Darkest Mercy

Chapter 37

“No!” Keenan saw Donia through the ice, watched her fall, and could do nothing. Instinctively, he exhaled on the ice wall, but all that did was add to the already thick barrier. He slammed a sword into the wall. “Damn it, Don!”

He screamed, “Aislinn! I need help here. Please. Sunlight.”

He dragged his hands against the wall in a futile effort to get to Donia, and tried to think of something he had to use. Ice was of no use against ice; swords and knives weren’t going to chip away at a solid wall anytime soon enough to help her.

“Ash! Please!” He looked around, trying to find the Summer Queen. “Ash! Donia’s down. I need your sunlight. Get me in there. Please!”

Beside him, Tavish clasped a hand on his shoulder. “Niall’s with her.”

“She’s dying,” Keenan snarled. “Aislinn!”

A blast of sunlight knocked a hole in the wall, and Keenan scrambled through it. Tavish didn’t follow; he stayed behind, guarding the other side of the opening the Summer Queen had burned in the wall.

Keenan glanced at Niall, who was locked in the fight with Bananach, and then he gathered Donia into his arms and stood.

“Go,” Niall barked out.

Keenan backed through the opening in the wall of ice and pulled Donia’s motionless body with him. Winter fey were swarming over the remaining fights in the warehouse now.

“Close the hole,” Tavish urged. “I can’t stop her if she gets out.”

Cwenhild raced toward them. As she reached them, she directed, “Freeze her wounds, and get her out of here.”

The terror that was mounting inside Keenan made it difficult to speak. All he got out was: “She’s . . .”

“Not dead yet.” Cwenhild’s tone was even, but her expression was worried. “She’s my queen; I’d have felt it if she died.”

Keenan looked down at Donia. “Where’s Far Dorcha?”

“Out there.” Cwenhild pointed with a red-gloved hand.

Not a glove. Blood.

“Keenan! The hole—”

“I can’t. I’m sorry. I don’t have enough to do both.” Keenan cradled the unconscious, bleeding Winter Queen in his arms, and exhaled on her wounds. The ice he’d inherited from his mother felt like the greatest gift in his life just then.

Tavish stepped in front of him. “If Bananach gets out—”

“If Don dies, I don’t care,” Keenan interrupted.

“The court—”

“Get me to Far Dorcha,” Keenan told Cwenhild as he stepped around his former advisor. “I don’t care who you kill to do it. Now.”

The head of the Winter Guard didn’t hesitate. She raised her arm in some sort of signal, and winter fey flanked them. As they walked, Keenan concentrated on the Winter inside him. He exhaled on Donia’s heavily bleeding wounds again, freezing them shut as best he could.

In only a few minutes—which seemed too long—they stood at the door of the warehouse. The ice wall that Donia had erected now stood in Keenan’s way. He needed to get her to help, and he had no sunlight to melt this wall.

A cry of frustration spilled from his lips—and with it came a breath of frost.

Both hopeful and afraid, he leaned against the wall and attempted to draw the ice into him as he’d once pulled warmth into his body to try to resist the cold. He tried to ignore the thought of his body filling with ice, of shutting down as that cold poured into him as it had so often when the last Winter Queen was angry or punishing him.

For Donia. Even if it does feel like that . . .

He pulled the cold into his skin, but he wasn’t a regent any longer. The wall softened in front of him, but it didn’t vanish. A section of the wall was not ice but slush now, and Keenan pushed through it.

On the far side of the mostly still intact wall, the winter fey were strong enough that they were slaughtering those of Bananach’s faeries who had remained in the street. A cadaverous faery stepped toward him and frowned.

Keenan backed away and clutched Donia tightly to him when he realized who the faery was. “No.”

“You need not carry them to me. I can collect them without anyone’s help. . . .” Ankou paused and sniffed Donia. “She’s not dead yet.”

The look Cwenhild leveled at the death-faery would’ve frightened most anyone, but Death was unconcerned. She simply walked away and resumed her corpse gathering.

Far Dorcha, however, was nowhere to be seen.

