Page 106 of The Blood Queen

I won’t die, but she’s right.

There is defeat wrapped all around me, as sure as there is spider silk now engulfing her thread on the loom.

My gift—the gift of my father—has always been to see auras.

Right now, when I look at the High Blade, I see triumph but also strands of yellow confusion, and—there, almost hidden.

Black fear.

And I know what I’m about to do is exactly what must be done, because if I can invoke even a whisper of terror inside this monster, then I must act without hesitation.

Carefully, carefully, I lift a strand of spider silk thread up, a magic wisp weightless between my fingers.

I grasp the High Blade’s thread, and I pull. Not enough to break the thread, just shift it.

My vision goes red, then black. Dimly, I think I hear a scream. I don’t know if it is mine or hers.

We are too intertwined.

Colors—so many colors, more than are possible, blindingly bright—streak through me, burning into my eyes until I am no longer sure I even have eyes, a body, a soul. I am nothing.

Pull one thread, and the entire cloth unravels.

Break the cloth, break fate.

Rather than slice through the High Blade’s thread, I rewove it in the loom, using human skills and spider silk and magic.

Rather than kill both her and myself, I chose instead to kill neither of us.

I chose to reweave fate instead of cutting it.

And as soon as the threads settle, I pick up the loom and smash it to bits.

No one will ever play with my fate again.

* * *

The throne room.

Centuries ago.

The High Blade has added a hidden blade to the Faerie Queen’s shuttle. The queen accidentally severs her own thread.

The Faerie Queen is erased from reality.

Not all fates can be changed.

* * *

One thread: The High Blade is banished, exiled beyond the new magical wall erected around Scotland that protects the people and the portals alike.

This is the timeline I live, the fate woven for me by me.

A new thread: The High Blade is captured. Rather than be banished, where she can use her exile to gather strength for hundreds of years and hatch a new plot, the Damhan-Allaidh and her spiders wrap the High Blade into a cocoon, trapping her in eternal stasis, the webbed prison hung over the empty bloodred throne.

This is the timeline I have created.

For all of us, everyone. I lived in the world where the High Blade was banished, and that world fell. Killing the High Blade in my timeline would mean the future still had to face the fall of both Scotland and the Seelie Court and deal with the repercussions of that bloody war.