“Get up.” Mother steps over him and sweeps toward me as if she didn’t just threaten to cut his eye out, right in front of me. “Get up and straighten your skirts. You are my daughter and you will not appear before Maren looking like some slovenly slattern.”
I can barely breathe, but somehow my body pushes itself to its feet. I move like a puppet on her strings.
There has to be some way out of this mess.
I can’t just give in.
I won’t.
But… how?
I’ll sign the contracts, I promised. But I never said I’d marry him.
The world slows down around me as I lift my gaze to my mother.
She wants me to learn how to be manipulative?
She wants me to learn to play the game?
So be it. It’s a heady, unbalancing thought. I don’t even know what I can do, but now it feels like there are options out there if I can just find them.
“What am I supposed to do with him?” Edain calls, reminding us both of Finn’s presence.
Mother stills, casting the stranger a hard look.
“I urge a cautious response,” Edain tells her. “Finn can still be useful to us. Perhaps Evernight won’t pay your price for him, but the prince is known to be loyal to his men. If he wants his little pet back, then he’ll have to agree to some sort of arrangement.”
“Fuck you.” This Finn spits a bloodied gobbet of spittle at Edain and bares blood-stained teeth in a smile.
Edain tears a silk square from his pocket and wipes the blood off his hand and shirt. “Careful now. We’re bartering with your life, and I seem to be the only one who gives a damn if you live or die.”
“Kill me then. I’ll die for my prince here and now if it will spare him your trap.”
The loyalty in this Finn’s eyes steals my breath, because nobody in my mother’s court would ever offer their life for her like that.
“Throw him back in his cage,” Mother finally says, before her fingers dig into my wrist. “I care not. If Evernight can be brought to heel, then I will have him grovel at my feet. Right now….” She wrenches me cruelly toward the door flap of the tent. “My daughter and I go to greet the queen of Ravenal and pay her respects.” Her fingers leave cruel marks on my arm. “And she will be signing a marriage contract today.”
7
Iskvien
If Mother was surprised by my smile when I greeted Maren, and the easy grace with which I signed my name to a marriage contract between Aska and Asturia, there’s no sign of it on her face as she leads us into the heart of the Hallow.
I keep waiting for the lash to fall but it occurs to me that the reason she doesn’t suspect something devious in my heart is because I’ve never dared openly defy her before.
She thinks me cowed.
We climb toward the Hallow.
It’s a nexus point where leylines meet, and we used it to arrive here yesterday morning. The power of the Hallow can be used as a portal, except one is bound by the leylines. You can only travel to another nexus point, another Hallow.
It’s also the place where the Seelie Alliance meets whilst at the queensmoot, and there is to be a gathering of the heads of the alliance.
The gently sloping hill is capped with ruins, with the Hallow right in the center. It’s a sacred place and to spill blood here is forbidden. Each queen is allowed to bring five guards only, and the space around the Hallow has been cleared for two hundred yards around it so that any threat can be seen coming.
The enormous standing stones of the Hallow cast ominous shadows as we walk between them.
Some still bear lintels; enormous wedges of stone somehow hauled on top of a pair of sentinel stones. Other lintel stones lie cracked and shattered at their feet. Some of the scholars at the Akvaran University in Aska have tried to study this Hallow, and believe they’ve found the quarry where the stone came from—nearly a hundred miles away from this place.
Nobody has been able to fathom how the otherkin who once ruled this world managed to get those stones into place. Their tools were primitive, their magics bound to the Hallows and their gods. And yet the floor of this particular Hallow is polished slate so smooth it almost seems like an obsidian mirror. Bronze glyphs are etched into the stone, and research has proven that on certain nights of the year, moonlight will spill through little holes in the sentinel stones to create a perfect circle of moonlight on each glyph.
It wasn’t just a portal to the otherkin.
It wasn’t just a place of worship and sacrifice.
It was also a calendar of all the celestial events, and right now, the little circle of moonlight lights up the glyph that corresponds with Lammastide—or as some of the Askans refer to it, Lughnasadh.
Five golden thrones have been brought into the Hallow.
We’re the last to arrive.
“Greetings, Adaia,” calls Queen Maren, her smooth dark hair tumbling in a silken fall over her shoulders. A black crown circles her head, the points akin to a spear. She’s rumored to be the most beautiful woman in the world, and if she’s not, then she’s very close to the top of the list.
Lucidia of Ravenal slouches in her chair, looking irritable. She clutches a shawl around her shoulders as if she feels the cold, and maybe she does, because age is starting to settle over her face and hair like a mantle. The fae live for enviously long centuries, but Lucidia has taken that first step toward the grave.
It doesn’t make her any less dangerous.
She squints in our direction. “You’re late.”
“My apologies.” My mother leads us toward the throne in front of the Asturian standard. “I had a little… issue to deal with within my camp.”
“One can believe that,” says a deep, masculine voice that
