Page 38 of Beyond the Faerie Gate

He doesn’t attempt to start another conversation, and neither do I. Like a coward, I focus on the food until there’s nothing left, and then wordlessly head for my bedroll.

It feels like I’ve barely drifted off when a rough, calloused hand covers my mouth.

I wake instantly, my breathing panicked until I see it’s just Jaro. But the dread returns as I take in the worried frown on his face and the urgency in his hunched posture.

“Get up, leave your things, and get to Blizzard,” he whispers. “Stay low to the ground.”

I nod once, and his hand leaves my face. I move as quickly and quietly as I can, but I’m only halfway to the kneeling horse when I hear the first clang of metal on metal behind me.

I look back to find Jaro holding a sword above his head, blocking an attack from a Fomorian. On his arm, a glowing golden shield blocks a second blow from another attacker. More and more of them are swarming the camp, and I can’t even see Drystan.

“Rose, go!” Jaro roars.

I turn on my heel and sprint for the horse. It must be three steps away when Drystan growls. “You fucking traitor!”

Like a magnet, my head whips around.

There, on the other side of what remains of the fire, Drystan is duelling another of the Fomorians.

Like the others of his kind, his ears have two points, and he shares their grey-blue skin. His hair is long and ash blonde, and it falls to his waist in wild warrior braids. He’s even dressed like them, wearing loose black trousers and nothing on his torso beyond the metal bands around his upper arms. The outfit leaves plenty of his body on display for me to observe.

I don’t know what it is about him, but I just can’t look away.

His eyes are a startling shade of turquoise, which shines like gems as he meets my gaze for a second before his attention is consumed by the fight with Drystan.

Only he’s not wielding a weapon in the traditional sense.

No. All around him, almost a dozen glowing ghostly white swords are fighting independently of one another. Attacking Drystan on multiple fronts while the Fomorian himself wields a seventh with practised ease.

Somehow—I’m not sure how—I just know.

He’s one of them. One of my Guard.

So why is he fighting Drystan?

“Rose get on that horse, or I’ll spank your ass red,” Drystan yells.

His sharp words shake me out of my shocked stupor. I reach out blindly for Blizzard, stumbling forwards until my hand makes contact with the stallion’s flank. He’s enormous, even though he’s kneeling for me to mount him. Somehow, I manage to yank myself up using his mane, though the horse doesn’t like it very much if his whinny of protest is anything to go by.

I’m still only half on his back when he stands and takes off at a gallop, shooting across the meadow we camped in towards the road. With no saddle and no reins, I start to slip instantly. Only my grip in his mane stops me from sliding off.

“After her!” the Fomorian yells. “I want her alive and untouched!”

That voice—his voice—cuts through me like jagged glass as Blizzard races across the meadows. I don’t know how to ride, or how to put myself in sync with the rise and fall of his four legs, so every time I bounce upward, I crash back down onto his back with bruising force. I twist my head around, trying to see if we’ve lost our pursuers.

No such luck.

The lizard-riding Fomorians are closing in on us. The animals’ bodies are low to the ground, but it doesn’t seem to slow them.

They’re gaining on us and the ground is getting boggy, making it harder for the stallion to run.

“Keep going,” I beg the horse.

Time seems to slow down as I turn my head and come to a sickening realisation that our pursuers are no longer just behind us. They’re running alongside us as well.

One of the Fomorians loads a bolt into a heavy crossbow and takes aim. My breath freezes in my lungs and my muscles tense, even though there’s no way we can avoid it.

The bolt hits Blizzard in the shoulder. The horse stumbles, and then rears back in fright. I’m thrown forward, then backward, and finally lose my grip on his mane, just in time for them to fire a second bolt.

This one doesn’t hit Blizzard.

It hits me.

Drystan

All three of us feel it like a punch to the gut.

The blade prince’s legendary ghost swords vanish, and Jaro’s wolf lets out a chilling howl beside me as the breath whooshes from our lungs.

I drop my sword as my palm begins to burn. The skin throbs in time with her heartbeat as it slows down, and then… stops. Nausea pools in my gut as I peel my glove away.

Rose’s symbol is there, staring blindly out from my palm, as it always does. Her stamp of ownership is just as clear and contradictory as it was the day I first got it, twenty-five years ago. A skull with a single rose blooming inside its mouth.

As I watch, a tiny line blazes into being above it.

Her first death.

Goddess, no.

“You.” I snatch my sword up, ignoring the pain of Danu’s displeasure as I round back on the Fomorian responsible. “You swore an oath, you goddessless Fomorian bastard. She is all. Or did that not penetrate your thick skull?”

He’s alone—all of his minions went after our Nicnevin.

They killed our Nicnevin.

The shy, innocent queen whose aura is so pure that it hurts to look at her. Gone. Because of them.

For an instant, Caed’s eyes flash with the same agony that’s in mine, only to harden so fast that I could’ve imagined it. His ghost swords reform and block my attack.

“Inconvenient,” Caed mutters, slipping his iron sword into the scabbard strapped down his spine like he has all the time in the world. “Oh well, I suppose there’s no point in finishing this.”

He lets out a piercing whistle, and his drake slithers towards us. Jaro lunges, but is cut off by another of those damned swords.

“Coward!” I growl. “You killed her and now you’re running away?”

There’s no mistaking the fury in his expression this time as he swings up onto the back of his mount.

“My mistake,” he hisses. “I didn’t realise you were deaf. Next time, I’ll order my men to keep her alive in sign language. Then maybe you’ll stop wasting both our time blaming the wrong fucking person.”

