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My eyes opened. Darkness around me, and a little light came from the distance, which I wasn’t even sure how I saw since I was lying face first against cold concrete.

My muscles screamed, exhausted, but I moved anyway. I forced myself to roll over so that I could better see my surroundings.

A muffled scream escaped me as I pushed myself off the concrete, and then I was on my back, breathing as if I’d been running for miles.

Memories started to come back to me, slowly first, then all at once.

That word, that awful word— murderer! —repeated itself in my mind in the background while I went through all that had happened.

So sudden. So… impossible .

One minute I had been laughing and crying with the prince of the Seelie Court, the same guy who’d saved my life all those years ago, and the next, I was being accused of murdering him. The next, I was looking at him on the ground, dead. Bleeding. A knife sticking out of his chest.

My God, had that really happened? Part of me was convinced it was just a dream, and the other part wished it would be.

I hoped with all my being that I woke up any second now, and I was somewhere with Rune instead—on top of a moving carriage, or in a tunnel, or even in the Enclave—anywhere at all. Just not here.

Unfortunately for me, no matter how hard I squeezed my eyes shut and how deeply I breathed, the night didn’t change. The past didn’t change.

I had really been accused of murdering the prince I came here to save.

Pushing myself to sit up, I looked at my surroundings, finally motivated enough to even care about where I was. Or that I was somehow still alive.

Even after that fall, and after barely swimming in the river, I was still breathing.

Above me, golden-green stalks of grain swayed in the breeze. Rows and rows of them stretched on either side, taller than me, starting off a couple feet from the edge of the river. I was still in the water up to my hips, but…

It wasn’t a river at all, I realized. It must have been some sort of a irrigation canal because I could see the actual river reflecting light in the distance.

It simply poured into this canal that was made out of concrete, and it was lined with what I was pretty sure were grain stalks on both sides.

My heart picked up the beating. The queen’s palace was there, possibly two hundred feet away. It loomed in the darkness, feral, golden, menacing to me now. A place crawling with death, and I’d somehow made it out of there in one piece.

“ Rune,” I whispered to the night because it had been him who’d saved me. He’d told me to jump, and his shadows had brought me here. I looked at the other side, but I couldn’t see much from the stalks, just the sun peeking through the horizon in the distance, bathing the sky in light.

I needed to run as fast as I could, as far as my legs could carry me. I needed to run before anybody found me, and I needed to figure out a way to find Rune.

Not sure how my legs held me when my entire body felt like it had gone through the sewer.

Must have been my instincts because I was moving, putting one foot in front of the other no matter how much it hurt.

I went straight for the stalks because going back to the queen’s palace now was a bad idea.

A very bad idea, and I had already made it my mission to get as far away from it as was possible.

As far away from this entire fucking kingdom as I could get.

Thoughts and memories rushed through my mind.

My entire life had turned upside down since the moment I saw that video of Fiona being bullied at that party, and my brain was insistent that I replayed everything that had happened since that very night.

I kept going, seeing absolutely nothing though I was pushing back stalks, snapping some in half, trying not to think about what could be waiting ahead or what could be following me close behind and I wouldn’t even realize it until it was too late.

My God, how in the fuck had I ended up in this position? How had everything changed— again —so goddamn quickly?!

But my head was too crowded to even try to come up with a sensible explanation, so I just kept on pushing myself to move, deeper into this field, with no idea just how big it was, or where it led.

The sky continued to lighten up with the rising sun, and I wasn’t sure whether to be happy about it or to panic.

Because light meant I could see, but it also meant that everyone else could see me as well .

I don’t know for how long I ran or how many times I fell on all fours and had to force myself to get up again.

I couldn’t even tell how much the sun had moved in the sky, just that I eventually reached the end of the grain field.

With my hair and my dress sticking to my back from sweat, and my breathing faster than it had ever been before, I made it to the end, and finally saw something besides grain.

