Rhea shot a blistering spell that knocked a fey clean off his feet, sending him flying, and then grabbed me. She was saying something, yelling it even, but I couldn’t hear her. I couldn’t hear anything but the howling of the wind.

Because this immersion had been deeper than the others as Faerie pulled me down, and tried to drown me. To the point that it had literally felt like I was Arsen. I could smell the wine he drank, feel the thickness of the glass under our fingers, taste the fruit. I felt the chillness of the wind, stealing across the balcony, and the ache in his shoulder from where Aeslinn had gripped it.

Even more, I felt his confusion at his king’s actions, which made no sense from either a political or military standpoint. I shared his pain at the lost lives, many of them old comrades for, in some cases, hundreds of years. Knew his impotent anger. Saw again the face of the fey he’d raced to the city, the young, laughing countenance that he’d last seen lying waxy and pale on a heap of others, having been drained by a monster’s kiss…

It hurt, as if I’d lost a friend of my own, and trying to separate myself from him now was like trying to clean off a body that had fallen into a vat of molasses. He clung to me like an ill-fitting skin, but one that was tightening all the time. And nothing Rhea did was changing that.

I dimly saw her yell at Guinn, who was taking on half a dozen fey at once—and winning. Because the trees were helping her. I did a double take, even as out of it as I was, but it was true: heavy wooden knots were being brought down onto fey heads, huge limbs were slashing across vulnerable bodies, and masses of leaves were suddenly dumping onto archers, burying them and their weapons under mounds of tree gunk.

Maybe the trees were angry that the fey had burnt their friend, or maybe the Svarestri felt alien to them, like invaders in their forest home. It didn’t look like Aeslinn’s fey knew much about green, growing things, but Guinn seemed to have figured them out. Because she circled a hand through the air and the trees crowded closer, hedging us in, and grabbed the fey with hungry roots.

It was the perfect time to escape, but I couldn’t move. Because I was already moving, as Arsen got up, drained the glass, and went back inside. He passed through an expansive sitting room, then down a hall with many doors and into a large bedroom at the end, where he began taking off his armor to examine his wound.