Chapter 20
TWENTY
ALLERIA
“Alleria … Alleria, open the door.”
For one half-dreaming moment, I think I’m home, in my own bed, with Merina standing outside the door to my bedchamber.
Then the sound of the sea reaches me. A low, distant crash against rock.
I’m not in my bedchamber. I’m not even in Shentari anymore. I’m in Underhill.
Nightward. I’m in Nightward.
My eyes open to darkness, broken only by the faint glow from the sconces on the wall.
“Alleria, please.” Merina’s voice trembles. “I need to talk to you. I need to explain what happened.”
My mouth opens automatically to answer. I clamp one hand over my lips, pressing hard enough that my teeth break through the skin, and I taste the coppery tang of blood.
It isn’t her.
It can’t be her.
Merina is in Shentari. Not in Underhill. And certainly not in the Nightwild Guard’s keep.
“Alleria?” The voice softens. “I know you can hear me.”
It’s not her.
It’s not real. Don’t answer.
Something taps on the glass.
I pull my knees up against my chest, curling into the smallest shape I can make. But her words have already done their damage, and the images are forming in my mind.
The crowd. The scaffold. The rope. My father watching, with Merina standing silently beside him.
“I can feel your pain, your loneliness. Won’t you let me in?”
I stare at the curtains. They’re drawn across the window, dark and so thick they block out everything beyond.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
“Please, Alleria. Let me in.”
I shake my head, pressing my lips together to stop myself from answering.
“If you don’t want to let me in, just open the curtain? We can talk through the window.”
My hand is still pressed over my mouth. I’m terrified to move it, because I want to say her name.
Merina.
I called her Rina when I was little and couldn’t quite manage the whole thing. Rina, my big sister who let me crawl into her bed during storms even though she complained about my cold feet. Who laughed, and danced, and found joy in beautiful gowns.
Who stood beside my father to watch me die.
“Don’t you want to know what I was thinking when I watched them place the noose around your neck? Don’t you want to know what I said when the trapdoor opened? Was I upset? Was I happy? Was I glad you were going to die?”
I pull the pillow over my head and cover my ears, because I do want to know.
I want to know so desperately it hurts.
After everything, the cell and the trial and the rope, some broken little part of me still wants my sister to have loved me enough to look away because watching me die would have destroyed her.
I want that version of it. I want so much to believe that’s what happened.
“I can tell you all the things you don’t remember,” she says. “All the things Cairn hasn’t told you.”
The breath stills in my chest.
“He’s keeping secrets, you know. He hasn’t really explained how you survived, has he?”
My fingers tighten around the pillow.
“Deep down, you know that.”
She’s right. I do know he’s keeping secrets. I’ve known it since I woke and found my body changed.
“I can tell you. All you have to do is let me in.”
My feet find the floor before I register moving. The pillow slips from my hands and lands on the rug. I stand up, one hand gripping the bedpost, the other half-lifted toward the curtains.
“Alleria.” The words turn gentle. “I looked away. Isn’t that what you want to know?”
Yes. Yes, that is what I want to know. But not just that. I want to know if she turned away before the rope tightened or after. If her hands shook. If she saw her sister standing there with a noose around her neck, or if she only saw the problem the kingdom needed to remove.
The curtains hang in front of me, dark and still. Behind them, Merina waits, offering answers to all the questions I’ve been too scared to ask.
All I have to do is open them.
Except Merina is a world away, where humans pretend the fae are the monsters.
I hold tighter to the bedpost. I know better than to open the curtain. Vessara and Serath have both warned me.
Do not answer the voices. Do not invite anything in.
That’s what it wants. A small opening of any kind that it can reach through. It wants me to forget every warning and tear the curtain aside.
Merina sighs. A small, irritated sound I recognize.
“You always needed to know the reasons for everything. Even when you got into trouble for it.”
My hand shakes.
“Would it help if I told you I was sorry?”
Tears spill down my cheeks, and I close my eyes. It doesn’t help. The dark behind my lids brings the image of the scaffold again.
“Would you believe me?”
My nails dig into the wood of the bedpost.
No.
Yes.
I don’t know.
That’s the part that hurts the most. After everything, some broken little part of me still wants there to be an answer I can live with, and would take a lie to get it.
An explanation that lets me keep the sister I loved without admitting she stood beside my father and waited for the trapdoor to open.
“They say fae can’t lie, but is that really the truth? Are you sure being collared by iron didn’t change that? How certain can you be that Cairn isn’t lying to you?”
I know he hasn’t told me everything.
