Chapter 13 #2
My stomach fell. “Raja,” I whispered. “Her house is by a lake that is in the daylight part of Blackwater, surrounded by mountains and trees on all sides.” That was pretty much all I knew about the place where I was headed—which was pathetic all on its own.
“Do you have anything of hers? Something we can use for tracking?”
“No, I?—”
I stopped—speaking and walking and breathing.
I looked down at the ground, at the boots on my feet. Holy shit…
“I do, actually.” I looked at Maera, who’d stopped, too. “These boots belonged to her just a few days ago.”
Her smile was big and full this time. Even the yellow of her eyes lit up. “Then I’m going to need you to stand very still for a moment.”
Then she whistled.
At the same second, all three of the werewolves were running toward us.
Running .
My muscles locked down tightly and the scream was stuck in my throat, and I stared death right in the face while Maera continued to tell me that it was okay, that I didn’t have to be afraid, that they had to come close to me— extra close so they could smell my boots.
Once again, I thought I passed out standing, and there were wolves at my feet, sniffing my legs, so close I could touch them. So close I understood exactly how big they were, how wide, how easily they could kill me.
Maera wasn’t concerned. When the wolves stepped back and I was able to blink my eyes, to look at them, to analyze their faces—their wide, yellow, intelligent eyes, teeth sharp and as big as my pinkies, ears perked up—she smiled.
She just looked at me like one might a child they thought was cute and she smiled.
I survived, though. The wolves retreated, one sniffing the air still, one sneezing three times in a row, the last already ahead. Maera’s face filled my vision.
“They have her scent now. They will take us to her. Come, let’s keep moving.”
That my legs still held me was a wonder on its own. I walked side by side with the alpha werewolf as my mind turned on itself with all the questions I had no answers to.
We walked all day, taking breaks whenever we got tired, and we never once came across anybody or anything.
No altars or temples or strange sorcerer gardens.
The wolves knew their way, and they had their noses, their senses, Maera said.
They would keep us far away from anything that could harm us, and if we kept going at this pace, we would be in Blackwater territory before dawn.
I said I could handle taking quick breaks. She believed me.
The more we moved, the more she talked to me about the names of the trees, the scents in the air, the waves of magic, where they were thick and where they were weaker.
I came to understand that I could actually feel all of it. I could almost see the currents of magic hanging in the air if I focused long enough, and I could tell with almost perfect precision which direction each one of the wolves were, even when I couldn’t see them.
It was so strange, but incredibly cool at the same time, and I couldn’t fucking wait to tell Rune.
Eventually, my legs did get tired, but I knew there was no more food in Maera’s bag, and I didn’t want to stop, anyway.
I just wanted to keep going while I could, take advantage of these werewolves—in the back of my mind, I thought they might realize soon that they didn’t want to take me all the way to Blackwater, after all—and cover as much ground as possible.
To be completely honest, I didn’t actually believe that I would make it. To run away from the Seelie Court, get out of those gates and survive Mysthaven? I couldn’t even joke with myself that I’d ever get to Blackwater, yet I still kept going.
Even when my knees shook and black dots were constantly taking away my vision, I kept going.
We must have walked for hours and hours, and then my legs just refused to work anymore. The sky was dark. The ground looked so soft.
My eyes closed and I fell .
I was sure I’d end up face first against the patchy grass. Instead, I fell on soft, fluffy fur.
There was no energy in me to even be afraid at that point, so when I was grabbed and pulled up, my legs rearranged so that I was in a seated position, I didn’t even try to resist. Maera’s face was in front of me, and she was smiling.
She was so beautiful, especially in the night. Her eyes were extra bright now.
She said, “We can stop to rest, or we can keep going. We only have about an hour left.”
An hour.
I was sure she meant an hour until we had to stop, until the wolves got tired, too, until she got tired. So, I said, “No rest.” My words were slurred together, but she understood.
“As you wish,” she told me, then grabbed my hands and put them on the soft, long fur, wrapped my fingers into fists. “Hold on tight.”
I did, at first. While I had energy, I did hold onto the fur in my fists, and when the wolf moved underneath me, that’s when I really understood what was going on.
