Page 1 of Broken Hearted
Chapter One
It was the night of the Winter Solstice. The portal was going to open, and I was about to either betray my people or my best friend. I was in an impossible position.
My mother smoothed down my long, dark hair, which mirrored her own. “You should have no fear. Even though you haven’t trained for this your entire life like Dawn, you’ve done well these last months. We always knew it would be a possibility, even if a small one.”
She was right. Every hundred years, the Summer princess, Faerie’s champion, went through their portal and returned with the heart of an Ethereum lord, stopping the curse that threatened our realm. If she failed, the task fell to the next princess. But that had never happened before. So there had not been much reason to train me for a job that was unlikely to come my way.
Six months ago, the portal to Ethereum opened in the Summer Court, and Dawn had traveled to the mirror realm, but she never returned. Princess Aribella, the Fall princess, then became the champion and went with the same directive. But she, too, never returned.
As the Winter princess, I was third in line.
I peered down at my bag, packed with maps and rations. I was as ready as I’d ever be.
I’d been surprisingly calm after Dawn’s ghostly apparition, along with Princess Aribella and the Ethereum lords, had come to see me. I knew Dawn at her core. She was not a woman easily fooled, and she would never give up on her people, so I had to believe that she had a plan to save us. I trusted her, which meant I could no longer trust Queen Liliana.
It had been hard to keep my questions buried deep inside over the past few months of training with the Summer queen. But I did. I trained with her, and I saidyes, ma’amwhen she told me that I was Faerie’s only hope and ordered me to cut out the heart of the first Ethereum lord I saw.
I told my mother I would do the same.
Only I knew I had been living a lie, and it was eating at me. Negative thoughts crept into my mind. What if Dawn was wrong? What if it hadn’t been Dawn that visited me at all? What if it was someone pretending to be her in order to trick me?
But she knew about my birthmark and my first crush. Of course it was Dawnie.
I took a moment to really look at my mother. She was strong, emotionally and physically. She’d led our people well, with my father by her side, for twenty years. Until they ripped the illusion of a perfect marriage away from me and my sisters when I was fifteen by telling us they were divorcing.
Unhappy. Affair. I hate you. How could you?I’d heard my mother scream all of those things at my father one night when I wassupposed to be sleeping. She wouldn’t stand for the betrayal, and I didn’t blame her. But I also still loved my father. It was a hard place to be: stuck between two people you loved. Now I felt that way again. Nineteen years old and I was torn again.
Between Dawn and all of Faerie.
“Your sisters want to say goodbye.” My mother gestured to the door.
I turned to her. “If I don’t make it back—”
“Nonsense.”
“Mother, if I don’t make it back in two days’ time, take everyone to the Spring Court,” I told her sternly.
She appeared a little shaken then, but the truth of the matter was that Dawn and Aribella had both been in my position and hadn’t returned. The same could happen to me, especially if Dawn’s plan to save Faerie was going to take a long time to execute. In that case, I wouldn’t be returning right away.
“I will get the heart immediately, or something has gone wrong,” I lied. I had no intention of killing one of those men. Not after Dawn claimed one was my mate.
Mate.That word was foreign to me, and I wanted nothing to do with it, but I recognized that I might have been lied to my entire life. That there was a chance the Ethereum lords weren’t evil like we’d been told, but rather that they were just men with families and people who depended on them.
She nodded once, and we both left the room.
Seraphina, Elowen, Aria, Freya, Thalia, and Amara were waiting outside the door to my dressing room, standing stiffly with their arms at their sides. I knew they were trying to bebrave, but their misty eyes and quivering lips betrayed how they really felt.
After me, Seraphina was the eldest at seventeen years old and the one I was closest to. The rest of my sisters were born two years apart. My mother planned her heirs perfectly, as she did everything else in her court.
I looked Seraphina in the eyes and grasped her shoulders. “Be strong.”
For weeks, I’d agonized about whether or not to tell her about Dawn and what she’d said, but in the end, I decided it might endanger her life and my plan. So instead, I sent a letter to Lorelei, the Spring princess who was next in line to travel to Ethereum if I failed to destroy the curse. In the letter, I told her about Dawn and the Ethereum lords who had appeared in my bedroom. If I didn’t return, she needed to know there might be another way to save our worlds that didn’t involve carving a heart from someone’s chest. Lorelei was the gentlest and most kind-hearted fae I’d ever met. Her gifts were rooted in bringing forth life, not ending it. Even with Queen Liliana’s training, she wouldn’t be able to kill an Ethereum lord. Of that, I was certain.
“Come back to us,” Seraphina growled, and I grinned. There was the sassy sister I knew.
I pulled her into my arms, and then all the rest of my sisters pressed in around me, holding on to me and pushing me into the center of a giant sister hug.
Emotions clogged my throat, but I kept it together for them. When everyone pulled away, I was looking down at little seven-year-old Amara. She was missing one of her front teeth, and her hairhad some streaks of red, like my father’s. She was the sensitive one of us who had yet to fully control her power, which was evidenced by the snow now falling on my head even though we were still inside.
