Chapter 14 #2
I crawl out of my hiding place, and move deeper into the trees, away from the Dell’s boundary.
When I’m far enough that the torchlight from the gates is just a faint glow through the branches, I find a gap in the canopy where moonlight pools on the forest floor.
Stretching out on my back in the dirt, I tilt my face upward.
For every night of my captivity, I watched the moon rise and set through iron bars.
Every night I felt it call and couldn’t answer.
I could see it, but I couldn’t touch it.
The collar drained everything I tried to draw, turned the connection into agony, until I learned to stop reaching.
Until I learned to look at the moon and feel nothing, because anything else would have broken me.
Now I reach for it, and power answers.
The moonlight sinks into my skin. I close my eyes and let it slide through me. Drop by slow drop, the emptiness inside me fills. I breathe it in until my lungs ache, until every nerve ending burns with moonstruck power once more.
It’s not quite the flood I once commanded. Once I could pull moonlight into my hands and shape it into blades, shields, and untold nightmares. I could call down silver fire that burned through wards like paper. I could wrap myself in shadow so deep that even fae eyes couldn’t find me.
I don’t have the power to do that yet. But this … lying in the dark with power pooling in my chest for the first time in so long … this is enough.
This is more than enough.
I missed this.
I didn’t let myself think about how much, because thinking about it would have driven me mad. But I missed it, the same way I’d miss the sound of my own heartbeat.
I lift one hand toward the sky, fingers spread. Silver light gathers at my fingertips. I push harder, and the light steadies, brightens, then spills down my palm to my wrists. When I close my fist, the light winks out. But I can feel it now, flowing through my veins, humming under my skin.
Waiting.
When I finally sit up and open my eyes, the world has changed. Everything is sharper. The shadows between trees have texture and depth I thought I’d never see again. The wards at the Dell’s boundaries are visible to me now, their weakest points clear to my gaze.
I stay there for a moment, luxuriating in the power settling inside me. Even the night air tastes different than it did an hour ago. Cleaner. Colder. Full of wicked possibilities.
It’s time to move.
Through the trees, lamplight still glows inside the preserve.
Voices drift across the grounds, too faint to make out the words.
Torches burn at the main gate, where the two guards stand at their posts.
Silently, I circle the high wooden fence, looking for a way in.
It’s easy enough to climb, but there are too many people awake, so I find somewhere shadowed and wait.
Before the Sealing, I spent three weeks in a hollow tree waiting for a human war party to pass. They camped fifty feet from my hiding spot, built fires, posted sentries, and never knew death was watching them sleep. I picked them off one by one over six days, until none were left.
Centuries in a cage has only sharpened the patience I learned from that. If I have to wait days before I can make my move, so be it.
Hours pass. The light in the windows dims and turns the courtyard dark. The guards’ conversation drifts to me on the night air—complaints about the cold, their wages, and the cook’s latest attempt at stew. One of them laughs, a low sound that carries in the quiet.
I wait until their voices turn lower, then move along the fence to a section hidden by overgrown brush. The wood here is weathered but sturdy. I pull myself up and over in one smooth motion—
A door bangs open.
I drop flat on the far side, pressing into the earth.
Footsteps come closer. A man’s voice, slurred with drink, calls out.
Another voice answers from further away.
The footsteps stop. I can hear him breathing, no more than fifteen feet from where I’m lying.
He fumbles around in the dark, then the smell of urine reaches me just as I hear water hitting the side of the fence.
Armies used to flee at the sound of my name. Now I’m hiding in shadows while some nameless fool relieves himself three feet from my head. The absurdity of it makes me grind my teeth. There will be time later for reclaiming what I was. Right now, survival is all that matters.
After what feels like an eternity, he finishes and walks away, whistling. I wait until the silence settles, then rise into a crouch and listen. The guard’s conversation continues. A horse snorts in the stable, and somewhere a door creaks, but no footsteps follow the sound.
I wait for a moment longer, then move … past the grain store, around the tack house, through the narrow gap between the farrier’s workshop and the storehouse. This path is burned into my memory. They marched me along it whenever I was taken out to be some noblewoman’s plaything.