Pulling my lips inside my mouth, I tried to slow down my breathing, to slow down my heartbeat, because it occurred to me that I was surrounded by fae, and they could hear so much better than me. If those guards were nearby, they could hear me, and then I’d have gone through all of that for nothing.

So, as much as I wanted to just run and never stop until I reached the end of the world, I closed my eyes and breathed in through my nose and I forced my mind to clear for a moment. Just one moment until I figured out how to get away from this place.

Then I could panic all I wanted. I could scream and cry and pull my hair out all day.

Eventually, I calmed down enough to control my breathing, then pushed the last row of stalks in front of me to the sides to see what was ahead.

The queen’s palace looked even more ethereal in sunlight.

Every inch of it shimmered golden, and the reflection in the glass of the many windows made it look like it had eyes that could see everything around it.

On the other side of it, far in the distance was the outer wall of the Seelie Court, and it looked even taller and wider than it had seemed when I first came here with Rune.

Impossible to climb even if I were invisible and had all the time in the world .

The palace had a wall of its own, too, surrounding it.

I must have gone underneath it to get out here with the river.

A branch of it passed by just a few feet away from where the grain field ended, and it bent inward, forming a smooth, shallow basin a little farther away.

Wooden washboards leaned against mossy stones, and half-filled baskets floated near the bank.

On the other side were two large trees, right across from one another, and on their branches hung lines of rope full of clothes in all colors, in all fabrics, moving gently in the breeze.

The faint scent of soap and sun-warmed water was in the air. On the other side of the river, beyond the trees, were buildings made of dark wood that kind of looked like barns. Four of them stood in a row, almost identical to one another down to the size and shape of the doors.

Nobody was around here that I could see, but it was only a matter of time, I figured, because the sun was already up. I would only get this one chance.

Without another thought, I moved. Jumping between the stalks I’d parted, I didn’t stop, just went into the river without any idea how deep it was.

The water only reached up to my hips, and those boots that Rune had stolen from Raja for me were half the reason I didn’t slip.

No fish that I could see—and frankly I didn’t dare look twice because the thought of glowing fish that could eat magic was far too fresh in my mind still.

Whatever was in the water, I would rather just not see.

Thankfully, the river was only about thirty steps wide—I counted to keep my mind busy. I passed the wooden washboards and the floating baskets with wet fabrics in them, and I made it all the way to the other side, to those clothes that were hung there, just waiting for me to pick them up .

A jacket made out of dark green velvet, threaded with silver. I knew it, had seen it before—Helid’s guards had had something similar on them when they came to my house. When they so thoroughly fooled me into thinking this would be easy .

Come to the fae realm, heal the prince to pay my debt, and go back home. Easy.

My God, I felt like such a fucking fool now.

The jacket was a little too big for me, but I didn’t care.

I grabbed a pair of pants to match, too—same colored velvet.

There were five rows of clothes drying under the morning sun that hid me perfectly until I went closer to those buildings.

Until I saw that nobody was around the one closest to me, but there were fae near the last one on the right, near four carriages attached to those gigantic horses that were considered normal here.

Fear tried to lock my limbs in place, but I didn’t let it. This was my only shot. If those fae came closer, and if the guards thought to look for me here, I was already as good as dead. Might as well try to hide while I could.

So, with the velvet jacket over my wet dress, and holding the pants tightly to my chest, I moved.

I walked around the last row of clothes drying on the rope, and I headed for the first building with my head up and my jaws locked.

My eyes didn’t blink. I didn’t dare succumb to the urge to run, get there as fast as was possible, because if those people by the carriages saw me, they’d know something was up. But if I walked, they might think I was one of them. If I walked slowly, they might think I was supposed to be here, too.

I didn’t dare even turn my head to look to the side, to see if they saw me, if they knew I was there, if they rang the alarms. I didn’t stop moving at the same pace until I slipped inside the doors that were twice as tall as me.