Grace glares at him, and speaks those words again. He does not understand them—she’s speaking in the old fairy tongue, and he hasn’t heard it for aeons—but he does recognise the look in her eyes. He’s felt such rage in his own expression many times before.

“Please,” he says, and he’s aware that he is begging. All around him are the sounds and sights of his plan only just beginning—gunfire and fighting, and human cries of pain as they die beneath the hands, claws and teeth of things they do not yet understand; the triumphant roars and songs of brave Kin finding their footing in the world once again; humans scattered at his feet, broken and afraid. It is all he’s ever wanted. It’s all within his grasp.

“Please,” he says, taking two strides towards the fairy.

She raises her hand, whispers more words in her old tongue, and Mallian freezes to the spot. Every muscle vibrates, knotting into cramps that bring a muted roar of pain from his constricted throat. He shivers as he tries to tear loose of her hold, and knowing what her power over him entails—he had two years held pressed to the damp ground to consider it—he directs every ounce of his strength into ripping free.

He is a butterfly pinned to a board.

He feels the eyes of the humans upon him, and some Kin as well, traitors to their kind.

“I... never... lose,” Mallian says, and then the world around him blurs, blackness falls, and when he next opens his eyes it is raining, and the Fold has him once again in its grasp.

The fairy is there as well. She lets him fall free and slump to the ground, his muscles settling and strength returning. When he looks up again she is gone, and there’s only him.

She didn’t bind me to the ground, he thinks, but there is no comfort in that realisation. He looks around the Fold and sees only what he has seen before—the same views, the same skies, the same alien stars.

She left him free because there is nowhere for him to go.

31

31

Sammi was weak but conscious, and everything about her had changed. Vince didn’t want to touch her anymore. Once he’d dragged her back from Mallian he let her go, and they watched together and yet apart as Grace and Mallian slipped out of sight back through a portal the fairy created for less than the blink of an eye.

There, and then gone.

“So is that it?” Bone asked.

“They could have gone anywhere,” Dastion said.