She nodded, shifting to the entrance of the cage, her body shivering violently.
“It’s about fifteen feet below you, Orla. You will land in the snow, and then you need to find your way to the woods. I’ll help you as soon as I can.”
For Orla, this leap would be more difficult than for the others. She couldn’t see the ground. But Orla always did what she had to without complaining.
She threw herself from the cage and landed hard in the snow, tumbling. In moments, she was on her feet and running for the forest, the wind whipping at her dress.
I leaped to the next cage, where I recognized the deep voice of Aeron.
“Torin,” he shouted, “they will kill you.”
I leaned over the side of the cage, the frozen metal stinging my body through my clothes.
My blade carved through his lock. I barked at him to go after my sister. He jumped from the cage, whirling to face me, and pointed to another cage to my right.
“Shalini,” he shouted.
And with a sharp pang of horror, I realized that Moria had trapped a human in one of these cages, someone who could easily die from frostbite.
With a thundering heart, I leaped to her cage and hacked through the metal of her lock. Her door groaned open, and Aeron called her name again and again, his voice wild. I peered into her cage to see her shuffling, half crawling toward the open door. Her body looked rigid with the cold under her cloak. She practically fell out of the cage and into Aeron’s open arms. He carried her like a bride toward the forest, following after Orla’s footsteps.
I crouched, ready to jump to the next cage, but something stopped me. From around the corner, a line of red-clad soldiers marched, archers among them. My heart pounded like a war drum as I watched them kneel in the snow, arrows aimed at me.
I wasn’t sure of many things at this point except that I’d been shot with arrows far too many times recently. Of that, I was completely certain.
One of the soldiers barked out an order to shoot. I braced, waiting for the arrows to fly.
Only the punishing wind hit me. Maybe, in this hellish landscape, they understood that their new queen did not have their best interests at heart.
“You know me!” I shouted into the snowy wind. “I am your king. And whatever has happened while I was trapped in the enemy lands, whatever they said about me, you must know who I really am. That I have always done my best to protect Faerie, to keep you all safe. Some of you served with me for years. And it was never like this when I was king, was it?”
My gaze landed on a man with blue hair and bronze skin whom I recognized. “Lonan! Your family joined me for dinner to celebrate the birth of your youngest sister.” I pulled my gaze to another, one with golden curls whose family owned a cattle farm. “Malo, I helped negotiate the conflict between your family’s farm and the neighbor’s when their fence was crumbling in your fields.”
Overhead, the Sinach swooped lower with Moria on its back. She was maybe a hundred feet above us in the air.
The creature unleashed a flaming stream beneath iron-gray clouds. The soldiers looked over their shoulders at the burst of flame, and the tension in them sharpened into talons.
I raised my sword. “I still hold the Sword of Whispers. The old gods have still blessed me as their chosen king. The Unseelie Queen Mab trapped me in her kingdom against my will, and I fought tooth and nail to return to you.”
On top of the Sinach, Moria’s crown gleamed like brutal shards of ice. She bellowed into the storm.
The dragon whipped back around, arcing even closer, and the poisonous miasma of fear spilled through the air. The Sinach pounded his wings, now only twenty feet behind the soldiers. From its mouth, a scorching burst of flame blasted the snow behind them.
One of the archers loosed an arrow, and I blocked it with my blade. The second arrow, too. The soldiers were terrified of the dragon and doing as their queen commanded, and how could I blame them? No one wanted to burn to death.
My blood roared in my ears.
With a reign of terror, Moria had an iron grip on this kingdom. As the dragon unleashed its flames, the arrows kept flying until I could no longer block all of them. One of them slammed into my gut, another into my bicep. The pain ripped through me, and the force of the second arrow knocked me off the cage.
I slammed down hard into the snow, my spine jolted by the force of the fall onto ice. And as my soldiers clamped chains around my wrists and my throat, they whispered apologies to me. They whispered that they didn’t know the truth, that I could be a demon lover, for all they knew, but I could hear the doubt in their voices.