Chapter 33

I’d grown accustomed to the bone-chilling sleet that had accompanied me since I woke in Faerie. I was not prepared for a full-on blizzard, but that’s what awaited us through the doorway.

The throne room was a blur of white. A howling wind tore around the room, pelting me with wet snow from every direction. Fae huddled in clusters around the door, snow piling up on their hunched shoulders and bowed heads. Sleagh Maith and lesser fae alike clung to one another, fear all but radiating off their trembling forms. But as close as they were to the door, they didn’t move, didn’t dare bolt. Some sense of self-preservation telling them that the first to move wouldn’t be moving for long.

And the reason for all that fear raged in the center of the storm. The queen, sword in hand, stalked across the center of the room, raving in one of the fae languages. A body at her feet.

Dark blood stained the hem of her gown, splashes of the blood dotting the tattered garment up to her high waistline. More blood soaked into the icy snow all around the body, like the nightmare version of a snow cone.

The queen whirled around as we entered. More blood had spattered her pale skin, momentarily distracting me from the madness burning in her eyes. Until that gaze landed on me like a hot iron in the blizzard.

“You.” She pointed the sword at me, and I froze. “Are you satisfied now? I’ve killed him. I. Killed. Him.”

I glanced at the body again, I couldn’t help it, couldn’t stop myself. It was at an angle, the face turned away from me, blood mixing with hair that glistened even in the storm. I couldn’t positively identify the bloody shape from this angle. Not by sight. But by her words, I knew who it had to be.

Ryese.

Relief flooded through me, despite the queen’s growing rage, but something nagged at my senses. I tried to chalk it up to the drug, or my exhaustion, or maybe the impending hypothermia, but it persisted, drawing my eye back toward the body even as the queen stomped through the mounds of ice and snow, straight toward me.

Ryese wore a flamboyant court outfit, similar to how he’d dressed at the ball when I’d first met him. The shirt with its frilled collar and sleeves was soaked in blood all across the chest and up over the shoulder, but the flowy sleeve closest to me was hardly touched. Despite that, blood coated his palm.

Blood that hadn’t been there when I’d last seen him.

It was possible that he’d touched his own blood as he died, but Falin had said seeing Ryese’s bloody hands would likely be the only way the queen would believe he could be behind the plot against her. She’d killed him before I even presented what I’d learned. Something had changed her mind.

I peeled back my shield, gazing across layers of reality.

The body changed. A soul glowed from within, but the form was no longer Ryese. The form slimmed and curved into feminine lines. The hair darkened to a chestnut brown, twined with bits of mistletoe.

Maeve.

I saw both images overlapping. The glamour that wrapped the dead fae kept trying to push forward, make itself true. I’d seen fae disguised with glamour inside Faerie before. While Faerie tended to accept strong glamour and make it part of its reality, it couldn’t change a sentient being from one thing or person to another, but this one was trying to in a way glamour never should have done.

Which I guessed meant Ryese had finally given the queen enough Glitter that her fears were taking form. She stalked forward, clearly unaware that she’d slaughtered her council member by mistake.

But if the butchered form in the middle of the courtroom wasn’t Ryese, he was still in the court. Still waiting to spring his trap.

Someone in the huddled mass of fae straightened, and Faerie buckled, a new gash tearing open in reality. It felt like something cut straight through the magic of Faerie, draining it away in the areas it touched. And I could think of only one thing that would do that.

Iron.

The queen was still striding toward me, sword pointed at my heart. Falin had edged forward, not quite putting himself between us, but trying to draw her attention. The wound in Faerie grew.

I had no special fear of iron. It hurt when touched, and I knew it was dangerous, but I wasn’t afraid of it. Which meant, this wasn’t likely my drug-addled imagination.

It was Ryese’s trap.

A hooded figure lifted a small blowpipe loaded with what had to be an iron dart. My first instinct was to yell to Falin. But even as the warning rose in my throat, I realized what Ryese had meant when he’d said I was Falin’s weakness: it wasn’t that I was the key to defeating Falin, but that Falin would defend me. He stood now, in front of half the court, between the queen and me. Everyone was watching them, watching him lift his blades to a defensive position to fend off her sword.

