“Wendy, I know you’re realy busy, but you need to come see this,” Wila said. “The whole palace is talking.”

“About what?” I asked.

“Elora’s new painting.” Wila pursed her lips. “It shows everyone dead.”

18. Future

Elora had the “gift” of precognitive painting, although she’d be the first to tel anyone it was more of a curse. She would paint one scene from the future, from an event yet to happen, and that was it.

Since she’d been so weak lately, she’d hardly painted anything.

It drained her too much, but if Elora had a powerful vision, she couldn’t hold it in. The precognition caused her terrible migraines until she painted them and got them out.

Also, Elora tried to keep her paintings as private as possible, unless she thought they had some value that everyone should see.

And this one definitely did.

The painting sat on an easel at one end of the War Room. Elora had tried to keep the gathering smal, so only the people who needed to know would see it, but as Wila said, word of the painting was spreading through the palace like wild fire.

Garrett stood by the door, keeping the riffraff from sneaking a peak. When Wila and I entered, Marksinna Laurent, Thomas, Tove, and Aurora were gathered around it. A few others were sitting at the table, too stunned to say anything.

I pushed Laurent to the side so I could I get a good look, and Tove stepped back. The painting was even more horrifying than Wila had explained.

Elora painted so wel it looked like a photograph. Everything was done in exquisite detail. It showed the rotunda, its curved stairwel colapsed in the middle. The chandelier that normaly hung in the center had crashed and lay destroyed on the floor. A smal fire burned at the top of the stairs, and gold detailing was coming off the wals.

Bodies were everywhere. Some of them I didn’t recognize, but others were startlingly clear. Wila was hanging off the destroyed stairs, her head twisted at an angle that she couldn’t survive. Duncan was below the chandelier, broken glass stuck al over him. Tove lay in a pool of blood spiling out from him. Finn was crumpled in a mess of broken stairs, his bones sticking through his skin. Loki had a sword run straight through his chest, pinning him to the wal like an insect in an entomologist’s display box.

I lay dead at a man’s feet. A broken crown lay smashed near my head. I died after I’d been crowned. I was Queen.