He can help. He will. He has to.

“Find the Dark Man,” Keenan told the winter fey, and then he sank to his knees in the street.

Aislinn had heard Keenan’s words to the Scrimshaw Sister and to Tavish, and at the edge of her vision, she had seen him carry Donia’s limp body outside. That leaves me and Niall. She had no idea if Niall was still standing, or what the situation was. She could see a wall of shadows farther into the room, and she hoped that it was Niall who had erected it.

And that Seth is safe behind it.

She glanced toward the ice wall; on the other side of it, a fight continued. Niall and Bananach were slashing at one another. On her side of the hole in the ice, the head of the Summer Guard waited. A Hound with an unsheathed blade raced toward her guard.

“Tavish!” Aislinn focused more sunlight in her hand—but then remembered that in this, the Hunt was on their side. She lowered her upraised hand just as Tavish looked her way.

“My Queen?” He came to her.

Around them, several more Hounds appeared and cut down Ly Ergs. The Hunt—which had been stretched thin only moments before—seemed to be everywhere at once. The tide had shifted against Bananach’s faeries.

“What’s happening?” Aislinn asked as Tavish arrived at her side.

“That.” He motioned.

The Summer Queen followed her guard’s gesture to the unexpected sight before them. Fey the likes of which she’d never seen were flowing into the warehouse. Water trailed in their wake as they gathered faeries into their embraces and departed. The newcomers wrapped amorphous bodies around Bananach’s faeries, and then flowed back out the way they’d come.

One faery stood in the doorway; its hands were raised as if conducting a symphony. The faery’s body seemed to be a droplet of water shimmering in the air, as if it would finish falling in another instant.

“What is that?” she asked.

The water-droplet creature turned its attention to her and said, “Ally. Of his.”

“Yours?” Aislinn asked Tavish.

Her guard shook his head.

“Land king vow,” the faery said, and then it continued conducting the other water fey.

“Oh.” Aislinn shook her head. Between the Hounds, the rowan, the Dark Court, and now the water fey, the fighting had shifted to favor the united courts. Unfortunately, that didn’t undo the fact that Donia was fallen—or that the faery who’d struck the Winter Queen was still standing.

The Hounds who had pushed the fight outside the warehouse were now returning—in part, it appeared, because of the reduction in the number of their opponents. The water fey didn’t fight: they simply took prisoners and left.

Smaller areas of fighting continued, but the forces who opposed Bananach’s fey were obviously going to prevail.

That leaves Bananach.

“I can either help Niall or leave the wall in place,” Aislinn said softly. “Any advice?”

“He is not winning, and the one who would seal the wall appears to be unable to repair it,” Tavish said. “If you can help him, do it. We are running out of options.”

The Summer Queen exhaled, and the ice melted.

The flood of it rolled through the warehouse. The water fey pulled it to them, lifting it until a section of the room was underwater. It had the effect of a giant, wall-less aquarium. Which is impossible. The faeries that she had seen blended into the water. Some of the land faeries tried to swim in the vertical river, but it was futile.

And then, the water itself—and the whole of those contained within it—exited the warehouse in a rush.

Aislinn was left in a much less crowded warehouse. Hounds and rowan formed a line of defense behind Aislinn, and in front of her, Niall and Bananach fought on.

“Ash,” Niall said. The Dark King was bleeding from more places than Aislinn could count, but he’d cut through the faeries and then stood against War while the rest of them barely made it to his side.

Or fell when we got here.

The Summer Queen took a steadying breath.

I would offer mercy if I could.

Summer is not made for murder.

But even as she reminded herself of those things, she knew too that Summer was deadly. Droughts and fires, storms and floods, mud slides and parched bodies—those were the domain of Summer as well.

We are past the point of mercy.

The Summer Queen concentrated the heat that radiated through her body and sent it as a single beam toward Bananach. The raven-faery couldn’t knock away the sunlight, although she did lift a shadow-made shield. Some of the sunlight was absorbed by the shadows, but enough of it pushed through that it charred flesh and feathers.