And when Ryese’s iron dart took the queen in the chest, all would assume Falin had turned on the queen. In one blow, Ryese would take out both queen and knight.

My scream of warning still only just beginning to bubble out of my throat, I dove forward, tackling the queen like a demented linebacker. The move was sloppy, but she wasn’t expecting it, and I knocked her off her feet, taking her to the ground.

Heat exploded across my back as I felt Faerie rip apart in the space we’d occupied. The queen hit a snowdrift with a loud ooaf, her sword dropping beside her. I landed on top of her, and tried to roll away, but dizziness exploded in my head, filling my vision with dancing black dots.

“What is the meaning of this, planeweaver?” the queen bellowed, but she wasn’t doing much better at regaining her feet than I had.

I couldn’t catch my breath, couldn’t even get close. “Ryese,” I managed to get out between wheezes. “Iron.”

“Impossible. I killed my nephew with my own hands.”

I shook my head. “Glitter,” I said, not sure she’d understand. But Falin would. Then I turned, trying to touch the burning line radiating across my shoulder blades. My gloves came away with a thin band of blood. My blood.

The dart had grazed me, nothing more, but the pain clawed at my back, the burn much more than was warranted by the grazing cut.

A cut made by an iron dart.

Shit.

Iron disrupted Faerie’s magic. It could kill a fae exposed to it for too long. In the mortal realm, touching it cut off a fae’s connection to Faerie, and drained the life-sustaining magic from their body. What happened to an already fading fae?

I had the feeling I already knew. I was so exhausted. So cold. I hurt, and not just my back. As if the iron had poisoned my very blood, the pain traveled through me like daggers dragged against my skin. And the two Deaths kept yelling at me. Or were there three now? Yes, a new one had appeared, telling me it was time for him to take my soul. At least he didn’t scream.

I could curl up in a ball in the snow and let go. Give in to the fuzzy feeling in my head, close my eyes, and sleep.

But no, if I did that, what would happen to Rianna? To Ms. B? The garden gnome? No, I had to get up. To do . . . something.

Thoughts were getting harder to string into coherent ideas. I needed to stop Ryese. I needed the queen to grant me a tie to Faerie. I needed to protect Falin. I needed to make Faerie stop screaming. . . .

That last one made me stop. The Deaths were screaming. Some of the gathered fae—those not frozen in shock—were screaming. But Faerie itself wasn’t, was it?

Not exactly, but it was in pain. I could feel it, sense the pain in unraveling layers of reality.

The dart.

I could feel the trail it had sliced through Faerie. More than that, I could feel the disturbance it still made, like a festering wound, blistering reality around it. The blowgun Ryese had smuggled the iron into Faerie in must have had some hard-core spells on it, because the iron hadn’t been doing this much damage before. Now the layers of reality felt like they were withering.

I twisted, looking for the projectile, and beside me, the queen sucked in a breath.

“Planeweaver, what? No. Someone send for a healer.” She reached for me, but her hand stopped before she touched the bare skin on my shoulder.

Falin stepped closer, his eyes wide, fear reflecting in his gaze. Then his jaw clenched and he whirled around, marching through the huddled fae and shoving them aside.

I couldn’t see the graze the dart had cut across my back, but it was barely bleeding, and couldn’t have been much more than a scratch. Still, I twisted, trying see what they saw. Unfortunately, I could. Gray tendrils spread under my skin, crawling over my shoulder.

Iron poisoning.

I stared at the graying skin. The third Death, the one that wasn’t yelling, knelt beside me.

“It’s time, Alex,” he said, holding out his hand.

I looked from him to my shoulder and then back. “You’re still not real.”

With that, I concentrated on searching for the dart again. The blisters in reality were right in front of me. It had to be in that snowdrift.

