And besides, the Dark Fae didn’t care about Aurora right now. She had another target.
Me.
She narrowed her eyes. I expected her to say something, but she didn’t. Where was our wizard, Gerrold? Trapped in the press behind the tightly packed Light and Dark Fae?
She raised her staff. I raised my hands again, spreading them like a shield.
The bolt of sickly green light struck my hands. And… I braced myself against the force of the interloper’s power as if I were trying to hold a door shut, the magic reflecting off my palms. I had no idea what I was doing or even how I was doing it, but I felt my feet sliding on the floor and I knew I couldn’t keep this up forever—or even for more than a few moments.
I wasn’t afraid anymore and I wasn’t angry. All I could feel was determination. I just reacted with pure instinct. I gathered my own strength, pressing hard against that force. I took a deep breath, squinted against the green glare, and screamed “You! Leave! Her! ALONE!” at the top of my lungs, and I gave a huge mental and physical push back.
With a boom that drove me backward so I sprawled on the floor, the dark magic reflected from my hands back to its caster. She screamed when it hit her with another boom.
There was a blinding flash. And when I could see again, she and all her creatures were… gone. There were just a few tiny black rags fluttering down from the ceiling and a scorched place on the floor where she had stood.
The Dark Fae were the first to react—and with faces now distorted by fear, they fled. Some opened portals right in the Hall and stepped through them; some took to the air and crashed through the windows to escape. A few ran for the door behind them, eliciting more screams from the guests they ran into or over on their way out. In an instant, the Light Fae set out in hot pursuit except for the first four or five from the front row who rushed to my side. I watched the pursuers for a moment; they weren’t in pursuit to catch, they were merely making sure none of the Dark Fae returned. They still couldn’t attack the Dark Fae—the one who’d started this was very dead, and if anyone here had been thinking of allying with this stranger, that thought had probably been blown out of their heads when I turned the tables on her.
A purple-haired fellow dressed mostly in scarves took my right hand while a dignified blond with blue-and-yellow bird wings got my left elbow, and between them, they helped me to my feet. I gazed into the Fae faces around me, my head still not working very well. “What happened?” I asked, dazed, as Domna returned through the pantry door.
Domna placed her hand on the bird-winged Fae’s shoulder and gently moved him aside. “That, my dear young mortal,” she said, “is what we would like to know!”
My knees more or less buckled at that point, and the purple-haired Fae caught me and lifted me in his arms as if I weighed nothing. “Up,” Domna ordered. “We must gather in the King’s private chambers.” She looked around at the other Fae and nodded. “I see all the Council are here, save Bianca and Brianna, and they are already upstairs. Let us go. Take young Miriam up, Ealsfird.”
Most of them flew out the smashed windows. I was too dizzy to think clearly, but it was fortunate that my purple-haired rescuer was thinking for both of us and carried me into the pantry and up the privy stair, probably guessing that this was where everyone else had gone.
He located where everyone was by following the buzzing of voices in Mama’s solar. He was still carrying me when we entered the door.
“Oh, my god—Miri!” gasped Mama, after seeing me being carried this way. My rescuer put me down, and I managed to stagger toward her. Mama was holding Aurora in one arm as she embraced me with the other, and that gave me a chance to reassure myself that Aurora was all right.
She looked up at me and cooed and burbled, and I nearly wept with relief. “I’m fine, Mama,” I repeated over and over until she finally believed me and let me go. I wobbled over to one of the couches and thumped into it heavily.
Bianca sat down next to me while just about everyone else was doing their best to make sure Mama and Papa got calmed down. “I know your brain is most probably swimming,” she said, and patted the hand I had resting on the couch between us. “But I need you to answer some questions now before your memory fades.”
“I’ll try,” I said, with uncertainty, as Domna separated herself from the rest and came to sit nearby and listen.
I was feeling dizzy and light-headed, so I didn’t think about what I was saying before I blurted it out. Normally—especially with Fae—I’d have thought twice about anything I was going to say. Belinda had trained me pretty strictly that way.
Bianca asked me a lot of questions: Had I done anything like this before? (Of course not.) Had I ever played about with magic even a little? (It never even crossed my mind.) Did I ever sense that something was going to happen before it did? (No.) Had Papa’s wizard asked me questions about magic? (Never!) And a lot of other questions about how it had felt when I stopped the curse and how it had felt when I deflected the interloper’s magical attack back on her. Really detailed questions. Bianca even suggested words when I hesitated so I could put a finger on what I’d been doing, and say, “Yes—like that.” Words like “bastion,” for instance, when she asked what I had been trying to make myself into.
Then Domna asked me how I was feeling now. “A little sick,” I said. “My head is still spinning. And I don’t think I can stand up right now.”
She tsked, twirled a finger over her left hand, and created a whirlpool of sparkling motes of light; and a tiny sapphire-colored bottle coalesced out of them. She picked it up with two fingers and handed it to me. “Drink this,” she commanded. “All of it down at once or you’ll choke on it.”
With a grimace, I unstoppered the bottle and did as I was told, and I nearly came out of my skin. It was like drinking fire! But the burning vanished quickly, leaving behind a lovely warmth that spread all through me; my head stopped spinning; and I began to feel normal again.
Now Brianna joined us. Looking past her, I saw that the rest of the Fae were in conference with Mama and Papa and that Aurora was in the cradle that had somehow been brought from the nursery, with Melalee standing over it like a brooding dragon and brandishing a candlestick as if it were a weapon. And while I absolutely sympathized with her instinct to protect Aurora, she did look kind of absurd. Then again, maybe her instinct was right; some Fae were susceptible to silver.
“Well,” said the third one of the godmothers. “I certainly didn’t expect my gift to be exercised quite this soon.” She tilted her head to the side and looked at me. “And what are we to make of you?”
Domna snorted. “She’s Fae-blooded, that’s what we make of her. How much and from where, I have no idea. We’ll have to research her family tree.”
Those words evidently caught the ear of the Clerk of the Court. Like the Light Fae, he had somehow weathered all this with his wits and aplomb still intact. He sidled over to her. “It has to be on her father’s side,” he said, talking as if I weren’t there. Which, truth to tell, I was used to from the clerks and older courtiers. I didn’t like it, but I was used to it. It’s just the way some people are when they get old; they act like anyone younger than they are is invisible. “When His Highness proposed to the Queen, I traced her mother’s lineage back so far that if she had any Fae blood, it couldn’t be more than a fraction of a droplet.”