63
Light blasted up through the blades into her hands, her arms, her heart. Bryce could hear it through her feet, through the stone. The song of the land beneath her. Quiet and old and forgotten, but there.
She heard how Avallen had yielded its joy, its bright green lands and skies and flowers, so it might hold the power as it was bid, waiting all this time for someone to unleash it. To free it.
“Bryce!” Hunt shouted, and she met her mate’s eyes.
None of what the Princes of Hel had said about him scared her. They hadn’t made Hunt’s soul. That was all hers, just as her own soul was his.
Helena had bound the soul of this land in magical chains. No more. No more would Bryce allow the Fae to lay claim over anything.
“You’re free,” Bryce whispered to Avallen, to the land and the pure, inherent magic beneath it. “Be free.”
And it was.
Light burst from the star, and the caves shook again. They rolled and rattled and trembled—
The walls were buckling, and she had the sense that Hunt lunged for her, but fell to his knees as the ground moved upward. Stone crumbled away around them, burying Pelias’s sarcophagus, the corpses of the two newly dead kings, and all their other hateful ancestors below. It churned them into dust. Sunlight broke through, the very earth parting as Bryce and the others were thrust upward.
Sunlight—not gray skies.
They emerged in the hills less than a mile from the castle and royal city. As if the caves had been backtracking all this way.
And from the rocky ground beneath them, spreading from the star at Bryce’s feet, grass and flowers bloomed. The river from the caverns burst forth, dancing down the newly formed hill.
Sathia and Flynn laughed, and both siblings knelt, putting their fingers in the grass. The earth magic in their veins surged forth as an oak burst from Flynn’s hands, shooting high over them, and from Sathia’s hands tumbled runners of strawberry and brambles of blackberry, tangles of raspberries and thickets of blueberries—
“Holy gods,” Tharion said, and pointed out to the sea.
It was no longer gray and thrashing, but a vibrant, clear turquoise. And rising from the water, just as they had seen on the map Declan had found, were islands, large and small. Lush and green with life.
Forests erupted on the island they stood on, soon joined by mountains and rivers.
So much life, so much magic, freed at last of Vanir control. A place not only for the Fae, but for everyone. All of them.
Bryce could feel it—the joy of the land at being seen, at being freed. She looked at Ruhn, and her brother’s face was bright with awe. As if their father didn’t lie beneath the earth, lost forever to the dark, his bones to be eaten by worms.
It was only awe, and freedom, lighting Ruhn’s face.
No more pain. No more fear.
Bryce didn’t know when she started crying, only that the next moment Ruhn was there, his arms around her, and they were both sobbing.
Their friends gave them space, understanding that it wasn’t pure joy that coursed through them—that their joy was tempered by grief for the years of pain, and hope for the years ahead.
The world might very well end soon, Bryce knew, and they might all die with it, but right now the paradise blooming around them, this awakened land, was proof of what life had been like before the Asteri, before the Fae and the Vanir.
Proof of what might be afterward.
Ruhn pulled back, cupping her face in his hands. Tears ran down his face. She couldn’t stop crying—crying and laughing—with all that flowed from her heart.
Her brother only pressed a kiss to her brow and said, “Long live the queen.”