Chapter 14
FOURTEEN
CAIRN
I hold the glamour keeping me hidden in place until she disappears, then drop it and move deeper into the trees.
The wards are my first concern. I don’t want to find myself trapped inside the hunting area again.
I have to assume they’ve already repaired the damage I did.
Their mage would have felt the breach, and humans are nothing if not predictable in their fear.
They’ll have patched the hole and congratulated themselves on their cleverness.
I skirt wide, testing the boundaries with senses that are slowly remembering what they’re for. The ward magic hums at the edge of my awareness, familiar and hateful. When I find where it starts, I stay clear and circle toward the Dell from the north.
The hedgerow at the Dell’s northern boundary is overgrown and neglected. I push through into the gap where the branches weave thick enough to hide me, and sink to the ground.
Inside the preserve, my people are waiting.
My escape will have brought them a short reprieve from the hunts.
Cowen won’t want to risk patrons' necks while a fae runs loose, or more accurately, he won’t risk losing another prize.
They might have delayed any further hunts while they searched for the missing princess, but the modifications won’t have stopped, and the rentals to bored noblewomen won’t have paused.
The Dell’s business continues unhindered, but not for much longer.
Soon, these humans will remember what it meant to fear us.
I close my eyes, fill my lungs, and on the exhale, the world splits open.
My body stays where it is, twigs digging into my back, the earth cold beneath me. But layered over it, I’m somewhere else, looking through eyes that aren’t mine.
Sliding into a mind requires patience. Push too fast, and the connection shatters. Too slow, and you skim along the surface forever, never sinking deep enough to achieve anything. The trick is settling in gradually, letting yourself become part of someone’s awareness, so slowly, they never notice.
Most mortals have no training in mental defense.
They don’t need it. The fae who might have invaded their minds are collared or dead, and human mages care only about bindings and wards and discovering new ways to hurt us.
It never occurs to them that something could slip past their defenses without tripping a single alarm.
Their arrogance is their oldest weakness.
I ease into place and wait for the connection to stabilize, then separate what belongs to her body from what belongs to mine.
There’s the sense of movement first. The sway of a horse, and the rhythm of hooves on earth. Wind pulls at her hair, tugging loose strands across the field of vision. The smell of woodsmoke drifts from somewhere ahead, mixed with horses, sweat, and the scent of forest.
Then emotion. Relief, fear, and shame tangled together, knotted so tight I can’t tell where one ends and another begins.
I let it wash past. What she feels doesn’t matter. What matters is what I can see.
The horse crests a low rise, and the Dell spreads out below.
The main gates stand open, with two guards flanking them. They’re armed, stances relaxed, their attention turned inward toward the courtyard instead of outward watching for threats. It probably hasn’t occurred to them that I might come back.
Beyond the gates is the lodge, with its stable and smithy, and scattered outbuildings, and set off to one side of the courtyard, the fenced enclosure.
Everything else falls away.
The post stands in the center of the pen, chains and iron rings bolted to the wood.
Four days ago I stood there, chained in place, while Alleria and her party inspected their quarry.
I kept my back to them, refusing to let them see my face, but I heard everything.
Her intake of breath when she saw the spread of the rack they’d grown on me for her, while the huntmaster explained what a fine trophy I’d make.
Her attention skitters away from the enclosure now. She doesn’t want to look. She doesn’t want to remember standing at that fence with excitement bright in her eyes.
I hold my focus while her gaze slides past, taking note of the height of the fence, the distance from the post to the gate, and the way the gate stands open, waiting for the next fae to be displayed there.
The horses stop in the center of the courtyard, and the ordered routine of the Dell dissolves into chaos.
I track movements through the crowd. There are four guards visible, their eyes on the horses.
If I were there in body instead of riding behind her eyes, I could easily have walked through the front gates at this moment, and no one would have noticed.
Humans. So confident in their cages and collars that they forget what happens when the lock breaks.
A male pushes through the press of people, shoving past those who don’t move fast enough, and when he reaches the horse, he pulls her down, wrapping his arms around her so tightly I feel her ribs compress through the connection.
