Hilde glared at Lidia as she stood before the sprite, the queen free of her crystal and burning a bright bloodred. “And I walk free as soon as I do this favor for you?”
“No one shall stop you.”
Hilde weighed Lidia’s expression. “What is it, then?”
Lidia nodded toward Irithys. “Undo what you did years ago. Remove the tattoo from her neck.”
Hilde showed no shock, not even a glimmer. Instead, she again glanced between Lidia and the sprite, who remained silent and watchful. “Won’t your master punish you for that?”
Lidia said, “All I do is in service of Rigelus’s will, even if he cannot always see it.” A pretty lie.
But Hilde nodded slowly, her wispy silver hair gleaming with the red of Irithys’s flame. “I shall seek shelter in my House until you have officially cleared my name, then.”
Lidia produced a key to the hag’s gorsian shackles. Irithys simmered beside her, now a tense violet, as the lock clicked.
The hag’s shackles fell free.
Before they could hit the floor, Hilde whirled toward Lidia, mouth opening in a scream of fury—
Lidia drew her gun faster than the eye could follow and pressed it against the side of the hag’s head. “I don’t think so.”
“You’re a traitorous pile of filth. Rigelus will reward me handsomely when I tell him about this.”
Lidia pushed the barrel of the gun into the hag’s temple. “Free the queen now, or this bullet goes into your brain. And the shackles go back on.”
The injury would be permanent with gorsian shackles slowing the healing. Death would find her almost instantaneously.
Hilde spat, a wad of greenish-brown phlegm splattering at Lidia’s feet. “Who’s to say you won’t kill me afterward?”
“I swear on Luna’s golden bow that I shall not kill you.”
There were few stronger vows, short of the blood oath of the Fae. It seemed to do the trick for the hag, who bared her rotted teeth but said, “Fine.”
A wave of a gnarled hand and some chanted, guttural words, and the ink melted down Irithys’s fiery neck. Like black rain, it sluiced down her flaming blue body, dripping to the stones below.
And in its wake, as it cleared, the sprite began to blaze a blinding white.
Lidia lowered the gun from the hag’s head. “As promised.”
Hilde sneered, “What now? I leave, knowing you have some scheme afoot?”
Lidia slid her gaze to Irithys. “Your move, sprite.”
Irithys smiled, and crooked a small, white-hot finger.
Hilde burst into flames. The hag didn’t even have time to scream before she was ash on the floor. Amid the acrid smoke curling through the room, Irithys glowed like a newborn star.
“And now, Hind?” the Sprite Queen asked, bright as Solas himself.
Lidia held out her forearm. “Now you make it look like an accident.”
“What?”
“Burn me.” She nodded to Hilde’s ashes. “Not like that, but … enough. So it looks convincing when I tell the others you overpowered me and Hilde when I fetched you for more help torturing the prisoners, and then you got away.”
Irithys’s white flame again turned yellow. “Got away to do what, though?”
“Create a diversion.”
“It will hurt.”
Lidia held the sprite’s stare. “Good. In order to be real, it needs to hurt.”
She laid out her plan for the queen as quickly as she could, telling her how to navigate the path of disabled cameras to get out of the palace, where to hide, and when and where to strike. And if somehow, against all odds, she succeeded … she laid out what would be required of Irithys after that. As insane and unlikely as it was.
All of it relied on the queen. When Lidia had finished, Irithys was shaking her head—not with refusal, but with shock.
“Can I trust you?” Lidia asked the sprite.
Irithys began to glow white again—white-hot. “You don’t have any other choice now, do you?”
Lidia extended her arm once more. “Make it hurt, Your Majesty.”
* * *
Darkness and debris and dust. Coughs and groans.
From the sounds behind her, Bryce knew Nesta and Azriel were alive. What state they were in … Well, she didn’t particularly care at the moment.
The power she’d siphoned from this place, from Silene herself, thrummed through her body, familiar and yet foreign. It was part of her now—not like a temporary charge from Hunt, but rather something that had stuck to her own power, bound itself there.