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The pills she’d made to poison Dyonisia—the ones we had planned to give to Kitterfol Lexington so he could slip them to her—still sat in a jar like glittering, nearly translucent pearls, strapped to her dresser with rope. Unused. Untouched.
“Coen?” Nara urged again, glancing down at the bag. “Where were you?”
“Pliyith,” I finally answered through steadying breaths.
“Did Pliyith become desert overnight?” Barberro rose from a chair in the corner where he’d been cradling the stump of his arm. He nodded at the sweat I knew was pouring down my face. “Because Barberro did not know one person could create so much bodily fluid.” He lowered his voice. “And that includes Nara when I…”
“That’s quite enough.” Nara raised herself on tiptoe to bop Barberro’s head. “What is this, Coen? Why were you in the human territories?”
“When I was in a meeting with Her Majesty the other day, she mentioned the metals that the humans possess in bulk… specifically the ones that counteract or disrupt our magic in some way, like iron—” I pulled an ornate shield with a metal rim from the bag. “Steel.” I pulled out a sheathed dagger. “And lead.” I pulled out a single cone-shaped piece of metal that fit in the palm of my hand.
Nara gasped at that last one. Small amounts of iron ran in our blood alongside bascite, tugging on our magic the same way the moon kept the tide rolling, so the shield wasn’t as big of a shock. Dyonisia’s wagons and gates and vaults were made of the stuff in order to confuse the magic of her prisoners, and I knew Mydusia’s own dungeons utilized it, too.
Likewise, steel made up the blades of most of our weapons, like Rayna’s knives and my sword, only immobilizing bascite momentarily. But lead?
I rolled the conical piece of metal between my fingers, feeling that suffocating weight wash over me all over again.
“How did you even get it here?” Nara breathed, bowing over it but refusing to touch. “Wouldn’t it have prevented you from Walking?”
With a slight grin, I pointed at the drying sweat on my forehead. “Took a lot of effort even with only one of these things, and the humans have thousands. Millions.” Indeed, that armory I’d found had been stacked high with shelf upon shelf of tin boxes filled with these things. It made sense how they’d held their own against faeries and vampires for the last five thousand years.
Well, until recently.
I still couldn’t get the reek of the humans’ fear out of my nostrils. Maybe their weapons weren’t enough for them anymore, but it might be enough for us.
“Barberro feels it.” The towering faerie shuddered. “Something coming for eyesight. Squeezing tighter and tighter…”
“Like Dyonisia’s antipower,” I said, and Nara’s head snapped up.
“You think it might counteract her dome?”
“Only one way to find out.” I nodded at a chest in the corner of her quarters, where I knew she kept vials of ingredients to make our suppressant pills: including tiny wisps of Dyonisia’s milky power. Only someone with Nara’s alchemy skills could have pulled the magic from the dome without detection.
Understanding what I meant, Nara hurried to the chest, swung it open, and brought out one of the vials. She hurried back to me and uncorked it.
Immediately, a teardrop-sized dollop of mist floated out, swirling in midair. I brought the piece of lead close to it, and…
The mist cringed. Like an animal that had just been struck, it jerked backward and slowed its swirling. If it could make a sound, I’d bet anything it would be whimpering or wailing. But not dead. Not obliterated like I had hoped.
Barberro squinted at it. “Antipower is fractured. Some molecules are split while others… they have stayed together. Like chain with links halfway broken.”
Nara frowned. “I can try to perfect a formula that would destroy it completely, but I’m not sure I can do it with such little lead. And I’m not sure I could do it with a lot of lead either, because then my own power wouldn’t work.”
I shook my head, thinking of the human girl who’d disappeared from right beneath my own nose and wondering where she’d ran off to. “What would you consider a super deadly power?” I’d asked. If you could create little cracks in someone’s body without them realizing until they suddenly crumble into a million pieces.
“We don’t need to destroy Dyonisia’s power all at once,” I said. “We just need to weaken it, wound it enough that when the time comes…”
Nara nodded, her eyes lighting up. “She cracks.”
CHAPTER
30
RAYNA
“It’ll never happen.”
Frustration bubbled up inside me as I released my Object Summoning hands from Fabian’s chains for what felt like the hundredth time since he’d arrived.
