Page 71 of The Fallen Kingdom

Lonnrach. He’s not in hiding. Not anymore. He’s here.

When I reach for Aithinne’s hand, her skin is cold and clammy. What Lonnrach did to her was worse. He tortured her for two thousand years in a faery prison beneath Edinburgh, killing her over and over again even though he never had the power to cause her permanent death.

Lonnrach did it just because Aithinne and Kiaran gave up their thrones and the kingdoms fell apart. Aithinne is the one who built the prison that trapped him and the other fae underground. He spent centuries getting his revenge on her for that betrayal.

“My Queen,” he says lightly. Then: “Falconer. Back from the dead and fighting alongside the one who murdered you.” He laughs, deep and rich, and the sound of it makes me shudder. “You’ve been busy, haven’t you, Sorcha?”

I can feel him staring at me, as if he were whispering in my ear:Look at me. Look at me now.

I lift my eyes. He’s beautiful, almost like a storybook prince, with salt-white hair, pale skin, and light gray eyes—but cold, hard, and bitter. Lonnrach is a devil in handsome livery.

Sorcha steps forward, slightly in front of me. I’m surprised at how almost...protective the gesture seems. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“I could ask you the same question.” Lonnrach doesn’t seem bothered as he steps casually through the field of body parts. “But I suppose I already know the answer, don’t I? You came here forhim.” His lip curls. “Kadamach.”

Sorcha reaches back behind her skirts and places her fingers at my wrist. I try not to let my surprise show when she starts easing my blade out of its sheath there, slow and careful, so he doesn’t notice the movements.

So that’s why she stepped in front of me.

“And you?” Her voice is stiff. “You’re the last person I’d expect to find searching for the Book. You told me I was a fool for trying.”

“I had a kingdom and a Queen to protect back then.” He looks at Aithinne with disgust. “Now I don’t.”

“Ah yes, how things change.” Sorcha has my blade out an inch. “One day you’re a knight, and the next you have your fanciful delusions of being a monarch shattered by your own sister. So what conceited plot brought you here?” Another inch of the blade. Sorcha tilts her head as if deep in thought. “Did the Morrigan promise you a pitiful little kingdom of your own? No, she’s much too selfish for that. An offer to be her consort, then.” At his silence, she laughs. “Oh, you arepathetic.”

“Better to be the Morrigan’s consort thanthisbitch’s knight.” Lonnrach’s eyes flicker to Aithinne and her expression shutters. He smiles when he sees how nonresponsive she is. “The Morrigan promised me I could have you. Don’t you miss our time together in the mounds? I do.”

Aithinne is panting hard. She shakes her head once, sharply, and I swear I hear her breathe a word.No.

“Shall I tell you one thing I’ve learned, brother?” Sorcha tugs my blade completely out of its sheath to hide behind her skirts. “Leverage is what keeps you alive. The Morrigan only needs one from our lineage to open the Book. So the other is going to have to die.” She lifts the weapon and snarls, “And it isn’t going to be me.”

She throws the dagger and it sinks right into his chest. Lonnrach cries out, but I don’t see if he goes down; Sorcha grasps me by the arm. “Run! If he’s made a deal with the Morrigan, she’ll be—”

Something grips my leg roughly, and I stumble forward. I look down in horror to realize one of the severed fae arms has me by the ankle, its fingernails digging into my clothes to hold me in place. It’s alive. The goddamn thing isalive.

Sorcha seizes me and yanks me out of its hold. “Aithinne,” she snarls. “Stop staring, you lackwit. Let’s get the hell out of here!”

The entire field comes to life like something out of a nightmare. The severed limbs writhe around us, reaching and grasping to bring us down. We race through the tilled dirt, each movement made more difficult by the sheer number of fae body parts; we’re climbing over them, tearing our clothes to get out. A hand has a bruising hold on my arm and I pull free, but it’s replaced by another, another, another. We won’t get far like this.

A sound draws my attention to the line of trees on the other end of the field where there are figures silhouetted in the moonlight. The garden wasn’t the entirety of her graveyard. The Morrigan kept whole bodies in the woods.

And she just possessed an army of her dead faery victims.

Fae of every type stand in a line, each of them with vivid, sapphire-blue eyes. The same eyes I saw in the cave. The Morrigan’s eyes.

She speaks out of the mouth of a female faery in the front. “There’s nowhere you can hide that I won’t follow. Surrender, little bird.”

Sorcha almost backs into me. “Never.”

Sorcha whirls and runs, roughly pulling me and Aithinne with her. We shove our way through the field in earnest now, more desperate than coordinated. Here, in the deepest part of the field, those limbs reach for us with grasping hands and fingernails that rip through our clothes.

Aithinne crushes a hand with her boot, panting. “Does this fleeing involve a plan?”

“The plan,” Sorcha answers, “is to get to the woods.”

“The woods?” Aithinne’s voice echoes as we careen through the field, kicking and slicing skin open with our swords. “Are they magical Morrigan-repellent woods?”

“At the moment I wish they were magical idiot-repellent woods,” Sorcha snaps, breaking the fingers of a severed hand to pull herself free. “Falconer, why don’t you make yourself useful and clear us a path?”

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