Page 67 of Beltane

But none of us slept very well that night. In the weeks since Midsummer, we barely talked unless it was about finding Lex, and I just…I hurt too much to do it again the next day and the day after that and on and on until forever.

I couldn’t do it anymore.

I knew what I had to do, even if it killed us, even if it made them so angry with me that they never wanted to see me again. Perhaps that would be best. Perhaps they were a bad habit. Cold turkey had always been my favorite way to quit.

Better make it quick.

“I have to go home now.” My heart ached to say it, but I saw no other way. I had wanted to stay with them, I’d wanted to throw my royal title away for my beloveds. I’d even decided that was what I planned to do before all of this. But now…now we were broken and worse yet, there were no pieces of us to put back together. What we used to have simply died out there on that battlefield.

“Don’t do this, Miri.” Carter sighed and brushed a finger under his puffy eye. “Not after everything we’ve been through. We need each other, maybe more now than we ever did. You’re just tired. We’ll regroup tomorrow and?—”

“No. Enough of this.” I took a deep breath and whispered a quiet, “I’m sorry, Ivy, but Lex didn’t want this for you. He didn’t want this for any of us.”

“Don’t talk about him like he’s dead.” Her voice broke as she said the words.

“He’s been gone for weeks,” I said. “If he could come back to us, he would have done it by now.”

“There’s got to be a way?—”

“Stop doing this to yourself, my love.” I brushed the back of my knuckles down her cheek, wiping away a tear. “Enough now. Enough.”

No one said anything after that. Ivy rolled onto her other side and cried herself to sleep. Carter clenched his eyes shut and breathed through sobs until Ivy’s whimpers softened into slow, deep breaths. And I got up.

After everything we’d been through, after all we’d already done for each other, I couldn’t bear to say yet another goodbye. So after I dressed and gathered my things, I stood at the doorway to take one last look at them, knowing in my bones this was right.

Ivy’s steel gaze crept open just as I turned to leave, glaring at me from her spot on the edge of the bed. She didn’t move to stop me, nor did she open her mouth to tell me to stay. It wouldn’t matter if she did. Though I loved her more than life itself, I needed time. I needed space.

I wanted to tell her I loved her, that I would never forget her, but even those words would fall flat. What was love, after all, compared to what we’d been through? What was love but chemicals and hormones designed to trick people into caring, only to have the rug pulled out from under them? What was a broken heart compared to duty and honor?

What the four of us had surpassed a silly, stupid thing like love years ago. We were the same soul existing in four bodies, and now that a quarter of us was gone, our combined life force was a leaking sieve with no plug to save it, least of all for a spoiled princess who’d already had her life planned out for her.

I might as well return to my sullen castle and live out my remaining days as peacefully as I could. So, with all of that weighing heavily on me, I turned to the door, opened it, and left my soul in Killwater with the two people who would always own it and the prince who’d sacrificed it all to make sure they could.

Act V

If we shadows have offended,

Think but this, and all is mended,

That you have but slumbered here

While these visions did appear.

-Puck, Act V, Scene II

26

Miri

SIX WEEKS LATER

“Why didn’t you tell me this when it happened?” Edward crossed his legs and took another sip of tea, his bright green eyes narrowing suspiciously at me from across the table. I’d hired a private jet to take me back to England, and now we sat in my rooms at Kensington for our daily afternoon tea.

After we disappeared together for nearly three months, Gran had been loathe to let either of us out of her sight again. Edward had officially moved into the rooms next to mine, and now that I could finally talk about Killwater without sobbing, I had agreed to tell him the entire story. I’d started with meeting Ivy at boarding school and confessed all of it, right up until Edward had been taken the day of the Washington-Fairfax wedding.

He had listened, promising to tell me what he had experienced while his mind had been taken over by the king.

“Would you have believed me?” I took a drink of my chamomile and smiled, watching as he squinted in deep concentration.

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