I keep to the shadows, stopping often to listen.
A servant emerges from the lodge’s back door, and I flatten against the wall.
I can’t risk using glamour or magic to hide me, not this close to the mage who lives here.
I don’t know how adept he is at feeling magic other than his own.
The female walks within ten feet of me, carrying a bucket, and muttering to herself about the hour and the cold. She passes without looking my way.
I wait until the sound of her footsteps fades, then move on.
The tack house is dark, and I ease around it, keeping low, and pause at the corner to check the path ahead.
There’s twenty feet of open ground between here and the gap between buildings.
Torchlight flickers at the far end, near the main yard, but the light doesn’t reach this far.
I cross quickly and slip into the narrow passage. The smell hits me immediately. Waste. Old blood. The stench of bodies kept too long in too small a space. The smell of the cages.
I stop at the edge of the yard, and let it roll over me.
The rows stretch out before me. Thirty cages in the first section. Thirty in the second. Twenty more at the far end. Iron bars gleam dully in the torchlight, and the ward vibrates against my skin, setting my teeth on edge.
Two guards sit by the brazier at the far end of the first row.
I know them both. One of them likes to kick the bars when he’s bored.
The other spits in the water when he’s filling the bowls.
They’ll do their nightly circuit soon, following the same route they always walk.
I dismiss them as unimportant, and focus my attention on the cages I’m looking for.
Vel is in the first row. I can see the shape of her through the bars. She has a particular way of holding herself, straight-backed even in captivity. She’s never lost the bearing of the warrior she is.
Caelum is three cages down from her, standing close to the bars the way he always does, staring at nothing. The light went out of his eyes decades ago, but he’s still alive.
Therin is near the far end of the second row, close to where my cage was. We could see each other when I was still there. He’s awake, staring at the guards with eyes that burn.
None of them know I’m here. The guards might have told them I was killed on the hunt, if they bothered saying anything at all. They don’t know I’m less than fifty yards away, with nothing between us but the wards and a few guards who have never faced an uncollared fae.
A sound drifts on the night air, low and barely audible. The melody is old, older than this place. A song from Underhill.
Serath. She used to hum that song when we rode to battle, a habit she never broke. Hearing it loosens the knot in my chest. I breathe deep, hold it, then release.
As much as I want to storm the cages now, I can’t. Not yet. I force myself to pull back from the cage yard, before I’m seen.
I need somewhere to hide and prepare. The route they marched me along is the only part of this place I know. Everything else is unfamiliar ground, but there will be somewhere forgotten. There always is.
It takes some time, but eventually I find myself outside the grain store.
It’s set apart from the other buildings, and I circle it slowly, looking for a way in that doesn’t involve the locked door.
Around the back, I find what I need—a gap where the foundation meets the earth, just wide enough to squeeze through.
The space is dark, cramped and stinks of rat droppings and mold, but it’s perfect for what I need.
I lower myself to the ground and inch my way through the gap.
Inside, the darkness is absolute. The floorboards of the building above me are inches from my face, and the ground beneath me is cold and damp.
Things skitter in the darkness, rats and bugs disturbed by my intrusion.
I pay them no attention and drag myself forward until I find a spot where the space opens up slightly, where the ground dips and gives me room to lie flat without my nose pressed against the boards.
Something runs across my hand, and I let it.
I’ve slept in worse places. This is nothing.
From here, I can no longer see the cages, but I can feel the wards humming at the edge of my awareness. Lifting one hand, I will silver light to life. It dances between my fingers, little flames of moonlight lighting up the darkness.
Four days ago, I couldn’t have managed this. The iron had drained me so completely that lighting a candle would have been beyond me. But the power is waking up now. Still weak and sluggish, growing stronger by the hour.
Soon.
I let the light fade and settle into the darkness.
Let the humans relax, let them believe that now the princess has been returned, they can hunt and kill the beast at their leisure. Let Cowen sleep peacefully dreaming of the money he’ll make once hunts resume.
He has no idea that death has already slipped through his defenses.
For three hundred years I’ve waited.
I can wait a little longer.