Chapter 5
Sabine
Thick hemlock boughs shade us from the midday sun, but more than that, they hide us from the world. Under these branches, Woudix and I have spent weeks poring over tottering stacks of leather-bound books, some hundreds of years old, with yellowed pages and moth-eaten spines.
And oh, the things I’ve learned here in our private world beneath the branches.
Things like how Vale first became a god by drinking sacrificial blood.
How, one by one, each of the ten fae drank after him and uncovered their unique affinities.
Couples in the street fell in love as Alyssantha passed—Goddess of Sex.
Card players suddenly hit a good luck streak when Popelin—God of Pleasure—winked at them.
One after another, they rose in power until the fae court dominated the human and fae realms.
I can’t flip through the pages fast enough.
This terrible hunger inside me craves more than peasants’ offerings of chicken eggs or woven flower crowns.
It wants blood. It wants sex. It wants truth.
To drink the past down like wine straight from the bottle, until my stomach is sickly and sated and I collapse in a dizzy mess.
Before the Gloaming, I couldn’t tell you five facts about the Beginning or the First or Second Returns. To me, the fae gods were as distant as the high, snow-capped Darmarnach Mountains, and certainly just as harsh.
Take Immortal Iyre.
Late at night, I’ve woken more than once in cold sweat, thrashing in Basten’s arms, violently jolted from nightmares of being back in the Convent, a Sister shoving my face in the ground at the goddess’s statue’s feet, mouth rubbed in dirt until I kissed her stone toes.
Basten holds me, planting soft kisses along my temples, murmuring reassurances that it was only a nightmare.
Fair to say, a year ago, I wasn’t exactly devout.
Now? What does one do when one is the very type of goddess one once loathed?
There are moments when panic sets in. I think of that hateful stone statue of Iyre, and how the real Iyre is no less cruel.
And Artain—what an ass. Being fae like him makes me want to claw into my flesh, dig the glowing fey lines out like ripping apart a doll’s seams.
On days like that, I hide behind my human glamour, stay in bed all day, sobbing into my feather pillow, wishing away the silver in my blood.
But not every day is so troubled. The truth I never would have guessed is that being fae feels, well, electric.
All my life, I never knew what it felt like to fully stand up straight instead of hunching over a mop and bucket.
To fill my lungs with cool winter air to their fullest, without the pinch of frostbite.
To marvel at a body so alive that I feel as bright and new every morning as the rising sun.
I wish on every damn star that I could gift this feeling—this lightness—to everyone. If I could only show Basten what it was like, I know he’d tip back his head and laugh in awe. He’d be happy, for once.
The clouds shift overhead, bringing me back into the present.
Woudix sits at my side, leaning toward me so he can flip the pages of the book in my lap while he explains the meaning of the architectural renderings of the ancient city of Calisyrune.
A fledgling sparrow lands on a branch above us, its newly grown feathers sticking out at awkward angles.
Hello, little one, I murmur. Still learning to fly?
It chirps indignantly. I can fly!
I smile. Of course you can. My mistake.
Woudix glances up. “What’s it saying?” His tone is dry but amused.
“It says…that you seem to have overlooked a comb this morning.” I teasingly flick an errant lock off his forehead.
“Mmm,” Woudix purrs, smooth and devious. “Is that so? Tell it that if it shits on this book, I’ll give it instant passage to the underrealm.”
I feign indignation. “Rude!”
The sparrow flies off, equally offended.
Just then, a shape moves in the trees. Through the gap where the bird had perched, Basten stomps into view in the distance.
My breath stills, lips parting slightly.
It’s rare to get to watch him when he doesn’t know he’s being observed.
His godkiss means he’s always ten steps ahead, even of the fae.
But now, he strains under a wheelbarrow full of steel tools fresh from the blacksmith’s.
He’s so intent on not dropping his load that he isn’t paying attention to the sights and sounds of his surroundings.
Gods, I could watch him all day.
Sweaty-soaked, messy, muscles straining—he’s so handsome it hurts.
The tools, I’m certain, are for the river valley refugees.
Basten has never been one for words, but at night, when we lock my bedroom door and it’s just us, I manage to corkscrew out of him the details of his days: that he’s been busy meeting with the refugees, gathering tools, seeds, cloth—whatever he can scrounge—for them to start afresh.
He’d snort if I said it out loud, but it’s plain as day: This is what a king does.
