Epilogue

Isolde

I drummed my long, black-painted fingernails on the windowsill, looking out at the clumps of snow as they fell from the sky. What a wild past several weeks it had been. My body was covered in fading bruises and defined muscles from the constant training Queen Liliana and her staff of tutors had been giving me. I had heard rumors that Dawn had failed her task and never returned, news that had gutted me. Dawn and I had been very close, making sure to connect every year at our famous winter festival that drew revelers from all four courts. And I’d gone to see her during the summer at the honey bee fair.

I peered wistfully at the dried flower crown of daises I’d bought just last year with Dawn while visiting the Summer Court. I’d wanted to believe the rumors were untrue until Queen Liliana and the Summer Court refugees flooded across our borders and then asked me to take over where Dawn had failed. She put no stock in sweet Aribella and knew that this task would end with me.

I gripped the hilt of the blue kyanite dagger my mother had given to me when I was twelve. Winter princesses never expected to be called as champions: we were third in line to travel to Ethereum, but my mother was a prudent woman who left nothing to chance. Myself and my six younger sisters all started training when we reached womanhood. I was ready for this, maybe not quite to Queen Liliana’s reckoning, but I wasn’t going to hesitate to do my duty for my people. I would make sure that curse never touched our land.

I would complete what Dawn had set out to do. I just wished I’d been able to say goodbye to her first …

“Isolde!” a familiar voice shouted behind me and with my heart in my throat I spun around, expecting to see a ghost.

What I saw instead was a spectral form of not only Dawn but Aribella as well, and four handsome men with them. I screamed, staggering backward against the wall.

Was she visiting me from the afterlife? Summoned by my thoughts of her? Or was there something more nefarious at work here?

I gripped the blue kyanite blade in my hand and pointed it at all of them.

“You’re not Dawn,” I said, certain I was hallucinating. But even as I shook my head, I stared at her familiar face and the braided plait of long blonde hair that hung over one shoulder. Everything about her was as I remembered. Would my mind even be able to conjure such a perfect likeness of my beloved friend?

She stepped closer to me, ghosting straight through my bed and I yelped.

“Izzy, it’s me. Dawnie,” she pleaded, using our childhood nicknames. “And we have so much to tell you, but I’m not sure how much time we have. These are the Ethereum lords. All four of them.” She pointed around the room and I scanned the handsome men, my gaze falling on one in particular.

He had chin-length dark hair with streaks of gold running through it. He peered at me with a bit of an aloof expression, but even so it stirred something within me. Something I pushed down because this was insane.

“You’re not real. If you were, one of their hearts would be on the tip of your knife.” I knew Dawn too well for this ruse. She was the strongest of us all, lethal, brutal, and there was no way she would have just grabbed that guy’s hand and held it! The Ethereum lords were our enemies!

“Izzy,” Dawn pleaded with me, pulling the dark-haired men beside her forward. “Zander, the Ethereum Northern lord, is my husband. We’re married.” She held up her hand and smiled softly. “And I’m pregnant,” she whispered, but not quietly enough because everyone else heard her.

The other men’s faces showed shock right before they broke into cheers of excitement.

I shook my head. “Lies. Go. Leave me, ghosts!”

I could feel the tears brimming in my eyes, but I pushed them down.

“I’ll prove it,” Dawn said. “You have a birthmark in the shape of a triangle on the back of your left thigh.” I froze at her words. “Your first crush was Tanner Larson, Sir Henrick’s squire. You used to steal sweets from the kitchen and bring them to bed when we had sleepovers at the winter festival.”

I stared at the apparition in disbelief. How did she know those things unless …

“Izzy, it’s me. I know this is hard to believe but … I need you to try.”

Her words practically ripped my soul from my body. It must be her. How else would she know all those details?

I fell to my knees, hands shaking as the dagger dropped onto the carpet of my bedroom.

“How?” I asked, trying and failing not to hyperventilate. She married an evil Ethereum lord? And now she was pregnant? That meant she didn’t come back on purpose. She wasn’t dead … she just gave up on us.

Dawn’s apparition stepped closer, kneeling down before me. “Isolde. They’re our mates. We’ve been lied to and all these years they’ve been preparing us to kill our mates.”

I gasped, looking up at the men present again.

Mates? I could guess at what that meant, but it wasn’t something we believed in here in Faerie. Mates were as much of a fairytale as any other I’d heard, but as I scanned the room I saw that Aribella was now in the arms of one of the dark lords. The scariest-looking one. His longer hair hung loosely over his face but even so I saw the scar on his cheek.