“Alleria.” His voice breaks on her name. “Gods, girl!”
I know that voice. He called her name in the forest. Now I have a face to go with it.
She sinks into him, and the bond connecting my mind to hers floods with warmth and safety. I let her have the moment, and while she’s lost in the reunion, I look at the courtyard over his shoulder.
A woman approaches with a blanket. Two more guards come out of the lodge. The path to the stable stands clear, and beyond it, the gap between outbuildings that leads to the back of the property. Then another figure comes toward her, and my focus sharpens.
Cowen.
The huntmaster straightens his coat as he walks. His face wears an expression of relief, but I can see the calculation underneath. He’s thinking about cost and how to present this so the Dell’s reputation survives intact.
He bows when he reaches her.
Seven days ago, this man stood and watched while bone erupted through my skull. He looked at me the way a butcher looks at an animal being brought for slaughter—assessing how much money could be made from the carcass.
He’s wearing the same expression now.
My body in the hedgerow goes rigid, fingers digging into the earth, responding to the surge of rage. I have to wrench my attention away before it bleeds through the bond.
Control.
There will be time for Cowen later. When I can take my time with him, and make sure he understands why he’s dying.
When I refocus, he’s gesturing toward the lodge. Her protector guides her through the doors and into the entrance hall. She glances toward the wall, then away but not before I see what’s there.
Trophies. Dozens of them.
Antlers spread from polished plaques—twelve-point, sixteen-point, configurations even larger.
Tusks curving in cruel arcs, yellowed with age.
Ram horns spiraling tight. Bone ridges that must have grown along spines before they were sawed free.
Brass plates beneath each one are engraved with dates and names of those who made the kills.
Alleria fixes her gaze on the floor, on her protector’s boots, and on her own white-knuckled fists. She won’t look at the walls.
I do.
The connection shows me everything in her field of vision whether she focuses on it or not. The trophies are grouped by type—antlers near the door, tusks along the far wall. Above the fireplace, a single rack spreads wider than a man’s armspan. The centerpiece. Cowen’s pride.
Each one was grown on a living fae body. Each one was cut free after the kill.
I can’t recognize who any of them were. There are no faces or ways to identify the fae who died wearing these modifications. But I swear a silent oath that Cowen will answer for every single one.
Alleria climbs the stairs, and the wall of trophies falls behind us. The room she’s taken to has a fire in the hearth, a bed, and a copper tub waiting for her.
“I’m right next door,” her protector says. “Anything you need.”
Emotion floods through the bond again, a twisting, nauseating guilt that steals the strength from her legs. She sinks into the bathtub, hands shaking, thinking about the trophies on the wall, and standing in the clearing with her bow drawn.
I was going to do that.
The thought rises through the bond, clear as speech.
I was going to kill him, take the antlers, hang them in my room and never wonder if he felt it.
Horror follows guilt, then shame, and underneath that, so faint I almost miss it, she’s wondering where I am, and whether the hunters will find me.
She hopes they won’t.
Interesting.
Her thoughts keep circling. My hands on her skin when I healed her. My mouth on her breasts when the guards knocked. The way I pinned her to the floor, her body trapped beneath mine.
And the butter knife.
Back at my body, my mouth curves. She’d moved with all the stealth of a drunken cow, picked up the knife from the table and crept across the room. When she knelt beside me with the blade pressed to my throat, her hands shook so badly the vibration traveled through the steel into my skin.
A butter knife isn’t much of a weapon, but she might have opened a vein before I could stop her. Instead, she gave herself time to think. Thinking is fatal when you’re trying to kill someone faster and stronger than you.
The bathwater cools around her. She gets out, dries and pulls on clothes.
The sounds of voices drift up from below, but she doesn’t go down to join them.
Instead she retires to her bed and stares at the ceiling while her thoughts grow fuzzy, still thinking of me.
My face appearing and disappearing in her mind.
When her awareness softens into sleep, I slip back down the bond and release the connection.
My eyes open in the hedgerow. Through the gaps in the leaves, I can see the moon, fat and silver, riding high above the trees … and it calls to me in a way I can’t ignore.