Behind me, I heard a loud yelp, and I twisted around in time to see Falin’s hand clasp around the throat of a fae. He hauled the fae off the ground, one-handed, and the fae’s hood fall back to reveal Ryese’s crystalline hair.

“Don’t kill him, my knight,” the queen said, an edge of panic in her voice as she pushed herself out of the snow. “I killed him once already today. I can’t see it again.”

Rational or not, desperate or not, a command was a command, and Falin’s killing dagger thrust stopped, inches from Ryese’s chest. The man in his arms sagged, a smug smile slithering across Ryese’s face. Oh no, he wasn’t just walking away from this.

I thrust my hand into the snowdrift, searching. More than the feel of something harder than snow, it was the sudden stabbing pain that rushed down my fingers, even through my gloves, that told me I’d found the dart. Trying to insulate it with inches of snow, I scooped it out.

The dart looked innocuous enough. Just a bit of thin, dull metal no longer than my pinkie nail. But it was far from harmless. If Ryese had managed a clean shot at the queen, and she had died, the small dart could have easily been missed, the blame for her unknown cause of death easily falling on her feared bloody hands.

Patting it into the center of a small snowball like a deadly core, I climbed to my feet. Then I had to wait a moment as my vision swam. I braced my feet, trying to avoid crashing back to my butt in the snow. Deep breath. Two.

“Falin,” I yelled.

He stopped, looking up from where he was in the process of dragging Ryese in front of the queen. The slighter man thrashed in Falin’s grasp, the smugness now absent from his face as more and more bloody, dead versions of himself appeared around the queen. For her part, the queen seemed to have forgotten everything but the multiplying bodies, her distress feeding the drug and hallucinations.

“Catch,” I yelled, tossing the snowball to Falin as gently as I could. It still crumbled as he caught it, but the dart remained cushioned in a small layer of snow.

I’d been working without a plan, thinking only that the dart needed to get back inside the dampening effect of the blowgun.

Falin had other ideas.

He drove the thin bit of metal into Ryese’s palm. The other fae screamed, the sound a high-pitched cry of pain and fear.

The skin around the dart immediately darkened, the glow in his skin dampening. Whereas the tendrils crawling under my flesh were a cloudy gray, his spread out in ink-black lines. Falin had once told me he’d been switched during infancy so that he’d not only learn about the human world, but also gain some resistance to all the metals, especially iron, found in mortal reality. I’d also grown up outside of Faerie, so I had some resistance as well. But Ryese was a pampered noble, and the iron poisoning shot through his flesh, creating an elaborate spiderweb of darkness across Ryese’s palm.

“I’m removing this poison from our court,” Falin told the queen as he hauled the howling man to his feet.

The queen’s fevered gaze swept over Ryese, taking in the darkness spreading over his skin. Then she nodded and leaned closer. “If you are alive, my favorite nephew, blood of my blood, my Ryese, then you are banished from this court and all my territory. As long as I rule here, no door will open for you in winter. Here witness it, all of you.”

Ryese’s pitiful cries took on a new level of frenzy, but the words had the ring of a binding oath to them, and I felt the magic of Faerie shift, acknowledging the queen’s proclamation even as the huddled fae murmured their witness to her words. Falin gave no heed to the other fae’s pleading, but dragged him to where two winter guards stood waiting.

“See him to the edge of our territory in the mortal realm,” he told the guards. They nodded, and then hauled Ryese out of the room. As soon as he passed through the doorway, the sound of his cries fell off abruptly.

Falin turned back toward me. I tried to smile at him, because we’d won. The alchemist had been caught and dealt with. The queen couldn’t deny me my tie to Faerie now. But my face seemed frozen, unable to respond to my prompting.

I realized I wasn’t cold anymore. I didn’t even hurt, though the gray tendrils were now circling down to my elbow. All I felt was tired. So very bone-weary tired.

I tried to sit, not caring that the only place to do so was the snow, but my legs gave out halfway down and I crashed onto my butt. I didn’t even have enough energy to yell.

I lay where I fell, my eyes fluttering closed. The last things I saw were the three Deaths hovering over me. Then the world went dark.