A wolf was carrying me on his back—the brown one, the guy with the longish hair, and he was walking slowly, and he was massive, and I was so damn comfortable it was ridiculous.
I’d ridden horses here in Verenthia on saddles meant for people to sit on and it had been hell, but this ?
The way his body moved underneath mine, the way I felt all of his strong muscles against my legs, the way I was steady as though we weren’t moving at all—this was a completely different story, and now I wished I’d listened to Maera all along.
Still, exhaustion won even when I wanted nothing more than to keep my eyes open, my attention about me, to see where we were, where the wolves had taken us. It was so absurd to me that they really knew the way, that they could take me where I needed to go, but…
I blinked, and sometimes slept there sitting for seconds, even minutes at a time, and then the trees had changed. The barks had become black, their leaves a dark grey.
Blackwater.
We were actually in Blackwater—and when I finally understood what that meant, I woke up almost all the way. Looked around. Held on tightly to the fur of the wolf underneath me.
Surreal.
All of it was surreal. The silence in the background of the footsteps, the three wolves walking through the trees, two of them carrying women on their backs, the sky that was dark still.
Then the wolf walking by himself started to run deeper into the woods and disappeared from our view completely. My instinct was to be afraid—why did he suddenly start running? But a look at Maera riding the wolf on my left told me she wasn’t alarmed. Her shoulders were relaxed, eyes half closed.
Even like that, she looked… regal. So much more queen-like than the Seelie Queen I’d met before.
“What’s a noxavira ?” I asked in a whisper, almost accidentally.
I thought I would spook her, but Maera must have known that I was awake because she didn’t even bat an eye, barely glanced my way as she answered. “It’s a word in the old Veren. It means the shadow between truths.”
Goose bumps down my arms.
“It’s not a bad name nor a good name. It’s what my people call events or objects or people they cannot put in a single category, that’s all. ”
“But I am in a single category,” I insisted. “I’m mortal. I’m the prince’s Lifebound.” That sounded like a single category to me.
Maera turned to me again. “But not just.” Her shimmering eyes scrolled down my body.
“You smell fae, but you don’t look it, and you haven’t shifted after my scratch.
A fae would have. You’re no mortal because you possess magic inside of you, a lot of it.
And you might be Lifebound to a dead man, which is not how life-bonds work at all, Nilah.
If my wolf were to die, I would, too, and vice versa. That’s a life-bond.”
“The prince isn’t dead,” I whispered, feeling all kinds of strange all of a sudden, and more awake than I had been for hours, though my body was still weak. “Maybe…maybe it was a mistake. Maybe he lives.”
“Maybe,” Maera said with a deep nod. “You have a plan. I trust you will see it through, make sense of this…confusion.”
Confusion, she said. The confusion that was me. My very existence.
Fucking hell, just when I thought I couldn’t possibly feel worse about myself.
“Can you be honest with me?” I asked, even though I didn’t want to. Even though I would rather just change the subject and never have to even think about this again.
“Always,” Maera said with a solemn nod, and I tasted the truth of that word as if I were a damn noxin.
“What do you think I am?”
At that, she paused. Clear to see that that wasn’t the question she had expected but she answered anyway.
“I’ve been thinking about it for a while,” she told me. “And the truth is that I don’t know, Nilah. But what I do know is that you will find out. Your heart has courage, and you have will. The rest will follow.”
I was jokingly going to say to say, that was not the answer I was looking for at all, but…
“We’re here.”
It was like she suddenly stabbed me in the gut. My eyes opened wide, and I was suddenly looking about myself, sure that she was wrong, when…
The lake.
My stomach fell all the way to my heels and my heart broke into a thousand pieces at the sight of it for whatever reason.
The lake’s surface was just visible in the distance through the trees, and the mountains beyond, just as I’d seen them when we were at Raja’s place.
When Rune and I were swimming together in that very lake.
The actual lake is right there.
I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t even form a single thought for a while, could only hold onto the fur of the dire wolf underneath me, not even bothering to try to make sense of that very fact at all.
I could deal with all of it later, I figured.
When Rune came and found me. When I told him about this, I could think it through then.