I know then and there that whoever did kill our Nicnevin is going to die an incredibly painful death. It’s written in the stiffness of his body and the hard, flat line of his eyes as he stares south in the direction Blizzard fled in.

But he doesn’t say another word to us as he spurs the wingless dragon north, his ghostly blades disappearing with him.

Jaro’s wolf and I exchange a look, and I can tell he—like me—is considering pursuing him, but neither of us do it. Instead, we take off in the opposite direction.

We find Blizzard first. My horse is injured, but alive. The second I touch him, I can feel the wound he’s sustained and read his memory of what happened.

Horses don’t think like fae, but I still stiffen as I see his memory of Rhoswyn toppling from his back and falling still on the ground.

I pat his neck, soothing him as I brace myself to do the inevitable.

The bolt comes out easily, spraying me with blood. Once it’s out, Blizzard’s healing takes over.

I wait for Jaromir to say something—no normal horse could heal from a wound like this—but he doesn’t shift back or comment. My hand runs along the collar of my jacket, checking that it still covers the ribbon on my neck before I swing up onto Blizzard’s back.

“Take us to where it happened,” I whisper.

The horse obeys instantly, and we don’t have to travel far before we find it.

The spot where Rose died has been burned with the Goddess’s fury. Black scorch marks form a giant echo of the new Nicnevin’s mark on the ground, branding the very earth so that everyone will know this is where we failed.

Jaro’s wolf heads to the centre and curls up, whimpering as his nose snuffles the bloody pile of clothes in the centre.

My fists clench by my sides; the only outward sign of my rage. I want to hunt the bastards who hurt Rose right across the Endless Sea and slaughter them in the dirty tunnels they call home. Either that, or collapse on my knees and mourn on the dirt with Jaro.

But Winter Court fae don’t do such things. We’re cold, precise, and stoic by nature, and the practical part of my brain is already whirring to life.

We will get our revenge, but Rose’s safety comes first.

Everyone knows that when the Nicnevin dies she’s reborn in Danu’s sacred cave. The bastard Fomorian is probably on his way there right now. We can’t let him get his hands on her.

“We don’t have time for this,” I hiss. “We need to get to Elfhame before Caed does.”

Once she’s safe, I’ll gut the bastard.

I can’t kill him—he’s part of her Guard, bound to her as we are. But I have patience. I can keep him begging for days.

Jaro shifts back, kneeling in the ashes. “He won’t find the cave.”

No one can, unless they’re summoned by Danu herself. “But when Rose leaves it, she’ll be defenceless.”

Not to mention terrified. I don’t think either of us got the chance to tell her about what happens when a Nicnevin is killed.

If we’d done our jobs correctly, she would never have needed to know.

The cave is somewhere in Elfhame—a province whose namesake city is currently under siege by the bulk of the Fomorian army—so when she emerges, she’ll be in even more danger.

“Not if we find her fast.” I pat Blizzard’s flank and stride back to the camp. The horse faithfully follows me, breathing down my neck as I walk.

We’ll retrieve our supplies, then we’ll get our queen back.

It’s clear Jaro is still in shock, because his eyes are blank as he trails behind Blizzard.

“How did you know his name?” Jaro asks. “I thought you said you hadn’t seen the others since we took the oath.”

I roll my eyes. “I haven’t. That scrawny boy who swore the oath with us is infamous. Everyone knows the blade prince now. King Elatha’s bastard son showed up about five years ago, right when the effects of the Nicnevin’s absence were really starting to take their toll.”

It’s difficult to rationalise the memory of the Caed we first met—small, shivering, and terrified in a cave full of fae—with the cold-hearted bastard who landed on our shores with his blood-thirsty cousin. He hadn’t even hit his growth spurt back then, and we were all ready to kill him for what he was.

We had no clue who he was, or we would’ve struck him down before he could take the oath. It wouldn’t have mattered that violence in the sacred cave was forbidden.

I still have no idea why he chose to swear himself to Rose. Kitarni made it clear he could’ve walked away—any of us could. But I suppose we all had our reasons, and it’s a safe bet that Jaro was probably the only one with honourable ones.

“What about the northern forts? The defences? I thought we were prepared.”

I scoff. “For raiders, maybe. This was an army. We were in the middle of the worst famine in memory. People were starving, the stores were empty, and children started being born without magic, or not surviving birth at all.”

I remember the horror of those days too keenly. Tiny graves for tiny spirits with soft, sad auras. So young that they had to be carried to the gates of the Otherworld by my huntsmen. I’m more used to it now, but it never gets any easier.

“When Caed’s fucking men arrived at the northern shore, they carved a path down the Torvyn river and quickly claimed territory in the north of the Autumn Court…” My own court was only spared because the Nicnevin’s absence turned it into an icy wasteland that was impassible to most fae, let alone Fomorians. “They didn’t take captives. He has a policy of leaving no survivors, unlike his father.” If you can call the slaves the Fomorians used to take ‘survivors.’ Caed’s refusal to take slaves is a small mercy. “He made the push toward Elfhame a year ago. The siege of Elfhame City has lasted almost five months.”

Jaro’s silence goes on for so long that I shoot a glance back at him. There’s a worried look in his eyes that makes me wonder if he has relatives he’s concerned for. Probably does. Spring Court fae are notorious for having large families, despite the fertility problems plaguing our race.

“It got that bad?” he asks.

I let out a humourless laugh. “Whatever you’re thinking, I assure you, it got worse.”

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