“You once asked for my permission to chop a man to pieces for insulting her.” I kept my voice low, and he looked over at me, his eyes angry. “Now I’m giving you a country full of them. They killed her people in front of her. Her family. I suggest you make sure your sword is sharp. I have a feeling you’re going to be doing a lot of chopping before we make it to the Palace of Night.”
I stepped away from the three men and started toward the empty plain where the mermaid’s pool had once been, before my aunt’s army had burned it to the ground and the mermaids who had lived there disappeared. We had a memorial for the missing mermaids planned for the space but nothing had been finalized yet. Right now it was just an empty field where nothing could grow. I wished Talia, the queen of the mermaids, were there. She always knew what to say to give me strength.
“Allie!” I turned to see Winston chasing after me. “Allie!”
“What?”
“What are you planning? Our army is exhausted. We aren’t prepared for another long siege. We don’t have the soldiers or the weapons.”
“I’m not planning a siege,” I said. “I’m not going to fight her into a truce. This time there is no surrender that doesn’t involve me taking over my aunt’s throne and banishing her to the Bleak.”
“Allie—”
“No!” I threw my hands up between us. “No! I’m doing this. I’m ending this now.”
“But—”
“I’m ending this because I’m sick of it, of her. I’m fed up. Done with spending my nights pacing the floors, waiting to hear that you died. That Mercedes was killed or you were attacked and I was never going to see one of you again. I am done being afraid of losing the only people I have left. So I’m taking my army across that border, and I’m going to let my aunt feel what it’s like, the fear and the worry of knowing your people are under attack. The dread that comes from waiting to hear that the people you love are never coming home to you.
“I’m going to surround the Palace of Night, and when it finally falls, I’m going to take her crown, and I’m going to drag her to the top of the tallest tower and make her watch as her lands burn. Then I’m going to lock her in the nothingness between worlds and watch as Kuolema and the rest of the Dragons of the Bleak rip the flesh from her bones.” I paused for a beat. “You want to know something else?”
“What?” His voice was deep, and he flicked his eyes up to stare at me, not bothering to hide his sadness.
“I’m going to enjoy every single second of it.”
Chapter Six
Later that night, long after an almost silent dinner where we all barely ate, I found my best friend sitting in the back of the formal gardens next to the large Silver Leaf Maple that she’d bonded with. She was cradling the Orb of the Dryads in her hands, staring into it, her head back against the tree’s still-scorched trunk. “Mercedes?”
“Yeah?” She looked up at me.
“Are you—” I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t ask if she was okay because none of us were okay. There was no way to be okay anymore; I didn’t know if we ever would be again.
“There’s nothing.” She rubbed her forehead back and forth against the blackened bark and didn’t look at me, letting her hands cord through the grass underneath her fingers, taking it from parched and wilted to a vibrant green with nothing more than a touch.
“I don’t know how to explain it, but there’s nothing there, in my mind. Before, there was always this, this knowing feeling at the back of my skull.” Mercedes pulled her fingers from the grass, and it withered again.
“A feeling? You mean like telepathy or something?”
“I couldn’t read the other dryads minds—I didn’t want to read their minds—but I knew they were there, that they existed. We were linked together, and we could touch everything, anything that was alive was open to us, its thoughts, its feelings, and the things that made it sing.”
“And now?”
“Now there’s nothing. There’s emptiness in my mind. I’m alone in my own thoughts, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
“We’ll figure it out.” I wrapped an arm around her shoulders and squeezed her to my side. “I don’t know how we’ll figure it out, but we will. Maybe there are dryads across the border. Once the invasion is over—”
“No.” She pulled away from me, and I could see tears running down her cheeks.
“Mer—”
“No. I don’t want to bond with another tribe over the border in Bathune. I don’t want to give up my connection with my tree. This is my home, and they were”—she let out a small sob—“they were my second chance at a family.”
“I know.” I looked down at my own hands, helplessly clasped together in my lap, unsure what to say. A new family—that’s what we’d made here in Nerissette. Mercedes, Winston, Rhys, Timbago, John, Talia, the dryads, and all the rest of the people of Nerissette. We’d made ourselves a family, and now outsiders were trying to tear us apart. They were picking us off one by one.
“I don’t know what to do. I mean, I thought we were safe with the Fate Maker gone. I thought we were finally going to get a chance to just, I don’t know what… But whatever we were going to become, it was supposed to be better than this.”
“It will be better.” I rested my head against her shoulder, taking comfort from the way her tree warmed in my presence. “I’m going to make it right.”
“How?”
“We’re raising an army, and when they’re ready, I’m taking them over the mountains to confront my aunt face-to-face. I promise, I won’t let anyone ever hurt you again. I can’t help Darinda and the rest of your sisters, but I promise you, Bavasama will never hurt anyone else that way. I’ll kill her before I let do that again.”
“You can’t kill them all. You can’t destroy an entire kingdom over me.”
“Why? Why can’t I do the same thing to them that they’ve been doing to us since we got here?”
“Because we aren’t them, and we can’t become them, either. We shouldn’t want to become them. You weren’t there. You didn’t see them. You didn’t see what they were like.”
“Winston and I found Bavasama’s soldiers when we were looking for you. I saw her men in the mountains, hurrying across the border, trying to escape.”
“In the forest.” She turned to look at me. “You didn’t see them in the forest, Al. They were laughing. They had us trapped, and all they could do was laugh and point. How evil do you have to be to know you’re going to kill people and laugh at them first? To them we weren’t even real. We were things. Animals.”
“You’re not an animal!”
“No, I’m not. I’m Mercedes Garcia, second daughter of Joseph and Rosalie Garcia, last Sapling of the Dryad Order of Nerissette. I’m best friends with a queen, I once dyed my hair green on accident, and I used to get my term papers on famous Olympians for gym class by copying from Wikipedia because I knew Coach Wilkie wouldn’t catch on.”
“I know you’re—”
“I’m not an animal,” she said forcefully, “but today—in that clearing—all I was to them was a creature they’d been sent to hunt down. You can’t do that, Allie. You can’t become the type of person who’s so twisted inside that you can do those sorts of things. We can’t become those people. You want to know why?”
“Why?” I muttered.
“Because I refuse to be the type of monster that rounds up strangers and kills them for no reason, laughing the entire time, and I refuse to let you become that type of person, either. You’re my best friend, and I won’t lose you to that kind of darkness. I don’t care if you are a queen, you’re my best friend first, and it’s my job to protect you from that.”