KARIS

Loftin ran behind me, staying nearby but giving me wide berth as I stumbled through the forest. Through the once-proud trees was a clearing where the skeleton of another structure lay, bone-white stone arching into the sky overhead.

Two Leancan caught up to us, but kept their distance as Loftin approached.

And then the earth turned frigid. Strands of my hair whipped my face as she approached, knocking the Leancan off their feet and slamming them into the earth on her way to me. I considered letting the Banshee kill me or take me to Nemain.

Loftin must have seen it on my face. He shook me. “You’ll never find Iric if you give up. Do not give up!” He waited until I looked in his eyes. “We’re too exposed. We have to run!”

Loftin shouted, reaching a hand out for mine. Then he whispered, “This is our chance to escape.” I took his hand and we ran as fast as we could, jumping over the rocks and boulders, carving a path over land, but it was getting us nowhere. The next shriek was just behind us.

He was right. Out in the open, there was nowhere for us to hide. The Banshee flew across the land at speeds I couldn’t even comprehend. I could hear the claws on her fingers emerge as she flew impossibly fast, in a straight line toward us. Loftin shoved me to the ground and covered me with his body as she swooped.

My chin struck the earth and my teeth crashed together, upper against lower. “Are you okay?” he panted.

“Yeah.”

“We have to run. She’s circling around, but we’ll have to dive down when she comes back and run when she doesn’t catch us.”

He didn’t say what to do if she caught us. He didn’t insist I use my power or conjure light or try something new. He didn’t tell me to turn her into nothing. Maybe he knew I couldn’t have done it. Not even to save us both. I wasn’t sure I could come back from that, not the same as I was now. I’d used my crazy light ribbons to kill the Banshee so I could protect Loftin, but turning one to ash? That would make me just like Nemain. No, our only options were either to keep running until she gave up, or until we were too weak to go any farther.

Just react. Run. Dive. Run. Stay alive. Don’t give up, he commanded.

Stumbling forward, we ran as fast as our legs would carry us until the loud shriek behind us had Loftin screaming for me to drop to the ground. He was only a second behind, but his weight never fell on mine. I glimpsed back to see him in the clutches of the creature, being taken far too high into the air. His legs flailed uselessly.

“Stop! Please don’t hurt him. Please!” I shrieked.

The Banshee gave a grisly smile, but slowly lowered him back toward the earth and brought him forward to me. “Your kind never asks. Never says please,” she rasped.

“My kind?” I breathed.

“Royalty,” she snarled.

“The others couldn’t talk. The other Banshees,” I concluded, trying to distract her as she hovered closer to the ground. Loftin clawed at his throat where she held him, trying not to allow her to asphyxiate him.

Closer. She kept easing further down.

Hovering just above the ground, she dropped Loftin, who collapsed in a heap on the ground, gasping for air, his face mottled and purple.

“I am their leader,” she announced, a proud smile stretching over her face. “The strongest.”

“Why do you keep attacking us?” I eased toward Loftin, whose eyes told me to keep back.

“It is my order,” she answered simply.

“Nemain gave you the order to attack us?”

“Not attack,” she enunciated. She looked to me and rasped, “Retrieve.” But when she narrowed her eyes on Loftin, she whispered, “Kill.”

I wasn’t going to let that happen.

“Your services are no longer required, bounty hunter,” she imparted to Loftin in a saccharine voice. Just before she swooped down to grab him again.

I jumped to my feet and raised the arm with the Asper. When she saw it, she hissed and flew backward. “Not alive. Can’t hurt me!” she wailed.

Swallowing, and with every ounce of strength in me, I asked the snake to protect us. I imagined it alive, its fangs sharp as needles and ready to bite the beast who was ready to hurt Loftin. My forearm began to itch. Looking down, scales formed, not of mirrored ink, but actual scales. An Asper curled itself around my arm, striking out at the Banshee.

The Banshee darted a quick glance at Loftin. He was too far away from me, and she knew I wasn’t faster than she was. I couldn’t reach him in time. She raced toward him, but I threw the Asper at her. It coiled around her neck, sinking its teeth into her flesh, retracting and sinking in again. It struck her until she fell from the sky and then slithered back across the ground to my feet, which were now next to Loftin. He scuttled backward, afraid of the animal that had just saved us. He surveyed me, eyes wide, as though he had never seen me before. As though he were terrified.

“The Asper saved us.”

“I know,” he whispered.

I grabbed his arm. “I remember. I made the connection to my mother when I was a child. She’d begun experimenting with taking powers from a few Seelie she’d caught trespassing and then she used their powers on me, to try to force me to do things. I made the funnel to take anything she absorbed, so I could fight back.”

He nodded. “Good.”

The Asper coiled into a ball, waiting at my feet until I crouched and extended my arm to him, and then he coiled around it, situating himself so that his fangs were still pointed at the writhing Banshee only feet away.

