And then the words fall from my lips, quiet and certain. “A human cannot make a bargain with a fae.”
Sira’s command echoes in my mind.Turn that wretch under my control into a human.
She didn’t say my son. She didn’t say Caspian.
That wretch under my control.
One of the first lessons I learned in the Vale. One the Prince of Thorns taught me.It pays to be specific in bargains.
My heart stutters.
If a fae is made human…
They can’t be bound anymore.
My breath catches.
We don’t have to stop my mother’s magic. We don’t even have to stop Sira.
We just have to stop the bargain.
I snap my gaze to her, my mother, Queen of the Vale, drowning in her own magic. She meets my eyes through the glow.
I scream the only truth that can save us. “A human cannot make a bargain with a fae!”
Her lips part. Her throat bobs.
All my life, we’ve been apart. But do we think the same?Understand. Please understand.
The queen closes her eyes.
And turns the magic on herself.
“No!” Sira screams, but it’s too late.
The light arcs, twisting and bending like a serpent devouring its own tail. It slams into my mother’s chest, and she jerks back, arms flung wide, mouth open in a silent cry.
And I take a moment to realize what a sacrifice this is. My mother, one of the few fae left of the Above, the most powerful fae in the Vale, sacrificing her magic to save us.
Her shining chestnut hair dulls to a mousy brown. The gold flecks in her eyes twinkle out. And her pointed, regal ears blur at the edges, curl in. The simple iron band wrapped around the ring finger of her right hand cracks in half, then plummets to the floor.
Her power vanishes. I feel it drain from the air as if someone’s stolen the moon.
She falls to the ground like a petal from a dying flower.
77
Caspian
They’re gone.
I can’t feel them anymore.
My thorns, my beautiful purple thorns, that for so long have felt like an extension of my own self. Who I am.
The Prince of Thorns.
Without them, who am I?
