11. Kat
Kat
I didn’t have the breath or brainpower to argue. Also… maybe he was right.
We’d been about to kiss, and although I was a fool, I still understood that was a terrible, terrible idea. Even if it had felt right for those few fleeting moments.
I needed to control myself. However tempting, Bastian was off limits.
He hadn’t even apologised. At least I’d tried to. Getting involved would only lead to more hurt, and I hurt enough.
I needed to get away from him. Not just now but forever. Home was safer.
Eventually, his heaving chest calmed and he dropped my sleeve. After several turns and a flight of stairs, we reached the corridor that housed his office. Coming the opposite direction, almost blocking the hall, was a huge man. His dark grey hair matched his dark glower.
It took me a moment to realise there was someone else at his side—a woman with strawberry-blond hair. Her freckled face broke into a broad smile when she spotted us.
Bastian sighed, shoulders sinking. When we reached them, he turned, but didn’t look directly at me. “This is Faolán.” He gestured at the giant. “I’m the queen’s right hand, and he’s mine. And this is Rose. Meet Katherine—or Kat.”
Somehow, Rose’s smile grew broader. “ Katherine .”
Faolán’s eyes widened a touch as he looked down at me, and I realised his lowered eyebrows were more a sign of curiosity than irritation. “Kat.” He nodded. “She’s so small,” he muttered out the side of his mouth.
I couldn’t help chuckling.
Bastian arched one eyebrow at him. “And yet she still has ears.” He clapped the giant on the shoulder. “Rose works for me and for some reason agreed to marry him.”
“Her life was in danger,” Faolán muttered.
Rose swatted him. “But I chose to stay married to you, didn’t I? No danger involved. And as for you…” She pointed at Bastian and narrowed her eyes. Shaking her head, she turned to me. “Anyway, ignore these two. I am so pleased to finally meet you properly.”
I threw a questioning glance at Bastian, but he was still studiously avoiding my gaze. “And I—”
“Rose is going to be your bodyguard. I’ve already briefed her about”—his eyes flicked to my gloved hands—“precautions.”
She eyed us, then peered down the hall. “What have you two been up to that’s got you looking so flustered?”
“Archery practice,” Bastian answered too quickly. “Turns out Kat doesn’t need much of it. I’ll leave you two to your day.” Clearing his throat, he opened the door and I caught a glimpse of Brynan at his desk. He disappeared inside, calling back, “Faolán, my office.”
Faolán frowned from the spot where Bastian had stood a moment ago to me. “What—?”
“ Now ,” Bastian’s voice clipped through the open door.
“Sorry, little flower, duty calls.” Faolán kissed Rose on the cheek.
As he held her shoulder, I had to bite back a gasp. At the tips of his fingers were claws instead of nails, short and blunt like a hound’s.
Nodding to me, he followed Bastian.
I stared after them. It felt like I’d been hit by one whirlwind after another.
“Bastian… can be like that sometimes.” She winced and gestured back the way she’d come. “I’ll show you the city. I hear you haven’t seen much of it.” Her lips pressed together, an expression that ill-suited her. Her face was made for smiles and laughter.
The city meant venturing out from the palace’s protection, but it might also give me a chance to find out about unCavendish as well as go to my appointment at the Hall of Healing. At least I’d touched Bastian for the day, so I didn’t need to worry about that.
I stole glances at her as we walked through the palace and she explained how the hill it was built on had once been a volcano. Natural hot springs fed the baths in the basement levels and were channelled out into the river that cut the palace off from the rest of the city.
It was only now Faolán wasn’t next to her that I could tell, despite what he called her, she wasn’t a “little” anything. She had to be six foot tall and well-muscled. And it took a while longer before I realised why she put me at (relative) ease. “You’re human.”
She shot me an infectious grin. “Mostly.” She peered along the corridor. We were alone. “Until not so long ago, entirely.”
I squinted at her in question, but asking what she was had to be considered rude, even for non-fae.
She winked as we turned a corner. A handful of guards waited at the end. “I’ll tell you later.”
Before we stepped through the doorway, she warned me we were passing into a lodestone, and I steeled myself for the lurch that felt like walking down a staircase with one more step than I expected.