He’s ridiculous, really—this growlsome brute prowling around like a bull with a wheelbarrow, trying to help people. He embodied the beautiful, maddening contradiction of being human. He’s broken but trying. Caring and gruff.
Cold, pale fingers snap in front of my face, making me jump.
I jerk around to meet black storm cloud eyes.
“Lady Sabine.” Woudix’s voice rolls like rough velvet as he says my human name, which I’ve asked to be used in private. “Your attention isn’t on Calisyrune, is it?”
“Oh—no.”
Softly, teasingly, his lips purse in a scolding tsk-tsk-tsk.
I blush, a guilty smile tugging at my lips, as I obediently return to the book’s architectural renderings. “Sorry—I don’t know what’s going on with me today. It’s harder to focus. I want to be here, I promise. I can’t tell you what it’s meant to me to learn about the fae world.”
Woudix drapes a long arm over his bent knee. His blind eyes are always distant, and yet, somehow, I get the sense he can see me clear as day.
“It’s the weather,” he says with certainty, lifting his face toward the highest tree boughs.
“Do you feel that? This morning, the grass was covered in frost. Now, one could bake bread beneath that sun. The wind comes from the east, then the west. The world is restless. The seasons are changing. They’re affecting your focus.
You’re letting yourself be shaped by nature, instead of shaping it yourself. ”
I run my fingers over the book’s stiff pages, marinating in his words.
On impulse, I sneak another glimpse through the branches at Basten, but Woudix must sense the tilt of my chin, because he leans over to flip the page.
“Like she did,” he murmurs, tapping the open book to get my attention.
I marvel down at the book’s full-spread illustration rendered in sepia ink.
I don’t understand how Woudix knows the contents of each page by memory, but it’s Immortal Solene in full fae splendor.
She stands naked in a pond. Her gown is made from living river reeds that wind around her limbs to cover her nude body.
Flower blossoms spill out of her hair, and in her extended palm sits a lime-green toad.
I’m so struck by the sheer power of this goddess, captured in ink, that it takes me a moment to notice the more minor details: actually, those aren’t reeds. It’s a rice field, and on the nearby shore, rail-thin villagers with hollow, hungry eyes kneel to her, hands clasped in supplication.
“This was the great winter famine of Western Golath,” Woudix explains. “Thousands were at risk of starvation. Immortal Solene thawed the frozen fields and sprouted a bounty of rice that matured within a single day. She fed a kingdom of hungry bellies.”
My fingers rub over the illustration, trying to grab it and make it real. A hunger pang thrums in my belly. It aches, how badly I want this. To help the river valley refugees just as Immortal Solene helped during the winter famine.
It’s like a splinter I can’t unearth. The urge—no, the need—to let my fey flow.
Tears sting my eyes as something dark and mean suddenly twists inside me. I slam the book shut, turning sharply away. I hug my knees to my chest.
“People need her now, like they did then,” I spit out. “And I can’t do anything but read about how powerful I was in the past.”
A sob catches in my throat. No matter how quickly I wipe tears off my cheeks, the warble in my throat gives me away. The next time I go to brush away a tear, Woudix grabs my wrist, tight like a shackle.
I freeze.
He’s…touching me. He’s never touched me.
I pause, breath held, eyes wide and wary of the god who commands death itself.
Slowly, he draws my arm toward him, gently but forcibly unfurling my tightly held fist until my palm is open to him.
Like a map of my secrets.
He drags one cold finger down the line of my inner wrist. Following the fey line that’s resting just beneath my human-glamoured skin. Wherever he touches, my body responds on its own, erupting in glowing silver light that I can’t tuck away again.
My heart slams against my ribs, quick and painful.
I feel more exposed—just from an open palm—than I did riding across half of Duren naked.
“You see?” Woudix says as the glowing lines appear. “She’s here. She’s always been here. Waiting for you to find her.”
One by one, he ignites the lines that run along each of my fingers. Thumb. Index. Middle. Ring. Little finger.
When I finally catch my breath, it’s to realize he’s placed a tiny brown seed in my palm.
A rice seed, gods knows where he got it.
He presses his thumb over the seed in my palm, securing it, before guiding my hand to the earth beneath us, where he plants my palm firmly against the soil.
I tug slightly, testing, but his grip is unyielding.
“What are you doing?” I breathe, not sure if I should be frightened.
“Not all knowledge comes from books.”
He finally removes his hand, and somehow, the world feels wrong without his touch—like I’m all on my own.