A Court of Heart and Fealty | Rhysand

Chapter 92: Someday

Chapter 92: Someday

They had to drag her from the cell. She let them grab her elbows, the tops of her feet scraping along the gritty stone, legs hanging limply behind her. They went upwards. She couldn't be certain, but this was the fifth time in the past—two moons, maybe. They only pulled her from her cell in the deepest pit of the dungeons for one of two things.

One: the Games. Every year, it was her one chance to watch Faeries die from a hand other than her own. But even Amarantha had begun to grow bored. Her cruelty had been stretched to its limits. But it was easier when she was entertained. Now she sought it elsewhere, like a drunk who had become immune to wine.

Two: Galadriel had become Amarantha's favoured executioner. Always fire. Galadriel had become horrifyingly adept at burning someone from the inside out. The skin on her arms had permanently scarred from the burn of the magic. But she had to. They laced her food with Faebane and another, weaker spell over the dungeon kept her magic dulled. This was the only time she could let the magic out before it drove her closer to insanity than she already was.

So when someone opened the doors to her cell, it always meant death.

Today the air reeked with it.

When they entered the throne room, the crowd's eyes turned to her and she knew which option today's was. In the past years, the audience in the throne room had grown quieter and quieter. There were also two reasons for that. There were those who were quiet because they had given up. Amarantha had tamed them, subdued them. They were wrapped in a blanket of fear that they were so used to it had become comfortable. The other group was the ones simmering with an icy rage. The type of wrath they claimed the Night Court's Spymaster to have, sheltered beneath a stoic face and keen patience.

Three things.

The guards forced her to her feet by the side of the long dais. Galadriel faced the crowd and did not look anywhere but her next victims. She didn't even bother to see who they were. Female. Male. Children. Elders.

Galadriel. She was Galadriel.

Amarantha began her speech, which had grown less and less convincing over the years as well, now nothing more than a brutish reminder that she was Hell on a Throne with a crown of poison spikes.

Galadriel wobbled forward. The muscles that the Illyrians tried so hard to build on her were nonexistent anymore, her skin sagging from frail bone. She caught the dark silhouette in the corner of her eye.

The High Lord of the Night Court.

She walked towards the centre space before the throne, dipping her head at the Queen. The weight of eyes prickled against her back. It had only taken her first excursion from the dungeons to realise that the people of Prythian had been informed of her mateship.

The Night Court. The Night Court was her home.

Galadriel turned back to the kneeling form, the broken sobs of a young, female voice only cracking through Galadriel's haze over the world. The girl was young, barely fully grown and still perhaps with some years left. Her brown hair had been torn from her scalp in places, blood spotting pale skin. She didn't even seem to know why she was there, unformed pleas scratching in her throat. It made the magic in Galadriel seize up, curl back in on itself in detest for what it knew it would be called for.

But there was no choice. If she did not, if Galadriel publicly displayed the same defiance that did in the deepest pit of the Mountain, she would be killed. Whether it cost Amarantha Rhysand or not.

Galadriel did not wait for the order, driving her magic outwards, letting it reach for the fuel of flesh. Her world went quiet, sublimely quiet as the power surged through her. She could not feel, did not see, refused to listen. She made herself utterly numb.