Page 24 of Bound to the Shadow Queen
Again, I saw Everly’s scars. Her fists clenched and bleeding. My mother’s blood staining the snow.
“The Unseelie are not capable of love.”
The male on his left snarled, thrashing against the ice. I turned my mana on him instead. The veins under his skin rose to the surface, hardening as his blood turned to ice. The fight drained from him with one last twitch, frost fogging his lungs until he was nothing but a statue.
Alaric shouted, straining against the shackles, his shredded wings flaring in helpless fury.
I let my mana flow back to him. Slowly. Purposefully. Frost curled across the ground, climbing his legs, cracking through skin and sinew. His talons split as the ice pried them apart. His wings twisted in their sockets, the bones groaning before snapping under the pressure.
He screamed, and the sound threaded through me like fire. I thought of Everly’s scars, carved into her skin by Unseelie hands. I thought of the night my mother fell to her knees in blood-soaked snow, her eyes lifeless and unyielding as the Skaldwing blade tore free from her back.
I pressed harder. His breaths broke, shallow and wet, his eyes rolling back with pain.
The tree shuddered. A gale ripped through the chamber, slamming frost and blood into shards that glittered in the faelight. Roots cracked. Wood splintered. Iridescent light flooded the hollow, dazzling and cold.
“Don’t.” The single word echoed across the cramped space.
I didn’t need to look to know who had come. The mana was familiar, threaded into mine from the day I took the crown. The voice even more so.
I hadn’t gone to my Visionary, so she had come to me.
The clicking of Nevara’s staff heralded her entrance. Her ethereal hair was pulled back in a simple traveling braid, her pale pink cloak a jarring contrast to the carnage she delicately stepped around. She held out her hand somewhere between a plea and a warning.
The warning she hadn’t bothered to give me when she let me crown a traitor as Queen, then allowed that same bride to be taken by those whose lives Nevara was so desperate for me to spare.
I didn’t hesitate. With a clench of my fist, the male exploded into a cloud of blood and snow.
Only his necklace remained, falling to the ground with an ominous clatter.
Everly
My mother was ignoring me.
Not that we were alone for long enough to truly question her, but she was keeping an intentional distance, cutting off conversation every time I even considered swinging it back around to the Dragon.
After I changed into my leathers, my uncle paraded me around and insisted I go flying with some of the Stormbreak Clan. And himself, of course.
In the decade I had been gone, I had never once risked bringing out my wings intentionally, let alone risked flying.
I hadn’t let myself miss it.
Then the journey here had been nothing but chains and panic and the unending agony of straining muscles that had long since atrophied with disuse, there had been no chance for even the illusion of freedom.
Now, though, with the clans shrinking to dark specks below and the mountains unfurling in jagged and endless peaks in the distance, I could finally admit to myself what I had been lying about for years.
I had missed this.
The rush of air tearing through my hair. The way the weight of my problems seemed to scatter like loose feathers from up here, falling far behind me.
And my mother’s face, at peace in a way I had almost forgotten existed.
I hated to be the one to shatter it.
But I hated her secrets more.
Edging my wings closer, I slipped just out of formation until we drifted apart from the group. I kept my voice low, careful, though the wind still carried it sharply between the two of us.
“What are you keeping from me?”
