Chapter 31
Thirty-One
“Ithought this was a mistake,” I told Fieran when I found him in the common room, waiting for me impatiently. I closed my bedroom door with a bang, worried Fieran would somehow sense my illicit book, my connection with Ander. “That we had to wait.”
“It would be wise,” he muttered. “But you obviously aren’t going to trust me or my plans until Tay is on his feet.”
“Trust your plans?” I echoed. How surreal. “You won’t tell me your plans. You don’t trust me.”
“You’ll tell my plans to Ander if you think it’ll help Lidi and Tay,” he said the words as simple fact, as if he didn’t have any feelings around that truth. It was probably yet another of his lies.
“Not if you give me a reason to trust you.”
“That is the problem, isn’t it? One of us has to bow first.” He gestured me ahead of him, sweeping one arm in front of him in a mocking little half bow. “Which I’m trying to do, by saving Tay and having him returned home, so no one will hold power over you.”
“You’re the one with all the power, aren’t you, Fieran?”
“I wish.” There was something heated about his gaze.
If he’d been keeping Tay in the healing sleep in order to maintain his power over me, maybe this was him surrendering. Or maybe he genuinely wanted me to trust him.
We crossed the foyer as shifters streamed around us, giving Fieran a wide berth. For once, I didn’t feel as if I might be carelessly knocked over by jostling shifters who either paid me no mind or intended to hurt the mortal.
Two shifters were pulling the enormous arched doors, shutting out the arc of the dark night sky. When Fieran called to them, they paused.
As Fieran walked through the gap, I hesitated just inside the threshold.
“Trust me to get you back into bed tonight, or stay there,” Fieran said without looking back over his shoulder.
Fuck. I smiled my thanks at the two just as they started to move the doors anyway—assholes—and I slipped through the closing gap in the doors.
Then I was out on the marble stairs down to the city. The cold night air slapped me in the face as I rushed to catch up to Fieran, with his damned long legs. “Don’t suppose you care to explain the plans for how we get back in?”
“No. Over time, you’ll come to trust me.”
“Is that so?” The two of us reached the bottom of the steps. “I have ideas for how you might earn my trust.”
“I already have a simple seventy-two-step plan to do just that,” he promised me.
“Seventy-two steps?”
“I know you’ll be difficult.”
Two Fae walked past us, arm-in-arm; their eyes studied me for too-long a second before they flickered to Fieran, and the tension that trembled in the air died.
When my shoulder bumped his arm, I was startled by how I’d moved close to him. He didn’t comment, for once.
A shimmering silver moth, bigger than my hand, fluttered by my face. I glanced down the alleyway it flew toward. There were no stacked crates or discarded trash or tidy herb gardens between businesses in the village; instead, the alley was a slice of forest, the entrance to it dark and foreboding.
“If I tell you not to come out here at night,” Fieran asked casually. “Will you do it just to spite me?”
“That would be stupid, wouldn’t it?”
He raised an eyebrow as if that were not an answer. Did he really think that little of mortals—or of me in particular?
“No,” I answered crisply. “At the moment, I can’t imagine a compelling enough reason to drive me out into this city alone.”
Still, our surroundings were beautiful. It was darker than my village at night, as if all the city lights were tucked away beneath the high walls that sliced through the forest. Above us was a beautiful sky, a swirl of stars and purple.
It felt as if the Fae had built the city within the forest, and I stepped over mushrooms that grew between the cracks of the cobblestones.
Had I missed these details when he brought me to his house? “Was this like this when we went to see Tay?”
“The city changes at night.”
“How old were you when you stopped being afraid to walk the streets at night?” I wanted to know about his childhood. I wanted to know everything about him.
“Next month, surely.”
He must be joking, but his face didn’t give him away.
We turned down a street where trees grew over the walls and arched above our heads, limbs tangled together as if they might never be separated. The leaves overhead whispered in the night breeze, and I couldn’t help straining to hear, as if there would be words threaded in their rustling.
“Are you shivering? Where’s the cloak I leant you?”
“Leant me? I thought you gave me your cloak.”
“I’m not trying to start another argument with you.
As fun as I find our fights.” He caught my arm suddenly, as if he were pulling me out of danger, but I didn’t see what it was.
A shine of the water covered the street and reflected the constellations above, which seemed to be moving too quickly, and my stomach turned in sudden nausea.
