Page 70 of The Fallen Kingdom

“Idiot,” Sorcha snarls, seizing me by the shirt. She pulls me hard and starts running. We sprint for the portal, the branches around us closing in. We’re not going to make it. It’s too far.

Too far.

No, we’re almost there.Focus. Find Kiaran. Find the Book. Kill the Morrigan.

Just a little farther...

A branch wraps around my wrist and I cry out, hacking with my sword. Another yanks my feet out from under me. I slam into the ground and the branch ruthlessly drags me back, but I claw at the mud for my sword to hack it away. I manage to get to my feet, but now it has me again, with a painful grip on my arm.

Sorcha is there. She snatches one of the small blades out of the sheath at my wrist and smiles with a flash of her fangs. “I guess I’m buying you time, too. This still doesn’t change a damn thing.”

She slices through the branch, grabs me by the coat, and shoves me hard through the portal.

CHAPTER 32

THE PORTALsends me to the edge of a dark, moonlit field. It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust enough to notice that there are figures on the ground. Shapes I can’t quite make out—

Footsteps crunch through the grass behind me. The low murmur of Sorcha’s voice drifts from the cradle of forest trees at the edge of the field. Then: “Ugh! Aithinne, would you let go of my—”

“Your arm is much less muscular than I thought it’d be.”

“That isn’t my arm, youidiot.”

I turn just as they both stumble out of the trees at the edge of the field. Aithinne is plucking branches and leaves out of her hair and Sorcha is tugging at the heavy material of her dress. Her heels sink into the soft dirt of the field as both women head toward me.

“Glad you made it,” I say.

“Of course I made it,” Aithinne said cheerfully. “I’m amazing.”

“You were stuck in a tree,” Sorcha says with a snort. “I had to cut you loose and pull your heavy arse through the portal just as it closed—”

Aithinne nearly runs into Sorcha, who has frozen in her tracks. She looks past me and her breath hitches. “Oh, my.”

I follow their gazes and a cold shiver runs through me. The figures in the ground I couldn’t make out before are body parts. Thousands of them. None of them whole or attached: just a field of limbs and hearts and other organs growing out of the dirt as if it were a garden.

This wasn’t a battle. This wasn’t even a slaughter. This was for enjoyment. There is an organization to it, a perverse sense of pleasure in the way the field has been tilled and the body parts separated into their own distinct sections. Hearts. Limbs. Organs. Heads. The way one might separate flower beds and catalog each different type.

Each part is perfectly intact. There are no signs of rot, not even the scent of it. Like Derrick said, thedaoine sìthdon’t decay. That’s why they burn their dead, because otherwise they end up like this. I can’t look at the pile of heads, at the features so pristine it’s as if they were still alive.

There is only the stench of blood, heavy in the air. As if the Morrigan had fertilized the ground with it. It’s so strong that I have to swallow before I heave.

I stagger back until my shoulder brushes against Sorcha. God, even through her dress and coat, I can feel her skin is frigid, alarmingly so. She hasn’t moved at all.

“What the hell is this?”

Sorcha glares at me in fury. “What do you think it is?” she asks in a hiss. “It’s every fool who’s ever come to claim the Book. They were useless without the blood of my lineage to open it. The Morrigan plays with them for a few hundred years and eventually grows bored. Then she kills them and adds them to her little garden.”

Beneath Sorcha’s rancor is a slight tremble that hints at her fear. I saw her memory; Sorcha must have lived in terror of one day being added to the Morrigan’s disgusting collection, of being torn apart one last time and not revived. Sorcha’s voice must have been the only thing that saved her.

My pulse is loud in my ears as I look again. The field extends as far as an ocean. It must have taken thousands of years of faeries coming through the portal to form a field this massive.

“I thought they couldn’t find the portal without your blood,” I say.

Sorcha tears her gaze away from the sight before us. Her expression settles back into its usual one of smooth scorn. “How observant you are, Falconer. My ancestors would take other fae to the door, collect payment, and leave them there to the Morrigan’s mercy. Why do you think I killed all of my relations? It wasn’t just because I found them irritating.”

“Except for me,” says a low voice near us.

I freeze. His voice. That voice I heard for weeks in the mirrored room. Teeth at my skin, at my throat, biting me over and over. Leaving me to grow weaker each time until I stopped fighting him. Until Ilethim. And I’ll never forgive myself for it.

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