I emerge into a forest. Instantly, I notice how the fae lands are different from the Elf Kingdom. Motes of magic drift through the air between the trees, casting everything in shades of blue and green. Vining flowers I don’t recognize hang like curtains from the trees’ leafy boughs. Even the earth seems different under my feet; it’s more untamed, magical, and much more like what I think I originally expected of Midscape.
Hook’s growl followed by a shout brings me back to reality. I sprint forward, dashing around the trees to a low-lying clearing. Two fae lie dead, their throats slit with a violent dark line. Eldas faces off against a beast with paws that match the prints we saw in the road. The animal is the size of a bear, covered in fur around its face and paws, but the rest of its body is coated in wet-looking scales, like a serpent’s.
Hook’s whimper draws my attention across the clearing to where the wolf has been beaten back by another fae with ram’s horns. The man’s eyes gleam a bright violet and his hands move through the air, vaporous magic tracing his motions. Both beast and man wear necklaces weighted by labradorite around their necks.
I hold out the briar and sink my feet into the ground.
An arm closes around me and the blade of a dagger is at my throat.
“King Eldas!” Aria shouts over my shoulder. My ears ring. I was right; it was her all along. I’ve never been so angry about being correct. “If you won’t parlay with us for your dear brother, then perhaps your queen?”
Eldas’s bright eyes leave the beast to face us. A rage unlike any I’ve ever seen twists his handsome features into pure malice. Waves of shadow radiate off of him and the presence of the Fade thickens with his magic.
“Let her go,” he growls.
“Let us go and agree to give us the land that’s rightfully ours!” She pushes the dagger closer to my throat.
“Aria, don’t do this,” the man with the ram’s horns says, voice weak with emotion. “You were supposed to get away.” I see something I recognize—an emotion I’ve seen in Eldas numerous times now. Admiration, compassion. I’m beginning to piece together the simple plot this seems to have been…Aria fell in love with one of the rebel fae. Love was the one thing that could make someone act against their own best interests.
“You insult your people’s—your family’s—attempt at diplomacy and hurt your cause with this.” Eldas holds out his arms and an array of silver blades pop into existence. He summons each one with nothing more than a thought—a true name of a weapon he learned and saved in his memory throughout the course of his life. “Kill her and you kill us all.”
“Our lands are cold and cruel,” Aria shouts. “She only makes the Elf Kingdom viable for food and game.”
“That’s not—” I can’t get out a word. Aria yanks me tighter and the dagger bites into my throat as I dare to speak. Blood slips down the blade, dropping to the earth.
“Silence,” she snarls at me. “We have a way that you’re no longer needed. A ritual that will restore this land.”
Ritumancy… Willow explained it as the act of performing rituals to gain magic. I never expected Aria to be the one to give me the missing piece that finally put together the puzzle of how to end the cycle. But she did.
I just have to survive long enough to test my theory.
“Don’t take another step closer,” Aria shouts as Eldas begins to move; his eyes are still stuck on me with panic. “I know you, you won’t dare risk the life of the Human Queen.”
Droplets have been dripping from the hand I cut on the wall for a good minute now, mingling with my blood streaming off her blade. I smirk; I learned very early on how dangerous my blood can be when mixed with nature.
“He won’t,” I whisper. “But I will.”
Magic explodes out from around me with a force I haven’t felt since the afternoon with Harrow in the lunch nook. I release my control and it flows into the earth unfettered.
I am like a blight on the land. Death spreads out from around me as the power is consumed and leeched from the earth itself. Balance, it all requires balance.
The briar falls from my fingers and writhes outward. The thorny vines wrap around Aria and she lets out a shout. I can feel their tiny daggers digging into her flesh as if the vines were a part of my own body.
Yet, none of the thorns face me. Aria is cocooned in a wicked prison—trapped, but not dead—and I am free to step away as the vines wrench her hand holding the dagger away from my throat like violent puppet strings. The earth cracks under my feet as I walk. Thorny, angry briar follows me and races toward the beast as I point in its direction.
The clawed and scaled creature makes an attempt to get away. But it can’t outpace my magic. The air shifts as Eldas turns his attention onto the remaining fae. The weapons he summoned rain like a hail of steel on the remaining man. Aria lets out a scream of pure anguish—cold and lingering.
I lower my hand the moment the last fae is wrapped in briar. All at once, energy leaves my body and I sink to my knees. They slam into the rocky ground, now cracked and dry—void of any life but my snaring vines.