Chapter 16
SIXTEEN
CAIRN
Pale light filters through the gaps in the foundation when the Dell begins to awaken.
A door bangs somewhere. Footsteps cross the grain store floor, heavy boots making the boards above my head groan. Dust sifts down and settles on my face. I don’t move. I’ve been lying here all night, perfectly still, listening to the guards change shifts and the night sounds fade into silence.
Now that silence is filling up again. Voices, muffled by wood and distance.
The clang of a bucket. Someone coughs, spits, and walks past. The ring of a hammer starts up from the smithy.
Horses stamp and snort as stable hands begin their work.
A woman laughs, the sound cut short abruptly.
A cart creaks across the courtyard. I make note of all of them, my senses finely tuned to direction and distance.
In the corner where two foundation stones meet, a spider has built a web. I’ve been watching it work for hours, adding strand after strand. The web is complete now, intricate and beautiful, and the spider sits at its center, motionless, waiting for its prey.
I could do the same. Stay here like this for days if I needed to. I won’t have to wait that long, though. Tonight, when the Dell goes dark again, I’ll move.
The spider doesn’t stir. Neither do I.
Between one breath and the next, iron bars fill my vision.
The shift is sudden, disorienting. One moment, I’m staring at the web, the next I’m somewhere else entirely. Rust flakes along the edges of the bars where the metal meets the ground. There’s a body behind them, curled on bare earth.
Recognition is instant.
Caelum. One of mine. Quick-witted, light-footed, always the first to spot danger and the last to fall back from it.
I remember him laughing around a campfire the night before the Sealing, making jokes about the humans we’d face.
He’d wagered he’d kill more than Therin when the battle came. Therin said he’d take that bet.
He’s not laughing now. His eyes are empty, dead. Whatever made him Caelum has been scooped out and discarded, leaving only a husk behind.
Every instinct screams at me to move now, to act, to burn through the building I’m hiding beneath. But I hold still.
The vision shifts to another cage. This fae is sitting upright with their face turned away, but I can see the shape of the skull beneath the skin, and the bones jutting out from beneath the thin fabric of a tunic that might have been white once.
Revulsion floods through me as her stomach lurches, bile rising.
She’s walking along the rows of cages, and unwittingly sending everything she sees through the bond to me. This is an unexpected opportunity, and I take it.
A female with empty eyes, standing at the bars. A male curled on his side, his body twitching. Another female, this one pacing the narrow length of her cage. I know that pacing. I spent enough years doing the same thing.
Then she stops in front of a cage, and the familiar face that fills my vision takes my breath away.
Vel.
For a moment I forget I’m seeing through borrowed eyes.
She’s right there, close enough to touch …
and she looks old. Vel was ancient before the Sealing, older than me by at least a thousand years, but she never looked old.
She carried her age with grace and power.
Now she looks like something that’s been worn down by cruelty, eroded to a shadow of what she once was.
But her eyes … they haven’t changed.
She’s looking right at Alleria, and there’s nothing broken in that gaze. Her eyes are full of contempt and cold fury that centuries of being trapped by iron hasn’t managed to extinguish.
Vel spits at the princess, and a guard steps forward to bury an iron bar into her ribs.
My body goes rigid beneath the grain store, fingers curling into fists, silver light flickering across them.
I force myself to calmness, but my nails are cutting into my palm, while Vel takes blow after blow for her defiance.
I can do nothing but lie here, watching through the consciousness of the woman she spat at.
Alleria’s horror slams through me. Her nausea and outrage, and a desperate wish to do something.
But she just stands there and watches, because what else can she do?
I can hear the thoughts unfiltered in her head.
She chooses to move on without speaking.
She has to, because if she doesn’t she will say the wrong thing.
She passes more cages, then stops again. This time she’s in front of a male, and I have to grit my teeth against the surge of fury that threatens to break my concentration.
Therin.
He’s standing at the front of his cage, hands wrapped around the bars, ignoring the pain they will be causing him.
He watches Alleria approach, head tilted slightly to one side, eyes tracking her the way a predator tracks prey.
The look on his face sends fear spiking through her.
