Chapter 40
CHAPTER FORTY
The wraiths moved fast—much faster than any horse, even at a gallop. I finally understood how they had so thoroughly decimated us humans in the southern district.
They were impossibly quick, like shadows under the moon.
The trees rushed by, and I was carried in what felt like icy silk. No hands touched me, but all around me I was girded by shadow. Even so, traveling to the iron gates took hours. The Sylvanwild lands were much larger than I’d realized, and nearly all of it was filled with dense forest.
The wind hissed past my ears, cold and constant. The forest became a smear of motion, and somewhere between the blur and the silence, my body grew heavier. Not asleep—just untethered. Drifting.
My eyes closed, and the forest vanished.
I stood barefoot in the middle of a snow-covered field, the hem of my jerkin wet and clinging to my thighs.
Ahead of me, the horizon glowed with a strange light, and there—at the center—stood my mother.
She wore the same threadbare shift I’d seen her in the day she died.
Her face was the way I remembered it from childhood, untouched by grief or acid rain.
Blond hair, blue eyes, hands white with flour.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” she said, her voice the wind itself. “Not yet.”
I tried to step toward her, but my feet wouldn’t move. The snow beneath me wasn’t snow anymore; it was ash. I looked down and saw the southern district burning around me, flames licking up from the ground without fuel.
“I’m trying,” I said, though I didn’t know what I meant. “I’m trying to get out.”
My mother didn’t smile. She only raised her hand and pointed—to the left, where the ash swirled into a shape. A throne, twisted and overgrown, half-formed from root and bone. Something glinted on the seat.
I stepped closer. The air grew colder with each footfall.
As I neared, the outline sharpened: a dagger, long and curved, its blade the color of deep frost. The tip gleamed like a thorn, wicked and waiting. It didn’t feel abandoned.
It felt asleep.
Behind me, something bellowed. A sound I didn’t recognize and somehow knew too well.
I jerked my head over my shoulder—
And the vision shattered like glass.
The wraiths had stopped moving. I blinked, my body aching with cold. I was no longer in the field or the fire or anywhere but here in Sylvanwild. The air smelled of rust and stone. The moon was no longer out. The forest was gray with predawn light, as were the high iron bars in front of me.
I was at the iron gates.
I turned. Behind me, the wraiths were nearly invisible in this light.
Almost incorporeal, like a barely-there skein of muslin.
But their scythes still gleamed. They hovered a moment, then slid off into the forest. They seemed to evaporate, those fae of old, who had harnessed nature too long and too voraciously.
If Dorian was right, and I had used magic, then their fate could be mine.
But Dorian was wrong. He had to be. I was human, not fae. And a human belonged in the Kingdom of Storms, not here.
I spun toward the vine-covered gate. I had arrived. I was free… nearly.
When I approached, I found the latch undone. It creaked, a squeal in the early morning, as I opened it to the world beyond.
There, on the path out, stood Rhiannon.
She was dressed in brown leather, her bramble diadem no longer set on her head. Her pants and jerkin hugged her body, her boots ending at her knees. And this time she didn’t hold her scepter; she held a longbow as tall as me. Already nocked, and the tip of an arrow pointed directly at my left eye.
Her elbow didn’t shake. She had the strength to hold that bow for days.
“The trials aren’t done, pettifey.”
She was flanked by more than a dozen fae, all of them women. All of them with bows held ready.
Dorian was right: Rhiannon had known by morning. And though the wraiths had been fast, they hadn’t been fast enough. Someone had gotten to her and told her what had happened.
Was it Faun? I doubted it.
Dorian had been right, too, about Rhiannon and me. Just like that, I was a threat. Judging by the sharpness of that arrow’s head, I was now her enemy.
She actually believed I had used magic. That I was worthy of this ambush.
But if she was going to kill me, she’d have let loose that arrow the moment my face had appeared in her vision. Which meant she had other plans for me. I couldn’t conceive of what those might be, but some strange, masochistic part of me was glad for this.
Being forced to stay meant I wasn’t leaving Dorian behind.
