Page 88 of The Queen's Box

“But—my Queen—”

“Do you challenge my command?”

Aesra’s jaw worked. Slowly, she lowered her sword.

The mosquito hovered lazily in place, buzzing and buzzing. Severine stepped forward and plucked it from the air between two fingers. She squeezed, and a tiny burst of blood and pulp smeared her fingertips. She wiped the mess on her skirt.

“You see?” she said. “It isn’t hard.”

Aesra dipped her head. “Yes, my Queen.”

“Our guest showed more composure than you—and she’s a mortal!”

Aesra’s ears flushed red. Willow’s ears, too, felt hot.

They picked their way through the last stretch of the trail, thorns snagging at Willow’s skirt. Then, as it had yesterday, the forest dropped away, and they were on the spongy ground of the small round clearing.

There it was. The pond.

“You want another gift from the normal world?” Willow asked, already knowing the answer.

“‘The normal world,’” Severine mused aloud. “A rather flattering term, don’t you think?”

Willow blinked. “I’m sorry?”

“You call it ‘the normal world,’ but it’s not. To us, it’s the mire.”

“The mire?”

“A world of concrete and car alarms. Of discarded things and toothless rituals, where mortals build and waste and call it progress. You pile your dead in metal drawers. And yet”—Severine crouched, fingertips brushing the moss that slicked the stones closest to the pond—“your world gives birth to such vitality, almost as if it can’t help itself. Weeds, mold, larvae. Spores thick as smoke after rain. You’ve seen it. You’vefeltit. That stubborn, surging push. That hunger to grow.”

To her surprise, Willow felt indignant on behalf of the mortal world. Yes, there was noise and dirt and waste and rot, but there was goodness, too. Cole. Brooxie and Ruby and Juniper. That hidden, aching belief that even a mortal, any mortal, could make the world better.

“What Serrin needs, only the mire can give,” Severine said. “And you, Willow, are the only one who can reach in and fetch it.”

Willow nodded and tried to embrace the sanctity of the task. “Another bird,” she said.

“A bird is better than nothing, I suppose. It will keep him from worsening. For now.”

Willow’s heart stuttered. Serrin, worsening? He was supposed to be healing. Growing stronger. She pictured Serrin—perfect, distant, noble—and her spirit curled protectively inward.

But if it wasn’t a bird Severine wanted, then what?

In her mind’s eye, Willow saw Cricket, the sweet, spoiled tabby who used to sit in her lap and purr like a motorboat. At night, when Willow went to bed, Cricket would curl against Willow’s stomach, kneading tiny claws into her pajamas until she drifted off to sleep.

She misses you like crazy,Juniper had said.She prowls the house looking for you, meowing a weird, sad meow.Andthen, changing the subject but not really,When are you coming home?

Willow shooed Cricket away, her thoughts racing ahead to make space for what came next.

“In the normal world,” she began—she would not call it the mire—“we wrap our meat in plastic. We shape it like dinosaurs for children’s plates.”

Severine’s eyebrows went up. “Dinosaurs? I don’t think I’ve ever—” She blinked. “How odd.”

“But it’s still meat,” Willow said. “Still a life, taken so another can go on.”

“Yes,” Severine said. “We do what we must for the ones we love.”

“A cat,” Willow whispered. “Would a cat do?”

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