A columned chamber stretched before us, wide and long, the high ceiling showing a sky full of racing clouds and the tinge of sunrise gold. The image moved, and when I gave Rose a questioning look, she shrugged. “Magic. You’ll get used to it.”
In fact, the buzz on my skin was less noticeable than it had been when I’d left the Hall of Healing, growing clearer when I focused.
Ahead, at the chamber’s centre, a fountain glittered, and beyond that stood two huge doors, wide open to the outside. The grand hall Bastian had mentioned. He’d brought me a different route that first day.
I could probably find my way from here back to his offices and the practice yard, even if it wasn’t the most direct way. That was progress.
Before we stepped out into the burgeoning day, I glanced back. The door we’d entered through cut off the far left-hand corner of the chamber, while another matching door cut off the right-hand corner. That had to be Dawn’s entrance.
We crossed the same bridge as that first day, and since I avoided looking over its edge (or even acknowledging it had one), I spotted that the sky above matched the one from the hallway. Magic, indeed.
“You’ll get used to it all.” Rose gave me a lopsided grin. “It took me a little while, but now I love it here. Ari, too. That’s my friend—she’s one of us.” She tapped the rounded tip of her ear.
“Mostly” human—yet her canine teeth were long and sharp like a fae’s.
Curiosity ate at me, but the bridge deposited us into a busy street and fae stared as we passed.
So many people—people I could kill with a single touch.
I clutched at the buzzing sensation on my skin, desperately trying to will the magic inside me to be small. I was a girl again, my father rapping a ruler across the table, making me jump.
Sit straight.
Knees together—you’re not a whore.
I hated myself for leaning on those lessons—what had they got me? I’d been poisoned—not just by the aconite, but by all the words my father and uncle had dripped into me for so, so long. Except… without those lessons, without their tight boundaries, who the hells was I?
That was too big a question. Far, far too big.
And right now, I needed to keep this magic under control. Much as I hated their rules, they had taught me to be quiet, small, contained, and I needed this power in my veins to be the same.
Still, the fae watched.
“What are they looking at?”
“Us.” Rose shrugged. “But mostly you.”
I frowned, every inch of me rigid from holding on. “They didn’t stare as much when I came this way before.”
She gave me a sidelong look. “Were you with Bastian, by any chance?”
“I suppose he’s enough to scare the curiosity out of most people.”
Another flashing grin. “Mm-hmm. We’re human, which is unusual enough. But I’m old news now. You’re still fresh and new, and you must know about fae and red hair. I’m sure Bastian’s told you the effect—”
“They like it. I know.” I didn’t want to think about the effect I had on Bastian nor him on me.
“There you go. And, of course, the rumour mill started churning the moment Bastian came galloping into the city with a half-dead woman in his arms and demanded the best healer save her life.”
I swallowed down a reaction. Galloped . Demanded . I rubbed my chest where my heart dipped.
All of this is real.
Rose went on, pointing out various buildings along the way.
Art galleries that were open for anyone to visit.
Indoor and outdoor theatres. A school of art, where, through a window, I caught the glimpse of a naked model posing with a pair of weighing scales in her hand and a snake draped over her shoulders.
Music drifted from open windows, a song dropping off as we passed from one street only to be picked up as we entered another. Sometimes the next tune was faster or slower, happy where the last one had been sad, but somehow they all felt akin to one another, like garments cut from the same cloth.
I’d heard in stories that fae loved art and beauty, but this…
It drowned me so exquisitely, I didn’t know where to look next, even as I tried to keep an eye on the surrounding faces. Was that woman following us? Was I just being paranoid?
“I probably should’ve shown you around the palace first, but I figure you’ve been cooped up too long.”
Agreed. Outside and doing something at long last. Speaking of which…
“I have a request, actually.” I kept my tone casual, even though a little thrill ran through me. “This necklace—I think it came from the city, and I’d love to get something to match it. Do you think we could find the jeweller it came from?”
She glanced from the pearlwort necklace to a tower topped with a massive orrery.
“We have time to visit a few before your appointment, and getting to know the city though jewellery shops is as good a way as any. Though I warn you, there are a lot of jewellers in the city. It might take us a while to find the right one.”
“I’ve got nothing but time.” I had to find out more about unCavendish, and this was my only lead.
