Chapter 35
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
I lay on the bed’s padding, my cloak over me. Dorian busied himself in the other room, his back to me. I couldn’t see his face as he said, “Sleep while you can. I’ll keep a watch.”
"Right," I said, too fast, too flat.
We were back to who we’d been. That moment between us had been nothing, an anomaly. It was better this way.
So why couldn’t I close my eyes?
"Where will we go in the morning?" My voice sounded tight, clipped—a world away from the softness it had held a minute ago.
"There’s a way out." Dorian still faced away from me. He paced toward a threadbare animal skin so worn it was hard to tell what creature it had once belonged to. He pointed. "Under here."
"A cellar?" Did he mean for us to hide down there until the trial was done?
"If it hasn’t collapsed on itself."
"And if it has?"
He didn’t answer. He struck off into the other room and began rummaging among the detritus there.
We didn’t speak again that night.
I slept on my rolled-up cloak atop the old padding, facing away from where Dorian eventually sat with his chair angled toward the door. I glimpsed him before I fell asleep: his sword lay across his lap, his body rigid, face forward, jaw etched in stone, eyes onyx.
A clamp of sadness closed over my chest. It felt distinctly like longing, which was stupid for so many reasons. He was a murderer, a kidnapper, a monster. And anyway, it wasn’t real. It was just my body responding, not my mind.
I had control over my mind, even if my body betrayed me.
I squeezed my eyes shut and pressed my face into the cloak, trying not to breathe in the scent of him. But it was impossible. It was soaked into the wood, into the mattress, into the air itself.
By the time sleep finally dragged me under, I could not feel sadness. I could not feel anger. That scent, maddening and inescapable, had erased everything else.
A hand touched my shoulder. “Eury.”
My eyes opened. I was fully awake the moment Dorian’s voice sounded above me. I had slept more deeply than I’d expected, but fear and its partner, exhaustion, were powerful sedatives.
I turned my face up to him. He hovered over me, his hair veiling his face in the crystal-light semidarkness.
“It’s time to go.”
I nodded once, and that was all we said.
We ate and drank in silence. Then we got on our gear and Dorian flung aside the animal skin to reveal a trapdoor set into the floor. He grabbed at a latch and pulled it open with a squeal of hinges and a plume of dust.
I stepped forward, but his hand went out to me. “I’ll go first.” He started down an old earthen set of stairs, ducking his head and disappearing inside. A few moments of silence elapsed. When I stepped toward the entrance, his face appeared from the shadows. He nodded me down.
The cellar was cold but not collapsed. Past the steps, a square of light from the cottage above showed shelves with ancient jars.
“This was my mother’s root cellar,” Dorian said as he pulled the trapdoor shut above us. We were enclosed in darkness.
Her root cellar. My mother had always fantasized about having a root cellar—but those were for the inner districts. Not us.
On instinct I reached into my pouch and drew out the small crystal he had given me. Its light grew between my fingers almost at once, as though my own body powered it. I held it up, and Dorian’s eyes lit fuchsia like an animal’s.
He half-smiled. “Brilliant light, for such a small thing.”
I turned the light toward the shelves. “You said this was your mother’s cellar?”
Behind me, he rustled with the shelving on a far wall. “A shock, I know—even evil Unseelie have mothers.” He yanked at the shelf, and when I turned I found it pulled away from the wall to reveal an opening. “Mine was a bit paranoid.”
I stared into the pure darkness. “Paranoid of what?”
Dorian ducked into the tunnel. He extended his hand back toward me. “Everything.”
What had happened to Dorian’s mother? If fae never died of old age, then…
It was a useless question to ask. He wouldn’t tell me right now, anyway.
I didn’t accept his hand, and he didn’t push it. I kept two steps behind him as we passed through the narrow tunnel. He had to hunch, and his shoulders were nearly too wide. It seemed perfectly suited for my size, if not overgrown with roots and crawling with bugs.
“We could stay down here,” I said. “Until the trial is done.”
He snorted. “Why, Eurydice, that wouldn’t be in the spirit of the Sylvanwild Court. What would our fair queen say?”
“She wouldn’t have to know.”
“Keeping secrets from our monarch?” He tsked. “Risky. But that would be the Unseelie way.”
“So?”
“We can’t stay down here. Soon the Hunt will follow your fear to this tunnel.”
I paused. “And not yours?”
“Yours is… far more potent.”
“And why is that?”
He stopped and turned back, his eyes purple in the light of my crystal. “We’re nearly at the other side.” He’d ignored my question. “Once we’re up there, we’ll head to Virellan Falls. It’s half a day’s walk.”
“Virellan Falls?” I echoed.
“Waterfalls at the edge of our lands. We can spend one night there, beneath the falls. The water should mask our scent that long.”
“So that’s the plan? Move from place to place until ten are dead?”
“It’s the best plan we have. We’ll never win against the other fae or the Hunt. I haven’t the power to protect myself against them, much less the two of us.”
I nodded. He was right.
“Eury.” He turned toward me in full. “How good is your memory?”
I didn’t know the point of his question. “My mother always told me it was a trap.”
“That fits.” I didn’t know quite what he meant, but before I could ask, he said, “What about directions?”
“You saw the inside of my district.” I knew it like the whorls of my fingerprints, but that was exactly how it had felt to me as a girl: whorling, easy to get lost in. I’d had a lifetime to learn all the alleys and turns.
“Yes, I did.” He dropped to the ground and gestured for me to get to my knees. His finger began moving in the soft earth. “From here, it’s southeast to the falls. Keep the sun a little to your left before noon, and a little to your right once it’s past its arc.”
I watched his finger trace a line between two spots. “Why are you telling me this?”
“If we’re separated—”
“You said we won’t be.”
His hand stilled, but his face remained angled down. “Because I’m no hunter, Eury. Not like some of the others. I’ll do everything in my power to keep us together. But should you end up alone…”
I swallowed. Then I’m dead. “All right.”
Dorian nodded and continued with his directions.
When he had finished, he made me repeat them: keep the sun on my left, then on my right; halfway, I’d find a rock in the shape of a woman’s reclined body; once at the falls, I should follow the river and push past overgrowth to find a path behind the falls.
“You wait for me at the falls,” he finished. “I swear, I’ll find you there.”
“You’ll find me there,” I said, my voice thin.
When he was satisfied by my recitation, he rubbed out the tracing he’d made in the ground. That felt like the ghost of his mother acting through him. We rose, and we continued through the tunnel until we reached another set of stairs carved into the earth.
Before we ascended, I touched Dorian’s arm. “This tunnel—your mother built it?”
He paused with a foot on the first step. His face lowered. “Yes.”
I hesitated, then asked what had been gnawing at me since we’d come down here. “Why?”
He flinched as though he’d been pinched. His lips pressed together. “Because once, someone came through the front door who shouldn’t have. And she never wanted to be caught unprepared again.”
The words hit colder than the damp earth around us. I stared, waited for him to say more, but he started up the steps without another word. At the top, he grunted and pushed something aside. Light flooded in. Light. Air. And with them, danger.
We were back amongst the fae. Back amongst the Wild Hunt.