Chapter 29
twenty-nine
The sky over most of the Unseelie Court—and the rest of Verenthia—turned dark with night within the first hour of us making our way deeper into the kingdom.
The dark seemed to press in on us like a living thing where the small clumps of fae lights had faded, and we did stick to corners and backs of buildings, even though Rune had put his magic all over us to make us look as inconspicuous as possible.
But holy shit, this place was a fucking nightmare.
It might have been a kingdom once, but now it felt like a shell—an empty shell, its streets fractured, its towers broken, at least the ones that were taller than four stories.
Even though there were noises here and there, in the moments in between the silence was heavy, pierced only by our footsteps, and the rustle of stray leaves that seemed to be spread out around the streets, even though I had yet to see a single healthy-looking tree here.
Houses slumped against each other like drunks, some doors open just because, even the ones with the lights on inside.
The magic that I’d felt in the other courts was so much weaker here, faded, brittle, barely hanging on.
I wondered if there were any ley lines moving underneath the ground that was so withered and dry, like husk.
I wondered if the people here could try to tap into them because this whole thing felt wrong.
This place used to carry life—it was evident in the many buildings, even though half of them were empty.
There was majesty to some of them, the way the woods were carved, the way the pillars stood, like they had been proud once.
And the dark here wasn’t wild and all-consuming like in the Midnight Court, and the light wasn’t as glittering as in the Seelie—here it all look tired.
Even the statues, broken and chipped so that you couldn’t even tell what they had been once, looked spent.
Then there were the people.
Rune shouldn’t have bothered to put illusions over us, because nobody looked our way.
The Unseelie were beautiful creatures, just like all other kinds of fae, with auburn hair and eyes made of flames, tall, slender bodies and outfits mostly in greens and oranges, warm browns and reds.
Outfits that looked just as old as the fae wearing them, and the fae did not age.
They were forever preserved in their prime until death—so why did these fae look so spent?
Was it the magic? The curse?
Both?
And the worst part was that none of it would even matter if we couldn’t find the heir and give them back their throne. None of this—none of anything would matter.
A single question pushed back all the rest as it rose from the deepest, darkest layers of me—if we failed, would I leave Verenthia and go back home, knowing Rune would die if he followed me, and he would die if he didn’t?
Knowing Maera would never cross the Aetherway and leave her people.
Knowing this entire place would stop existing within a decade, if that.
Or…would I stay?
Such a simple answer that it freaked me out because it felt like it should be far more complicated.
I would stay, each and every time. Knowing that my family would be in Earth. Knowing well that I might never see them again. Knowing death was inevitable, and it would probably come with a lot of suffering, a lot of pain.
I would still stay.
Of course, the thought remained inside me, together with all I didn’t dare to say yet.
The three of us walked ahead, my hand in Rune’s, Maera’s wolf on his other side.
We walked for a long time, but it also felt short to me because my mind was so crowded with thoughts of this world I was in and the realization of how much it had changed me.
It had changed everything—the way I carried myself, the way I looked at myself, the way I thought of myself and the rest of the world.
And I’m not even talking about the changes that happened to my inner voice when I was PMSing or something.
No, this was permanent. This was all me.
Verenthia had forever changed me, and a big part of me was thankful for it.
Then we arrived.
Rune squeezed my hand before he stopped walking, and Maera’s wolf sensed it right away. She stopped with us and looked around, yellow eyes searching.
Buildings surrounded us, and trees with barely any leaves on them, and people who dragged their feet as they went about their business. The tiny orange lights hovered in the air, like they, too, were tired and yearning to go dark.
“There,” Rune said, pointing a finger ahead—toward a building that was bigger than the rest, four stories tall and made of dark stone blocks.
Behind it the wide road curved and we couldn’t see where it led at all, just the tips of the trees that looked like skeleton fingers pointing at the dark sky.
“It’s behind these buildings, in the middle of a forest,” Rune said. “We’re almost there.”
Nobody was looking at us, nobody had stopped us, nobody was coming—and we were almost there already. Easy. It seemed too easy, but at the same time, this was the break we needed. Just a little break in what was surely going to be one big chaotic mess, no doubt.
So, I took it, and when doubt tried to intrude, I pushed it out as we walked, faster now than we had before because we could taste the freedom. We could see the end to this, at least through a hopeful eye.
