Before I knew it, we were outside, dancing before the large fire at the center of the courtyard, and the heat from it made me sweat. I let my hands rise into the air, and I spun beneath the starry sky while people around me laughed and danced and kissed and fucked. And I reveled in the frenzy, desperate to forget everything about Adrian and my father and my future, until the first scream broke out.
I halted in my rhythm. My euphoria was suddenly drowned in fear as the courtyard filled with a line of knights from another time. Between each pair was a woman. The first had dark hair, and somehow, I knew that her cheeks were usually rosy and that her eyes were bright blue, but right now she was pale, and there was no light in her eyes.
Her hands were tied behind her back, and the soldiers gripped her upper arms, the indentations of their fingers making her skin turn white. They only released her when they pushed her into the fire.
“Evanora!” I screamed, and I struggled but found I too was bound.
She hit the wooden pyre, and her horrifying screams filled the air. She thrashed and the wood collapsed, sparks exploding as she rolled, a ball of flame that parted the crowd until she came to a stop, dead.
The display did not stop the sequence.
The next woman was Odessa. She tried to fight, but she was subdued with a crack to the skull and tossed into the flame. She did not move but wilted there on the pyre.
I did not stop screaming, even as my voice broke and my throat bled. I screamed as my coven, my sisters, these women whose souls spoke to mine, died before my eyes. I did not know how long it lasted, but the fire began to lose its potency, and over the dying flames, I saw a set of dark eyes—King Dragos. Beside him was the woman whose magic had haunted me since Lara, Ravena, her unmistakable ginger hair even more radiant in the firelight.
When the king met my gaze, he smiled.
“Bring him,” the king ordered, and my eyes shifted to a familiar face framed with white-gold hair.
“Adrian.” His name rasped from my mouth, and my heart beat harder in my chest. “Adrian!”
He was brought to his knees before me, and I saw that his head was bleeding, his lips were cracked, and bruises bloomed across his cheek.
“Yesenia!” He looked up from the ground, desperate.
“Adrian,” I repeated his name, and for the first time tonight, I felt a sense of calm wash over me that came from a simple piece of knowledge—he would live.
He would live, and he would damn the world.
Dragos’s voice echoed in the courtyard.
“To think my greatest knight would choose a witch over his kingdom. Well, tonight, you will watch her burn. Tomorrow, you will collect her ashes. Light it.”
“Yesenia!” Adrian struggled against the guards, but they beat him until he could barely rise to his knees.
As the soldiers moved forward to place torches at my feet and the smoke rose to fill my vision and my throat, I spoke. “Do not fight, my love,” I said. “You are destined for this world.”
“Yesenia,” Adrian whispered, then begged. “Please. Please. Please.”
I shook my head and spoke words that ripped my heart in two. “All the stars in the sky are not as bright as my love for you.”
And as the flames lapped at my skin, I squeezed my eyes shut and clenched my jaw tight. I would not give Dragos the satisfaction of my screams.
At the end, I felt no pain.
Twenty
I woke up with a start to find that I was in Adrian’s room. I was dressed only in my shift, the smell of smoke clung to my hair, and my throat was sore. I touched my neck, wincing as I swallowed. As I rose into a sitting position, I found Adrian standing a few feet away, staring out his dark windows.
He did not seem to know that I had awakened, and I was too caught up in my emotions to attempt to bury them now. I’d been inside Yesenia’s head. I’d watched the people she loved die. I’d watched Adrian beg for her life at my feet. I’d heard him scream for her. I’d seen his horror and his pain.
“I know about Yesenia,” I said.
Adrian turned toward me. He was still dressed as if he had come from the celebration in the great hall, but he had discarded his overcoat.
“Everything you do, you do for her.”
He said nothing.
“What I don’t understand is, why me? Why make me your queen?”
“Isolde—” Adrian said my name like he was desperate for me to understand, but there was no explaining this.
I pushed the blankets off and stood from his bed. “You took me from my home to fill a place beside you that I could never fill in your heart.”