She doesn’t understand what she’s seeing, but she knows he’s dangerous.
Therin smiles.
Alleria hurries away.
More cages, more bars, more of my people reduced to shadows of themselves.
I catch glimpses through her vision of a male with no teeth, a female whose hands shake without ceasing, another curled into such a tight ball, it’s impossible to tell if they’re male or female.
Each one comes with the pain of knowledge that I failed to protect them.
And then I hear Serath’s humming.
Alleria stops, and the melody winds through the bond toward me. She doesn’t understand what she’s hearing, or that the song is older than this world humans have built on the bones of mine. It belongs to Underhill, to the deep places where the wild magic runs sweet and slow.
She sang it the night we fled Therison Vale, her voice rising over the sounds of the dying.
Serath opens her eyes.
For a moment, she and Alleria just look at each other, then the fae’s eyes close again, and the humming continues.
The bond is a wildfire of emotion, so strong I can barely separate her feelings from my own. Horror and guilt and shame. Fury and despair and disgust.
Then she stops in front of another cage. The door is open. The interior empty.
My cage.
It’s strange seeing it from the outside.
I spent so many years staring through those bars, memorizing each rust spot, every flaw in the iron.
I know the exact place where the metal is weakest. I know how many steps it takes to cross the width and length.
I know the patch of ground where water pools when it rains.
She stares at it for a long moment, while Cowen speaks beside her. The straw on the floor is matted and stained. There are scratches on the ground where I tried to claw my way out, and a groove worn into the floor where I paced, back and forth.
Her throat tightens. Her eyes burn. Cowen’s voice reaches me through the bond, offering to show her how a modification is performed.
Her refusal is instant. A single word that cuts through the air.
Then she’s moving, walking fast, and the flashes become a blur of motion.
The cages, the passage back to the courtyard, the carriage, and her ever-present protector’s worried face.
Then the connection snaps, and I’m back beneath the grain store, while the spider continues to stare at me.
I lie still for a long time after the bond goes quiet. The images linger—Caelum’s empty eyes, Vel taking those blows. Therin’s predator smile, and Serath’s melody. They feed the anger simmering beneath my skin, turning it into an inferno that will only be quenched by blood and death.
The sounds of the Dell change as time passes, the bustle of day giving way to the quieter rhythms of evening. I stay where I am. I can’t risk moving until it’s full dark, and the silence settles. So, I count the hours by the sounds above me.
The grain store door opens twice more. Boots cross the floor. Voices drift past, talking about dinner, a card game someone lost, and the weather turning colder.
The sun sets and the moon rises, stars wheeling overhead, invisible to my eyes, but I can feel it in my bones, my blood. My power stirs in response, stronger than yesterday.
I wait until all I can hear is the soft murmurings of the guards, and then I move, sliding out from under the grain store one inch at a time, pausing often to listen and make sure no one has noticed me.
The cold air hits my face, and I breathe in, letting it fill my lungs, reminding me that I’m free.
The Dell spreads out before me, silver-washed in moonlight. The stable and smithy are dark, but the lodge shows a few faint lights in upstairs windows.
I stretch slowly, working blood back into cramped limbs. My body responds, sluggishly at first, then with growing ease as the stiffness fades. I’m still weaker than I should be. But it will be enough. For what I plan to achieve tonight, anyway.
I circle wide, keeping to the shadows, and move from building to building. Each one gives me cover, and takes me closer to the passage that will lead to the cages.
The orange glow of the brazier comes into view where the night guards are warming themselves.
They’re sitting as close to the fire as they can get without singeing their boots, passing a flask back and forth.
Their attention is on each other and the warmth, not the cages or darkness surrounding them.
Professionals, these two. The pride of human security.
Their voices are low and lazy, drifting toward me on the night air.
“—told her I’d be home by midwinter, but you know how it is.”
“They never understand.”
“No, they don’t. My mother was the same way. Always asking when I’d settle down and find a nice girl to have babies with.”
“Did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Find a nice girl.”
A laugh. “Found a few. Never settled down, though. What’s the point? This work pays well, and isn’t hard. Watch the cages, walk the rounds, make sure nothing gets out.”
“Easy money.”