10. Sabine
Chapter 10
Sabine
W arm tendrils of sunlight caress my cheek, and I blink awake with a start.
It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust. Everything is blurry until I shade my face from the direct, mid-morning rays cutting through an arched window.
Holy gods. I’m in the strangest bed chamber I’ve ever seen.
The heavy wooden furnishings feel swathed in shadows, even with morning light at the window and candles flickering in sconces. There’s a mineral smell in the air reminiscent of ancient stone. Gnarled vines push through chinks in the mortar to climb in intricate patterns up the walls, their vibrant, maroon blooms taking the place of any artwork or tapestries.
The four-poster bed seems to have been carved from one giant tree trunk. Fur pelts drape over crisp satin sheets. The bed’s canopy is sewn to mimic papery dried leaves.
All together, it gives the feeling that nature has overtaken the room and yet, at the same time, exists in a perfect balance.
As I sit upright, my clothes rustle loudly.
Alarmed, I look down to find I’m no longer wearing the dirty, tattered velvet dress from Lord Berolt’s funeral. Someone has dressed me in a fresh gown of heavy obsidian silk with a plunging neckline, dark crystal beads, bat-winged sleeves, and a serpentine lace corset.
Even worse? They’ve also bathed me.
The dirt is scrubbed from my nails. My feet are buffed to soft perfection. My hair is freshly washed, dried, and twisted into what feels like an intricate fae crown braid.
Panic grips me as I run my hands down my body, trying to recall who did this. Who touched me. Where there should be a memory of someone getting me dressed, there is only a void.
My lungs seize up, unable to pull in a deep enough breath, and I fight with the coverings to scramble out of the massive bed.
This terrible void…is this what Basten felt when Iyre took his memories?
With a pang of longing, I frantically twirl the twine ring on my finger.
Thinking of him causes the room to spin, and I rush to the window, shoving open the hinged wooden lattice. The air is fresh, with a trace of an unfamiliar floral incense. An eventide chant floats through the air, calling to me strangely, like a siren’s song. It isn’t exactly soothing…more like an intoxication. I find myself leaning out over the sill, closing my eyes, breathing in deeply.
When I open my eyes, Norhelm unrolls beneath me.
There’s an eerie sense of barely-tamed wilderness to the capital city. Mountain cliffs flank both sides of the valley, dotted with gnarled, wind-blown trees. Enormous elms shade the buildings, and a natural system of streams weaves among the streets like a tapestry. They feed into a raging river that surrounds Drahallen Hall on three sides. The castle itself juts out over the rocky river valley on a promontory.
If I were to fall? I’d crash down sixty feet to jagged rocks.
Still, despite the dramatic setting, the small city has a bustling charm. I don’t quite know what I expected from Norhelm. Perhaps haunting, shadow-laced spires. A city the rest of the world has forgotten. From the looks of it, Norhelm is all those things—but also much more.
Like the villages we passed on our journey, there is no obvious sign of squalor in the streets. Carriages rumble down cobble-lined lanes, and residents greet one another with waves. I spot a market beside the river, packed with customers jostling to peruse an unbelievable bounty of fresh fish, as though the fishermen simply whistled and salmon jumped into their nets.
I do a double-take when I spot a man riding a saddled moose. Near the market, a woman sells cloudfox pups from a basket on her arm, leashes securing the wriggling little pups from floating away. A small girl strolls down the street, sipping nectar from a flower bud in place of a teacup.
This is no bleak city full of indentured workers beholden to my father’s reign. In fact, at first glance, Norhelm looks…charming.
Ta-DA! A small voice calls up from the woven rug.
Spinning around, I find my forest mouse darting out from under the bed. She turns in a circle with a flourish of her tail.
Little friend! There you are! Relieved tears puddle at the corners of my eyes as I fall to my knees to cup her in my hands. I was afraid we were separated when Iyre knocked me unconscious!
I told you I would always find you. She preens her tail proudly.
