Chapter Twenty-Three
Velor did not think of himself as heroic.
He would have found the word embarrassing, and not only because he disliked drawing attention to his own usefulness.
Heroics were for princes, queens, and the sort of fools who mistook impulse for virtue.
Velor preferred service. Service could be done well.
It had shape. It had order. It asked for steadiness more than brilliance, and steadiness he had in abundance.
That had been true of him from youth.
Other fairies had wanted glory, or beauty, or influence, or lovers in profusion, or songs made about them after they were dead.
Velor had wanted only to be of use to someone worth serving.
Fairies had no churches, no hymns, no gods kept behind carved doors with candles burning before them.
They followed the wisdom of nature because nature did not lie and did not ask permission.
Still, if anyone had cared to assign piety among fairykind, Velor would have earned the word.
Pious in loyalty. Steadfast in it. The most among them all.
Karai had been his prince for most of his life, and Velor had never wanted another. To serve Karai was to serve a mind he respected, a ruler who rarely made careless demands, and a man whose discipline ran so deep it ordered the people around him whether he intended it or not.
Derran had come later. Velor had gone to the sky court under pretense.
A spy, which was the least sentimental term for it and the truest.
Yet years spent serving a good prince had a way of complicating the initial purpose.
Derran had trusted him. That had mattered.
Velor had admired him too, though he would sooner have bitten off his own tongue than say so aloud.
The sky court prince was reckless in places Karai was not, but he was generous and brave and far more perceptive than people first assumed.
Velor knew he had made a misjudgment once, badly, in allowing him to go to the burrow court and challenge Karai over Ina.
That fight could have ended much worse than it had.
Still, Velor had been the one to bring Ina there to stop it.
He had never meant Derran harm. If anything, he had meant to keep both princes from destroying themselves and each other, and had simply chosen the wrong path toward that end.
Derran, generous in the way that made loyalty easy and guilt harder, had already forgiven him.
Even now, in the odd tangle that had become the lives of Ina, Karai, and Derran together, Velor still found himself sometimes falling back into the old habits of valetry when Derran stayed in the burrow court.
He liked that. He liked service that could be carried out with his own hands.
A coat brushed. A platter brought. A message sent before it needed asking for.
Some lives were built on grander things. Velor had never envied them.
So when Karai had called for him and told him to watch the mirage fairy, he had not hesitated.
Trepidation, yes. He had plenty of that. Only a fool would have faced such a prisoner without it. But fear and reluctance were different things, and Velor had no reluctance at all to dissuade his loyalty.
Now he sat outside her cell in the deepest part of the burrow court dungeons, where the air held the damp chill of old stone and the lamps burned low and steady in their brackets.
The corridor was narrow enough that no two fairies could pass shoulder to shoulder without awareness of each other.
The cell door was reinforced wood banded in steel, etched along every seam with the sort of old binding magic that made the eye feel tired if it looked too long.
Near Velor’s chair, cut into the door at the height of a watcher’s face, was a small viewing hole no wider than a pinhole and filled with reinforced glass.
It existed not for comfort, but for duty.
Every so often he leaned and peered through it to make certain the prisoner remained where she had been left.
She did.
Zuri sat chained against the far wall with enough metal and magic on her to hold an entire storm.
Ankles. Wrists. Waist. Neck. All fastened to iron rings set deep into the stone.
Karai had removed the magical hood from her face after the cell was sealed, both because it was needlessly cruel to leave her struggling for full breath and because the dungeon’s bindings were thought sufficient. Velor had seen her then.
Her beauty struck him. Not in the foolish way songs praised, as if beauty must arrive like divine lightning from a clear sky and leave a body smoking. It was more like touching another person in dry weather and catching a brief sting of static. Clear, surprising, and gone.
He had seen beauty before. Ina was beautiful.
Derran was beautiful in the bright, open manner of the sky court, Karai in the darker, stiller fashion that drew the eye more slowly and held it longer.
Zuri’s face was not, by measures of beauty, greater than theirs.
Only more dangerous in how easily it seemed built to invite trust.
Velor knew better than to trust invitation.
He waited a long while after the last of the rulers had gone before looking in again. Partly out of respect. Partly out of caution. There was no need to give even a chained prisoner more of himself than duty required.
When he finally shifted in his chair and bent to the hole, she turned her head toward the door slowly.
“Please,” she said in a low voice. “May I have water?”
Velor sat back.
There was a water pump in the corner of the corridor exactly for this purpose, with a shelf of plain wooden cups beside it. Prisoners had to be kept alive even when no one had yet decided how kindly they would be treated.
He went to the pump, filled a cup, and with a neat blink of magic sent it from his hand to the floor inside the cell, just within her reach.
When he looked through the hole again, she smiled and picked it up.
“Thank you,” she said.
She drank carefully, trying not to spill. When she had finished half the cup, she looked toward the door again.
“What is your name?”
Velor did not answer.
She laughed softly under her breath. “I am bound with magic older than the burrow court itself. Your name won’t undo that.”
He told himself silence was the better choice. Still, after a pause he heard himself say through the door, “Velor.”
“Velor,” she repeated. “Charming. I’m Zuri.”
He said nothing.
