He opens his eyes as the glow around his hands fade. “I can’t rouse her, though there’s nothing wrong with her. There’s a… silence within her. An emptiness.”
Thiago never reveals his vulnerability in company, but the muscle in his jaw tightens.
“There are more,” says the guard, who lowers his friend to the ground. “They’re all like this. Just… asleep.”
Lucere’s expression tightens, but I meet her eyes.
“Not one of my fae gifts,” I point out.
“What could have done this?” Kyrian demands.
Corvin kneels beside their guard. “Our guards are warded against mental attacks.” He tugs a leather thong from within the guard’s tunic. “They all carry a crystal that should protect them.”
There’s nothing on the end of the strip of leather. Just a shard of fractured obsidian.
I straighten slowly. A fire could be a coincidence. An untended candle. The phoenix feather finally igniting.
But this….
“This was an attack.”
A flash of cold fury crosses the Prince of Ravens’s face.
“If you don’t wake up, then I’ll kiss you, Eris,” Finn whispers in her ear. “I swear I will.”
I keep waiting for her to shove him out of the way with a grimace, but there’s… nothing.
“I don’t think I’ve ever wanted her to punch me so badly in my life,” Finn growls, sitting back on his heels. Cupping his hands behind his head, he lifts his eyes. “She’s not harmed. She’s not suffering. She’s simply been sent to sleep.”
“There’s only one fae who could have done this.” I hear the cold tremor in Thiago’s voice as he brushes Eris’s hair out of her face.
Lucere and I both look at each other, and for a second, all I see is a crown princess who’s struggling to hold on to her country in the midst of a brewing war.
“Queen Maren of Aska,” I whisper. “My mother’s ally and the Queen of Nightmares.”
Chapter Fourteen
“I cannot help thinking it seems awfully convenient,” Lucere growls, pacing the floor before the fireplace in her rooms. “You come here demanding an alliance with Ravenal, citing that the queen of Asturia will ruin us all, and when I tell you she’s offered us peace, this happens. Half my library is burned, a full company of guards falls into a dreamless slumber, and now you’re trying to tell me this is an attack by Queen Maren.”
“She’s the only one who has the power to do this,” I point out. Eris still hasn’t woken, though Finn’s chosen to sit by her bed. “I served at her court for two years. I know what she can do. Queen Maren is the nightmare we all pretend we can’t see, and Eris’s wards were—”
“Impenetrable,” Thiago says, and the quiet menace in his voice alarms me.
We both look at him.
He’s shaking his head at me. “Even if Queen Maren did attack us here, she couldn’t have gotten through Eris’s wards by herself. They were laid by thirteen of the finest of our sorcerers after the Battle of Nevernight.”
Lucere’s lip curls. “To contain that vicious creat—”
“If you dare finish that sentence,” Thiago tells her, his voice growing rough-edged with fury, “then you will not merely be a morsel caught between the jaws of Asturia and Aska, you will face me, here and now. Eris is my finest general. She has served the Alliance faithfully for nearly five hundred years. And she is one of mine.”
“Manners, Luce,” the Prince of Ravens purrs, though he’s barely deigned to join the conversation thus far. Lying on the daybed near the window, he strokes a white cat that wears a black leather collar. “As exciting as it would be to see the two of you shred pieces off each other, Ravenal’s already bled enough, hasn’t it? Great-grandmother is dead, war is brewing, and now someone set half the castle on fucking fire. We don’t have time to play games.” He arches a brow at Thiago. “We all know what your general can do. And we all know where Maren’s gifts lie. The only possible way Maren managed to do this is if she was wielding the Dreamthief’s Mirror.”
“That’s a myth,” Lucere snaps.
“No, it’s not,” says a quiet voice near the fireplace.
Imerys hasn’t said a word since we all retreated to Lucere’s private chambers, but despite the paleness of her skin and the streaks of ash that dull her blue-black hair, she drags the cold compress from her face and stares at her sister. “The Mirror exists. It was one of the great relics, created to trap the Dreamthief himself.”
“The great relics?” I can’t help myself. “You know of the great relics?”
“With it, you can access the Dreamthief’s powers,” Imerys replies. “You can control him, even as he lies bound within the Hallow.”
Prince Corvin straightens, looking dangerous in black leather with a cloak of pure raven feathers. “If Maren has the mirror, then she’s more dangerous than any of us can predict. She can steal into our dreams, she can trap us in endless nightmares, and even if we were to somehow fight off sleep, she can send us into the dream world in an instant.” He looks at Thiago. “And nobody knows how long it will take for them to wake. Or if they will wake.”
“What do we do?” Lucere asks.
“I told you what you needed to do last night,” Thiago replies. “The only way to defeat Adaia and Maren is for the three of us—Kyrian, you, and myself—to join—"
“Join what?” she demands. “Your war? Ravenal is finally free of my great-grandmother’s clutches! We have years of rebuilding to do. There’s barely anything left of the kingdom as it is, and—”
“There won’t be anything of it left if you allow Adaia to march in and burn it.”
“You and your fucking wife will drag us all into ruin!” she suddenly hisses. “Did you ever think of that when you first claimed Iskvien as your wife? Did you even give a
