Melissa Marr - Darkest Mercy

Donia concentrated every remaining bit of Winter she could focus on the short blades of solid ice extending from her hands. Her legs gave out, so her weight was supported on the sword that War had buried in her body. The Winter Queen lifted both hands and tried to drive them into Bananach’s neck.

“I don’t think so.” The raven-faery leaned backward.

War withdrew her sword, and as she did so it re-formed as an ax. She swept her arm to the side. The shadow-made weapon was still taking shape as Bananach brought it down on Donia’s chest.

“Donia!” Niall yelled, and it was the last thing Donia heard before she fell to the bloody floor.

“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.