Read an excerpt of chapter 2 of ‘Queen of Air and Darkness’

How good does it feel that we’re finally able to say Queen of Air and Darkness is going to be published next month? I still remember reading Lord of Shadows in May 2017 and wanting to dive straight into the final book to know how the trilogy is going to end.
We’re so close to the finish line and today’s reveal is only going to increase the excitement for Queen of Air and Darkness even more. We’re already being treated to a random snippet every day until the book is released and we also got a whole chapter of the final The Dark Artifices book back in June but Entertainment Weekly still surprised us with a really long excerpt of chapter 2, which is titled Melancholy Waters!

2

Melancholy Waters

Cristina stood despairingly in the extremely clean kitchen of the Princewater Street canal house and wished there was something she could tidy up.

She’d washed dishes that didn’t need washing. She’d mopped the floor and set and reset the table. She’d arranged flowers in a vase and then thrown them out, and then retrieved them from the trash and arranged them again. She wanted to make the kitchen nice, the house pretty, but was anyone really going to care if the kitchen was nice and the house was pretty?

She knew they wouldn’t. But she had to do something. She wanted to be with Emma and comfort Emma, but Emma was with Drusilla, who had cried herself to sleep holding Emma’s hands. She wanted to be with Mark, and comfort Mark, but he’d left with Helen, and she could hardly be anything but glad that at last he was getting to spend time with the sister he’d missed for so long.

The front door rattled open, startling Cristina into knocking a dish from the table. It fell to the floor and shattered. She was about to pick it up when she saw Julian come in, closing the door behind him—Locking runes were more common than keys in Idris, but he didn’t reach for his stele, just looked sightlessly from the entryway to the stairs.

Cristina stood frozen. Julian looked like the ghost from a Shakespeare play. He clearly hadn’t changed since the Council Hall; his shirt and jacket were stiff with dried blood.

She never quite knew how to talk to Julian anyway; she knew more about him than was comfortable, thanks to Emma. She knew he was desperately in love with her friend; it was obvious in the way he looked at Emma, spoke to her, in gestures as tiny as handing her a dish across a table. She didn’t know how everyone else didn’t see it too. She’d known other parabatai and they didn’t look at each other like that.

Having such personal information about someone was awkward at the best of times. This wasn’t the best of times. Julian’s expression was blank; he moved into the hall, and as he walked, his sister’s dried blood flaked off his jacket and drifted to the floor.

Head over to Entertainment Weekly to read the full chapter.

By the Angel, how sad and also maddening was this chapter? My heart breaks for the Blackthorns and I really, really want to shake some sense into people who support Horace Dearborn and the awful Cohort.

What do you guys think? Leave us a comment below or tweet us (@TMI_Source). I can’t wait to read your thoughts.

Queen of Air and Darkness is published on December 4!