“You killed me,” the Banshee wailed.

While Loftin stood, I inched toward her. “Karis,” he warned.

“It’s okay,” I answered over my shoulder. She was in no shape to fight, and my Asper was ready to protect me again.

“You tried to kill him,” I told her. “I was defending him.” But I didn’t turn her to ash. I didn’t obliterate her into nothing.

“You don’t understand us.” The back of her head hit the ground with a dull thud. A black tear leaked from her eye, trickling into her dark, stringy hair before it disappeared.

The air around us was suffused with feelings of sorrow and desperation. It seeped into my pores until all I wanted to do was cry with her. “Help me understand,” I implored.

She raised her head, her neck shaking with exhaustion. Then she reached out for me. My Asper hissed his disapproval, echoed by Loftin, but with my free hand, I touched hers.

The Banshee sighed, her raspy voice fading into one of beauty. “Thank you,” she uttered as her eyes flickered.

Her pale green skin faded to golden chestnut. Her hair thickened and the dark strands became a soft, honeyed brown. Her eyes settled into the color of rich earth. “Our true form,” she whispered.

Loftin knelt by my side. “You’re Seelie. You’re from Autumn.” The sadness in his voice was almost too much to bear.

The faery’s eyes fluttered, a crystalline tear falling from the corner of her eye this time. She opened her mouth to speak, but a soft gasp expelled from her mouth and she was gone.

I covered my face in shame. My skin crawled as the Asper sank back into my skin.

I couldn’t look at him. Couldn’t bear to face Loftin or the Seelie faery I just killed. Instead, I sat on the ground, completely broken, as sobs overtook my body. I killed her. I was responsible for her death. Loftin settled beside me, tucking me into his arms. I didn’t deserve his kindness.

“You didn’t know. I didn’t know. No one did.”

The words did not help or comfort me. If I were Loftin, I would have risen to my feet and walked away. I would have left me in the middle of Faery to fend for myself.

“I’m so sorry,” I cried.

“Karis,” he paused. “If you hadn’t touched her, we wouldn’t know what lay beneath. All this time we thought Nemain had unleashed the Unseelie. Now we know she’s been turning the Seelie into monsters, too.”

What sort of person did such things? One who was purely evil. A queen who wanted to punish...

“I’m an abomination,” I whispered. “You should have killed me the second I stepped out of Ironton.”

Arms propped on his knees, he hung his head. “I’m not sure what you are, Karis, but ‘abomination’ is not a word I would use to describe you.”

I closed my eyes and wished I’d never received sight, or been born fae, or been safely hidden away. There was a part of me that didn’t believe Finean when he told me Nemain was my mother and I was the only one who could fight her; that she was coming for me and wanted to kill me, to take my power. I didn’t want power. None of this seemed real. It felt like I was trapped in a nightmare.

I grew up hearing stories, meant to lull the children of Ironton to sleep, about a lost fae princess who walked the woods at night, crying and lost, until one day, a faery prince with shimmering wings swooped down to carry her back to his castle. They fell in love instantly, and she never felt lost again. Because she was exactly where she was supposed to be.

Did Finean make that up, too?

It was a romantic fantasy, but reality was far different. If I was the lost princess, I had been lost for a very long time. There was no faery prince to save the day, just the broken people around me. There were no beautiful fae castles. Only ruin, monsters, decay and death, and innocent fae turned into beasts.

And then there was me. Capable of such horrible things.

It was too much.

I couldn’t sit there and look at the faery I killed for a second longer.

I pushed to my feet and walked stiffly away. Loftin followed behind, but gave me space. He was watching over me still, but I had no doubt where we stood now. I was his iron.

* * *

LOFTIN

The Leancan had recovered and silently escorted us back to the ruined palace of the Spring Court. But I wasn’t ready to go into the darkness again. Not until she understood that she was the light.

I decided to tell her how Nemain came to power, how she was born and then taken away. And then about my father’s role in all this.

Karis stared at me, giving me her full attention.

“After Winter fell, my father, in an attempt to save our court from her wrath, went to Nemain and tried to form an alliance with her, promising to help find you, even if it meant betraying the other courts. In the end, it bought our people some time, but not much. He watched from a safe distance as she tore apart the Spring Court, and noticed that some fae were running away and then disappearing altogether. He saw Finean taking whomever he could through a mirror in the woods. Finean begged Father to go with him, and disclosed that the mirror led to safety, but Father refused.”

Her lips parted. “Your father told Nemain?” she guessed.

“He did. He shattered the glass to stop Finean and presumably stay in Nemain’s good graces. When the battle of the Spring Court was over, she came to him to see if he’d sensed you within that court. That’s when he told her about Finean. In that moment, she knew who had stolen you and where you had been taken. Even though she knew you weren’t hidden away in the remaining courts – Summer or Autumn –she shredded them anyway. The Court of Summer fell next, followed quickly by Autumn.”