“I just wanted to make sure you were warm.”
“It’s so much colder here than during the day,” I admitted.
He undid the clasp at his throat.
“I don’t want it,” I told him, raising my hand to halt him.
“Humor me.”
“Why?”
“If you think I’m a villain, why would you hesitate to take everything you can from me?”
“I’m not sure you’re a villain,” I admitted, and disbelief flashed over his face. Had I really managed to surprise the man who maneuvered all of us like so many game pieces? “I fear you’re something worse.”
“Do tell,” he purred, swinging his cloak around my shoulders. This one didn’t carry much weight, just a welcome, magical warmth…and his scent.
I reached up to grip it, but he was quicker; walking backward with uncanny ease, he latched it at my throat, his long, quick fingers working as easily as he handled a knife.
Something soared low overhead, darting too fast to see clearly, but it showered us in glowing dust. I ducked, and Fieran—now freckled with glowing specks—brushed something off my face with his thumb. “It’s all right. It’s harmless.”
“What’s the night market like?”
He gave me a knowing look. “Afraid to finish that thought? What am I, if not a villain?”
“I don’t want to hurt your feelings.”
“If that were true, you wouldn’t be rubbing Ander’s shoulder.”
I hadn’t been rubbing. “Are you jealous?”
I’d asked in a teasing tone, but he said flatly, “Yes.”
“Why?”
His lips quirked. “You should know the night market is twisted. Literally. It’s never the same two nights in a row, anchored only by its entrances and exits.”
He was paying me back for an unanswered question.
I ignored my stab of irritation. “What if we get separated?”
“We won’t.” It was one of those purely confident Fieran promises, like a god deigning to answer prayer.
“If we do.”
His lips tightened. “Then hang on and remember I’ll come find you, no matter what happens.”
Twin pulses of fear and worse, of warmth—an embarrassing desire to be protected that I had to smother—rose at his words. “As long as I’m useful to you.”
He ignored that, stopping me with a hand on my arm and turning me toward him. “Don’t eat anything I don’t hand to you personally. It can be cursed. Especially for a mortal. And you need to hold my hand.”
“Hold your hand? Like a child?”
“If that’s what the act means to you,” he said dismissively. “Then yes. Be a child…the kind of child who isn’t taken by the monster under their bed.”
He held his hand out to me, and with his other hand, gestured toward the door before us.
A forest spilled out of the building’s open windows. Ivy clambered desperately up the stone walls, growing in front of our very eyes. Twisted brown limbs jutted out the windows, reaching every which way, reminding me of hands reaching out for help.
I blinked, certain it hadn’t been there a moment before.
“Cara. I wouldn’t have brought you here if I didn’t trust deeply in your survival impulses.”
He was still holding out his hand. I took it, and I wasn’t sure which one of us threaded our fingers through the other’s first, but my palm was anchored tightly to his.
“Were you ever afraid of the monsters under your bed?” I asked as we walked toward the door. “You grew up training to fight monsters.”
“Don’t we all?”
The doors swung open before we reached them. There should’ve been wild greenery, but instead there were only stone steps descending.
“I grew up training to serve.” My voice came out light, high, slightly strained.
“I doubt that very much,” he told me dryly.
Hand-in-hand, we stepped into the darkness. The stone was slick underfoot, damp and slimy.
“Just because I’m a terrible server doesn’t mean I wasn’t trained to serve.” It was only thanks to him that I hadn’t left the village a disappointment.
The air carried a damp, loamy smell, like earth, but not fresh like a newly turned garden. Something made me think of graves. I couldn’t see more than a few feet further down the stairs, but the steps themselves were illuminated by a faint glow.
My foot slid on a slanted, slippery stair, and he squeezed my hand before he said, “I think you’ve been training to fight monsters all your life. But yours were different from mine. Hunger, maybe? Want? Whatever threatened your family? I have little love for mine.”
My breath came short, but he didn’t seem to notice. Or maybe he did, and that was why he kept up his prattle.
“Still, learning to stand against one monster is learning to stand against all.”
I wasn’t even really hearing him, but his deep, rich voice was comforting, and so was his hand against mine, reassuring me that I wasn’t alone.
The stairs were turning. Another turn, and there was a long crack in the wall; flowers grew out of it, wild and blooming and dripping luminescence.
“Everything is prettier here than home.” It was just my own prattle. “Even when it’s terrifying.”