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I was closing the distance between Mab and me when an arrow slammed into me from behind, piercing bone.
I heard her voice echoing over the hall. “Lost One, if you’re going to take aim at the Unseelie queen, you’d better not miss.”
I woke on tangled roots,inhaling the scent of blood mingling with earth and moss. In the dungeon once more, it was near total darkness.
My fingernails had grown too long. They curled over the tree roots.
I felt strangely disconnected from the lacerating pain in my back. My mind still wasn’t able to comprehend what had happened—the sword piercing his chest,his blood spilling onto the moss—but it kept replaying anyway, an endless loop in my thoughts.
It felt as if I’d seen it from a distance, a horror unfolding at the end of the tunnel.
It couldn’t have been me who’d stabbed him.
I lay, breathing in the smell of soil.
I couldn’t think of a single reason to bother moving.
19
TORIN
The blade went in—not as piercing as I’d thought, but like a punch to the chest, followed by a sort of dizzying disbelief at what I’d done.
With the stones beneath my back, I felt myself hollowing out—my bones, my skull. My body filled with cold shadows and the warm scent of her, like burning cedar.
I couldn’t survive killing another woman I loved. And what was the point of the two of us dying? Queen Mab would never allow me to live, for all her promises.
Light pierced the arches from above, and I was no longer in the Court of Sorrows, but I saw Ava before me. There she was, standing before the portal of Faerie as a little girl, trying to get back into a kingdom I already ruled as a child. Tiny Ava had tears running down her pink cheeks, and she clutched her Mickey Mouse backpack. She’d loved her mother, Chloe, but no one else in the human world thought she belonged.
My own mother’s voice rang in my thoughts, and the vision disappeared with a rippling of waves, like a stone cast into a lake.
You are dying, Torin.
I had to die at some point, Mother.
I’d always taken pride in being able to take care of people, anticipating their needs and making them comfortable. A king and queen were parents to an entire realm. A flicker of icy panic pierced my dulling thoughts because who would be there to care for them now?
But Ava was safe…
When I’d first walked into the bar to find a tiny brunette fae glaring at me, drunkenly staggering, I never could have imagined this was how it would end.
Somewhere in my soul dwelled a phantom life, one where Ava was my wife. One where she slept in the crook of my arm and kissed my neck. One where she peered over coffee at me across a morning-lit table.
In my phantom life, she curled up on a bed to read a book next to me.
But that was as tangible as smoke.
She couldn’t be my wife. Though, as my mind hollowed out, I couldn’t quite remember why…it was a stupid reason.
Was that the sound of Ava screaming?
My thoughts rushed back, a wild river careening to different memories etched in my mind. I was with my mom, walking after her. Snow covered the fields, but Faerie still had a queen, so icicles dripped onto the path. In some places, the snow had melted away toreveal bright green blades of grass. When my mother turned to look at me, I felt so proud of her for inviting the spring and for being the most beautiful woman in Faerie. But as we walked deeper into the forest, she wouldn’t stop coughing, and I hated the noise. Why had I felt like she was doing it on purpose? No one is sick on purpose.
I was falling apart because I knew she wouldn’t be able to look after me anymore.
The river of memory veered in another direction, and I was at her bedside, making her a card with a pencil and paper. Someone had convinced me that the magic of wellness could be created through a card.
Another turn of the river.