A laugh bubbles from my throat as more relieved tears roll down my cheeks. Have you explored the castle?
The kitchens are on the ground floor. There’s a pantry for everything. Root vegetables. Salted meat. Even a confectionary.
I smile because, of course, a mouse first thinks of food. What else?
The castle has five towers with five walled gardens between them. There are crawlspaces between the floors, so I can travel easily and unnoticed. Oh—and the cloudfox? From the forest? It was at your window this morning, but I couldn’t ? —
A sharp knock at my door cuts her off.
We both jump.
Hide! I tell the mouse even as she is already bounding across the rug to duck under the wardrobe.
I hurry to the door, pausing to marshal my emotions before opening it.
When I see who it is, I take a staggering step back. “You!”
Grand Cleric Beneveto waits in the hall. He doesn’t wear his cleric’s cassock, instead donning riding trousers and a loose black shirt open at the collar. It’s his hair that I know him by—the telltale white streak over one eye, giving him a look that’s more roguish than holy.
He gives a slight bow. “Highness, allow me to welcome you to Norhelm. Your father thought you might be more at ease if greeted by a familiar face.”
My fingers curl into my palms to quell the desire to deliver a sharp slap to his face. “I believe my father might be confusing familiarity with fondness.” My fists tremble at my side when his only response is a smug smile. “I suppose your being here means Rian was right about you. He always suspected you were disloyal to Astagnon.”
Beneveto wraps his hand around his neck like a noose, grinning. “Guilty.”
Oh, this insufferable man.
On second thought, I give in to the urge and lay the flat of my palm across his fresh-shaven cheek.
“Traitor,” I spit.
The smack reverberates down the hallway. A sting pulses in my fingers, and I shake out my hand, answering his smug grin with one of my own.
A scowl deepens his wrinkles as he gently taps his cheekbone. “Is it traitorous to defy evil? Or merely prudent?”
I wipe my hand down the length of my gown’s bejeweled bodice to banish his skin’s feel on my fingers. “Do you refer to Astagnon? Evil is a harsh word for the kingdom you supposedly shepherd.”
As he leans forward in the doorway, his white streak of hair falls in his gray eyes. “A kingdom that did you no favors, either.” He straightens, tossing back his mane of hair, then combing a hand through it until he’s restored a semblance of formality. “I am still shepherd of the souls in Astagnon. That is why I am here, Highness. Working with your father to give those poor lost souls a better life.”
My gown’s tight bodice squeezes my ribs. “Even at the cost of war? ”
Instead of answering, Beneveto scratches his eyebrow. “You should speak with your father if you’re going to bring up war. Come, Highness. I’ll take you to him.”
I fold my arms like a shield, presenting a hard outer shell, hoping it hides how my heart is hammering inside.
After twenty-two years, I’m going to meet my real father?
Swallowing, I nod for him to lead the way.
As we move through Drahallen Hall, I can’t help but be begrudgingly curious. The stone walls are chiseled with the ten fae symbols. Servants pass in fine, glittering uniforms with asymmetrical hemlines. Tapestries hang in the stairwell with portrayals of the stories from the Book of the Immortals:
One shows the Night Hunt, with Artain chasing Solene disguised as a doe.
Another shows Aria and Aron, the fated mates who Alessantha brought together.
A third shows Meric’s cursed prisoners wandering the Labyrinth of Justice.
“Volkany is blessed under your father’s rule.” Beneveto’s irritation at me seems to have mellowed by the time we reach the third floor. He motions to a young servant boy carrying firewood to the upper bedrooms. “King Rachillon is ushering in a grand new era. That boy, for example, will live to witness the Third Return of the Fae.”
I mumble a vague answer, not wanting to voice what I truly think: that the poor boy will be nothing but a plaything to the fae.
Like all of us.
A pretty young noblewoman, dressed in a midnight blue gown and wearing silver ear peaks, nods politely to the Grand Cleric as we pass. A godkissed birthmark winks on her russet brown skin above her breastbone. She extends a hand toward an unlit candle, and a flame springs to life at her fingertips.
