Her eyes flashed. “Your human mother left you weak.”
Morgant pulled his gaze away from me, and I sensed that he wanted to disappear into the shadows.
As I stared at him, the pieces slid together in my mind. He hadn’t known who I was until Mab ordered him to heal Torin. He must have had questions after that. That’s when he began bringing me soap, telling me the clues I needed to learn to survive.
Queen Mab narrowed her eyes. “This isn’t what I wanted, Isavell. I wanted an Unseelie heir. A daughter with magic. With wings. Because without those things, you are not my heir. True, you’ve managed to summon a little magic. You have done a good job of destroying my home.”
I raised an eyebrow. “I only did what the tree wanted. It wants to be free of these stones. From your suffocating court.”
“You think you know my home better than I? This tree is me. The castle is a child I hold in my arms. I guess no one ever told you that motherhood can be a terrible burden.”
I sucked in a sharp breath, my heart twisting. Maybe Chloe left me “weak,” but she’d never treated me like a burden .
My anger was threatening to suffocate me. “What do you want from me?”
“I want an heir who isn’t broken, Isavell, my daughter. And all those deaths mean nothing if the Unseelie don’t get what we deserve—the kingdom of Faerie.”
A door in the tower opened, and three soldiers dragged out Torin by his wrists, coiled tightly in manacles of thick foliage. His gaze met mine, his pale eyes mournful.
“Let him go,” I snarled.
A dark smile curled her lips. “I don’t want to make my child scream, but a queen does what she must. Ava, what I do next will hurt me more than it will hurt you.”
My stomach plummeted, and I looked at Morgant. His eyes seemed to search mine. Pleading. His words rang in my head…
We all have wings in the royal family. Some are just too stupid to use them.
“You have blood on your hands already.” For just a moment, she lowered the vines until I was within her reach, and she lifted her hand to touch my cheek. Her eyes glistened. “You are my daughter, and this will hurt more than the others. But I ask myself sometimes—what is one more death when I’m already haunted by a sea of blood in my past? When it is all for the glory of our realm?”
I gritted my teeth. Flaming tongues of my trapped magic licked at the ice in my chest, melting it away.
“Torin’s death,” she cooed, “will not weigh on my soul at all. He did, after all, murder my son. I am going to suffocate him. ”
I slid my gaze to Torin once more, feeling my soul scorched. The queen’s vines crawled over his neck, wrapping around his throat. Terror ripped through me as I watched them tighten, cutting off his air. His eyes went wide, and panic pierced my chest.
The monster queen had given birth to me.
“Then throw me off the tower, Your Majesty,” I yelled. “You’ve promised to do so since I first met you.”
My heart slammed against my ribs.
“Very well, then.” Mab’s expression was grim as she flicked her wrist, and the vine shot out into the windy night, high above the rocky earth. I gasped, and the vine unfurled.
The wind whipped at me, the ground surging closer.
As I plummeted, time slowed. In the hollows of my mind, I saw Torin, a child at his own coronation after his parents died. His expression was far too serious for a boy of his age, his little brow furrowed.
The wind yanked at my hair as I fell, and my memories flickered past me: Chloe making me hot oatmeal for breakfast, the sharp loneliness of her funeral. Shalini laughing so hard that she snorted. The day I’d met Torin in the Golden Shamrock…
The way he’d looked that night in the cabin when he’d told me about his mom.
The cold rock in my chest cracked open, and molten magic exploded at last. Hot tingles raced down my shoulder blades.
Searing power burst from my body, and my wings sprang free, tearing through the thin dress. I caught my breath, exhilarated .
The beating of my wings was instinctive, an innate part of me. I hovered just a few feet from the ground, close enough to see the dark blue pebbles on the path and the clouds of dust formed by my beating wings.
My thin, dark wings pounded the air behind me, and the muscles shifted and flexed against my shoulder blades. Like a heartbeat, they pulsed rhythmically, automatically. The feeling of the wind rushing over the delicate bones in my wings sent euphoria racing through my blood.
My heart slammed hard against my ribs, and my body blazed with power. Never in my life had I felt this strong.