She let the silence sit for a few breaths, as though testing its edges. Then, lightly, “You must be very trusted if they left you with me.”
No answer.
“Odd, though,” she went on. “That they left you all by yourself. Did they think you don’t need rest at all?”
Still nothing.
“You must be tired,” she said. “If you’d like to take a little nap, I can promise not to escape.”
He could not help it. The smallest snort left him.
Her voice brightened on hearing it. “Truly, Velor. Where could I go?”
He shook his head to himself, though she could not see it.
For a few moments she was quiet, and he wondered whether that would be the end of it. Then she said, “Do you have a wife, Velor?”
He kept his mouth shut.
“You don’t seem like the sort to have a wife, to be honest. You seem like that would bore you immensely.”
Velor rolled his eyes.
There was no sound in it, but somehow she seemed to know.
“Am I boring you, Velor?” she asked. “Shall I stop speaking?”
He did not reply.
That was the annoyance of it. He would not have minded if she kept talking.
Her voice had a pull to it, even stripped of the glamour in her eyes she was known for.
He did not mistake that pull for virtue.
Still, the corridor was cold, the hour late, and he had spent his life listening more than speaking.
A voice in the dark, even from the wrong mouth, could still reach some part of the mind that disliked empty stone.
“Well,” she said, “I’m already uncomfortable in here, Velor, so your comfort is not at the top of my mind. I feel like talking, and so I shall.”
The answer came out of him before he quite meant it to. “If you need something, I am duty bound to provide it.”
He regretted it at once.
And at once, too, heard the smile in her voice. “How lovely, Velor. How about something to eat?”
He rose and rang the small bell fixed to the corridor wall near the water pump.
It took less than five minutes for a young page to arrive, sleepy-eyed and solemn, carrying a plate of bread, roots, and cold slices of fish.
Velor took it, dismissed him, and blinked the plate through the dungeon walls to the floor beside Zuri just as he had done with the water.
She ate quietly.
When she had finished, she said, “Thank you, Velor. Do you have any wine?”
“No,” he replied, too quickly.
She did not sound disappointed. If anything, she sounded more pleased now that he had given her another word.
“How unfortunate.”
Then she was silent for so long that Velor’s own thoughts began to get noisy. He shifted in his chair. Waited. Counted the spaces between drips from the pump. Counted them again. At last, against his better judgment, he bent and looked through the hole.
She was staring back.
Not at the hole. At him.
As though she could see straight through the minuscule slit and into his face on the other side. She smiled then, very slowly, and narrowed her eyes in a way more seductive than any expression had business being in a prison cell.
Velor shut his own tight.
An odd sensation had begun to rise in him.
Not simple desire. Nothing so clean. A loosening.
As if the careful lines of himself, all those places in which he kept thought and appetite and duty properly sorted, were softening around the edges.
He did not like it. He also did not entirely mind it. That was worse.
He opened his eyes again.
Nothing in the corridor had changed. The lamp still burned low. The stone was still stone. The cup still stood by the pump. Yet the feeling in him had grown, and continued to grow still, overwhelming his senses.
“Velor, darling,” Zuri said softly through the door. “Does it feel cold in here to you?”
“Yes,” he heard himself mumble.
It did not feel cold. It felt warm. Too warm.
She let the pause stretch.
“I think what I really need, Velor, are your arms around me. Warming me.”
He hesitated.
“Please,” she added, with the barest catch in her voice.
That one word struck the center of his heart.
She had already found some path into his mind through voice and eye and waiting, and whether he had simply overestimated his own steadiness or her power was so great it overtook him, Velor could not later have said.
It did not matter. In that moment the decision seemed not only reasonable but necessary.
She was chained. She was cold. He could help.
He was, as he had said, duty bound to help.
He rose, unlocked the door, and stepped inside.
That was all she needed.
The moment he crossed the threshold and met her eyes without wood or darkness between them, something gave way in him entirely.
A fire sprang up at her side.
It had not been there a moment before. Now it burned close enough to her skirts to look dangerous.
“Help me, Velor,” she said.
Her voice held no panic at all.
He panicked for her.
The chains seemed suddenly monstrous. The fire too near. Her wrists caught. Her body seemed unable to turn away quickly enough. Without thinking, he reached with the very magic he had watched Karai use on the locks and released the shackles at her arms.
He had not yet drawn his hand back when she used her own power.
The rest of the bindings fell away in a smooth silent cascade, as though they had only been waiting for her will to touch them. Ankles. Waist. Neck. All gone.
She stepped toward him.
He still did not understand. Not until she leaned in and kissed him.
He kissed her back.
And in the same instant she drove a blade into his side.
The knife had no business existing. It was made of air and metal and fire together, forged only by the light in her hands. Pain tore through him, hot and deep. He cried out and dropped to his knees, both hands flying to the wound.
Zuri did not hurry.
That was perhaps the cruelest part.
She pushed him over with one hand, smirking as he sprawled on the ground, and walked out of the cell without so much as glancing at the blood already spreading under him.
By the time Velor understood enough to hate himself properly, his sight had begun to darken at the edges.
He saw only one thing clearly.
The bell on the corridor wall.
With the last of his focus, he flicked a finger toward it and sent a gust of wind magic hard enough to ring it.
Then his vision went black.