21. Chapter 21
21
Zara
L ike an arrow aimed at the sandy sea floor, I shot straight down. Pain lanced through my spine and my awareness dimmed as a massive headache exploded through my skull.
Dark shapes swarmed around me, but they moved too fast, and the light faded too quickly for me to register what these creatures were.
Then something grabbed me.
My entire body lurched as a force yanked me upward, sucking me from my watery grave. The magic binding my muscles vanished, and my limbs floated outward in the water, as did my dress. My hair billowed around my face, obscuring my view as the darting fish swirled and writhed in the waves around me.
Cold hands grabbed my ankle, then my waist, spinning my body until my face pointed up. My eyes stung too badly to register what was in the water with me, but strong arms wrapped around me as we rose.
A second longer and I would’ve taken water into my lungs. Then cold air washed over my wet body as I was pulled from the waves and toward the clifftop like a bird.
Grasses prickled against my skin as I hit the earth.
My lungs burned as I sucked in air, and my wheezing was accompanied by the groans of my rescuer.
Casimiro stood a few steps away, hands on his knees, heaving air through clenched teeth as black lines pulsed up from his hands toward his elbows. When he spied me watching him, he straightened and slung his hair backward with one hand, tossing a few water droplets into the sunlight.
“I knew you’d try to leave.”
Fists formed and loosened at his sides. His white shirt stuck to his skin, and his chin dripped water like a garden fountain. He lifted his face toward the sky, eyes squeezed shut and mouth open in an uncharacteristic grimace.
“Stars, Valencia, you could have died.”
The words tumbled from his lips as if by accident, and I found that my inability to stand had nothing to do with the pain in my spine. I stared at him, trying to read the sarcasm that was surely buried somewhere, or the venom that would be hidden in his meaning. I found none.
He leveled his dark eyes at me, his cold veneer quickly returning, then glanced down at the black lines spreading up his arm. “Don’t flatter yourself by thinking your life matters to me,” he said. “When someone bound to our court escapes, the magic that ties your blood to the one who made the bargain will bind your body until you are retrieved.”
Finally, I clambered to my feet in my now heavy dress. “Why not let me die then?” I managed to breathe out.
“Because,” he said simply, his tone calm and even once more, “if you die outside of the prescribed trials you’ve agreed to, my father will suffer. The bargain comes with a price for both parties. And while I’m not opposed to my father suffering, I am opposed to him coming home early.”
My brows lifted. Here was a valuable piece of information, almost like he was handing it to me on a platter. But why would he do that? To establish trust? He’d have to do more than drag me from the waters and tell me that he didn’t love his father to make me trust him. The warm sea breeze loosened a halo of tiny hairs from my wet curls and tossed them in my face. Casimiro’s dark hair whipped backward in the wind, revealing his face in the bright sun in a way that made him look almost boyish—certainly not the grim captor who sulked through his own palace halls.
I glanced at his blackening arms, and though he was trying to hide it, whatever was happening to him was causing him pain. The skin around his eyes was tight and his mouth moved less than usual as he spoke. “And you inherited these bargains from your father?”
His jaw twitched before he answered. “My father left me in charge of ensuring he does not suffer.”
“Where is your father?”
Casimiro’s eyes narrowed. “Away.”
“I gathered that. How long will you be in charge ?” I parroted his words with mock deference.
He stormed forward, and I matched his movements, stepping backward, barefoot, over the dry grass. “Stop running, Zara. I’m only trying to take us—”
But I’d already stopped at the sound of my name, and his chest bumped into my shoulder. In Avencia, men did not use women’s first names until they were well acquainted. The only men who’d ever called me Zara were my father and a half-dozen past lovers—or rather, men I’d hoped would be my true love.
But it turned out true love wasn’t something I could craft, uncover, or insert within another person, no matter how much I liked them. Love was supposed to be fierce and forever, a force that nothing in the world could stop. Of all the men who’d claimed to adore me, not one had loved me like that. My true love was still out there, searching, as I was, for the match that would finally make this mad world make sense. I would survive my year of torture and find him—one day.
The heir to the Shadow Court wrapped one cold hand around my upper arm, gently but firmly, and in another blink, a doorway opened up in the very air beside us. Another second and he pulled me through after him.
We stood in a black hallway so dim in comparison to the sunlit clifftop that I felt momentarily blind.
