Page 20 of The Blood Queen

Cecil bellows, “Attack!” and kicks his horse forward.

The wisps swerve through the air, leading us into the thickest of the trees.

Alyth and I dip and dart between trunks and branches, and when the going gets too tightly clustered, I shove her ahead of me, awareness prickling hard at the back of my neck as I hear axes hacking at the branches behind us.

“Samson!” my father shouts. “You’re dead, boy, you hear me? Dead!”

“Where are the wisps bloody leading us?” I call to Alyth.

She grunts ahead of me but stays quiet, frustration evident in her tense shoulders, her hunched posture.

We stumble out into another clearing. This one’s blissfully empty of Red Caps.

I whirl around, watching the path we took, certain my father’s gonna surge through the trees. I’m still exhausted, stretched too thin, but if I need to summon up a Red Cap rage to protect Alyth, I will.

“There!” She grabs my arm as I’m turning, hauling me toward…a mushroom ring? It’s no bigger than a wagon wheel, a circle of knobby brown mushrooms centered in this clearing.

The three wisps hover just above it, rotating around themselves so their lights leave the imprint of interlocking circles in the air.

Alyth bolts for the mushroom ring at a full sprint, dragging me along. “Don’t break the mushrooms!” she orders.

I follow just as armor clangs behind us.

The Red Caps are here.

“Alyth!” I cry, but she releases my arm and jumps, lands in the mushroom ring—

And vanishes.

It’s not even a question what I’ll do.

Voices shout for me from behind, but I blindly leap after Alyth and fall into the portal.

6 Alyth

A fairy ring. A temporary portal into the fae realm, a sign of the natural link between the two worlds. They’re beautiful and rare.

And I have to destroy it.

As soon as Samson and I are through, I whirl around. “Stomp on them!” I shout, kicking the mushrooms that grow in a perfect circle on this side of the portal, a parallel to the one in the forest out there. We’re at some distant edge of the fae realm. “Quick!” I fling my foot out, sending a tawny brown cap flying, but that’s not enough. I reach down and yank, pulling at the white stem and tossing it aside.

A hand fills the hole where the mushroom had been, earth caked in the nails of the clawing fingers.

Startled, I cry and fall back, and Samson spins around to me, ready to fight and defend. But it’s not the Red Caps he needs to attack. “The mushrooms,” I gasp. “Destroy them all! Quick!”

He doesn’t question me, thankfully. The more fungi we uproot, the harder it is for the Red Caps to claw through. The first one has been able to reach his arm up to his elbow, but the others show only fingers and then nothing at all. When I reach the last mushroom in the circle and crush it under my heel, an electric zip of white energy zings around the circle.

The various fingers that had been poking up through the soil—and the arm—flop over, severed from the Red Caps who owned them. There’s no blood, just burnt ends and the lingering stench of roasted flesh.

Samson gags, staring with horror at the still-warm and twitching arm of the Red Cap.

“Be grateful that’s all that made it through the portal,” I say.

Samson leans closer to it. “That’s Cecil’s hand. Arm.”

“Really?” I ask, peering down.

Samson nods. “His ring.”