AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He kept his voice loud as he continued: “Will they be treated as scum, in this new world without the hero in the prophecy?”
Chapter 48: Feremir
Everyone looked at me, but everyone avoided standing beside me at once. I didn’t care. Jasmine was on that stage, about to be executed.
“Feremir, my boy,” the queen replied from the platform, her eyes burning with anger as she faked a compassionate smile. “I understand your pain. Your sister tricked you as well, and once, you would be able to see that as well. But you see,” she turned to the crowd. “Feremir is young. He does not understand the intricacies of ruling. The Seelie and the humans live together in peace, but we are not equals. They do not suffer. It is kinder to let them serve their superiors.”
Despite the disgust I felt at her words, this was the confirmation I needed. The queen was the same as she always had been. Her words about peace between the Seelie and the Unseelie, or the fae and the monster folk did not reveal a changed mind. She was just pretending.
“And the Unseelie?” Aislinn shouted from beside me. I hadn’t realized that she had caught up to me after I distanced myself from her in order to speak. “Weren’t they the ones who created the monsters?”
An approving humming rose from the crowd.
“We thought so,” the queen said. “It pains me that Jasmine was able to trick us...”
“How old is she?” someone from the other side of the square shouted, his voice deep. “How could she have created the monsters fifty years ago?”
The queen looked baffled for a second before she quickly gathered herself.
“She is young,” the queen confirmed. “But she works with others who had done the horrible deeds before her birth. When they died, she took over their awful tasks.”
“Why?” a woman shouted. The voice came from the front of the crowd, where the lords and ladies of the Seelie sat.
“But how?” another shouted at the same time.
“The champions were turned into monsters,” someone closer to me said, in a lower voice. “How could that girl could have done all that? Infiltrated the trials? For what?”
“The boy mentioned the hero in the prophecy,” a woman said somewhere close to me, again in a lower voice. “I heard of the prophecy. If she is...”
Everyone talked, in hushed whispers or excited chatter around me. The air was filled with a medley of voices, questioning, trying to understand, and defying.
The queen did not like it.
“Silence!” she shouted. “Bring him to me!”
At first, no one moved. But then, as soon as the queen’s face distorted with anger, one of the soldiers standing on the steps of the platform jolted. He looked over his shoulder with wide eyes and upon seeing the queen’s expression, he gestured at his fellow soldier to follow him. They entered the crowd, but it would take them some time to reach me still.
I decided to use that time.
“I am the diviner who had the prophecy,” I shouted. I didn’t focus on the queen this time, instead I looked at the Seelie. “Our next ruler has been foretold, as it is tradition. But the queen decided against it. Knowing that the next ruler would be born of both fae, Seelie and Unseelie, she outlawed any interaction between our kinds, and she started a war. She did it for power! Jasmine was the one foretold. It was the queen who created the monsters! I saw it with my own eyes!”
