“You’re lying.” My voice was rough, scraping through my tight throat. It couldn’t be true. Something must have gone wrong. I didn’t stab him hard enough. But...it should only need a scrape.
Oberon grabbed my arms, his nails digging into me. I trembled at the rage in his eyes. “I am not lying. The blade has a twin. Did he not tell you that?”
Shock slammed into me. My lips parted, and my knees almost buckled as a strange sense of relief filled my heart. “But that would mean...”
“The Mist King didn’t die.” Oberon laughed. “You truly thought you’d killed him. And that an ant like you could kill me, too. You’re pathetic.”
He reared back his hand. I didn’t have time to think, time to breathe, as he brought it down hard against my head. The last thing I knew was pain and a darkness as deep as death.
* * *
Chains rattled as the guards yanked me down the gloomy dungeon corridor. I winced with every step, the bonds too tight around my wrists. Exhaustion weighed heavy on my shoulders, tugging on my eyelids, but I forced myself to stay alert.
I glanced into every cell we passed, but the dungeons were mostly empty. Oberon didn’t need to take captives, not when we all so readily fell in line. And those who disobeyed didn’t end up behind bars. They ended up with their heads on spikes in the village square.
“Tessa!” a familiar voice exclaimed from a cell just ahead.Val!Hope surged in my chest, propelling me forward. I’d fought so hard to find her. My feet had kept moving when the rest of me could not, all so I could save her and my mother from a cruel fate. Failure was a lead weight strapped to my heart, but at least they were here and not lost to the mists. At least I would see their faces again. And I would take my last breath if it meant they could escape. The chains jangled as I tried to get a better view, but the guard yanked me back.
As we passed the cell, Val and Mother pressed up against the bars. Tears were streaming down both their faces. They looked tired, their clothes wrinkled and dirty, but their beaming smiles was the thing I noticed most.
I slowed, my entire body shaking. The world stilled around me, and for a moment, it all felt worth it. Every excruciating wound. Every hour of sleep I’d lost. Every choice I’d made had led me right back here. They were trapped in a dungeon beneath a castle full of cruel fae, but they were alive. My fingers brushed the bars, but the guard tugged on my chains until my boots skidded across the stone away from them.
“Tessa.” My mother shoved her hand through the bars and reached toward me, but the guard dragged me farther down the passageway. The strings of my heart unraveled at my feet, and I tried to pull it back, but the guard didn’t give me a chance. He hauled me away from their cell, away from the pieces of me that had always been with Mother and Val.
“Aren’t you putting me in there with them?” I asked, craning my head over my shoulder to keep my eyes locked on their faces. This couldn’t be happening. I’d only just seen them. We hadn’t even had a chance to say a word to each other.
“No,” the guard said gruffly. “You’re going in with the other one.”
“The other one?” I asked as we reached a door and pushed through. Had another human rebelled against the fae? I tried to think of who it could be. Most of the mortals in Teine would never even blink in the wrong direction. So, who else had Oberon captured? And why?
Surely not Morgan…
The guards didn’t answer. Instead, they yanked open the nearest cell, shoved me in, and slammed the door behind me. I looked around, and then everything stopped. A girl with chestnut hair stood before me, her brown eyes glassy with tears. Her smile was one I’d recognize anywhere. An impossible smile. A smile that froze the blood in my veins.
“Is this some kind of trick?” My back hit the bars as I stumbled away. “Are you making me a hallucinate? You killed my sister. She’s not alive!”
My rough voice echoed down the stone corridor. This was almost worse than anything they’d done to me so far. To make me see my baby sister, to make those brown eyes gaze at me with soft worry. I almost fell to my knees.
“It’s me, Tessa,” she whispered.
For a moment, there was nothing I could do but stare. This was impossible. Oberon’s guard had thrown her head at my feet. She was dead. Nellie had been taken from me. It had been the worst moment of my entire life, and the wound from that day still festered, poisoning my heart against the world.
She spread her hands in the shape of wings. “You did it. You flew away like the ravens.”
Those words.Our secret language born from our tears and our pain. No one else knew them. No one understood the bond we shared. A bud of hope stirred inside me like a seedling stretching through the dirt to reach for the sun. Could this be real?
I shuddered from the fear of hope.
“Please don’t just stand there.” She swiped at her cheeks, the tears smearing across her skin. “You’re looking at me like I’m a stranger. I need you, Tessa.”
Something in me cracked. I almost fell to my knees from the wave of grief that rolled over me, dragging me down into the bottomless depths of the sea. But right in its wake, just before I drowned beneath the weight of it, something else followed, pushing that grief away. It was an emotion I had not felt in so long that it was a stranger in the shadows, a ghost of who I’d once been.
I took two steps toward her, trembling. “Nellie?”
She rushed at me and launched into my arms. Our bodies collided, my breath knocked from my lungs. I clutched her against me, fisting her dress, breathing in the scent of her hair. She still smelled like apples after all this time. Sagging against her, I wept.
I had no idea how, but my sister was here.
Nellie wasalive.