“It’s true,” Aribella confirmed, her mouth curving into a soft smile as she glanced up at the man next to her.

The man I’d been glancing at before, the one who looked like he’d spent too much time in the sun, cleared his throat. “Technically, I’m engaged but Zane could be your mate.”

He gestured to the tall lord next to him who waved awkwardly and looked at me hopefully. He was undoubtedly handsome, I grudgingly admitted they all were, yet I didn’t feel a thing when I looked into his unusual eyes. They were dark blue, with a smudge of brown in one of them.

I glanced back at the lord who’d spoken about being engaged and something uncomfortable flipped in my chest. Leave it to me to think the one unavailable guy was the hottest.

“This is a lot.” I finally stood, taking in a shaky breath. I peered back at Dawn, lowering my voice. “What do you mean we were lied to? Your mother has been training me these past several weeks to kill one of those guys.”

“Please don’t do that,” Dawn said with her hands out in a gesture to calm me. “My mother … means well, but Isolde, you have to be careful around her. She knows we are sent here to kill our mates. That’s why they tell us to never let them speak, to kill them quickly. I think they are afraid of what would happen if we actually got to know them.”

“You’d fall in love,” Aribella said wistfully, and I frowned.

Mates? Love? These were things that horrified me. After my own parents’ ugly divorce I wanted nothing to do with so-called love.

“Listen, Dawn, that all sounds nice for you both but your lands are dying, your people refugees. It’s going to keep coming, I can’t just forget that for a chance at love .” It was ridiculous.

Dawn nodded, shame covering her features. “Aribella and I did not make our choices lightly. But these men, they have people too, and families, and feelings. They aren’t monsters, Izzy. And we found another way to end the curse, not just put it off for another hundred years. Once you get here—”

“Isolde!” Queen Liliana’s voice called from behind the door and my eyes flew wide at the same time Dawn’s did. She looked longingly at the door and then it started to open and Dawn ran back to the others.

“Bring us back!” she cried, to someone I couldn’t see.

Then they were gone, nothing more than air.

Queen Liliana strode into the room scanning the space with wide eyes. “Who were you talking to?” she asked.

My gut tightened as I replayed Dawn’s words. They send us here to kill our mates. The four men I had seen didn’t look like evil monsters. They looked … normal.

“Oh.” I laughed nervously, pointing to a romance novel on my bedside table. “I was reenacting a part from my favorite book.”

Queen Liliana frowned. “Well, that’s silly. You need to grow up now, Isolde. We’re all counting on you.”

I swallowed hard. “Yes, Queen Liliana.”

“I came to tell you that your poison class has been moved up, so I need you to come now.” She moved her hand in an irritated gesture.

What was I supposed to do with this new knowledge? Was it even true, or was Dawn lying to me? But I couldn’t think of a single reason why she would.

I peered at my room, wanting to see Dawn again but knowing somehow that it wouldn’t be possible.

“Okay.” Sure, go learn poison-making so that I could kill my best friend’s new husband! Great idea.

As I followed her down the hall, my mind spun out in a hundred directions. Dawn insinuated that her mother couldn’t be trusted, that she knew the Ethereum lords weren’t evil.

“Queen Liliana?” I asked.

She peered at me. “Hmm?”

“I’ve always wondered, why don’t we allow the Ethereum lords to even speak?”

She stopped walking, her face taught. “Because they lie, dear,” she said.

I shrugged. “So we can’t hear a lie?”

She raised one eyebrow. “Why are you suddenly asking this? Do you have any idea what is at stake, Isolde? If you fail me I have to go to the Spring Court and we all know that Lorelei is soft. Softer than even Aribella had been. You are our best hope, so all of these questions need to stop. I need you to be a killing machine by winter solstice, and questioning why we do things isn’t how you’re going to get there,” she snapped.

Whoa. That was quite the response for such a simple question.

My stomach sank in that moment. Dawn was right. Queen Liliana knew and she didn’t want me poking around in things.

I inclined my head in indifference but fear seized me in that moment. Dawn had said there was another way to possibly help our people, but she disappeared before she could explain more. So what was I supposed to do? And why couldn’t I stop thinking about the tanned guy with the blond streaks in his hair. The engaged one!

Oh Dawn, what have you gotten me in to?

Suddenly traveling to Ethereum and cutting out the heart of an Ethereum lord had become much more complicated. The fate of our people rested on me and I had no idea what I was going to do.