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Fey called Earth, struggling to free herself, but the Queen’s power was too strong, and even with her body healing itself she was growing weaker by the second. The stone crawled further up her arms, up to her shoulders. It reached her neck and wrapped around her throat, pulling her head back so she was forced to look at the Queen where she stood on the dais next to her throne.

Forced to look at her sister Alice, helpless and beaten, where she knelt.

“I hold the very powers of a Goddess in my veins,” the Queen continued, and the room seemed to fill with her power as she spoke.

Eyes meeting Fey’s, Alice called Fire in one last desperate attempt at freedom. Flames erupted from her hands and coursed up her arms like a snake, heading for the Queen’s hands.

They never got there. The Fire died, inches from Edelin’s skin, the flames evaporating under the control of someone much stronger.

“Neither of you are strong enough to challenge me,” she told them, staring at Fey. “And now you’ll learn what happens when you try to kill a god.”

In a single motion, the Queen wrenched Alice’s head back and raised the knife.

Fey screamed as the blade came down in a flash of silver. Screamed at the spray of blood that followed.

Chapter 61

The blade of Air that severed the Queen’s hand from her body had been so fast and precise that Fey hadn’t even seen it. Hadn’t fully understood what had happened, until the knife clattered to the floor, and the Queen’s hand fell as a bloody mass beside it.

The Queen shrieked in pain, her remaining hand releasing Alice’s head. Alice, suddenly free, didn’t move. She sat, frozen, her eyes locked on something behind Fey. On someone behind Fey.

The air in the throne room swirled in a maelstrom of fury as Joy entered.

There was no time for the Queen to react, no time to even raise her remaining hand to defend herself.

Joy moved like air itself, each motion precise and exact. Razor-sharp blades of air sliced at the Queen. One by one they severed her sigils, tearing through her nightclothes to destroy each of the markings that granted her extra power. Fey had forgotten them. Forgotten that the only person in the realm granted more sigils than the Queen’s Blades was the Queen herself.

While hobbling the Witches of the realm, the Queen had been granting herself more and more power. Her skin was covered in sigils, and Joy methodically removed each and every one.

When the Queen screamed, bindings made of Air hit her, gagging her and wrapping around her arms like ropes.

“Edelin,” Joy said. Her voice was a cold rage, sharp and biting as winter frost, but Fey was surprised to see that her sister was crying. Twin rivers of tears flowed down her cheeks, but Joy’s voice was unshaken. She was rage. She was power. She was justice. “In the name of the Goddess, I accuse you of treason against the realm.”

The Queen snarled from behind her gag. Blood flowed freely from the stump of her arm, dripping onto the stone below her, and with a single flick of her wrist Joy conjured another rope to bind it, stemming the flow.

“I accuse of you knowingly harming the citizens of the realm. I accuse you of blasphemy against the Goddess herself.” With each word the binds holding Edelin tightened, straining against her skin, forcing her body to contort. “And I accuse you of attempted murder of a Queen’s Blade. The punishment for these crimes is death. How do you plead?”

There was a noise in the hallway, and Fey was stunned to see people there. Guards… and servants. Civilians. Everyone who had evacuated the palace, everyone who had been called to fight the fires outside, they had come to investigate the noise. Servants, guards, even a few nobles of the Crown. They looked into the blood-soaked room in horror.

Joy loosened the gag of Air that bound Queen Edelin, preventing her from speaking.

“You stupid girl,” the Queen hissed the second the gag was loosened. Her voice was strained from pain, but still full of that strength and power that had made her such a formidable ruler. “You have no idea what you are doing.”

“How do you plead?” Joy asked again.

“You accuse me of blasphemy? Of treason?” The Queen laughed, a dark awful thing. “You bitch, I am the Queen. I am incapable of treason.”

A few of the guards looked ready to intervene, to step forward to do something, anything to help their Queen, when Joy spoke again.

“You have knowingly poisoned the citizens of this city,” she said, voice loud and clear, carried by Air through the room and out into the halls. The guards stopped, frozen in their tracks. “You have taken the very power the Goddess has given them, and wrenched it away from them, and for what? So you could remain in power? So no one could be stronger than you?”

“I was protecting them,” the Queen hissed. “If people knew that there were others who could wield all four powers, Witches not from the royal line, what do you think would happen? It would be chaos. It would be war. The other Factions would rise up and challenge us, kill us all. The realm requires stability, it needs a Queen chosen by the Goddess herself.” Edelin struggled against her bonds. “You understand that don’t you? How many people will die now that this secret is out? How many Witches will kill one another to take the throne? I wasn’t poisoning anyone—I was saving them.”

Joy tilted her head to the side, as though listening.

“It’s not too late,” the Queen insisted, jumping at Joy’s attention. “Let me go, and I’ll let you live. Your other sisters here, too; I don’t care. Let me go and we can salvage this, we can stop it from getting any further than it needs to. The realm needs stability. The realm needs me.”

Joy nodded slowly, and for a moment the Queen’s eyes filled with triumph. She had won, she had convinced her.