“I can tell you what you really are.”
For one awful moment, I want to let her.
I let go of the bedpost and step back. One step. Then another until my legs hit the bed. I climb beneath the sheets again, pulling them up around me with hands that won’t stop shaking. The pillow goes back over my head, and I press it down hard. But it doesn’t stop the voice from reaching me.
Beyond the window, my sister’s voice turns gentle.
“Oh Alleria, you’ve always been so easy to hurt.”
The tapping starts again. Quiet at first, then growing louder until it’s hammering into my skull. Above it, Merina says my name. Softly, then impatiently, then with the same sharp note of disappointment that used to make me apologize even when I hadn’t done anything wrong.
But I don’t answer. I let her call. I let her tap. And I stay beneath the sheets with the pillow over my head, and wait for the dawn.
There is a pot of tea and a plate of toast waiting for me when I stumble, gritty-eyed, into the sitting room hours later. The fire in the hearth has warmed the air, the curtains are open, framing the sea beyond the glass.
Thankfully, there’s no sign of whatever was pretending to be Merina all night long.
I cross to the hearth and sink into one of the chairs. A cup has already been poured, and I reach forward to pick it up. I’m taking my first sip when the door swings open.
“Oh good, you’re already awake.” Serath walks in.
“I’m not sure I actually slept.” I sip my tea and watch as she walks over to the chair opposite me.
Sitting down, she looks at me, eyes tracking over my face. “Something disturbed you?”
A small laugh escapes me. “You could say that.”
She frowns. “What happened?”
My gaze darts to the open curtains. The balcony beyond them is empty.
“Something was calling to me last night. First through the door, then through my bedchamber window.”
“Did you open the curtains?”
I shake my head.
“Did you answer it?”
“No.” I blurt the denial too quickly. “I wanted to. I almost did,” I admit quietly. “But I didn’t.” My hand is shaking. I lower the cup into my lap before I spill tea over myself.
“That’s good.”
I take a breath. “It sounded like my sister. It was her voice. It knew everything that happened to me. About the hanging … and how she was there. It knew I wanted to know whether she watched or looked away.” I swallow.
My throat hurts, as though I’ve spent the entire night screaming instead of lying silent.
“And then it started talking about Cairn. It said he’s keeping secrets from me. ”
“Hmm.” Serath sits back in her chair. “Did it tell you what those secrets were?”
“No. Only that he’s not telling me something I should know.” I lick my lips. “Is he?”
“I can’t answer that. I don’t know what he’s told you and what he hasn’t. But if he is, he will have a good reason for it. You can always ask him when he returns.”
“It said he can lie … No, that’s not true. It insinuated that he can lie.”
Serath’s expression turns grave. “Fae can’t lie, Alleria.”
I stare out at the sea, watching the waves roll in and draw back. “What was it?”
She doesn’t answer straight away. I drag my gaze back from the window and look at her.
“It was a Sluagh.”
The name means nothing to me, but the way she says it sends a shiver down my spine.
“They’re threshold beings, full of hunger and malice. They are attracted to heightened emotions, and people who are frightened or grieving or might forget the rules.”
“The rules about not answering or inviting them in?”
“Among others, yes. They cannot cross a protected threshold unless someone gives them a way. A word can be enough.” Her eyes meet mine. “Or opening a window because you want to see what is on the other side.”
My stomach flips. “I didn’t.”
“Oh, I know.” Her voice softens. “If you had, we would be having a very different conversation.”
I look down at the tea in my hands. “How did it know Merina?”
“It didn’t. It read it from your memories.”
I frown. “I wasn’t thinking about it.”
“No. But what happened to you was recent, and close enough to the surface for something like that to find.”
“It sounded exactly like her.”
“That’s what they do.” She reaches forward and touches my hand.
“Listen to me, Alleria. Do not let what the Sluagh said to you take hold. A half-truth is more useful to them than a lie, because your mind will fill in the rest for you. Nothing it could say to you could be worse than what you can imagine for yourself.”
“That isn’t very comforting.”
“No, but it’s the truth.” She gives my hand one final squeeze before letting go.
“What if it comes back?”
“You do exactly the same as last night. You don’t answer.
You don’t open the curtains.” She nods toward my cup.
“Finish your tea, eat some breakfast, and then get dressed. You need to get out of this room for a while. You spent the night trapped in here with a Sluagh whispering through the glass. Sitting in that chair and staring out of the window all morning is not going to make you feel better.”
“Where are we going?”
“We’ll take a walk through the keep, and I’ll show you some of my favorite places.”