“Good day, Grand Cleric,” she says with a heavy Kravadan accent.
I glance back over my shoulder to watch her continue down the row of candles, lighting each one for the evening with her godkiss.
“She is Kravadan?” I ask.
“You will find that many residents and servants in Drahallen Hall come from across the seven kingdoms. It stems from your father’s efforts to locate the sleeping fae. He requires ample godkissed people to search for their eternal resting places.”
My stomach cinches. “You mean they’ve been kidnapped and forced to serve him. Like the godkissed people who went missing from Astagnon.”
Beneveto doesn’t blink at the accusation. “Many were brought here forcibly, yes, but you’ll find that few wish to return to their homelands. Moreover, most are pleased to have been given the opportunity for a better life. That noble lady we passed lighting candles? Lady Caelena? She was a slave girl to a desert warlord. King Rachillon’s fleet of godkissed searchers freed her, brought her here, and your father rewarded her contribution to Volkany with a title.”
I press my lips together, not wanting to give voice to the doubts in my head. Tati assured me that I was wrong about Volkany being a cursed kingdom. Every instinct in my body bristles against accepting that, but can I deny the evidence I’ve seen with my own eyes? The prosperous villages? A thriving city? A castle filled with people who celebrate the fae as gods, not monsters? Then again, could there be greater proof of their evil than Iyre?
Beneveto stops at a gilded doorway guarded by a soldier in iron armor. “Here is where I shall take my leave for the time being. Your father awaits within.”
He nods curtly before he leaves me.
My stomach shrinks as I face the soldier, who towers over me a full head taller. Silently, he opens the door.
My feet don’t seem to want to move. My hands smooth over my bodice, working out nonexistent wrinkles. My father is beyond this door. Not Charlin Darrow, the drunken lord who locked me away in a convent.
My real father.
I force myself to take a step inside. The room is windowless and dark, making it nearly impossible to judge the size. At first glance, it could be a closet or a cathedral.
My eyes adjust to the darkness, picking up the glow of low lights from the walls. There’s something strange about the lights. They don’t flicker like candles.
I cautiously approach one, my shoes padding softly on the stone floor. Surprisingly, the glow comes from phosphorescent plants set in wall sconces.
When my eyes fully adjust, I find myself in a room of waist-height marble pedestals, each one illuminated by glowing plants. An enormous glass water tank is set into the far wall. Fanciful glowing fish swim within, their dorsal spots radiating impossible colors.
I seem to be alone, so I step cautiously to the first pedestal, which holds the long iron needle that Iyre used to cut a portal from Astagnon to Volkany. I glance over my shoulder before snatching it up and poking at the air like she did—but all that happens is I accidentally jab my finger .
I sigh.
No surprise—you have to be fae to use fae tools.
The next pedestal displays a leather-bound book locked in an iron chain, and the others contain a rusted horseshoe, a fisherman’s net, and a lasso woven from human hair, among others.
At the water tank, I tap gently to attract the attention of an eel-like fish with glowing fins, and gradually, I become aware of a pair of human eyes looking back at me from the other side.
Shrieking, I jump backward.
A figure slowly approaches from the far side of the tank, his features cast in the eel’s electric glow. My heart seems to stop as surely as if Tati had raised her ten fingers.
A man enters the room like a slow, heavy mist. The air grows tense, charged with an almost palpable sense of power. His beard is graying, yet his hair is still a honey blond, pulled back into a thick knot at the base of his skull. The ten points of his crown, rising like the points of a star, are etched with the symbols of the fae court. A steel brooch pinned to his doublet is cast in the size and likeness of an anatomical heart.
It’s him .
When he steps into the brighter light, it’s like all the air is sucked from my lungs. I never saw myself in Charlin Darrow’s bulbous features.
But in King Rachillon’s?
He has my straight, restrained nose. My same sea-blue eyes. From what I can tell, the same long hair, too.