“Your father must have been terrified.”

“He was. We all were. We’d seen and felt what she was capable of,” I recounted quietly. “She always assumed the rulers of the four Seasonal Courts knew who had hidden you and where. In the end, it didn’t matter that Father tried to help her and had forsaken the other fae rulers to do so. She wanted to wipe the courts off the map and build her own world. That was her goal all along, since she consumed her sisters.”

“Why couldn’t Nemain get into Ironton?”

“She couldn’t get into any of the cities with the magical dome walls. Finean may have taken you there and glamoured you, but you hid yourself. Your magic created the dome. The smoke that swirls inside came from you, Karis, and yours is the only magic Nemain has never been able to take. She can’t break through your magic because you’re stronger than she is. That’s how I know – how we all know – that you’re our only hope.”

Water pooled in her eyes, threatening to spill. “What about before the wall? What did the humans do?”

“Nemain didn’t unleash the Unseelie until after you were taken away from her. She used them to try to hunt you down, and against anyone who stood in her way,” I elaborated.

She glanced at the ceiling, contemplating. “What do you know about Finean?”

“Finean’s power lies in reflections, like mirrors. He can make identical images, multiplying them. He created the illusion of a magical dome over each of the human cities so Nemain wouldn’t see Ironton as an anomaly. But your power was so intense, each wall was as strong as the rest. Your power brought his illusions to life.”

“He told me that.”

“It was wicked, but brilliant. He multiplied your power, kept the human populations safe from Nemain, and at the same time, made a safe haven for what Seelie he could save. Ones he could rule. I don’t know if he told you this, but there’s a hidden city. From Faery, it just looks like another human village, but inside there are Seelie who managed to escape Nemain’s wrath. Some fled before she attacked, and others merely managed to survive or weren’t present when she came for them.”

“The Court of Reflections,” she declared, the tears falling onto her cheeks and running down to her chin.

I nodded. “The Court of Reflections, where Finean has made himself King. He’s only ever wanted power, Karis. Not unlike your mother. That’s why I said he was – is – dangerous.”

“And he’s also cruel. I know you don’t see it, but he is. We knew Nemain was coming, but didn’t know when she would strike. I’d reached out to Finean, but he refused to let anyone from Autumn enter the Court of Reflections. My father shattered his trust and the trust of every fae from the other courts.”

“It wasn’t your people’s fault,” she argued.

“No, it wasn’t, but the damage was done. Tension and emotions were high, and Finean couldn’t risk another betrayal. I understand why he refused to open the door, Karis.”

She pressed her palm against her chest. “How’d you escape?”

“Against my father’s orders, I led a group to the city to try to beg Finean to let my people in. He refused to even hear me out. Eventually, we had no choice but to turn back. The attack occurred while we were gone.”

Her eyes widened. “You found your court torn apart and your father…dead, but not dead?”

“Yes,” I replied softly. “Nemain slowly hunted every Seelie fae she could find who’d escaped her. Most were from Autumn. I never knew she’d turned them into Unseelie beasts. I thought she killed them. There were a few of us who lived in the woods, constantly moving. Other hunters. As the land died, it became more and more difficult to survive. There was a bounty on your head the moment she found out you were missing, and every one of us searched for you in the hope that if she got you back, she’d stop tearing Faery apart.

“Every midsummer, we waited for the humans to leave the cities, just in case one time, you would step out of the safety. But without a bargain struck with her, there wasn’t a guarantee Nemain would even let the hunter who found you walk free. It was common knowledge that she would make bargains with anyone brave enough to suffer her wrath if they failed. I think most of the hunters before me had given up. They tried to find you, but in the end, they weren’t really searching for the lost princess. They were searching for death.”

She was quiet for a moment. When her eyes flicked to mine, I thought I might crumble. “Did you go to her looking for the same thing?” she asked tentatively.

“No. One of her Banshees found me in the Winter Court. I couldn’t feel her chill and she caught me off guard. I wasn’t expecting it, but had no choice but to search for you. I sure as hell didn’t expect to find you.”

“But you did,” she wailed, tears welling again. “You were never helping me, and now Iric is probably dead because of it.”

My betrayal rocked her to the core, and the reverberation clanged through my own heart and soul.

“If it makes any difference, I didn’t have a choice. Her Banshee caught me and dragged me to Nemain. My only hope was that she’d make a deal, and since it was a one in a billion chance I’d find you, I made it just in case. I’m sorry.”

I knew it wasn’t enough. It would never be enough.

“If he dies, I’ll never forgive you or myself for trusting you.”

“I understand if you don’t, but please believe me when I say that you shouldn’t trust Finean either. He’s as deadly as the Asper on your arm and twice as sly.”

With pain glistening in her eyes, she entered the catacombs and didn’t look back.