Fragile Eternity (Wicked Lovely 3)

Donia couldn’t move. She sat staring at the shimmering vision of herself with hands red with Keenan’s blood.

“I worried, feared you’d be different.” Bananach crooned the words. “Beira took so much longer to reach the point of striking the last Summer King. Not you.”

The red-handed Donia stood over Keenan, watching him bleed. He had rage in his eyes.

“That hasn’t happened.” Donia called every reserve of Winter’s calm to the forefront. “I have not hurt Keenan. I love him.”

Bananach crowed. It was an ugly sound, breaking the peace of Donia’s home. “A thing I am grateful for, Snow Queen. If you were cold inside, you wouldn’t have the cruelty of Winter that we need to get things in place.”

“Why tell me this?”

“Tell you what?” Bananach’s head tilted in small increments until the angle of it was grotesque.

“If you tell me what it will take to start your war, why would I do it?” Donia crossed and uncrossed her ankles. She stretched, briefly letting her eyes drift shut as if she was nonplussed by the horrors Bananach brought in her wake. It wasn’t very convincing.

Battle drums rose like a wall of thunder around them. Screams pierced the rhythms of that drumming. Then the sound ended abruptly, leaving only the melancholy music of bagpipes, purer for the chaos that had preceded them.

“Perhaps I want you not to stab the kingling.” Bananach grinned. “Perhaps that would stop my lovely destruction…. Your action can lead to the same upheaval Beira’s killing Miach caused.”

“Which action?”

Bananach snapped her jaw with a decisive clack. “One of them. Perhaps more.”

Donia winced as the illusory figures continued their conflict. Her doppelgänger was struck again and again by a sun-and-rage-filled bleeding Summer King. Then, the scene looped back to the moment where Keenan said Aislinn’s name, but this time Donia struck him until he stretched motionless on the floor.

“There are so many lovely answers to your question, Snow.” Bananach crooned the words. “So many ways you can give us bloody resolutions.”

Again the scene unfolded.

She spoke to him, said words she had said over and over, words she’d once swore never to tell him again. “I love you.”

He sighed. “I love you, but I can’t be with you.”

Donia couldn’t look away.

Once more the scene began.

She spoke to him, said words she had said over and over, words she’d once swore never to tell him again. “I love you.”

He sighed a name not hers. “Aislinn…”

“I can’t do this, Keenan,” she whispered. Snow squalls rolled into the room.

He struck her. “It was just a game….”

This time they both struck out at each other until the room was filled with steam. In the steam, corpses appeared again, growing seemingly more solid as the moments passed. In the center of the carnage, Bananach stood like the gleeful carrion crow she was.

“Why?” It was the only word left to Donia. “Why?”

“Why do you freeze the earth?” Bananach paused, and when Donia didn’t reply, she added, “We all have a goal, Winter Girl. Yours and mine are destruction. You accepted this when you took Beira’s court as your own.”

“That’s not what I want.”

“Power? Him to suffer for hurting you?” Bananach laughed. “Of course it’s what you want. All I do is find the threads in your actions that will give me what I want. I see them”—she waved at the room—“none of these are my possibilities. They are all yours.”

CHAPTER 13

The next week seemed almost normal for Aislinn: things with Seth were right again, Keenan hadn’t pushed her boundaries, and court things seemed calm. She couldn’t continue ignoring Keenan, and it was becoming almost physically painful to stay so much away from him, so Aislinn had decided to simply pretend that the awkwardness of last week hadn’t happened. She might’ve been avoiding being alone with Keenan the past couple of days, but aside from a few very pointed glances when she called Quinn or Tavish into a conversation they didn’t truly need to be a part of…and okay, maybe a few very transparent moments of sudden needs for “girl bonding” with the Summer Girls, Keenan pretended not to notice her evasiveness. He merely waited as she held her faeries to her like a shield. She enjoyed time with them, Eliza especially, but that didn’t explain away her need to go dancing in the park the moment Keenan came too near.