So Rose led the way. My head spun a little with her endless chatter about different people and places in the city. It was comforting, even if I didn’t fully understand all the references she made, but that comfort was at odds with the looks following us.
I started to build a picture of who was from Dawn and who came from Dusk.
As well as blond, brown, and leafy green, Dawn hair colours tended towards the soft tones of a dreamy sunrise, while Dusk favoured deeper colours like the bright ones of a spectacular sunset or the deep dark of midnight.
Though a few had starlight hair in pale shades of blue, purple, and silver.
Skin tone varied across both, including the palest and darkest shades seen in humans as well as tinges of green or blue.
Everyone had pointed ears and that same impossible beauty that felt as dangerous as their sharp teeth.
In truth, it was.
Especially in the Dawn fae. As far as I knew, any one of them could be behind unCavendish. True, it was likely to be someone with power and influence, but I didn’t know the players yet, nor did I understand how to pick out the powerful fae from the average pawn.
This was a new game.
Still deadly, but with new pieces and new rules, none of which I knew beyond Bastian’s warnings.
“Bastian asked me to help train you,” Rose said as we turned onto a wide road full of shops with large, curved windows that seemed impossible to make from something as fragile as glass.
I eyed the paired long knives at her side. “To fight?”
She glanced around, then ducked closer. “To use your magic.”
Use it? There didn’t seem much point, since I didn’t intend to have it for long. Elthea had said she was confident she’d find a cure. Fingers crossed, that was why she’d arranged this appointment.
Still, it was a good excuse to pry a little about Rose’s “mostly” human status. I tugged the cuffs of my gloves. “You have… something similar?”
“No, but I was a human without magic, and now I have it and have learned to control it. He thought that might mean I could help you.”
I raised my eyebrows in question when she met my gaze.
“Oh, you want to know what I am?” She chuckled, then shrugged. “Faolán’s a shapechanger—a fae who can shift into another form.”
A man passing wrinkled his nose like she’d just said Faolán ate shit.
“And he was able to turn me.” She showed me her forearm where an arc of teeth marks showed pale against her freckles. “I’m a werewolf.”
I stared at the scar. “You mean… werewolves are real?”
“Oh, yes. Very real.” She flipped her arm over, revealing another set of marks, as if that proved it.
Another fae stiffened and hurried across the road.
“Don’t worry,” Rose called after them, “you’re safe. It isn’t a full moon. Or—wait—is it? Oh no!” Her back arched and she clawed the air.
I stopped mid-step. Was I meant to get help? I glanced up the hill—I could find my way back to the palace and fetch Faolán.
But… no. Her eyes weren’t wide in fear.
“I can feel myself losing control, I’m going to—”
She howled.
Fae scattered.
I was torn between concern about the attention she’d drawn and relief that it kept people at a distance, so I didn’t need to worry so much about poisoning them.
Pulling her sleeve down, she rolled her eyes. “Fucking hypocrites.”
I raised my eyebrows at her performance. “So… fae don’t like werewolves?”
“Or shapechangers. Even though ,” she added in a voice that filled the street, “the first Day King was one. In case you’d all forgotten that side of your beloved hero.”
The few remaining fae bowed their heads and hurried past. One clicked their tongue and muttered, “Exactly what I’d expect from such animals .”
Rose huffed a long breath out. “I’m sorry, it just really…” She gritted her teeth and shook her head. “Most shapechangers try to keep what they are secret so they don’t upset other fae. But I say screw them.”
“So I see.”
She frowned ahead. “Some think it’s just name-calling and being the last served at a bar, but in some villages they’ll attack you the moment they get a whiff of something animalistic.”
“You don’t need to apologise to me.” I went to touch her arm, but the sight of my gloves reminded me why that could be risky. I clasped my hands together. “I can get behind a bit of anger.”
Truth be told, I envied her. From the way Faolán had kissed her cheek and called her “little flower” so casually to the way she didn’t hide her feelings—I envied her.
“Thanks.” She shot me a smile softer than her others, like this one came from somewhere deeper. “Much as I love Tenebris, fae can be so ridiculous sometimes.”
“No arguments here,” I muttered.
From the corner of her eye, she gave me a look that felt more knowing than I expected, but when she stopped outside a shop and opened her mouth, it wasn’t for a probing question. “Here’s our first jeweller.”