“Daughter.” His voice is raspy and deep like he’s spent a lifetime around campfires. “I’ve waited a long time to put eyes on you.”
My body refuses to move, lips frozen, trapped between fear and awe. The king places his hands on the sides of my face as though trying to find himself in my features, too.
Shaking, I let out a held breath.
He slowly tilts my head down and brushes a kiss on my forehead. When he releases me, he touches his anatomical heart brooch and whispers, “By the gods. You look so much like her.”
Though my throat feels too dry for words, I force these across my sandpaper tongue: “My father—my adopted father—often said that I carried my mother’s features. I was too young when she died to remember what she looked like in detail.”
Rachillon strokes his long beard. “Isabeau was a beauty. But she was more than that. She had a defiance that I see in you. Which is why I know that, as much as you pretend not to be, you’re seething with anger that I took you from Astagnon.”
You took me from more than Astagnon, I think. You took me from Basten.
I seal my lips to school my temper.
Measuring my response, I say slowly, “I’m not willing to embrace a kingdom—even my parents’ kingdom—that kidnapped hundreds of godkissed people and slaughtered innocent citizens.” I tilt my chin upward toward the glowing ferns, their cool light washing over my skin. “I was there. At Duren’s arena. I saw what your raiders did at your command. The starleons, too.”
On the rare occasions that I stood up to Charlin Darrow, he corrected me with a slap that ached for days. King Rachillon, however, takes my challenge with a flare of pride in his eyes.
“I don’t relish the death of innocents.” He paces toward a pedestal that displays a pair of worn leather gloves. “Yet such is war. The gods blessed me with my own godkiss; I cannot deny it, as you cannot silence the animal voices in your head. I must do as the gods bid. They want me to wake them. To do so, I required godkissed people for their ability to find the fae resting sites.”
“And?” I place the marble pedestal between us, leaning forward over the seemingly mundane gloves. “You think the gods will thank you? Reward you? The gods will just as soon put you in a grave and dance upon it.”
I tense for the slap I feel sure to come—but instead, Rachillon throws back his head and laughs. When he finally wipes the mirth from his eyes, he says simply, “You are right that the gods can be capricious.”
Capricious .
As if they’re baby goats butting their half-inch horns against one another.
He picks up one of the leather gloves with as much reverence as if it were a crown jewel. “Do you know what these are? They are Immortal Artain’s hunting gloves. Whoever wears them shall have perfect aim. Come. Look at this.”
Rachillon steers me to the next pedestal.
“This knife—” he hovers his hand over a vicious curved blade with a serpent carved into the handle, “—is called the Serpent Knife. It was used in The Sacrifice of the Golden Child. Do you know the story?”
I shake my head softly. “In the convent, we only read the stories from Immortal Iyre’s chapter.”
He runs his finger over the serpent design. “In a time before time, Immortal Vale promised favor to a farmer if he sacrificed the prize kid out of his goat herd to the fae. The farmer, greedy and half-mad, used the knife to kill his youngest son instead and placed a chalice filled with the boy’s blood on an altar. Vale drank from the chalice, thinking it was wine. According to legend, that was the first time a human life was sacrificed to the fae. Vale didn’t mean to drink human blood, but he did, and it gave him far greater powers. It’s what turned them all from long-lived fae into gods .”
He speaks as casually of a boy’s murder as describing the supper menu. Ice runs through my veins as I think about the blood on Iyre’s lips.
Our blood fuels their powers.
He leads me to the next pedestal, which holds a delicate vase that swirls with mystical dark blue bubbles frozen in the glass.
“I’ve collected these fae artifacts at great expense over the course of nearly forty years,” he explains. “A diver died bringing this one back from a shipwreck. It is Immortal Thracia’s midnight vase. Her most prized possession, according to lore, as it was a wedding gift from Immortal Samaur during the First Return. He called upon the sun to heat sand from beneath a glacier, giving it its unusual color. It can keep any bloom alive for eternity, even without sunlight.”
