“I don’t plan on it. If anyone’s going to die—”
“Good.” I cut her off and smiled. “I’d sure hate to lose the fun of killing you myself.”
“Take her away,” she said, her eyes simmering with rage. The guard pulled me through the doorway with Jesse and his captor following behind, slamming the door shut behind them.
“You’re risking an awful lot, girl,” the guard holding me said quietly. “She’s got a short fuse on her and a mean temper.”
“Yeah? So do I,” I said and tried to jerk my arm out of his grip. “The difference is I’ve got one heck of an army standing outside your gate, and they very much want to come inside so they can kill anything that moves.”
“I doubt they’re as big as you claim. The people of Nerissette were always weak-willed cowards.”
“Yeah? Well, three different invasions in the past year have taken care of that,” I said as he began to pull me up the stairs, moving too fast for me to actually walk. I was forced to let him drag me along instead, my ankles banging against each and every stair as we went.
“That’s too bad,” the guard snarled. “After all, weak-willed slaves would have been so much easier to break after we marched over the border and conquered them.”
“My people will never be slaves,” I snapped as one guard shoved me into my tower room and the other shoved Jesse in alongside me, knocking us both to the floor before they shut the door, both of them laughing.
“Jesse.” I reached out to grab his hand. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. They didn’t hurt me.” He tangled his fingers through mine and squeezed them tight. “Not that it matters much. I’m not exactly a fabulous example of how to be a crown prince.”
“That’s—”
“I mean, in the end I couldn’t even get the girl. Not that I mind because, well, I always sort of thought that you and Winston would be cool together. I mean, you’re both super-smart, and half the guys on the football team sort of thought you were together and just keeping it secret. Well, they thought Winston was keeping it secret, you know, romancing the nerd and all.”
I grimaced at the easy way he suggested that a guy could want to hide being with me.
“Not that I thought that,” Jesse said quickly. “I don’t think Winston’s like that. He’s too good of a guy. All that military-parent stuff I guess. He was always the guy who did the right thing. He’s…what do you call it?”
“Noble.”
“Yeah. And it’s not like you’re a dog or anything,” Jesse continued as I slunk over to the table and sat on top of it, dropping my head into my hands. “You’re a pretty girl, I just don’t think anyone ever saw it because you were so shy. You let people push you around and overlook you, and so they just kept doing it.”
“I know,” I said softly.
“But you don’t do that anymore.” Jesse came over to sit beside me and nudged my shoulder. “Do you? I mean, you led an army here. You fought the Fate Maker, and soon you’re going to defeat Bavasama, and no one will ever do that to you again.”
He gently shoved my shoulder again, and I looked over at him and swallowed. “I don’t want you to do anything stupid,” I said. “Don’t sacrifice yourself for me.”
He smiled back at me, his eyes sad. “Sometimes you don’t get to choose your fate. Sometimes it chooses you.”
“Then you fight against it. That’s what the dragons always say. My friend Kitsuna…” I trailed off and felt my heart clench as I thought about the wryen and all my other friends currently marching toward us.
“Your friend Kitsuna?”
I cleared my throat. “She said that the dragons believe Fate is something that you fight against. In their stories, Fate isn’t a given that you have to accept. Kitsuna says Fate’s the villain, and you’re supposed to fight her and outsmart her and do whatever it takes so that you get the life you want rather than what she has planned for you.”
“Maybe Fate’s plan isn’t such a bad one for me.” Jesse shrugged. “It’s not like I’m ever going to belong in this world. I’m not a knight; I’m not brave. When the Fate Maker attacked us, do you know what I did?”
I shook my head.
“I tried to hide behind your throne,” Jesse said, his voice barely more than a whisper. “I was huddled up behind a chair, crying like a little girl when they found me. I’m a coward.”
“We’ll find a way to get you and Heidi home,” I told him, reaching out to grab his hand.
“I don’t belong there, either. After all that I’ve seen here, I can’t just go back and pretend it’s all the same. I can’t just forget what we’ve seen, what we’ve done. I can’t forget that Winston can turn into a dragon or that Mercedes is green. I can’t pretend that I haven’t seen what war is like.”
“You’ll forget. You’ll go through, and we’ll make sure that you forget—you and Heidi both. You’ll forget you were ever here, and you’ll forget that the rest of us ever existed. You just have to let us get you home.”
“What if I can’t ever really go back?” Jesse asked. “I mean, even if you wipe my memories or something, who knows if they won’t come back later? Maybe there are some things you can’t forget. Things you’re not supposed to forget.”
“I don’t know.” I shook my head and then looked over at him. “But I want you to do me a favor.”
“What?”
“Don’t try to be a hero. It’s—”
“Not my job,” he said quietly. “Fate doesn’t need me to be the knight in shining armor. That’s what Winston is here for after all.”
“No,” I said quietly. “I need you to do something more important than that.”
“What?”
“I remember when we were in ninth-grade English together.”
“So?”
“You were really good at making up stories in the creative writing section. Everyone wanted to listen to what you came up with.”
“Only because I was popular.”
“No.” I took his hand, squeezing it. “You were really, really good. So that’s what I want you to do. If…”
“If?”
“If we fail,” I said quietly, “I want you to stay alive and make your way back to Nerissette. Tell them the truth about what happened here. Tell whoever’s left how I—how we—died.”
“You’re not going to—”
The door creaked, and we both watched as it opened slowly, the Fate Maker standing there with Heidi in his arms and his hand tight around her neck and a long scratch down the front of his face that looked like a nail mark.
“Do you remember the first time we had breakfast together?” the Fate Maker asked me, his face contorted into a mask of pure rage.
“Yes.” I swallowed and then stood up, facing him, remembering the day he’d shown me just how far he’d go to stay in power.
“Good,” he said, his eyes blazing. “Because I want you to remember that no matter how tough you think you are, I’ll always be able to get to you and the people you care about.”
I watched as Heidi’s body began to waver in his arms, fading in and out like she was out of sync with the rest of us somehow. She began to shrink, and the air around her just seemed smaller.
“Stop!” I stepped forward, but instead of moving he just opened his arms and smiled as her transition between girl and tiny pink fairy finished.
He reached out and snatched her from the air, throwing her onto the floor and stomping down hard, crushing her miniature body. Just like he’d done to the fairy at the breakfast table.
Chapter Twenty-three
I sat with Jesse’s arms wrapped around my back as we both stared at Heidi’s tiny pink corpse. “I just don’t understand,” I said, my voice cracking on the last word.