Chapter 24
Elodie woke to darkness and the taste of blood on her tongue.
For a long, disorienting moment, she didn’t know where she was.
The floor beneath her cheek was cold stone, damp with something she didn’t want to think about.
Her head throbbed with a pain that radiated from the back of her skull down through her neck and shoulders, and when she tried to move, iron bit into her wrists. Chains.
Memory came flooding back—the attack, Cecily’s betrayal, Bertram falling, the blow that sent her into blackness. She was in Dunharrow Keep. In Alaric’s dungeon. Chained to a wall like something out of her own archaeological nightmares.
“Spinach fudge,” she muttered, and immediately winced at how loud her voice sounded in the silence.
She took stock of her situation with the calm of someone who’d spent years cataloguing artifacts in dark, cramped spaces.
The cell was small, maybe eight feet by ten, with stone walls that wept moisture and a floor covered in mouldy straw.
A single torch guttered in a wall sconce outside the iron grate of her door, casting just enough light to see by.
Her chains were attached to a ring set into the wall, giving her perhaps three feet of movement in any direction.
No windows. No furniture except a wooden bucket in the corner that she didn’t want to examine too closely. The air smelled of earth and rot and the mustiness of ancient stone.
Twelfth-century dungeon, some detached part of her brain noted. Iron fittings, hand-forged. Walls show signs of pick marks—probably carved from the existing cavern system. Consistent with regional construction patterns.
“Great,” she said aloud. “I’m about to die, and I’m taking field notes.”
A sound from somewhere above, footsteps, heavy and deliberate, made her freeze. They were coming. Whoever they were.
She pulled herself upright against the wall, ignoring the protest of muscles that had been lying on cold stone for goodness knew how long.
If she was going to face Alaric, she’d do it standing.
She might be terrified, might be chained, and might be completely at his mercy, but she’d be damned if she’d cower.
The footsteps grew louder. A key scraped in the lock. The door swung open. Lord Alaric de Montrevain stepped into her cell as if he were entering a ballroom.
He was dressed in fine wool and velvet, deep blue trimmed with silver thread. His boots were polished. His silver-touched hair was perfectly arranged. He looked, Elodie thought with a surge of disgust, like a man who’d dressed for dinner while his soldiers attacked innocent people in the night.
“Ah.” He smiled, and it was the most terrifying smile she’d ever seen—warm and genuine and utterly empty of humanity. “The faerie queen awakens. I trust your accommodations are not too uncomfortable?”
Elodie scowled. Her throat was dry, her heart was hammering, and she didn’t trust her voice not to shake.
Alaric didn’t seem to mind her silence. He strolled around the cell as if admiring the architecture, his hands clasped behind his back.
“I’ve been looking forward to meeting you properly.
Gareth’s little miracle, appearing from nowhere in a flash of lightning.
The servants at Greywatch are quite convinced you’re one of the fair folk.
” He turned to face her, those cold blue eyes assessing. “Are you? A faerie, I mean?”
“I’m an archaeologist,” Elodie said. Her voice came out steadier than she’d expected. “From a university in London. Not that you’d know what that means.”
“Oh, I know more than you’d think.” Alaric moved closer, and she forced herself not to flinch.
“I know you’ve bewitched my former protégé.
Turned a broken, silent shell of a man into something human again.
I know his household signs now instead of speaking, like a troupe of mummers.
I know he looks at you like you hung the stars in the sky. ”
He stopped directly in front of her, close enough that she could smell the wine on his breath.
“I could have attacked Greywatch directly, you know.” His tone was conversational, almost pleasant.
“I have the men. The resources. But lords who attack other lords draw attention. Richard’s regents frown on open warfare between nobles—’tis bad for taxes, bad for order.
And there’s the small matter of the king’s cousin, who still remembers that Gareth saved his life.
” He smiled a charming, empty smile. “Much better to draw one’s enemy out.
To make him come to you. To let him die in a rescue attempt—heroic, but foolish. Tragic, really.”
Elodie’s stomach turned. He’d thought of everything.
“And who would blame me for defending my own keep against an invader?” Alaric spread his hands, the picture of innocence. “He attacks, my men respond, and sadly, the Silent Reaper falls. A terrible loss. I shall wear mourning for a se’nnight, at least.”
“You’re a monster.”
“I am a practical man.” He shrugged elegantly. “Gareth should have stayed beneath me. Should have been grateful for my patronage instead of prancing about with his shiny new castle and his royal favour. He forgot his place. I am simply reminding him of it.”
“By murdering innocent people? By attacking a castle full of refugees?”
“Unfortunate necessities, my lady.” He didn’t sound remotely troubled. “Though I must admit, your little evacuation was impressive. Most of the servants escaped. ’Tis a pity. I’d hoped to have more leverage.”
He reached out and touched her face, a gentle caress that made her skin crawl, and smiled at her flinch.
“You’re the bait, little faerie. And he will come for you.
Because that’s what fools in love do.” His thumb traced her cheekbone, proprietary and cold.
“My archers will turn him into a pincushion before he gets within twenty feet of the gates. And you shall watch. I’ll have you brought to the walls so you can see him fall. Then we shall discuss your future.”
“I don’t have a future with you.”
