A Court of Bastards [ACOTAR]

Chapter 45

Leather trampled mud as Fiona hurried back to her tent with the wind whipping at her hair.

Red is the head that bears the crown, redder the head it belongs to.

After Elain's little revelation, Fiona had been keen to get out of her sight - somewhere those vacant eyes could not watch her quite so closely. Now she was striding as fast as she could past smiths and stoves and squabbling children, trying to dissect the sonnet.

Black the eyes that covet it's shine, bloody the battle that's long due.

Nesta had said it herself, Elain wasn't in her right mind. She'd warned Fiona not to engage, not to take heed of anything she said. Yet here she was, panicking over a silly little poem. It probably meant nothing, simply the unfortunate product of a fragmented mind.

The Crown of Bastards sits on a skeleton. Children will fight in the fields.

Her gaze wandered to the woods against her will, where she knew Bella would be taking the afternoon class for combat training. 

Of course, Elain was also a Seer. And the last time they had failed to uncover a prophecy, Velaris had gone up in smoke, along with its High Lord and Lady.

The King of Stone shall have his fill if the dead-man-walking yields.

She came to a halt suddenly, her mind working faster than her feet could keep up with. 

The King of Stone. Keir - or at least, he had been in Gabriel's prophecy. But what was this about a Crown of Bastards? Fiona let out a frustrated huff. There were too many moving parts, too many pieces to this stupid puzzle.

She reached her tent and kept walking, needing the cool, shaded expanse of the pine forest. A tight, concentrated frown puckered her forehead as she strode beneath the guard tower and outer perimeter, thoughts screaming through her mind at a mile a minute. What had unnerved her most of all was that Elain's prophecy seemed specially tailored to Fiona; an unconscious chill ran down her spine as she imagined the twin sisters of fate, weaving her destiny in strands of starcrossed silk.

Eventually she found a quiet clearing, and sat herself between the roots of a large sycamore. Sunlight filtered through the pines in thin shafts, illuminating patches of the forest floor around her. The clamour of camp felt so very far away - as did prophecies, war, and crowns. Out here, there were no courts. There were only songbirds, and beasts that stalked the undergrowth, living solely in pursuit of their next meal. 

The tip of a red tail caught her eye as it dashed between the ferns, a few metres from where she was sat. A moment later Fiona heard a faint squeal, and saw the triumphant head of a fox pop into view, its tail held high with a sparrow in its mouth.

As she watched the creature settle beneath an oak tree to enjoy its kill, Fiona felt something shift into place with a little click. Red heads, black eyes, bastards...why hadn't she seen it straight away?

"Elain's prophecy is about the Autumn Court." Fiona gasped, alerting the fox, whose ears swivelled in her direction momentarily before returning to its prey. As the weight of this revelation sunk in, she slumped back against the sycamore, leaning her head against the bark and murmuring a quiet, "Fuck."

The Crown of Bastards surely belonged to the Court of Bastards, which meant Eris was the skeleton on which it sat. Did that mean Eris was marked for death? Was he the dead-man-walking who stood before the King of Stone?

Fiona's stomach churned as she tried to visualise all the pieces of the prophecy. After Velaris, she had been desperate to face her father for a multitude of reasons, some of which she didn't dare to name. In the darker parts of her mind, she'd imagined standing before him, accepting Eris as her father before slitting his throat. And in some of her dreams, she'd returned to the Forest House to steal him away from Aidan and all his dreadful kin. Oftentimes she'd wake up crying, and wouldn't quite know why - all she could remember in the light of morning was her father's arms around her, and his sly smiles across the breakfast table.