Page 56 of A Land So Wide

The velvet radiated a power strange and difficult to understand until it was held.

It was like looking into a pond choked with brackish water and spindly weeds.

You couldn’t see through its depths, but you could sense things moving below the surface, things with keen eyes and powerful tails, things with jagged fins and pointed teeth.

Greer didn’t really believe the cloth would spring to life and harm her, but she had the irrational thought that it might try.

She wondered if the cloak recognized her, if it could feel Ailie’s blood in her veins.

When she put it on, would it rebel, chafing against a foolish girl who was decidedly not its owner?

But if it did take to her…

Greer shuddered as she imagined being wrapped in the dark energy she felt. Finn’s blood had already changed her in so many ways—what would a concentrated dose of Ailie do?

Would she be able to shift her form?

Would she be able to fly?

Both seemed beneficial against Elowen, but uncertainty kept Greer from pulling the cloak on and finding out.

“Maybe you should wear it.” She turned to Finn, ready to foist it upon him, but froze at the last moment, holding it close to her chest instead with a possessiveness she wasn’t entirely sure she felt.

Finn looked up in alarm. “It’s not mine to take.”

“But it could be, couldn’t it? You could wear it, and then you’d be king,” she reasoned.

“That’s not how it works. The queen is sovereign. The king is only her—”

“Consort.”

The word fell between them like shrapnel.

Finn cleared his throat, looking acutely uncomfortable. “Yes.”

“What does that mean, ‘consort’? Would you be”—she paused, grasping for the right word—“a partner?”

“Protector,” he corrected. “Someone to stand by your side, to help when the need arises.” He looked away. “A lover. A confidant. A husband.”

“Oh.” Greer swallowed, and an uncomfortable heat flushed over her chest. She’d thought as much, but it was another thing entirely to hear the words said aloud.

From across the clearing, Finn stared at her, motionless save for the flick of a finger worrying at his thumbnail.

In a flash so quick she scarcely saw it, he skittered to her and knelt in a snowdrift, impervious to the cold.

Heat radiated off him, warming her in turn, and when he reached for her hands, she did not pull away.

“I know it’s not the path you pictured for yourself. I know I’m not the man you imagined beside you.”

“You’re not,” she confirmed even as she allowed his fingers to tangle with hers.

He nodded, accepting the statement with downcast eyes.

She leaned in, trying to draw back his attention.

“But that doesn’t mean…” She stopped, unsure of the words she wanted to say or why she even felt the compulsion to give them.

She didn’t owe him reassurances. And yet…

“If things had been different…if I’d met you first…

” Greer shook her head, acutely aware of the cruelty of her attempt.

“I can’t. I don’t want to be sovereign. I just want to get Ellis, and then we’ll leave and never bother the Gathered or interfere with Elowen.

I’ll swear it to her. There needn’t be any…

Things don’t have to end like that.” She pointed to the dark stains spreading across the snow.

Even the rapidly falling flakes couldn’t cover the garish evidence of Hessel’s final moments.

“Elowen won’t take that risk,” Finn warned.

“What if I give her the cloak, as a sign of my sincerity?”

“You can’t!”

Surprised by the force of Finn’s outburst, Greer dropped her hold of him. “Why?”

“Elowen isn’t meant to be the sovereign! She’s done things Ailie would never have sanctioned.”

Greer felt her shoulders rise into a shrug. “But isn’t that her choice? If I became…” She swallowed down the word, unable to even say it. “I’m certain there are things I’d do that Mama wouldn’t approve of.”

Finn sighed, raking his nails through his short hair. “You don’t understand.”

“I don’t,” Greer agreed. “Which is why I shouldn’t have the cloak. I don’t know the Gathered. I don’t know your ways. I don’t even—”

“I know you,” he snapped, silencing her. “I’ve watched out for Ailie—for you—for years . I saw her middle swell. I heard the first cries you took. I watched you grow, watched you become the woman you now are. I’m telling you, Greer, you’re our sovereign.”

“I’m not,” she protested.

“Your mind is so sharp,” he argued, “your spirit so curious. You look at huge, unknowable things and you sort through them with reason and skill. You make the obscure understandable. Like with your maps. We need that. We need you.”

Despite herself, Greer felt a thrill stir as she dared to wonder. Could she lead the Gathered? With Ailie’s powers and Finn’s might, she could rule as sovereign. And with Ellis at her side, made king, made like her…

She shook her head. She could never do that to him.

“Elowen can’t be all that bad,” Greer began, chewing at the inside of her cheek. “Mama turned her for a reason. She must have seen—”

“She craves human blood.”

Greer glanced to the large swath of red staining the snow before she could stop herself. “One could say the same of you,” she pointed out not unkindly.

Finn growled in frustration. “It’s not like that…

I’m not like that. Not usually. You’ve seen me eat other things.

It’s possible. But Elowen…Human blood is all she wants.

Since she’s taken over, there have been so many more attacks.

And she’s careless, turning more and more.

The court is enormous—bigger than Ailie would have ever allowed—and they’re feeding only on human blood.

It changes us, gives us different strengths.

You saw how they shifted those stones…Resolution’s wards won’t hold them back forever. ”

Greer remembered the barn warming, the massacre at the Calloway farm, and let her understanding of that night shift. There was no Benevolence to have moved the Warding Stones. It had been the Bright-Eyeds. Elowen.

“And now she wants to venture south, where there’s more to feed on.

More settlements, more villages. More people.

It’s a foolish move. It risks exposing us, and there’s no reason for it.

There’s plenty of game here, game in the north.

We could wander for thousands of miles and not come across a single person. Our secrets would be safe.”

Greer started to refute it, started to tell him everything the hunters in Laird said, the way the Bright-Eyeds’ presence had shifted the landscape, taking too much, devouring everything in their sight. But she stopped short, her mind catching on a small detail she’d only now just noticed.

“Finn…you said it was just Mama and Elowen who’d attacked Laird.”

He nodded.

“How big is the Gathered now?”

He stared at her, unblinking. “I…I don’t know. I’ve been away for so many years, watching over you and Ailie. I…” He swallowed, the line of his jaw hardening. “At least a dozen. Probably more.”

She gaped at him.

Two Bright-Eyeds had annihilated Laird. Now there were over a dozen. She couldn’t fathom the destruction such a number could unleash. She sank her fingers into the plush folds of the cloak, her mind reeling.

The girl and her grandfather and the rest of their people.

Louise and Martha and all of Mistaken.

Towns she’d never heard of.

People she’d never met.

They were all in danger. It wasn’t enough to kill Elowen. It wasn’t enough to take her mother’s place and attempt to bring in an age of reason and moderation. She’d felt the dark stirrings of the Bright-Eyeds’ wild blood within her. Such abominations could not be allowed to exist.

She needed to destroy them all.

She needed to end everything Resolution Beaufort had begun.

Greer released a long, shaky breath and threw her pack over her shoulders. “All right. I’m ready to meet the Gathered.”