My clothes and hair no longer held a drop of ocean water. Casimiro’s were dry as well. He turned away from me in the dim hall—no, room—and shoved his sleeves back up to his elbows. His arms were streaked black. As my eyes adjusted, I made out rows of shelves dotted with tiny vials and a fur rug beneath a painted wooden desk stacked with books, loose papers, and an ink pot. A few of the vials glowed faintly, creating the only light in the room. Casimiro again grabbed my arm and turned me so that my gaze was averted away from the desk and wall of shelves and toward a wide archway that led into a small anteroom set with two other arches.
“I didn’t bring you to my room so you could stay,” he sneered.
“Your room?” My throat closed up a little in fear. My head whipped around and searched for the doorway we’d come through. There was an etching on the wall, the outline of a door with an eye on it, but it was too dim to make out any other designs. “You have a door to Avencia in your room ?”
He huffed. “It leads wherever I want it to.” He noticed the tensing in my muscles and added, “And it only ever opens for me.”
He marched me through this small room into a space even darker, with no glowing vials to cast any light. He seemed perfectly capable of seeing in the darkness, and he directed me to another door marked with a small moon-shaped window. Through the tiny window, a thousand stars shone.
Casimiro ripped open the door and starlight revealed the black lines still snaking up his arm. They’d diminished somewhat, now only discoloring his hands and wrists.
“Will that go away?” I asked, staring at his bulging veins. The binding sensation had broken as soon as he’d snatched me from the water, before we’d even returned to these halls. I shivered at the thought that being in his arms counted as being retrieved by the shadows .
His eyes held a faint blue glow as he fisted his hands at his sides. “Come. I didn’t rescue you just to make you swoon.”
He didn’t see my shocked grimace as he stormed toward a thin set of steps carved into the mountainside.
“I will never swoon for you,” I spat as I followed him out into the icy night. As soon as the cold air bit at my skin, I longed for the ocean breeze and warm sunlight of my world.
“Good, it’ll make this easier.”
I wrapped my arms around myself and hurried after the heir as he jogged down the stairs.
A veil of ice rested on the banister, so I held my skirts instead. “Make what easier?” The moonless night meant he was at his peak power, and I wanted to get away from him as quickly as possible.
But at the bottom of the stairs, Casimiro turned, trapping me on the narrow stone steps as he braced one arm on the frozen banister. “Your escape tonight was staged. I must say, you played your part seamlessly.” He ignored my guffaw and pressed on. “I knew you would try to escape, and everyone here knew I would have to retrieve you or let my father suffer. If I didn’t retrieve you, my father would know I was responsible, and—well, let’s just say you don’t want him returning early any more than I do.” He flexed his hand at his side. “But now I need your help.”
I blinked at him rapidly. “You need my help?”
His jaw tensed, but he showed no other signs of being offended by asking me , a mortal, for help. “Unfortunately, yes.”
The information washed over me like a bucket of cold water, and for several seconds I was speechless. “I don’t want to help you,” I finally admitted, crossing my arms, mostly to barricade myself from the bitter wind.
“I didn’t imagine that you did. But I design your trials, so it behooves you to do what I say.”
“Blackmail. An excellent choice. It befits your station.”
He sniffed. “I don’t need your approval or your admiration. I merely need your compliance.”
“What if I refuse?”
His gaze sharpened. “I will ensure that you never find out about your friend.”
My stomach dropped. “You know about Talia?”
He nodded.
“And you won’t tell me about her unless I help you?”
Another nod.
“You really are foul, you know that?”
Casimiro sighed. “This will only work if you choose to do it on your own. Any magic I place on you to force your hand would be traceable. This must happen without anyone discovering your true role.”
“My true role,” I repeated, brows lifting. “If I agree to this, am I your accomplice? Does that mean we’re partners , Casimiro?”
I threw his given name at him like he’d done to me, and it filled me with a sense of power that shot like lightning through my veins.
His brow quirked at my use of his name. “Think what you like, but I haven’t explained yet how this will work.” He paused, and the longer the silence stretched on, the more threatened I felt.
“Okay, fine. How will it work?” I needed to get back inside. My muscles were starting to shake.
He smiled, but the expression didn’t reach his eyes. “I need you to befriend the servants and find out who is poisoning them.”
“Poisoning them?” I barked, my chest rocking forward, putting me dangerously off balance on the icy steps.
Casimiro’s arm lifted from the banister as if to steady me, but when I straightened, his hand, now no longer streaked with black, quickly settled again on the icy stone. My eyes stared at his hand a moment too long, and when my attention shifted back to his face, I couldn’t reconcile his desire to kill me with his desire to keep me from falling.
“That’s what I said,” he drawled. “Most of the mortals here have been offered some sort of deal to not speak to any fae of the poisonings by whoever is behind it. But your only hope for finding out about Talia is to do as I say. With a word, I can place a spell on the name of your friend that will silence anyone who wishes to speak of her to you.”