Bananach glanced at Aislinn and snapped her beak-mouth in a wordless threat.

While she was turned away, Niall slashed at her with a short sgian dubh. Fresh blood dripped down Bananach’s arm. Feathers clung to the wound.

“Your forces are defeated,” Aislinn said.

“Not all,” War crowed. “Not me. Snow is done. He”—she bashed Niall over the head with the shadow shield—“is faltering more by the moment.”

“I am not faltering,” Aislinn said softly. “I’ve energy to spare.”

The derision in Bananach’s eyes would’ve been daunting once—had been daunting—but Aislinn wasn’t a mortal, wasn’t an unsure queen, wasn’t anything to be daunted. She was the Summer Queen, the first faery regent in almost a millennium to be fully in possession of the strength that begged to escape her body now.

“Niall, shield. Now.”

And without waiting but a moment, she exhaled sunlight; she pushed it from her skin; she sent it forward in a solar flare that set Bananach on fire.

In that split instant between Aislinn’s warning and action, the Dark King had pulled his abyss-guardians to him. They tangled into a solid wall of shadows, shielding him from Aislinn’s sunlight.

Vaguely, she was aware of his presence, of the faeries behind her watching, of Bananach’s screams of pain. Sunlight. Burn away the disease. The Summer Queen walked toward the burning faery. Sunlight rolled ahead of her steps, a blazing forest fire contained in only a few feet. Purify. Protect. Aislinn glanced at Niall. She remembered him striking her once, threatening her. Friend or not?

Summer had no words to ask such questions. She stared at him, trying to remember if she should burn him away too.

“Ash?” he said. He was battered, limping, yet he stepped between her and the screeching faery. “I will finish this.”

The Summer Queen shook her head. “She hurt Donia. She killed Evan . . . Irial. . . Gabriel, Tish, and she killed my fey.”

The Dark King nodded. His shadowy guardians were watching, but immobile. Their bodies were illuminated by the flames.

Bananach shook off the fire, shed it and most of her wings in a horrific shudder.

“Move.” Niall raised a sword.

“No.” Aislinn let vines come to her hand. Soil. Vines need soil. So Aislinn drew earth to her in a great tug, heard the roar of it coming behind her, and watched as it rolled in on either side of her and covered Bananach.

The raven-faery’s body was drowning in the weight of the now-boiling mud, tangled by the miniature white roses that sprang from the earth.

“She cannot kill now,” Aislinn pronounced.

The Dark King stepped into the mud and drove a shadow-wrought broadsword into the earth up to the hilt.

“Blood feeds the magick,” a corn-husk-dry voice said.

Aislinn turned to see Far Dorcha watching.

“Death feeds the soil,” he added.

In front of them, Niall sat down in the mud. Despite his battered and bruised body, the Dark King was smiling. He looked at her and said, “Seth was right.”

The Dark Man nodded. “He was.”

Perplexed, Aislinn looked from one to the other.

With one hand, Niall still held on to the broadsword; with the other, he wiped blood and sweat from his face. “Seth said we could kill her without all of us dying. Wasn’t sure if he was right.”

Far Dorcha chuckled.

“Where is he?” Aislinn’s poise faltered. “I looked during the . . . during . . . Is he? Where is he?”

“I put up a barrier to keep Seth safe when I got here,” Niall said. “He’s safe, Ash. Bananach couldn’t reach him.”

A strange look passed between Niall and Far Dorcha, but Aislinn wasn’t interested in asking why. Later, maybe, but right now, she had two more pressing matters to tend to. She nodded at Niall and then called to the death-fey, who had turned away already. “Far Dorcha?”

He paused. His expression was no more readable than it had been when she’d met him, but she thought a flicker of sorrow crossed his face.

“You offered me an exchange when we met,” she reminded him. “I know what I want.”

“What do you ask?”

“Whatever Keenan and Donia need,” she said. “If necessary, I will owe you a favor. Not a death, but I would put myself in your debt if I had to.”

Far Dorcha stared at her, but he said nothing. Instead, he nodded, and then strode away.