Page 114 of The Stolen Heir

The falcons have made a careful circle behind the trolls. At the signal, they draw their weapons and rush in.

There is fighting all around me. Arrows and blades. Screams.

I push myself to my knees. “Mother,” I say, forcing it out.

That was the word meant to end the masquerade of control.

“All who follow me, you shall follow Suren’s commands from this moment forward and forevermore,” Lady Nore calls out, following my instructions exactly as she was supposed to, at least until she pitches her voice low. “If she can make any.”

“Stop the trolls,” I shout, pushing myself to my feet. When I cough, blood spatters my fingers.

“You are the one to order me captured, child?” Bogdana calls to me. “You?”

I snap off the end of the arrow, gritting my teeth against the pain. Freeing my other hand.

Hurclaw is trembling all over. Whatever the poison, it is acting fast.

“You played us false,” the troll king says. “You never had Mellith’s heart at all, did you?”

“He cannot lie,” says Lady Nore, standing amid the carnage, watching it as though it is distant from her. “He told us he brought it north with him. He has it.”

What happens when she discovers how you’ve deceived her? When she realizes her role in your plan?

“Call off your people,” Oak tells Hurclaw. “Call them off, and I will give you the antidote.”

“No!” The troll king lunges for Oak. They topple together onto the snow. Oak is skilled, but nowhere as strong as Hurclaw.

She will have to decide how much she hates me.

Oak, who abandoned looking for the heart after he went to the Thistlewitch. Who tried to send me away, who hadn’t wanted to need me.

He’ ll steal your heart.Wasn’t that what Bogdana said in the woods?

My mind drifts dizzily back to the feeling of something inside me unraveling.

To lying on the cold ice floor of the throne room. Memories flood me until it seems as though I am in two places at once.

I am another little girl, unwanted and afraid.

Hag child, a woman’s voice says.You will take Clovis’s place in her bed tonight.

The feel of heavy blankets, embroidered with stags and forests. Warm and soft. And then waking to agony, to breathlessness. To my mother looming over me, bloody knife in her hand. To the joy, the relief I felt before the feeling of betrayal so vast it consumes me.

My real mother. My beautiful mother. Bogdana.

I hear her voice. But she is not speaking to me now; she is talking to someone else, a long time ago.I will make sure your heart beats in a new chest.

I am terrified. I feel the agony of her nails reaching into my chest.

I blink, and it is as though I am seeing double, still half in that memory, half in the snow at the edge of night.

Mellith’s heart is mine.

I ought to have known it since waking on the cold floor of the throne room. Since those dreams, which felt too real. Since the power sang through my veins, just waiting for me to reach for it.

I was afraid of magic from the first moment that Lady Nore and Lord Jarel stepped into my bedroom in the mortal world. And I couldn’t stop being afraid of myself. Afraid of the monster I saw when I glimpsed my reflection in still pools, in windows.

But all I am is magic. Unmagic.