of the city we gather to burn Daffran’s body, and local Guild members encircle the pyre with a ring of incantation. In their brown robes—the color of the earth, from which we’re all born—they resemble the piles of linseed that Jander laid out in the courtyard. And the linseed that Daffran fed the crows every day. His linseed, too, had contained powerful magic, enough to keep the Aphrasian monks disguised as birds, loose in the castle just long enough to slash or poison.

Jander replaced the magic with a poison that forced the evil out of each dying bird. He told me he’d concocted this potion with Aunt Mesha’s help, when he and Cal and Rhema last visited the cottage. He’d had a hunch about the crows even then, but kept it to himself in case it was just another false hope.

The demon’s destruction when my burning arrow pierced his heart sent a billowing cloud of ashy dust high into the sky. This message summoned Guild members from far afield in Montrice. While we ready the fire and lay the shroud on the logs, more and more elders in their earthy robes pour into the field. We’ve all been waiting for this moment for so long. With Phras finally dispatched, we have hit the Aphrasians in their gut. Without a spiritual leader, without a future, they no longer have a cause.

The Small Council has permitted me to attend this fire of Deia, possibly because they’re all scared of me now. If I can kill a demon with one arrow, what could I do to them? They’d forgotten, I think, that I’m a Dellafiore, with a heritage longer and more storied than anyone in Montrice. They’d forgotten that before I was a queen, I was an assassin.

I asked Hansen if he wanted to see this ritual fire as well, to witness history, and for a moment I thought he was tempted. But as night fell and cold air swarmed the castle with its bone-chilling damp, he decided it was too much of a risk for him to be outside for all those