His hand on my back steers me toward the next pedestal, but I step away from his grasp, a hand pressed to my dress’s tight bodice.
“If your rule is so just and your kingdom so great, then why did my mother flee?”
His blue eyes shine in the low, iridescent light that keeps shifting as the eels circle in their glass enclosure. Finally, he looks into the middle ground and sighs.
“Isabeau was an actress—did you know that?”
I can’t hide how much this unexpected fact shakes my world. The truth is, as much as I loved my mother, I knew almost nothing about her. For ten years, she kept her past a mystery. At night, when I would ask her to tell me about when she was a little girl, she would make up fantastic tales and tickle me until I giggled myself to sleep.
Rachillon smiles at my reaction, knowing he’s hooked my interest.
“Isabeau’s godkiss allowed her to glamour herself and any objects in her possession. As you can imagine, it was the perfect gift for an actress. She could change her face to match any role. But her talent extended beyond appearance. She was a wonder on stage. Her words, her eyes—she could convey entire worlds in one expression.”
In the softness in his rasping voice, I can almost believe that he loved her.
“I first saw her in a production of The Night Hunt,” he continues. “She was playing Immortal Solene. I courted her for months until she agreed to give up the stage and commit to servicing me. A concubine, yes—I couldn’t marry a commoner. Still, we were together day and night, always as equals. But then—” His throat bobs with a hard swallow. “—she fell pregnant. I was overjoyed. Though we were not married, I wanted nothing more than a child produced by our union. A godkissed seer predicted you would be a female and also godkissed…three days later, Isabeau was gone.”
My limbs are left shaken by this information. All my life, I would have paid a king’s ransom to have known my mother’s history, and now it’s given to me freely .
And yet, greedily, I’m salivating for even more.
“Why?” I press. “If you were so in love, why did she run away?”
Rachillon turns to the fish tank, running his fingers over the surface to trace the fish’s movements. “Isabeau feared the coming war. She could sense its approach, whether in one year or thirty. She wanted to hide you from it.” He tilts his head so I can see his profile glowing in the eel’s shifting light. “I didn’t think you should be hidden. I knew, in my soul, you would be key to the war’s outcome. And so, she fled. She didn’t want you to live the life of a revolutionary. She wanted you to simply be…happy.”
Happy . The word skewers me through the ribs.
It feels like a fairy tale. A fantasy. Maybe if my mother hadn’t died, I would have had a chance for happiness in Bremcote. Learning to sew and dance from her, marrying a boyishly sweet minor lord, having children of my own. But she did die. And everything that happened after?
Not exactly happy .
I take my time soaking in this knowledge, tucking it away deep inside me, locked in a place more treasured than this fae artifact room.
My mother loved me. She wanted to protect me .
After a lifetime of guessing, this information is water to a girl dying of thirst.
Rachillon lets the silence stretch, and for that, I am grateful. If there’s ever a time not to be rushed, it’s now.
Finally, I bring myself to look him in the eyes. “One more question. How did you know exactly where I would be, unguarded in the woods after Lord Berolt’s funeral, for Immortal Iyre to capture me? ”
He laughs to himself, but there is no mirth in it—only sadness. Pity. For me . “I was told the exact time and place.”
“What?” I blurt out. “By whom?”
He turns back to the swimming eels, the light shimmering over features so like my own. “Don’t you know?”
The fae artifact room spins on its axis, and I grip the marble pedestal before I lose my balance.
A wave of nausea rolls up my throat as I close my eyes, praying to every god who has ever walked the earth that it’s not the name I think it is.
Hands trembling, I hear the warning hum of every spider within Drahallen Hall.
“SSSSsssss, tck-tck-tck, sssSsssss, TCK-TCK-tck…”
They sense my pain. They’re trying to ease it. Hoping to soothe the unbearable wail in my soul.
But only one thing will make me feel better about learning the identity of the person who betrayed me to the Volkish enemy.
…their gods-damn death .
Rachillon rasps quietly, “The man who sold you out was Rian Valvere.”