An explosion rocked the ground.
My knees hit the floor, ears ringing. Someone yanked me up, pulling me back towards the blast. I was already starting to strike when a woman’s voice hissed in my ear, “I’m helping you.”
The smoke finally cleared enough for me to realize what was happening.
Syrizen. More than a dozen of them, stepping out of the air as if surging through invisible doors. One grabbed Max and yanked him away from the fighting — others stood with Sammerin, Nura, Eslyn. More still flickered from nothingness. There was so much blood on the ground that my feet slipped against the pier floorboards.
“Hold on,” the Syrizen said into my ear.
“The ship—” I started.
I didn’t get to finish. The world unraveled, and we were gone.
The sudden silence was deafening. The next thing I knew, my knees were on the ground, wet not with blood but with dew from damp grass, my palms pressed to the earth.
“She fucking burned me!” an aggravated-sounding voice was saying.
“She wouldn’t have if you’d given us a little warning,” Eslyn’s voice grumbled back. “I was two seconds away from taking Vivian’s head off myself.”
I turned my head. Max was beside me, also crouched in the grass. He’d barely scrambled to his hands and knees before he looked to me.
“Are you alright?” he panted, and I nodded.
I pushed myself to my feet and turned to the Syrizen. The one who had saved me, a blond woman with freckled cheeks, was sneering at a dark wound on her wrist. My fault, apparently.
“The ship,” I said. “The refugees were brought back with us—”
“We have the ship,” she said, a little impatiently. “We sent a few Syrizen there, too. They’re bringing it down the coast. Was this really necessary? It’s—”
“Why are we here?”
There was something in Max’s voice that made my head whip around. He had risen to his feet, and now stood completely still, all color drained from his face, eyes locked straight ahead.
For the first time, I noticed our surroundings.
Before us was a mansion. It was beautiful, the exterior crafted of smooth, white stone, covered with gold-plated decorations and sculpture. Gold columns lined its front, cradling a wrought-iron balcony that extended across the whole exterior, breaking only to make way for the massive set of white, arched doors at its entrance. We stood beyond its gates — massive, extravagant things befitting the property that they protected — and a bronze lion stared down at us appraisingly.
Beyond the mansion were mountains. I could barely make out a wall, dotted with large, square buildings, in the distance. Forts, perhaps.
I knew this place.
I knew it, even though I had never been here. Knew it, and couldn’t place it.
I felt Reshaye shift through my thoughts, as if unnerved.
{It has been many days,} it whispered, {since I have seen this place.}
A Syrizen stood at the center of the gates. She was wearing a red sash, wrapped around her waist and pinned to her shoulders so it flowed down her back. She was older than most Syrizen, her hair grey-streaked and bound tightly.
“Come,” she said. “The king wishes to see you.”
The king?
“The king?” Sammerin said.
Even he looked unnerved, eyes slightly wide as he stared at the building before us.
Max looked as if he wasn’t even breathing.
“Why are we here?” he said again.
“The king will explain everything,” the Syrizen said, lightly. “Come.”
“I’m not going in there.”
Max turned his gaze to me, his jaw set and eyes bright with fury, and all at once, the memories flooded over me.
Max’s memories.
Memories of dark-haired siblings running to meet him here, at these gates. Memories of his father’s grin and his mother’s embrace.
Memories of Reshaye’s rage, and their corpses.
All here, in this house.
We were in Korvius. Max’s childhood home.
Anserra tilted her chin towards Max.
“He said that you wouldn’t like being here,” she said. “And to tell you that the sooner you come speak to him, the sooner you can leave.”
Max stared forward with a jaw set so rigid it trembled.
“He?” The word rolled out between clenched teeth.
And it was Nura who answered as she stepped past us. “Who else?” she muttered. “Zeryth fucking Aldris.”
Chapter Four
Aefe
Once upon a time, I was a princess.
I was just a child then, of course. Too young to know better than to wear that power — that safety — carelessly. Like most children, I saw my circumstances as constant and unmoving. I did not question whether I deserved what I had. I did not question whether I could lose it.
But then, I’d have no reason to think such a thing. I was the Teirness of the House of Obsidian, the heir to the greatest power in the greatest house of all the Fey nations. If there was anything to make one feel untouchable, it would be that. I lived in a beautiful room crafted of polished black stone, high at the top of the cliffs that housed the House of Obsidian, and I’d look out over the most incredible view and take it all for granted.
I lived so far above the ground, and it never even occurred to me to look down.
For ten years, I lived that way — gluttonous on comfort and power and, above all, love. Now, it seemed like a whole other world, a cruel dream invented by a lonely mind. Perhaps it was a dream, because when it ended, it ended fast, like snapping awake to a crack of lightning.
It was all stolen time, anyway. I never should have held that title. My blood was tainted, cursed. Unsuitable.
One night, I went to sleep the Teirness, and I woke up with my father’s hands around my throat. Perhaps he should have killed me that night, for what I am. But instead of taking my life, he took my title.
What had amazed me the most was how simple it had been. By morning my sister occupied all the spaces of my old life, as if one princess could be seamlessly substituted
