Chapter 17

I jerked awake in the middle of the night, panting. My dreams had been filled
with the clicking of the Suriel’s bone-fingers, the grinning naga, and a pale,
faceless woman dragging her bloodred nails across my throat, splitting me open
bit by bit. She kept asking for my name, but every time I tried to speak, my
blood bubbled out of the shallow wounds on my neck, choking me.
I ran my hands through my sweat-damp hair. As my panting eased, a different
sound filled the air, creeping in from the front hall through the crack beneath the
door. Shouts, and someone’s screams.
I was out of my bed in a heartbeat. The shouts weren’t aggressive, but rather
commanding—organizing. But the screaming …
Every hair on my body stood upright as I flung open the door. I might have
stayed and cowered, but I’d heard screams like that before, in the forest at home,
when I didn’t make a clean kill and the animals suffered. I couldn’t stand it. And
I had to know.
I reached the top of the grand staircase in time to see the front doors of the
manor bang open and Tamlin rush in, a screaming faerie slung over his shoulder.
The faerie was almost as big as Tamlin, and yet the High Lord carried him as
if he were no more than a sack of grain. Another species of the lesser faeries,
with his blue skin, gangly limbs, pointed ears, and long onyx hair. But even from
atop the stairs, I could see the blood gushing down the faerie’s back—blood
from the black stumps protruding from his shoulder blades. Blood that now
soaked into Tamlin’s green tunic in deep, shining splotches. One of the knives
from his baldric was missing.
Lucien rushed into the foyer below just as Tamlin shouted, “The table—clear
it off!” Lucien shoved the vase of flowers off the long table in the center of the
hall. Either Tamlin wasn’t thinking straight, or he’d been afraid to waste the
extra minutes bringing the faerie to the infirmary. Shattering glass set my feet
moving, and I was halfway down the stairs before Tamlin eased the shrieking
faerie face-first onto the table. The faerie wasn’t wearing a mask; there was
nothing to hide the agony contorting his long, unearthly features.
“Scouts found him dumped just over the borderline,” Tamlin explained to
Lucien, but his eyes darted to me. They flashed with warning, but I took another
step down. He said to Lucien, “He’s Summer Court.”
“By the Cauldron,” Lucien said, surveying the damage.
“My wings,” the faerie choked out, his glossy black eyes wide and staring at
nothing. “She took my wings.”
Again, that nameless she who haunted their lives. If she wasn’t ruling the
Spring Court, then perhaps she ruled another. Tamlin flicked a hand, and
steaming water and bandages just appeared on the table. My mouth dried up, but
I reached the bottom of the stairs and kept walking toward the table and the
death that was surely hovering in this hall.
“She took my wings,” said the faerie. “She took my wings,” he repeated,
clutching the edge of the table with spindly blue fingers.
Tamlin murmured a soft, wordless sound—gentle in a way I hadn’t heard
before—and picked up a rag to dunk in the water. I took up a spot across the
table from Tamlin, and the breath whooshed from my chest as I beheld the
damage.
Whoever she was, she hadn’t just taken his wings. She’d ripped them off.
Blood oozed from the black velvety stumps on the faerie’s back. The wounds
were jagged—cartilage and tissue severed in what looked like uneven cuts. As if
she’d sawed off his wings bit by bit.
“She took my wings,” the faerie said again, his voice breaking. As he
trembled, shock taking over, his skin shimmered with veins of pure gold—
iridescent, like a blue butterfly.
“Keep still,” Tamlin ordered, wringing the rag. “You’ll bleed out faster.”
“N-n-no,” the faerie started, and began to twist onto his back, away from
Tamlin, from the pain that was surely coming when that rag touched those raw
stumps.
It was instinct, or mercy, or desperation, perhaps, to grab the faerie’s upper
arms and shove him down again, pinning him to the table as gently as I could.
He thrashed, strong enough that I had to concentrate solely on holding him. His
skin was velvet-smooth and slippery, a texture I would never be able to paint,
not even if I had eternity to master it. But I pushed against him, gritting my teeth
and willing him to stop. I looked to Lucien, but the color had blanched from his
face, leaving a sickly white-green in its wake.
“Lucien,” Tamlin said—a quiet command. But Lucien kept gaping at the
faerie’s ruined back, at the stumps, his metal eye narrowing and widening,
narrowing and widening. He backed up a step. And another. And then vomited
in a potted plant before sprinting from the room.
The faerie twisted again and I held tight, my arms shaking with the effort. His