Page 10 of Boundless

How strange. We all knew that no male heir had survived a full day after birth, but I still believed this Ice fae right away. “Who?” I asked despite myself.

“I am looking at him,” the Ice Queen said.

And she was lookingat me.

Secret, secret, always a secret.All I did and where I went and what I thought—it must always remain a secret,Mother said.

So many times I asked her why. So many.

“Take your time. Breathe through it,” said the queen. “Because I have yet to tell you the most important part of this story…”

I could have been floating.

The memories came and went, sometimes vivid enough that I felt like I was there, sitting in that storage room, looking at Queen Veyra, and sometimes I felt like I was just moving about in a never-ending darkness, never to wake up again.

Queen Veyra.

The burning under my skin had calmed now—or maybe it had just been waiting for me to recognize what it was before it could—magic.Midnight magic, more than I ever thought possible. Midnight magic that was so intense it was like charges of electricity inside me, in my every cell, in my flesh and bones, in even the air that left my lips when I exhaled.

The power of a fae royal. The power of the Midnight King, making its home inmy body.

By Reme, Lyall had not been kidding when he talked about it. He hadn’t been kidding when he said it would change everything when he took the Seelie throne. This wasincredible.

And then there was the dead queen.

Her words whispered in my ear still, sometimes slurred together, sometimes clear. The memory that had been taken away from me—allof it since the moment I woke up that morning, was now mine again. It existed inside me, and even though it felt so foreign, like it didn’t belong inside my head, it did. I wasmeback then, too. Just like I was now.

I’d sat with the Ice Queen before her death, and she’d been the one to tell me the truth about who I was, and what my role would be inherlife, in the fate of the entire Verenthia.

I was born to kill her, and I would.

Otherwise, the realm was going to fall.

“Rune.”

Cold on my cheeks.

My eyes refused to open the first few times I tried, but eventually they gave. It was Raja’s voice calling my name, and now that I was able to think straight, I remembered she’d been calling me for a while now.

“There you are.”

A ceiling made of shadows. I raised my head as much as my body allowed, expecting to feel pain, but there was none. In fact, all the places I’d been cut and bruised and hit with magic seemed to be fine—like the right side of my waist. I’d felt the king’s shadows when he hit me there, consuming my flesh, squeezing my ribcage.

Theoldking’s shadows.

Now, they were mine.

I sat up with much more ease than I expected, to find that I was lying on a bed. A bed that was in a room I had never seen before, a room with a ceiling made of shadows waiting to be usedby me.They were sources that Midnight kings and queens had created and had left behind when they moved on to the afterlife. The protection magic that existed in the throne room, too. The Midnight Palace made sure the shadows were perfectly preserved and ready.

I was in the king’s bedroom, which was part of the original palace that Emer and Reme created together with Verenthia. The original palace that served to ensure that the royal bloodline remained in power to keep the balance of magic in the entire realm. The original palace that, together with the other three, served as anchors of magic, and of the stars of creation themselves.

Now I knew that this balance had been disrupted a long time ago.

“Rune. Look at me.” Raja was in front of me, on the bed. “Take this. Drink it. It will clear your head.”

A cup was in her hand and she offered it to me. A cup made of silver metal, heavy, half-filled with clear liquid that smelled of sorcerer magic.

Suddenly I realized that I was parched. I didn’t like the smell, but I drank the whole cup anyway. Raja knew sorcerer potions and she would have my mind cleared in no time.