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Would I?

My heart was pounding at twice the pace of hers now.

Those quiet figures by her feet, drowning in their grotesque white cloaks, their heads bent beneath the hoods … Were they feeling it, the strength of the Mother’s magic tugging at their hearts with every beat? How long had they been sitting here, the poor souls – had she dragged them from their beds the moment she entered the city, prepared for my arrival from the very start?

Had they known all this time that they’d die the moment anyone succeeded in saving the rest of their world?

They remained suspiciously motionless. Either they had become too numb to react to anything, or she’d linked more than just their hearts to keep them subdued. Some forty or fifty ofthem, waiting quietly for death to come – which was monstrous, it absolutely was …

But if I forced myself to be purely rational for a moment, what was the alternative? Letting them live, allowing the Mother to walk free, and sending a hundred times their number to their graves outside?

‘Oh, I know what you’re thinking.’ The Mother’s voice was sweet like sticky, syrupy honey, the sound crawling down my spine. ‘A simple trade-off, isn’t it? These few lives for your victory? An easy price to pay?’

Easy.

I didn’t inform her she had, as a matter of fact, not the faintest idea what I was thinking.

‘What’s the catch?’ I flatly said.

‘So impatient, little dove.’ But she clucked her tongue at the hunched humans at her feet, as if commanding a flock of well-trained animals. ‘Go ahead, then, loves – show your darling Miss Emelin.’

TheirEmelin?

And then the first of them obediently lifted their hands to their hoods, and faces began to appear before me – panicked, tear-stained faces, but still alive, still in possession of their own bewildered eyes …

Faces I knew.

Faces ofhome.

My heart caught in my chest.

No, no,no– but there was old Miss Ariella who’d tucked sweets into my palm, and cross-eyed little Edie who was no longer so little at all, and Aldous, the blacksmith’s apprentice, whose hand language I’d used to teach Creon … Neighbours, dozens of them. Family friends. Nephews and nieces, and—

My thoughts stuttered.

And—

There, at the centre of the low stage, positioned right below the Mother’s feet with impeccable theatrical precision, sat the two people I’d called my parents for twenty years of my life, clinging to each other, gaping at me in mute, terrified horror.

Chapter 38

‘No.’

I barely heard myself say it.

No, no,no – there seemed to be no other word left inside me. The hall, the throne, the rows of fae and humans with their mutilated eyes … their existence had gone muffled, subdued, as if a heavy fog separated them from my mind and senses. Had the Mother tried to kill me in that moment, she would have managed; I would have forgotten about my own defences until I lay bleeding on the ground.

She didn’t.

She sat and watched the spectacle through a hundred eyes at once, cackling at the impact of her perfectly orchestrated blow.

No. Fifty strangers I could have killed. My old neighbours, the people who’d watched me grow from a tottering child into an equally misplaced young woman … I might have managed to sacrifice them, too. But those two pairs of eyes – those two people who had never needed blades or magic to reduce me to nothing but a fumbling mess …

Failure, their frightened looks said.

We always knew it, they said.

I’d kill them in the end, just as they’d always feared I would. Just as they’d always expected. Turning me not into the villain of their story, perhaps, but into—