Chapter 4 #2
I quickly add, “As a figure of speech, of course. In any case, I’m here. So, say what you need. Tell me what issues you’re facing, and I’ll do what I can. No promises, but I’m listening.”
Stunned, uncertain silence bounces off the chamber walls. I get the overwhelming sense that no one with an ounce of power has ever spared ten minutes to listen to their problems.
The rail-thin man limps forward. He seems to be their spokesperson.
“Thank you, Lord Basten,” he says, working his jaw.
“We’re from the lower Lunden River valley, just north of the border wall.
What’s left of the valley, that is. Lord Rian’s poison decimated the area.
Everything is gone. There was no choice for us but to leave and follow the rumors that Immortal Solene had awoken.
We hoped that she could repair our lands.
” He pauses, head bowed in thought. “If that isn’t possible…
well, there’s land upriver that is still workable.
If Immortal Vale could spare seed, tools, and maybe a few tents, we could rebuild.
We’re not asking for charity—we’ll earn it.
Pay his generosity back with offerings.”
I shift again, the leather groaning under my weight.
See, this is what royal-born pricks like Rian and Berolt and even Vale himself never understand.
They think peasants are simpletons desperate for their favor; but I grew up on the streets.
Surrounded by these same people. They don’t need rescuing—they only need the damn royal boot lifted off their necks.
I pivot slightly to look out the window.
They’re far, but I can see Sabine and Woudix in the garden, still flipping through that dusty old book.
Her hair glints like sparks in the sunlight.
From this distance, her words are hard to make out, but I can pick up the lilting rise and fall of her voice. It’s light. Curious.
I feel a tug in my chest. A tether between us. The bond tells me, she’s all right for now.
The refugee leader watches me. Waiting.
“You’ve done the difficult part already,” I say, bouncing my foot under the desk. “You kept your people alive. You didn’t give up even when the fae refused help. That tells me everything I need to know. You’ll have what you need to start over. I’ll speak to the castle steward today.”
I nod to dismiss them.
They leave holding their heads a little higher—and damn, if my own doesn’t feel a little lighter, too.
Maybe, just maybe, I can do this whole run-a-kingdom thing after all.
Each night, Sabine and I tumble beneath the sheets, making love and clinging to one another in our sleep until dawn.
But during the days, we’re apart. A space stretches between us the more she trains, and I work with the river valley refugees.
I reassure myself it isn’t a growing crack between us.
Hell, she still drinks my blood for breakfast. Falls asleep with my cock inside her.
But I can’t shake the way Woudix looks at her.
Hungry, plotting.
For more than just her body.
He hovers too closely during lessons, smirks too easily when she missteps. And she—gods, she laughs, too. As if she’s forgotten what we both know.
The fae are fucking liars.
Before the Gloaming, Sabine used to say the same. She would spit the word “fae” like it burned her tongue. But now, she makes excuses for them, says that Woudix has shown her amazing sides to their powers that could help people.
It frightens me how easily her doubt is slipping through her fingers. I try to remind her of everything we've seen: the bodies, the betrayals, the knife in her own chest. But she only sighs and cups my face and says I'm tired.
So, while she's training with Woudix, I start to walk the castle halls and listen at keyholes. After all, someone has to figure out what’s really happening in Volkany, and I seem to be the only candidate.
I want to know the real facts about the fae, not the cleaned-up myths they spoon-feed to Sabine like honeyed milk.
Unsurprisingly, the damn castle is locked down like a prison.
Fortunately, I know a lock-picker.
Getting help from the forest mouse is a slow, maddening process.
I can’t talk to animals like Sabine, not even with our acolyte bond.
Still, that hasn’t stopped them from trying to communicate with me ever since her Awakening.
Nuthatches dive bomb my head. Caterpillars fall from their silken threads to land on my shoulder.
Like they fear how Sabine is changing—like they want me to do something.
In an attempt to communicate with the forest mouse, I draw questions in the dust, pantomime like a lunatic, and all the while the damn furball just twists her head and stares.
But after days of this, the mouse finally scurries to the door, then pauses to look back at me as if to say, “Coming or not, asshole?”
“Coming,” I mumble.
She leads me through a first-floor hallway in the Stormwatch Tower wing, whose dusty floor appears to have been long overlooked by the maids.
