Which I guessed meant Ryese had finally given the queen enough Glitter that her fears were taking form. She stalked forward, clearly unaware that she’d slaughtered her council member by mistake.
But if the butchered form in the middle of the courtroom wasn’t Ryese, he was still in the court. Still waiting to spring his trap.
Someone in the huddled mass of fae straightened, and Faerie buckled, a new gash tearing open in reality. It felt like something cut straight through the magic of Faerie, draining it away in the areas it touched. And I could think of only one thing that would do that.
Iron.
The queen was still striding toward me, sword pointed at my heart. Falin had edged forward, not quite putting himself between us, but trying to draw her attention. The wound in Faerie grew.
I had no special fear of iron. It hurt when touched, and I knew it was dangerous, but I wasn’t afraid of it. Which meant, this wasn’t likely my drug-addled imagination.
It was Ryese’s trap.
A hooded figure lifted a small blowpipe loaded with what had to be an iron dart. My first instinct was to yell to Falin. But even as the warning rose in my throat, I realized what Ryese had meant when he’d said I was Falin’s weakness: it wasn’t that I was the key to defeating Falin, but that Falin would defend me. He stood now, in front of half the court, between the queen and me. Everyone was watching them, watching him lift his blades to a defensive position to fend off her sword.
And when Ryese’s iron dart took the queen in the chest, all would assume Falin had turned on the queen. In one blow, Ryese would take out both queen and knight.
My scream of warning still only just beginning to bubble out of my throat, I dove forward, tackling the queen like a demented linebacker. The move was sloppy, but she wasn’t expecting it, and I knocked her off her feet, taking her to the ground.
Heat exploded across my back as I felt Faerie rip apart in the space we’d occupied. The queen hit a snowdrift with a loud ooaf, her sword dropping beside her. I landed on top of her, and tried to roll away, but dizziness exploded in my head, filling my vision with dancing black dots.
“What is the meaning of this, planeweaver?” the queen bellowed, but she wasn’t doing much better at regaining her feet than I had.
I couldn’t catch my breath, couldn’t even get close. “Ryese,” I managed to get out between wheezes. “Iron.”
“Impossible. I killed my nephew with my own hands.”
I shook my head. “Glitter,” I said, not sure she’d understand. But Falin would. Then I turned, trying to touch the burning line radiating across my shoulder blades. My gloves came away with a thin band of blood. My blood.
The dart had grazed me, nothing more, but the pain clawed at my back, the burn much more than was warranted by the grazing cut.
A cut made by an iron dart.
Shit.
Iron disrupted Faerie’s magic. It could kill a fae exposed to it for too long. In the mortal realm, touching it cut off a fae’s connection to Faerie, and drained the life-sustaining magic from their body. What happened to an already fading fae?
I had the feeling I already knew. I was so exhausted. So cold. I hurt, and not just my back. As if the iron had poisoned my very blood, the pain traveled through me like daggers dragged against my skin. And the two Deaths kept yelling at me. Or were there three now? Yes, a new one had appeared, telling me it was time for him to take my soul. At least he didn’t scream.
I could curl up in a ball in the snow and let go. Give in to the fuzzy feeling in my head, close my eyes, and sleep.
But no, if I did that, what would happen to Rianna? To Ms. B? The garden gnome? No, I had to get up. To do . . . something.
Thoughts were getting harder to string into coherent ideas. I needed to stop Ryese. I needed the queen to grant me a tie to Faerie. I needed to protect Falin. I needed to make Faerie stop screaming. . . .
That last one made me stop. The Deaths were screaming. Some of the gathered fae—those not frozen in shock—were screaming. But Faerie itself wasn’t, was it?
Not exactly, but it was in pain. I could feel it, sense the pain in unraveling layers of reality.
The dart.
I could feel the trail it had sliced through Faerie. More than that, I could feel the disturbance it still made, like a festering wound, blistering reality around it. The blowgun Ryese had smuggled the iron into Faerie in must have had some hard-core spells on it, because the iron hadn’t been doing this much damage before. Now the layers of reality felt like they were withering.
I twisted, looking for the projectile, and beside me, the queen sucked in a breath.
“Planeweaver, what? No. Someone send for a healer.” She reached for me, but her hand stopped before she touched the bare skin on my shoulder.