Chapter 5
five
Nilah Dune
Sunlight on my face. It was…different. Like before—and I wasn’t even sure how I could tell. Just that the warmth of it felt better to me. Softer. Lighter.
Meanwhile, most things in Verenthia came with extra baggage—mostly magic spreading in the air. The same kind of magic that rushed through my veins now, too. Fae magic.
That’s because I was not merely a mortal. I hadn’t been since I was five years old.
Rune.
My eyes opened wide to a ceiling I remembered well.
White, and with a single small crack from one corner of the wall to the other, practically invisible if you didn’t know it was there—but I did.
After all, I’d woken up in this very room my whole life, and maybe that’s why I couldn’t move still.
Maybe that’s why tears were sliding from the corners of my eyes while I stared at the ceiling and tried to breathe deeply, tried to calm my racing heart.
Home.
I was home—without Rune.
The pain, the panic, the fear sliced me wide open as if they had blades to cut with. The magic in me reacted, brightened up in my chest, pressing against my ribcage and spreading toward my arms like shards of ice—those, too, intending to cut me piece by little piece.
Everything hurt, and everything was numb at the same time for the same reason—Rune was not with me and I was home and he was in Verenthia.
He was the King of the Midnight Court now.
He wasn’t here.
I don’t know how I managed to grab the pillow underneath my head and hold it against my face before the scream ripped out of me.
It was instinctual—I was home and if I had pain to let out, I hid so Dad and Fi wouldn’t see me, so that they wouldn’t feel bad.
I had pain and I wanted to disappear so as not to burden them with it.
Because I already had, hadn’t I? I’d burdened them so much by telling the truth that made every person in town turn against us. Mock us. Make our lives a hell.
I’d burdened them.
The guilt of it had suffocated me every second of every day. I don’t know why I was just realizing in those very moments how small I’d tried to make myself every single day. I don’t know why now, of all times, I was feeling sorry for myself for being so fucking alone and never realizing it.
Until Rune.
I stopped screaming into the pillow.
I sat up to find I still wore a dead queen’s dress, covered in holes and dirt and blood everywhere, while the apron I’d put on in the Midnight Palace was gone.
The mirror, the queen’s mirror revealing my reflection was right there over my bedside table, next to the lamp.
Fuck, I didn’t want to see it at all. I didn’t even pick it up.
Instead, I looked around the room—so tiny in comparison to the rooms in the fae courts.
Another untimely realization—the fae really liked their space, and I’d gotten so used to football-field sized halls and bedrooms as big as the entire house floor so quickly.
That’s why the walls of my old room felt like they were going to suffocate me for real any second now.
The thoughts in my head were a mess. I was crying, the tears continuously pouring down my cheeks, and I didn’t know how to stop.
Whatever had come over me, I watched myself as if from afar touching my desk and my old laptop, running my fingers over the wood of the door, the bed frame, the window.
I watched as if half of me wasn’t actually inside my body, which was moving on instinct still.
I opened the closet door and the smell made me cry harder—it was my smell, the smell I always had, that I never even noticed before, but now I did.
It was the detergent we got—mountain spring said the label, and it was fresh and slightly sweet and so very different from anything you could smell in Verenthia.
My hands shook as I picked up clean clothes, then somehow made my way outside into the hallway—so small!
It was empty, too. I couldn’t hear anything from my own sobbing in silence, either.
I just slipped into the bathroom and pressed my back against the door for a moment, then was naked and under the shower within seconds.
Ink on my arm, all the way up to my shoulder and the side of my neck.
Even though I tried to ignore it, didn’t even look down at my body as I scrubbed my skin clean, I felt it there, humming with magic.
Even though I knew it was foreign magic, it was cold.
It was almost like Rune’s shadows, but I didn’t dwell on it too much.
Images flashed in my mind. The face of the Midnight King and Vair, Raja fighting those soldiers—Rune being held down by those shadows that wrapped around his arms, my own magic that had clung to the Midnight King for just a moment.
A moment that had cost him his life and had saved Rune’s.
Somehow, I didn’t break down in the shower, but I actually cleaned myself up and walked out. Somehow, I could put all of my clothes on, then pick up the old ones and carry them back to my room.
I didn’t look in the mirror. Any mirror. I didn’t want to see my face, couldn’t. Not yet. I didn’t want to see exactly how the mark on my shoulder looked.
I just sat down on the edge of bed with my eyes closed, and I focused on breathing for a long time.
Never before had I found denim to be uncomfortable against my skin.
Jeans were my favorite clothing item, but I guess back then I hadn’t gotten used to silk and cotton as soft as clouds.
My jeans still fit me—which surprised me because I felt like a different person.
The red shirt I’d put on, too. It had an extra high neck and long sleeves that I hoped would cover the ink on my arm and shoulder.
