all the rage and fury suddenly gone. She sounded scared, delicate, and she gazed up at him, her beautiful features pleading.
But I could feel the glamour she was weaving. Something dark. Deadly.
She was within my merged realities, but I didn’t feel as connected as I had when I’d denied her glamour earlier. A moment of doubt that I could do it again flashed through me, and as glamour was belief magic, my own doubt was enough to make me powerless against it. I opened my mouth to yell a warning to Falin, but he was already moving.
He swung outward. His sword slid through her neck so smoothly that her head didn’t move. She blinked, her blue eyes wide in shock. The glamour dissolved.
“You are the one who made that youth ruthless,” he said.
Then her body fell.
Her head rolled, lips moving in words that would never be heard. Through my contact with the planes, I felt the moment the land of the dead recognized her death.
And Faerie shook.
The floor jumped, the walls rumbled. Falin and I both fell to our knees.
Faerie shook again. A great rumbling quake. I fell to all fours.
The ground continued to shake. Discordant notes originating nowhere and everywhere pierced the air.
“What’s happening?”
Falin drove his sword into the ground to help lever himself up despite the disconcerting way the floor lurched. “The queen is dead.”
“Well, obviously, but I wasn’t expecting the winter court to implode!”
The ground continued to shake. My shields were still wide open, and now that the queen was dead, the grave essence in her body called to me. Without shields, I couldn’t stop my grave magic from rising. It had already started slipping out of me. Too late to call it back. The best I could do was direct it. Well, the Mender wanted souls. Here was another one for him.
I sent my grave magic spiraling into the headless corpse. The queen’s soul popped free of her body in a brilliant silver flash. I didn’t give the ghost time to adjust. Imagining my magic rolling back in like the tide returning to the ocean, I pulled back the planes. The realities separated effortlessly, Faerie happily releasing the points where I’d forced it to brush against other planes. The land of the dead and the collectors’ reality curled, compressing. The queen’s ghost was swept up with it before she even realized she was out of her corpse. As my magic withdrew, it restored all the planes to where they should be, leaving no holes or patches.
The locket closed.
I threw my shields up, erecting them quickly. Then I huddled low, waiting out Faerie’s wrath.
Eventually the court stopped shaking. The air turned sweet. The melody of Faerie began again, similar but different from before.
Then Falin screamed.
He released the sword and doubled over, holding his head, the heels of his hands pressed to his eyes. I scrambled to my feet as the door to the room burst open. Maeve and Lyell ran inside. They screamed something when they saw the queen’s body, but I wasn’t listening. I ran to Falin.
He’d stopped screaming, but he was still clutching his head. His shoulder was in bad shape, the blood running thickly down his arm and torso. He had other less severe wounds here and there, but whatever was wrong with his face, I couldn’t see for his hands.
I knelt in front of him. More fae spilled into the room. Droves of them, likely coming to find out what had shaken Faerie. I didn’t know what would happen. We’d killed the queen. That was probably not good. If we needed to fight our way out of here . . . Well, that wouldn’t be easy. Especially if Falin was badly injured. Would Faerie blind him for his crimes? What was wrong with his eyes?
I reached out, putting a hand on his good shoulder and the other on one of his wrists. I made small soothing sounds, trying to get him to let me see what was wrong. Falin dropped his hands. His eyes blazed a brilliant blue, brighter than I’d ever seen them before. And ringing his forehead, made of intricately woven ice, sat a crown.
Lyell’s voice cut through the roar of whispers in the room. “All hail the Winter King.”
Chapter 24
I sat in my favorite of the castle’s gardens, PC asleep in my lap and a book open in my hands, but I wasn’t reading it. It had been three weeks since I’d fled from Faerie, the ground still trembling,