Page 91 of The Brightest Fell

“You should eat something,” said Melly. She sounded worried about my well-being. That wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was the way she was looking at me, with sympathy and something I didn’t want to let myself read as pity.

“Sylvester was supposed to be here.” I whipped around, looking for Grianne. She was gone. She had delivered me to the kitchen and left, presumably because she didn’t want to be here when the shit hit the fan. “Grianne told me Sylvester wanted me to come here. And where’s Jin? Where’s Tybalt?”

“Duke Torquill was with me,” said Arden. I turned.

Arden Windermere, rightful Queen in the Mists, was standing on the other side of the kitchen, with Sylvester slightly behind and to the left of her. It was hard to focus on him, or on anything beyond the box she was holding. It was made of wood—four kinds of wood, to be exact, oak and ash and rowan and thorn, carved with knives of air and water, joined together through cunning manipulation of the wood, not with anything as mundane as nails or hinges—and about the size of a thick paperback book, and I wanted it. I wanted it so badly that my hands began to ache again, this time with the effort of staying lowered by my sides. Assaulting a queen to steal a hope chest wasn’t the sort of thing that was going to end well for me.

Arden herself wore a long gown of frost-blue velvet, simply cut enough to pass as casual attire for a queen. It called the dark red highlights out of her long black hair and drew attention to her mismatched eyes, one mercury silver, the other pyrite gold. I wasn’t as human as I had been, but I was still human enough that when I finally switched my attention from the hope chest to her, she briefly took my breath away. It wasn’t a comfortable sensation.

I swallowed hard, forcing down the awe and the sudden conviction of my own insignificance, and asked the only question that mattered: “Where’s Tybalt?”

“Jin is with him,” said Sylvester. It would normally have been considered rude for him to answer for the queen, but his tone was gentle, almost careful, and it seemed like they had already discussed the necessity of handling me with delicacy.

It made me want to punch someone. “That’s not an answer.”

“October.” Arden somehow turned my name into a command. I glanced back to her, only flinching a little when I met her eyes. She held the hope chest out toward me. “Madden told me you were going to need this. I am . . . grateful that you were able to free him from the enchantment he was under, and regret that I did not notice the situation myself. I hope you will accept the loan of this treasure as a token of my gratitude.”

So she wasn’t going to ask anything of me in exchange for use of the hope chest. That should have been a good thing. That should have been her honoring me as a hero of the realm. Instead, it felt like the sort of gesture you made to someone on the brink of breaking down.

I didn’t say anything. I just looked at Sylvester, and waited.

It didn’t take long before he sighed and looked down at his feet. “Tybalt is with Jin,” he said. “There have been . . . complications.”

“What do you mean, complications?” My voice was a razor slashing across the throat of the world.

“Your betrothed is a King of Cats,” said Sylvester. He looked up again, meeting my eyes. “His magic is . . . substantial. When it misfires . . .”

“Jin isn’t strong enough to massage out the cramp,” I said, feeling suddenly numb again. “She can’t get him to change back.”

“No. But you might, were you at your normal strength.” He gave the hope chest in Arden’s hands a meaningful look.

The last time I’d used a hope chest, I had entered a strange fugue state where a version of myself had offered me a choice of two knives, one that would turn me mortal and one that would turn me fae, and invited me to be the guest of honor at a stabbing. I had responded by grabbing both knives, driving them into my own stomach, and staying a changeling. It hadn’t been a pleasant experience. I didn’t care. Lunging forward, I snatched the hope chest out of Arden’s hands.

Nothing happened. I froze, staring at the treasure in my hands. In my gauze-swaddled hands. I wasn’t touching the wood. I could fix that. Awkwardly, I tucked the hope chest under one arm and started yanking at the fabric on my right hand with my teeth, trying to unwind it.

“October.”

I looked up.

Sylvester was holding his sword out, blade turned sideways to make it clear that he wasn’t threatening me. “Use this,” he said.

Mutely, I nodded, and before he could pull back, I slashed my hand across the edge of the blade with a ferocity born of desperation and too many years spent learning how to be practically invincible. The gauze parted easily. So did the flesh on the other side, metal slicing to the bone in a sensation that was as agonizing as it was familiar. I had been here before. The mansions of pain were no longer a mystery to me, and might never be again.

Sylvester blanched. Arden turned away. Neither of them said a word. They knew why I was doing this. The kitchen was an island of silence, and I was the only thing that moved.

My left hand was still wreathed in gauze, but that didn’t matter: one would be enough. Ignoring the pain, I slammed my bleeding palm down on the hope chest.

Heat lanced up my arm, immediate and burning. It wasn’t painful, although it should have been. It was less like a forest fire, and more like the soothing, cleansing warmth of a hot pack against a strained muscle, turned up to a thousand. I gritted my teeth. The visions hadn’t come on yet. Maybe that meant they weren’t going to. The last time I’d done this, there had been goblin fruit and Firstborn blood in my system, making everything harder, divorcing me from myself. Here and now, I knew exactly who I was, and I knew exactly what I wanted.

What I was, I thought, as loudly and fiercely as I could. Make me what I was.

I could feel the hope chest responding to my demand, a distant, quizzical presence. It wanted more details. That was why it had given me the visions the last time, I realized: because it didn’t know how to communicate with me. It was too old, and too strange, and I was too young, and still too human. The edges of my vision started to blur as the hope chest began forcing a fugue state over me.

No, I thought fiercely. No visions. Make me what I was. I pictured myself as I’d been when this all began, the color of my hair, the slope of my ears, the position of the watermarks in my blood. Sometime in the last several years, my mental image of myself had changed from the half-and-half girl I had always been, moving to match the more fae creature I had become. I still wanted to keep what was left of my mortality for as long as I could.

And if this was the end of it, if I couldn’t guide the hope chest well enough to preserve it, that would be fine, too. I could save Tybalt. I could save my bruised and breaking heart. What was a little humanity when compared to that?

The hope chest grew even hotter, flame lancing through my fingertips and up my arms. Now it did hurt, becoming an all-consuming burn that was almost enough to make me drop the wood. I refused, holding on tighter and closing my eyes, blocking out all distractions.