It’s not just about him, and you know it, a voice said inside me. It’s power like you’ve never felt. Power in your hands.
I pushed it down, out of mind.
Rhiannon stared at me past the gutstring of her bow. “Turn around and walk.”
“I—”
The bow creaked as she drew the string tighter. “This isn’t a negotiation.”
I turned, and I walked. Back toward the citadel. Back toward Dorian. Back toward Feyreign.
Every ruthless queen must have a dungeon, and the Sylvanwild Court had an extensive one.
After they stripped me of my weapons inside the citadel’s throne room, I was led through a door and down and down by two of Rhiannon’s handmaidens—as though I were dangerous enough to need two female fae guarding me—into the citadel’s deepest recesses, where stone steps gave way to simple earth.
They would not speak to me. They treated me like a prisoner.
The passages narrowed as we got into the dungeon, the root system pressing in on all sides. Bugs crawled everywhere, and I had never smelled the earth with such potency—humid and thick and overpowering.
Those purple crystals pulsed at sporadic intervals down here, barely enough light to see. I was led to an area where the root-mass thickened into a wall, and I watched as one of the handmaidens closed her eyes and twisted her fingers through the air to force the roots aside.
Earth magic.
It was laborious work because the roots did not want to part. But a gap large enough for me to fit through eventually formed, revealing a hovel. And I was instructed inside with a silent gesture of the hands.
Once I had stepped through, the roots closed themselves behind me. I couldn’t tell if it was fae magic or the tree’s natural desire to retake its own shape, but they were impenetrable now. I tested them after the two fae left, tugging here and there, and the roots didn’t so much as rustle.
There were no windows, and not enough light to see by. I removed Dorian’s crystal from my belt pouch—they’d taken my knife but left me the light—and it illuminated a space barely large enough to lie down in.
There was no bed. A wooden bucket sat in the corner.
Truly, a dungeon.
I sat down, and for a time I listened. I heard nothing except the skittering of bugs, the whispers of worms moving through the earth. I was alone down here.
This was a maddening place. A place for a quick imprisonment or a quick death.
My shoulder throbbed where Faun had stabbed it. Infection, maybe, or just the herbs wearing off. One of my eyes still didn’t open, and my face felt tight and fat.
I thought of Dorian, where he was, and whether he was safe. Maybe he was still headed to the iron gates. Maybe he would pass through them and never return to Feyreign.
I hoped that was true.
Alone down here, the landscape of my feelings became less muddled. It had begun during the first trial, in Thalassa’s hedge home. It was the night I’d sat above him and sewn his wounds together. That look.
No, I realized with a start, it was before that.
It began that first night, when I was shivering. He’d wrapped himself around me in my sleep. He had kept me warm.
That was when flint and tinder had sparked—that morning, waking to his breath on my ear, unconscious and warm. Every day we were together, I carried that memory like I was still in the alcove with him wrapped around me. Walking, running, drinking, but always in the alcove, always enclosed by him.
And at some point it had tipped into desire.
But when I kissed him—when I pulled him into me with my own strength in that cave—that something changed. That was when it settled, weighty and real. His mouth had tasted of blood and breath and warmth, the press of him inevitable.
And now I couldn’t deny it. I had fallen so fucking hard, I would rather stay a prisoner in Feyreign forever if it meant he was alive somewhere up there.
I wished we were still in that cave. I wished we had never left.
On some level I knew I had entered the kind of shock I’d felt after the southern district was attacked.
Waves of feeling hovered just below my chin, wanting to overtake me, but I forced myself to stay head-above-water.
Maybe I had never allowed myself to feel the grief of what had happened that night in the Dip.
Since then, death had always been around the corner, and I had learned to keep moving.
Rhiannon’s handmaidens had left me my cloak, my crystal, and my mother’s journal. I wrapped my cloak around me and removed her journal from my jerkin. I slid my hand over the supple leather and set it against my cheek. My eyes closed, and I could almost smell her.
I lifted the crystal, opened to the first page—where her script was written in a tight scribble across the paper, familiar enough from childhood—and I began slowly to decipher each shape.
My love, she’d written. You were born today, during a storm.