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Fey stared at her long and hard. Then she nodded.
“I suppose I was wrong all this time, though,” Sana said with a half-smile. “It seems like you weren’t really a Water Witch at all. I hope… I hope that you find Fire suits you. I hope if you join Leandra’s coven, you do so with an open heart and find peace there.”
Fey looked away, shaking her head.
“No, Sana,” she told her, with a sad sort of laugh. “You were right all along. I am a Water Witch. And when this is done, if… if I survive the night… I hope your invitation to join the Temple still stands.”
Sana thought her heart might burst. “Oh, my child,” she murmured, coming forward and opening her arms to wrap Fey in a hug. “Of course it does, and I would be honored to?—”
“Nope!” Fey danced out of her reach. “Nope, none of that. Fuck the Goddess, Sana, pull it together, and don’t ever call me child again. We’re nearly the same age, for fuck’s sake.”
Still, even as Fey turned and left, slamming the door behind her, Sana’s grin was wide, and her heart was full of the Goddess’s love and pride for a child of her temple.
Chapter 54
Enlisting the Temple High Priestess had taken longer than she would have liked, and by the time Fey had finished delivering Alice’s package to Sana and explaining what she needed from her, the moon was high in the night sky overhead.
She was running out of time, and her next mission would be infinitely harder.
Fey still wasn’t sure they could trust Sana, still wasn’t sure the Priestess hadn’t known, but it was a chance they had to take. There wasn’t room for failure, wasn’t room for doubt. If this were to work tonight, they needed to trust one another.
Alice had given up on trust, but Fey hadn’t. Not yet.
And tonight, staring at the full moon, heavy and ripe in the night sky, Fey prayed to the Goddess her trust wouldn’t be misplaced.
She’d asked Alice for just one favor before she’d left. A mask, just like the one she’d left at the palace the night of Willow’s murder. Alice hadn’t questioned it, hadn’t put up any argument. The mask she’d given Fey had been her own once—one she’d kept, all these months, with her old Blade’s uniform.
For the last time, Fey attached her mask and donned her cowl. Anonymity was her best disguise for tonight. If this were the night she was destined to die, she would die as she had lived. A Queen’s Blade.
Sparing a glance at the full moon hanging lazily over the city, Fey steeled herself and made her way to the palace.
She could have been any Blade in her uniform with her mask on, and none of the guards she passed stopped her when she approached.
Her first stop was the empty wing in Solare. Her old home.
Fey stood in her old room, looking around at it with a heavy heart. When she called Fire to her fingertips, and set the bedding ablaze, she did it reluctantly. The loss of this place felt like a physical pain in her chest.
It was a shame, really, that so much of the building had been abandoned. A shame that the soldiers’ quarters had been consolidated in one small section near the training grounds.
If they hadn’t, maybe someone would have seen her. Would have stopped her. But Solare was empty, abandoned. And it went up in flames like kindling, all the dust and cobwebs that no one bothered to clean adding extra fuel to the fire.
Fey stayed to make sure the flames caught, setting a few more rooms alight on her way out, trailing her fingers over the walls and furniture and feeling that intense pulse of Fire purring inside her as she set them alight. By the time Fey reached the palace, Solare was an inferno at her back.
It hurt to burn the first place she’d thought of as home. But Fey couldn’t take any time to mourn the loss, not tonight.
Tonight, she had to find her sisters. She had to save them.
They were the only thing standing between Alice and the Queen, the only thing that might bring them all down.
As she left Solare for the last time, the building ablaze behind her, she could see the faint curl of smoke starting to rise from Lunairea, on the other side of the palace. Alice’s doing. It had to be so perfectly timed—with Alice waiting in the shadows for the generals within Lunairea to react to Solare’s burning, for them to begin to wake and gather themselves. For them to leave, rushing for the other building to try and salvage what they could.
Only then did Alice set the other building aflame.
Scattered, splitting their forces between both structures to try and keep the fires contained, the army would be distracted. Every available Witch would be pulled from their post and brought to help.
Leaving the palace woefully under protected.
Leaving it vulnerable to their invasion.