“Oh, but you do.” Alaric’s smile widened. “You’re either a genuine faerie, in which case, you have value as a curiosity, or you’re a madwoman that Gareth was foolish enough to fall in love with. Either way, methinks I shall keep you. A reminder of my victory.”
Something cold and fierce rose up in Elodie’s chest. Not fear, she was beyond fear now. Something harder. Something that had been forged over years of being underestimated, dismissed, overlooked.
“He’ll kill you,” she said quietly.
Alaric’s eyebrows rose. “I beg your pardon?”
“You think you know him, but you don’t.” She met his gaze without flinching. “You know the boy you trained. The eager young knight, who believed in honour and service and doing what was right. But that boy died in a forest clearing three years ago, and you’re the one who killed him.”
Something flickered behind Alaric’s eyes, not quite fear, but close.
“The man he became?” Elodie continued, her voice gaining strength.
“He survived you, the silence, and survived three years of building himself into something that could face you again. You think he hasn’t been planning for this moment?
You think he doesn’t know your walls, your weaknesses, every secret you’ve ever tried to hide? ”
Alaric’s smile had frozen on his face.
“You should have killed him when you had the chance.” Elodie let the words fall like stones. “You had your blade at his throat and you walked away. That was your mistake. Not Greywatch. Not me. The mistake was letting him live.”
For just a moment, one heartbeat, one breath, uncertainty flickered across Alaric’s handsome face. His hand dropped from her cheek. His posture shifted almost imperceptibly, as if he were suddenly aware of how close he was standing to something dangerous.
“God’s blood,” he breathed, and for the first time his voice held something other than smug certainty. “You truly believe that.” Then he laughed. But the laugh sounded less certain than before. Forced. A performance rather than genuine amusement.
“Brave little faerie.” He stepped back, composing himself with visible effort.
“I almost admire you. But bravery will not stop an arrow. Will not stop a sword, and will not stop me.” He turned and walked to the door, pausing on the threshold.
“Sleep well, my lady. On the morrow, you shall have quite a view from the walls.”
The door clanged shut behind him. The key scraped in the lock. His footsteps faded up the stairs, and Elodie was alone. But she’d seen it. That flicker of doubt. That moment when Alaric’s certainty had wavered.
Good, she thought fiercely. Be afraid. You should be.
She didn’t sleep. Instead, she sat against the wall and let her mind race through possibilities, each more desperate than the last. The chains were too strong to break. The walls were solid stone, and the door was iron-banded oak set in a frame that had probably held prisoners for a hundred years.
Think, Elodie. You’re supposed to be smart. Think.
But every plan she came up with crashed against the same rocks. She was chained, locked in, and Alaric had an army standing between her and freedom. Even if she somehow escaped this cell, she’d never make it out of the keep.
And Gareth was coming. She knew it with bone-deep certainty, knew it like she knew the sun would rise, like she knew her own name.
He would come for her, because that’s who he was.
The silent knight who’d pulled her out of a storm and given her a home.
Who’d learned to speak with his hands because she couldn’t bear for him to be voiceless.
Who looked at her like she was something precious when she’d spent her whole life feeling overlooked.
But Alaric didn’t know him. Not really. He knew the student, not the master. Knew the knight, not the reaper. And Gareth—her Gareth—wasn’t the kind of man who charged blindly into traps.
He won’t come through the front gates, she realised. He’s too smart for that.
The thought brought a tiny spark of hope. If Gareth found another way in, if he avoided Alaric’s trap—
Stay alive, she told herself. Just stay alive long enough for him to find you.
She closed her eyes and let her mind drift to Greywatch.
To the great hall with its worn tapestries and its perpetual smell of bread in the ovens.
To Marian’s quick hands and Bertram’s gentle fussing.
And of course, to Gareth standing on the battlements at dawn, his dark hair lifting in the wind, his grey eyes fixed on the horizon like a man watching for something he’d stopped believing would come.
She thought about the way he touched her face when she cried, like she was something fragile and infinitely precious.
The way his hands shaped signs with fierce concentration, determined to communicate even when words failed him.
The way he’d kissed her knuckles in the solar, gentle and reverent, saying everything he couldn’t give voice to.
He’d ridden away not knowing if she’d still be waiting when he returned. Not knowing if she’d choose him or spend the rest of her life searching for a way back to a world that had never really wanted her.
Coward, she thought bitterly. You told him you loved him and still couldn’t commit. He offered you everything, and you couldn’t even give him certainty.
If she got out of this—if they both got out of this—she wouldn’t be silent anymore.
She’d tell him she was staying. She’d choose him, choose this life, choose love over the uncertain possibility of returning to a world where she’d only ever been “the fairy girl,” the afterthought, the one people looked through instead of at, no matter if she could go back or not. It was the choice that mattered.
Please, she prayed, though she wasn’t sure who she was praying to. Please let me live long enough to tell him I’m not going anywhere.
Somewhere above her, a guard called out to another, their voices muffled by stone. A door creaked. Footsteps, not Alaric’s measured tread, but something else. Quicker. More purposeful.
Elodie’s heart stuttered. She strained against her chains, listening, trying to make sense of the sounds filtering through the ancient stone.
Something was happening.