Grave Visions (Alex Craft, #4)(96)

Chapter 33





I’d grown accustomed to the bone-chilling sleet that had accompanied me since I woke in Faerie. I was not prepared for a full-on blizzard, but that’s what awaited us through the doorway.

The throne room was a blur of white. A howling wind tore around the room, pelting me with wet snow from every direction. Fae huddled in clusters around the door, snow piling up on their hunched shoulders and bowed heads. Sleagh Maith and lesser fae alike clung to one another, fear all but radiating off their trembling forms. But as close as they were to the door, they didn’t move, didn’t dare bolt. Some sense of self-preservation telling them that the first to move wouldn’t be moving for long.

And the reason for all that fear raged in the center of the storm. The queen, sword in hand, stalked across the center of the room, raving in one of the fae languages. A body at her feet.

Dark blood stained the hem of her gown, splashes of the blood dotting the tattered garment up to her high waistline. More blood soaked into the icy snow all around the body, like the nightmare version of a snow cone.

The queen whirled around as we entered. More blood had spattered her pale skin, momentarily distracting me from the madness burning in her eyes. Until that gaze landed on me like a hot iron in the blizzard.

“You.” She pointed the sword at me, and I froze. “Are you satisfied now? I’ve killed him. I. Killed. Him.”

I glanced at the body again, I couldn’t help it, couldn’t stop myself. It was at an angle, the face turned away from me, blood mixing with hair that glistened even in the storm. I couldn’t positively identify the bloody shape from this angle. Not by sight. But by her words, I knew who it had to be.

Ryese.

Relief flooded through me, despite the queen’s growing rage, but something nagged at my senses. I tried to chalk it up to the drug, or my exhaustion, or maybe the impending hypothermia, but it persisted, drawing my eye back toward the body even as the queen stomped through the mounds of ice and snow, straight toward me.

Ryese wore a flamboyant court outfit, similar to how he’d dressed at the ball when I’d first met him. The shirt with its frilled collar and sleeves was soaked in blood all across the chest and up over the shoulder, but the flowy sleeve closest to me was hardly touched. Despite that, blood coated his palm.

Blood that hadn’t been there when I’d last seen him.

It was possible that he’d touched his own blood as he died, but Falin had said seeing Ryese’s bloody hands would likely be the only way the queen would believe he could be behind the plot against her. She’d killed him before I even presented what I’d learned. Something had changed her mind.

I peeled back my shield, gazing across layers of reality.

The body changed. A soul glowed from within, but the form was no longer Ryese. The form slimmed and curved into feminine lines. The hair darkened to a chestnut brown, twined with bits of mistletoe.

Maeve.

I saw both images overlapping. The glamour that wrapped the dead fae kept trying to push forward, make itself true. I’d seen fae disguised with glamour inside Faerie before. While Faerie tended to accept strong glamour and make it part of its reality, it couldn’t change a sentient being from one thing or person to another, but this one was trying to in a way glamour never should have done.

Which I guessed meant Ryese had finally given the queen enough Glitter that her fears were taking form. She stalked forward, clearly unaware that she’d slaughtered her council member by mistake.

But if the butchered form in the middle of the courtroom wasn’t Ryese, he was still in the court. Still waiting to spring his trap.

Someone in the huddled mass of fae straightened, and Faerie buckled, a new gash tearing open in reality. It felt like something cut straight through the magic of Faerie, draining it away in the areas it touched. And I could think of only one thing that would do that.

Iron.

The queen was still striding toward me, sword pointed at my heart. Falin had edged forward, not quite putting himself between us, but trying to draw her attention. The wound in Faerie grew.

I had no special fear of iron. It hurt when touched, and I knew it was dangerous, but I wasn’t afraid of it. Which meant, this wasn’t likely my drug-addled imagination.

It was Ryese’s trap.

A hooded figure lifted a small blowpipe loaded with what had to be an iron dart. My first instinct was to yell to Falin. But even as the warning rose in my throat, I realized what Ryese had meant when he’d said I was Falin’s weakness: it wasn’t that I was the key to defeating Falin, but that Falin would defend me. He stood now, in front of half the court, between the queen and me. Everyone was watching them, watching him lift his blades to a defensive position to fend off her sword.

And when Ryese’s iron dart took the queen in the chest, all would assume Falin had turned on the queen. In one blow, Ryese would take out both queen and knight.

My scream of warning still only just beginning to bubble out of my throat, I dove forward, tackling the queen like a demented linebacker. The move was sloppy, but she wasn’t expecting it, and I knocked her off her feet, taking her to the ground.

Heat exploded across my back as I felt Faerie rip apart in the space we’d occupied. The queen hit a snowdrift with a loud ooaf, her sword dropping beside her. I landed on top of her, and tried to roll away, but dizziness exploded in my head, filling my vision with dancing black dots.