We pass through archways thick with cobwebs.
At an iron door, the mouse climbs thick bolts to reach the lock.
A few quick maneuvers with her deft paw, and the latch clicks.
The door groans open, breathing out a gust of ancient air.
We descend uneven stairs lit by a single candle flickering in a wall sconce, burned so low it’s nearly dead.
The air is stale down here. Cold in a heavy, still way, as though it hasn’t felt a breeze in a hundred years. Down, down, down I follow the mouse. Fuck, how deep do these stairs go? Finally, the mouse reaches the bottom and disappears down a lightless hallway, vanishing into shadows.
I toy with the idea of going back for the candle, but I don’t want dripping candle wax marking my path, giving away the fact that someone was down here.
Fortunately, my night vision gradually adjusts until the shadows are clear but drained of color.
Impossibly, we head even deeper through the tunnel, until I can hear the Ramvik River rushing outside the heavy walls.
Moisture drips down the ancient stones. There are no more bricks here.
This passage is hewn directly into riverrock, strange blast marks that couldn’t have come from any human pickaxes.
Fey carved this, I think.
This must be the castle’s original foundation. Thousands of years old, if I had to guess.
The mouse stops and loops back, circling me urgently.
“What are you trying to say, huh? Oh…Oh. I see.” My voice fades as I take in dark paint marks, almost like writing, on the stone walls. They’re covered by a half inch of dust, like everything else down here.
Making a fist, I brush the dust away, coughing as it clouds the air. I shake it from my hair, raking the strands back, and study the walls.
At first glimpse, it’s just nonsense paint streaks.
I lean close and sniff. Actually, it isn’t paint.
It’s lampblack, which I haven’t heard being used as paint since ancient history.
But the brush strokes—faint though they are—don’t lie.
Someone smoothed chalky lampblack over this wall in only this one section.
Strange.
With a shiver, I think back on when I left Duren in Rian’s entourage, on our way to Old Coros. We passed a warehouse with a large mural of Sabine on the side, but someone had painted over it as a protest against her Volkish heritage.
I lean forward, picking at the flicking lampblack with a grubby fingernail. As a shard flecks off and falls at my feet, it reveals a faint—but unmistakable—painted eye underneath.
Unnerved, I step back, only to trip over the dusty rubble at my feet, nearly stomping on the forest mouse.
I bark a quick, “Sorry.”
It tears my fingernails to the quick, but I claw away flecks of rotting lampblack until I can make out more of the original painting beneath. If someone went to the trouble of covering this up, deep in this ancient basement, it must be for a reason.
Finally, I step back.
I regret not bringing the candle with me. My night vision is keen, but lacking in color, and I can only imagine this mural once glowed in iridescent hues of ground red ochre, azurite, gypsum powder.
“Fuck me,” I breathe.
It’s a portrait of the Immortal Court. All ten of the fancy fae bastards in their greatest finery, seated at a rough-hewn stone table in the middle of the woods.
Their reddened cheeks, rumpled robes, and wine-stained lips hint at a debaucherous tale.
Their clothes are simple and primitive, the style of thousands of years ago, though they’re bedecked in rough-hewn jewels.
The faces are different than they wear now.
Immortal Vale is completely white-haired, though the exact same Battle Helm Crown rests on his head.
Iyre has long, black hair in bouncy waves down to her waist. Artain is still a blond, preening bastard, but this version of him has a squared-off jaw.
It’s easy enough to recognize him by the bow at his feet, though.
And—gods damn it—the woman at Artain’s side, his hand resting possessively over hers, is a beauty with curly mahogany hair woven into an Immortal Crown. A wren perches on the woman’s left shoulder. A snake coils like a bangle around one wrist. Behind her, a buck bows his antlers.
“Sabine,” I whisper, the breath ripped from my lungs.
It isn’t her. Not my little violet. The face is wrong. The posture, too, leaning toward Artain with her tits practically shoved up in his face, and something almost sinister about her smile as she gazes over her shoulder at the buck.
But the way those animals flock to her?
Yeah. That I recognize.
A nasty scar in my mind flares with old pain. I should remember so much more about Sabine than just the way nature fawns at her footsteps.
It’s Iyre’s fault. Stealing my memories.