Behind the buildings, the trees looked even worse than the others we’d seen along the way.
The wood was dark, almost black—different from Mysthaven.
Here, the branches were thin, like they’d starved slowly but had yet to fall.
Here, they looked sick, and whatever disease plagued them hung in the air, thick and slimy.
No fae or animals that we could see around us, and we didn’t need to walk far.
Maera’s wolf rushed forward, her footsteps perfectly silent, and she disappeared in the darkness within seconds, but I wasn’t worried.
A few minutes later, we reached the last tree line and found her waiting, looking down at the square below us with barely any light floating over the strange structure.
Moon’s eye. The reading of the sorcerer in Mysthaven came back to me again. Where the moon’s eye watches and the bridge stands alone, the lost crown awaits in the court with no throne.
I saw it. It was right there. The fountain Raja described was so much bigger than I’d expected, and it was indeed shaped like an eye, the pupil like a moon.
It had dark patterns all over it, and though we were still far away, and the entire settlement was at least thirty feet below us, it really did look like a moon engraved out of stone.
The bridge was there, too, extending from the edge of the forest somewhere to our side where we couldn’t really see because of the trees and dipping down to the very edge of the stone pathways that crisscrossed all around the fountain.
In the forest on the other side, there seemed to have been another bridge once, but now it was ruined.
Only the edges of it extended a couple feet off the cliff because the entire settlement was built in some kind of a hole that looked man-made.
Fae made. The walls were smoothly carved, and the entire space was a perfect square.
There were gazebos and benches and tables that surrounded the fountain that looked like it hadn’t spilled water in ages, and it did look like what the reading described—except for one thing…
“There’s nobody here.” The place was perfectly deserted.
A growl came from Maera’s wolf. She’d lowered her chin almost all the way to the ground and her tail was low, too. I hadn’t heard her growling often, so when she suddenly jumped and ran to the right where the bridge most likely began, I almost screamed in surprise.
Rune and I followed, and I was certain that I wasn’t seeing right, that there was something there, that Maera’s wolf had seen them, and now she was taking us to them.
And we did find the beginning of the bridge with two large pillars of two women holding these large stars in their hands over their heads on the sides.
It was all made of the same pale stone, and the work of art was truly breathtaking even with the signs of time.
The bridge was intact, and the stone railings at its side thick and safe.
Maera’s wolf was already running down it toward the square below, and I wondered how in the world they’d managed to create a bridge that led down like this as we followed.
Must have been magic—what else? It was like gravity behaved differently here, and it was incredible to witness it.
Incredible to realize that the bridge curved exactly enough to lead us down but to not rush us forward.
The thick stone blocks underneath our feet had these ridges on the surface possibly to create grip and help with traction.
Close to the square, the bridge began to turn to the sides as it went, curving from left to right to give us more than enough space and make sure we weren’t being propelled forward by gravity all at once.
Once on the ground, Maera’s wolf walked slowly toward the first gazebo, head low and tail tucked still, though she no longer growled.
Silence. The sound of my heartbeat was in my ears, nothing else.
Maera moved like a ghost, soundless, and Rune could have been a shadow against the ground.
He stayed behind me as we went deeper, past the first gazebo and to the other side, to the benches and the statues of animals, the dead flowers and the chipped stone blocks.
All the way to the round piece of rock in the middle of the fountain that was a little taller than me, while the wall in the shape of an eye that surrounded it reached up to my waist. It didn’t look like anything from down here, definitely not like an eye or a moon—but while Rune and I had stopped to stare at it, Maera’s wolf had run a full circle all around the stone.
Her growl translated into words in my mind. “He’s not here,” I whispered once more because that’s what she said. And that’s what Rune knew, too.
Until suddenly he turned back.
Within a split second, shadows deeper than the night sprung from his fingertips and spread around me like ribbons of black silk, and Maera jumped to the other side, too, turned the way we’d come from, while Rune grabbed me by the arm and tried to pull me behind him.
I resisted, stood by his side and watched, because I knew what was happening even before I heard the footsteps in spite of Maera’s growling, and even before I heard the voice of a man coming from the bridge, loud and clearly:
“There will be no need for that,” he said. “Magic doesn’t quite work in this settlement anymore, I’m afraid.”
The Unseelies had definitely found us.