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I hadn’t even shifted more than a speck from the bed when the house rocked on the waves as the sound of boots against the wooden walkway pounded in a stampede of an army headed our way.
“Open in the name of the Queen!” The loud bark snapped through the dark like a whip, but it wasn’t at our door. They were a few homes down.
“Maybe it’s not us…” Ma’s hope was infectious, and I froze, staring at the blurry outlines of people through the stained curtain. “Maybe it’s…”
Screams exploded in the pitch, everything rocking as those pounding feet slammed against the old boardwalk and flooded into a small home across the way.
Jaspyr.
He wasn’t even five.
The screams grew, the sound ending in a flash of light so bright it was as though a sun erupted in the center of the Qit. A second later, and the screams turned to sobs, a man’s voice shouting orders before all those feet pounded in an urgent rhythm as they moved closer… closer.
My skin prickled the closer they came, warning me of something I already knew.
I couldn’t swallow. My heart was too high up my throat. I couldn’t breathe for the way my stomach had tied itself in knots. My mouth was dry, my body a knot of fear as the knock repeated itself. This time on our door.
I was frozen on the bed, not even having taken a single step toward the open hiding place Lily stood in. She stared with those wide eyes, her own fear screaming to run. To reach her. To hide.
I had always promised her I would protect her, that I would save her. Now, I couldn’t even move.
“Open in the name of the Queen!” That same booming voice consumed the air, blasting through our home as though there was nothing between us and them. No flimsy wall. No painting of caspyn lilies that Ma and Lily had made to “bring a smile to the walls.”
“We are but fishers…” My father’s voice shook as he raced toward me, the house rocking as he tried to shoo me into the tiny room that was supposed to save us.
Save us. Lily and me. It was only in that half of a breath that I realized exactly what was going to happen and why Ma was sobbing and kissing Lily’s brow.
The room was never for all of us. It would never save our family. It was never meant to.
Not that it mattered. Da didn’t get more than a step before the door was blown off its hinges.
That same bright flash I had seen through the window burned my eyes as the wooden door splintered with a sharp crack. Burning air whipped through our house, and I was thrown back onto my bed, wood and dust falling like a hot rain that sliced and bruised. Ma screamed in a shriek, Lily’s sobs cut me to my core as I focused on where the door had been, and where a yellow haired man now stood.
He was tall, broad, and looked about as old as Da but without the lines on his eyes and forehead. The point on his ears clearly peeked through the glittering hair.
Fae.
His eyes were pools of spilled ink as they darted around the room, his wicked smirk crinkling a long scar that cut straight through his right eye from hairline to chin. His tall leather boots hit hard on the floor with each step he took into our home, at least four other guards following right behind.
Three of the soldiers held their swords at their sides, the last to enter leaning against the doorframe as if to block it. They were all tall and ominous, but it was their uniforms that made them that way. Every inch of them was covered in black so consuming it sucked away any light that might have been left in the night, turning them into shadows with capes, hoods, and black leather boots to the knee.
The only bit of color was the white snake emblem on their chest. Only the one against the door frame didn’t have it; he might as well have been a shadow. The others stood like a wall, hands on the hilts of their long swords.
I had admired those swords as a child; I had begged Da to teach me to fight. Now I knew better, I knew who carried those swords. I knew what the sign embroidered onto their leathers meant. The bright sigil of the queen: the white snake coiled around a crown of ice.
The image hung from battered and sun-bleached banners in every corner of the Qit, in every part of the Realm, reminding us who ruled. Who had taken control, and what she could do with that control.
The queen had killed her family to take the throne after she discovered how the Catalysts were stealing magic, or at least that’s what Da whispered around the fireplace late at night when he thought no one else could hear, when it was safe.
In hushed whispers, he had told us stories of the last King, the last Ramal of Okivo, and the beautiful Princess Elara, whose name was still a prayer in some places, a reminder that she had tried to save us all before the crimson-stained altar. He told us of how she and her disturbed Catalyst had been the only ones to stand before queen Dalyah and attempt to stop the Red Wave that slaughtered the Catalysts and squashed magic. The start of the war that killed so many and enslaved so many more. But that all happened more than eighty years before we were born. Now, it was only memory. All we had were black banners and the armies that stole the children. We were left with a Queen that killed the magic.
The first man, the one with honey hair, removed his sleek black leather gloves as he tapped his way in, the smirk deepening as he caught sight of me on the bed and Lily crying in the tiny space that had been meant to save us.
“Well, isn’t this interesting,” he said, the boom in his voice replaced by a taunt. “I came for one Catalyst; but imagine my surprise when I destroyed that one only to feel two more hiding feet away.”
He continued moving closer, his eyes darting from Ma to Da to Lily and finally to me. The world felt heavy against my chest as he stopped before me, his long blond hair falling over his dark eyes. He looked down and smiled, or tried to smile. He had too much wickedness in him to truly smile. The evil blazed in his eyes as he reached toward me. I could feel it in the too hot touch of his hand against my chin, the prickling flavor of his magic trilling over my skin with one touch.
“Little monsters. Floating in these festering hovels, waiting for us to pluck them out.” Each of his words stung as his warm fingers pinched painfully against my chin, the touch heating as that hand moved from my chin to my neck.
