Page 1 of The Realm That Falls to Her

Prologue

The gates into the castle crumble before me, crushed by the force of my magic. I step over the debris and into the bailey in a single stride, rage beating a pulse through me.

She shouldn’t be here. I told her this was a foolish idea, but she was convinced that a deal with the humans was the wisest course. Now I tread the grimy earth of this forsaken realm, searching for her. A movement at the corner of my eye alerts me to a soldier, scrabbling in the dirt like a rat.

“Where is she?” I demand.

But the feckless human merely cowers at the sight of me, terror robbing him of the ability to answer. With a swipe of my hand, he joins the heap of splintered wood and warped metal that he was guarding.

The next humans I find have more fight in them, not that it does them any good. I only need to snap a few bones and turn their own weapons on them before they answer my question.

“The king has her,” they sob.

The idea is repellant. What right do these worms have to hold a High Queen of Faerie? How could their sticks and pins be a match for my mother? Merciful as she is, the magic of the realm flows in her veins, and she could raze this place to the ground if the notion took her.

So why hadn’t she? Why had she been gone for days with no word, no sign? Something was very wrong.

I follow the trail of men quaking in their armor, trying to stand between me and the thing I seek. They are no more than stalks of wheat to be cut down under the scythe of my power, falling one by one.

They lead me downwards, into the damp belly of this wretched place, until the shrieks of a woman in pain ring in my ears. Not any woman—my mother, Evanthe.

The heat of my anger almost overwhelms me, blinding me to everything but the narrow corridor echoing with her screams.

She’s lying on a table, her fine clothes in tatters, her chestnut hair darkened with sweat and blood. The human standing over her holds a knife in one hand—a gray, primitive thing that looks like it was made in haste. But the wave of nausea that hits me isn’t just from seeing her like this. I can feel a dragging darkness sucking at my magic even from this distance.

Cold iron.

I see it everywhere now—in the bindings on her arms, pinning her to the table, in the weeping wounds across her body. They’ve been torturing her with it, piercing and slicing at her flesh, leaving it burning inside her.

The man is startled by my entrance, his head jerking up, so that the paltry crown he wears glimmers in the candlelight. He shouts to the soldiers in the room, but I snap their necks without a second thought.

“What have you done?” I ask the king who signed his death sentence the moment he picked up that knife.

Fear darts over his features, but there’s a crazed light in his eyes that burns even brighter than the fear. Greed. There’s something he wants desperately. And he’s done desperate things to get it.

“Please, I only want to see her again. My Yvette, my wife. You can bring her back. I know your kind can.” He brandishes the knife at me, careening between begging and threatening, while my mother’s blood still drips from the blade.

I swipe my sword upwards in a movement almost too quick for his human eyes. The hand holding the knife thuds to the floor, severed at the wrist, and the king screams in agony. I let the sound of his pain wash over me, a welcome replacement to the shrieks he ripped from the High Queen.

He slides to the floor, cradling his arm, and I kick the knife away from me, feeling the blade’s malevolence leeching across the floor with his blood. The same evil enshrouds my mother, telling me shards of cold iron are still buried within her.

I wrench the bindings from her hands, not caring how they sear my skin, but I fear removing the rest of the iron from her body. In the human realm, she is so disconnected from the source of her power. If extracting it hurts her too severely, she might not survive. I examine her pale face, her eyelids fluttering shut as sleep claims her.

I hurl the iron binding at the king, letting it clang against the wall beside his head.

“Who told you how to make this? Who told you the secret of our weakness? No human has known how to make cold iron for centuries.”

“They were like you,” he gasps, smart enough to realize he should tell the truth. “Fae. They…they said that if I trapped the queen, I could see Yvette again. That I just needed to motivate her.”

“Think, fool. Is that exactly what they said? Or did they offer you vague promises and double meanings?”

His face slackens as he realizes I’m right.

“But—"

“My kind can mislead, but we cannot lie. So believe me when I say this: No one can bring someone back from the dead,” I spit.

“I thought fae’s inability to lie was just a rumor,” he whimpers, but he believes me, and I watch the light empty from his eyes as every hope leaves him. He hangs his head, defeated.

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