“You are despicable, you know that?” It hit me that he would try to kill me again in a few hours.
“People are suffering, and you say I am despicable for wanting it to stop?”
My brows pinched. “What about the trial? Am I supposed to find out all this and report back to you before the trial starts?”
Cold wind tossed his hair across his forehead as he continued. “That would be ideal, yes, but—”
“I see,” I said, cutting him off. “You need my help, but you’re still going to try to kill me in the morning?” My arms flew out at my sides. “You really should work on your bargaining techniques.”
“—but,” he repeated between clenched teeth, “since I know you likely won’t have time tonight, I will have to make sure you survive the trial tomorrow morning.”
My lips parted as breath rushed from my lungs, swirling in the air around the heir’s face.
He was going to save my life to get this information.
Before words could form on my tongue, my head began to shake in disbelief. “I don’t like this. I don’t want to be in your debt.”
He rolled his eyes. “You won’t be. Not after you bring me the information I desire. The mortals who have been poisoned do not know who is behind the attacks. But someone does, and you must find out who.”
My head was still shaking, processing. “Why do you care about the mortals? You like to watch us die.”
“I don’t have to explain myself to you.”
“Do you want my help or not?” I shot back.
With a long exhale, he stepped off the bottom stair and took a few steps away before speaking to me over his shoulder. “Whoever is poisoning the mortals is merely using them to test me. My court is well aware of the antidotes and potions I keep, so each poison they concoct is another attempt to see if I have a remedy. They’re hoping to find one I do not have a cure for, a poison they can use on—on their target.”
“On you,” I muttered.
Casimiro did not respond but his silence was answer enough. Someone in this court of nightmares wanted to kill the heir. The information shouldn’t have been shocking, considering the deplorable nature of these creatures, but it shook me nonetheless to know that this immortal was facing his own deadly trial.
“You want me to help you survive? Don’t you think you should have considered that before you tried to kill me?”
He cleared his throat. “I want you to uncover the traitor in my halls. I will not die by his hand.”
“Or hers.”
He shot me a quizzical look.
“Could be a woman, you know. Especially with as charming as you are.”
I glanced up at the stars, unsure how the heavens or whoever lived in them had concocted such a convoluted mess to toss me in. “I don’t understand. You said they’re poisoning the humans to find out what you don’t have a cure for. How does that tell them—”
“Because I heal them.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
As if moving closer would help me hear him better, I stepped down to the path, blinking rapidly as I tried to assimilate what he’d just said.
“I heal the mortals when they’re poisoned,” he said plainly.
For several heartbeats, I forgot how cold it was out here. Heat flared in my chest as I stared at Casimiro, his hair and his loose shirt rippling in the harsh wind in a terribly distracting way.
Finally, I found my words. “How can you heal some of us and kill others?”
His hand slid across the back of his neck as he rolled his chin upward. “Do not worry yourself with the ways of the Shadow Court. Find out who is behind the poisoning, and I will tell you what you wish to know about your friend. But ask anyone else of your friend, and my magic will bind their words.”
My chin inadvertently turned aside, as if I’d been slapped. “You really are a monster.”
But the words felt less true now that I knew he was healing mortals. He could simply let them die and, in so doing, keep his antidotes a secret, but he didn’t. He chose to save their lives at the risk of his own, and it bothered me to my core. He was a murderer. A wicked man. And yet he showed mercy.
To some.
Not all.
“But after I help you, you’ll watch me die as easily as you’ll watch me live.” A small scoff escaped my lips.
He clapped his hand so hard on the ice-slick rock wall beside me that I yelped in surprise. “You mistake the reason I am watching you, Valencia.” His breaths came fast and hot now, swirling in the cold night air.
For several seconds, I stared at him, unable to respond. My brow worked, trying to make sense of his confession. He did want me to die. Didn’t he?
“Only so you can use me as a pawn,” I finally managed.
He seemed relieved at my words, as his shoulders sank and his breaths slowed. “Here. Take this.” He grabbed my hand and slapped something small and pointed into it. “Keep this in your pocket tomorrow during the trial and you’ll survive. I’ll find you when it’s over. We’ve spent enough time out here.”
Casimiro turned, and in an instant, his frame shook as his shadow departed from him, flying off into the starlit night. His body kept walking, vanishing quickly around a corner on the narrow trail cut into the side of the mountain.
I stood there in stunned silence, holding a small ruby in my palm and the memory of his arms around me, pulling me from the water.