Sylvia’s eyes were still hazy, so it didn’t take much guessing to surmise what had happened. Why Sylvia had let Blaise out.
At first I’d been thrilled—not that Abra had obviously sent a human in Blaise’s path to cause her to fall, probably in some sick, twisted attempt to make me despise Blaise, to make me see in her what I detest within myself—but that it hadn’t worked. Temptation had been dangled in front of Blaise—a willing victim, entranced underneath the compulsion of Blaise’s bloodlust.
Yet Blaise had endured.
The elation, the pride, was quickly crippled by dread, however.
Because if Blaise can control herself, that means she’s ready to go out on her own.
She doesn’t need me anymore.
I suppose it should have been a happy thing. In another world, it would have been.
But I am a fool, and Blaise isn’t the only one of us who’s lied to the other.
She thinks there’s a chance I’ll be able to leave someday. She thinks if the queen was willing to make a bargain with me about the parasite, surely she’d make another. Perhaps if we found another trace of the Old Magic, the queen will free Zora, then I can leave with them.
Blaise is wrong.
She doesn’t know what I’ve done. The bargain I struck as she slept.
It’s not that I doubt Blaise would stay with me. That she’d shackle herself to my Fate and live out the rest of her days as a prisoner to the queen, just to be with me.
It’s that I know she would.
She proved as much when she let me perform the ritual on her, thinking it would kill her, just so I could have my sister back.
Blaise will ruin herself for me if I let her; and I simply can’t let her.
And if Blaise needs to hate me to gain her freedom, then I can live with that.
CHAPTER 46
BLAISE
It’s still daylight. I know because I peeled back a thick curtain just far enough to scald my finger.
The queen might have released me, but there’s no getting out of here until nightfall.
I’m still wiping the stinging tears from my cheeks, replaying Nox’s words in my mind, when the guards find me wandering the halls.
They bring me a letter, sealed in wax the color of blood that drips across the parchment, not yet entirely dried.
It’s from the queen, who requests a meeting with me in the throne room.
Something about the way the fae guards take note of the covered windows in the hall tells me I don’t have much of a choice.
I’m not sure what I was expecting from the queen’s throne room. Probably a looming space akin to my dungeon cell, just cleaner and without streaks of dust lining every surface in the room. The rank of mildew absent. A looming throne instead of a menacing dais.
But when I arrive in the throne room, I’m struck with the sudden urge to suck in a breath.
Even I can admit the throne room is magnificent.
Its vaulted ceilings bubble with carved stone arches, each beset with scenes of battles of beasts with threatening fangs and silvery-painted fur.
The entire room has a greenish aura about it, and I realize windows have been cut into the ceiling, allowing the light of the aurora to waft into the vast chamber.
It seems I could have waited out the sunset.
Cutting across the floor is a serpentine river of ice that eddies out near the throne, giving the illusion of a spiderweb cast across the floor. The surface of the ice reflects the greenish light, causing it to cast its eerily beautiful rays of light across the entire room.
The throne itself looks to be made of silver, with snowflakes smattering its shining facade.
Upon it sits the queen atop a pillow red as blood, the only contrast to the light flooding the room.
She glows with the very radiance of the night sky, and once again I’m struck by her unnatural beauty.
The striking bit isn’t as much admiration as it is curiosity, and for the first time I wonder if the queen’s face is truly hers. If it’s the face she’s always borne.
The fae have this annoying tendency to be perfectly symmetrical, but there’s something about the queen’s face that…well, isn’t.
I never noticed it before, not with my human eyesight, but her left eye is the slightest bit wider than the right, her nose just barely crooked to the side.
It has me wondering if all of the fae are this way, and I simply lacked the faculties to realize it before I Turned.
I suppose this isn’t the sort of thing I should be concerning myself with as I face the female I’m certain is about to end me.
But if this is the end, I suppose considering the facial structure of the fae is just as useful a topic as any.