I still hadn’t looked in the mirror, though, so I wasn’t sure.
The house I grew up in hadn’t changed at all, but at the same time it looked like a different world altogether to my eyes. The hallway on the ground floor, and the archways, and the sound of music coming from the living room or kitchen.
My footsteps were perfectly silent as I slipped into the doorway, half of me certain that I’d find the house empty.
It wasn’t.
Dad and Fi were standing in front of the kitchen counter side by side, as pale as the walls, their wide eyes on me.
Neither of us even breathed for a good moment.
The iPad on the kitchen table played Dad’s favorite country singer in the background, and suddenly my mind was stuck between this is home, I never actually left, all of this is perfectly normal, and I haven’t been here for possibly months, maybe years, and it all looks brand new to me.
Such a strange feeling.
Then Fiona ran around the dining table and wrapped her arms around me tightly.
Dad came to us, too, after a moment, and I remember a lot of squeezing and a lot of shaking and a lot of tears.
Parts of it were lost to me—possibly too painful—but eventually, we settled.
Eventually, we stopped crying and we were smiling, all three of us.
Eventually, we could sit down in the living room and take a moment to get ourselves together.
They hadn’t changed a bit, Dad and Fi, which, again, shocked me. It felt like they should have been older or something, or just different in the same way I was different in all that time I’d been away, but…
“How long was I gone?” I wondered because, though it felt like years to me, it couldn’t have been longer than a few months.
“Eighteen days,” Fiona said, her bright chocolate eyes wide and full of tears still, but she was smiling. Those were happy tears. “You were gone eighteen days, Nil. Today is the nineteenth.”
Fuck me sideways.
I looked at Dad next, just to confirm that I’d heard right, and he nodded. Eighteen days. Impossible. Really, just plain absurd. That was not eighteen days for me—it was a whole fucking lifetime.
“What happened to you, Nilah? And where is the man who brought you here? He promised me that he would return you himself—where is he?” Dad asked, his voice almost hushed, like he really didn’t want to even talk about it, but he made himself anyway.
“Helid, he…he passed away, Dad.” I swallowed hard when the image of Helid’s face, with that golden beard and those bloodshot eyes, came in the center of my mind. So fucking vivid still—like I was looking at him right this moment. Looking at his dead body.
My dad was shocked. He shook his head, his lips parted, and Fiona pulled at my hand from the other side to get me to look at her.
“What about you? We were scared, Nil. We got your letter and we thought you were okay. And then you just appeared in the yard wrapped in shadows…” Her voice trailed off and she shook her head, too.
She wasn’t afraid, though. She was more curious.
“Your dress was covered in blood. Are you okay?”
I leaned in and kissed her forehead. God, I’d missed her more than I could have possibly realized.
“I’m fine,” I told her, and I wasn’t sure if it was a lie, but it did sound true enough. “I’m fine, I promise. And I’m sorry for losing it when I first came, but I…”
My eyes closed. The memory came back to me slowly.
Holy fuck, I’d run straight into the woods. I’d found the Aetherway. I’d used my magic—all that I could push out of me, and it still hadn’t worked.
Most importantly, I’d used all of that magic in front of them. They’d been there. Both of them, and Betty, too. I remembered it, though faintly. They’d all seen.
“Just tell us,” Fiona said when I went a good moment without uttering a single world. I’d never been more thankful for that music in the background; otherwise the silence would have been unbearable. “Tell us, Nil. C’mon, tell us everything.”
I most definitely did not tell them everything, but I did tell them…some things.
I told them about Verenthia, about Rune, about Lyall.
I told them about Raja, too—and Vair. Of course, the details remained with me, but a talking silver lynx was quite a story, and as I told them about Vair, I found my fucking heart in pieces.
I had no clue what the hell it was about that animal, who was probably not a real animal at all, but I cared for him so much it was ridiculous.
Never mind that he’d literally kidnapped me—my gut twisted awfully at the thought of him all alone in Verenthia, with nobody to talk to, nobody to listen.
But nothing hurt as much as Rune.
Tears slipped from my eyes when I told them all that had happened.
Not the truth, mind you, but a version of it.
I told them that when Lyall did the life-bond with me, it also transferred some of his magic inside me, and that was why I could do what I did in the forest the day before.
It was normal—all very normal. When life-bonds are created, they transfer the magic from one person to the other.
I just didn’t mention the small fact that I had half the soul of a dead queen inside me, and that’s why the magic took. And also the tiny fact that I was no longer bound to the prince at all.
No, I did not mention those things.
Dad and Fi listened intently and absorbed every word I said. In the end, they stopped and looked at one another, and then at their laps for a long time.
Long enough that I felt I was going to pass out if I didn’t eat and drink water very soon, so I said, “If you don’t mind, I’m going to get something to eat real quick.”
They both jumped to their feet before I could.