Chapter 24
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I lay in darkness, on hardpack ground. My shoulder throbbed. So did my head. But what captured my attention was the voice above me—high, sparrowlike, impossibly ancient.
“Well,” the voice said. “This is unexpected.”
I opened my eyes. Darkness pressed in, thick with the scent of earth. Something heavy lay across me, but it shifted away a moment later, lifting the weight from my chest.
“She can’t see in darkness,” came Dorian’s voice nearby.
“No?” the sparrow-woman said. “You’d think humans would have figured out some solution by now.” Shuffling footsteps moved away from me, soft against the dirt.
“Are you all right?” Dorian asked. His hand came to rest gently on my uninjured shoulder.
“I’m alive.”
Then, all at once, light bloomed—a crystal hovered in the air between us, glowing with soft white radiance. The light caught on a gnarled hand curled around its stem, and above it hovered a face.
She looked exactly as she sounded: ancient. Her lips had folded inward with age, and her eyes were pale and pupilless—blank orbs like polished bone.
And yet, she was looking at me. I could feel it like a weight behind my sternum.
As my vision cleared, the twisted boughs of a hovel took shape around her.
The walls and roof were woven from thorns and leaves, arching some eight feet overhead.
I lay on packed dirt surrounded by the makings of a home: a crooked table, a pair of chairs, and unfamiliar objects I couldn’t name.
Beyond the old woman, the passage stretched deeper into darkness, the crystal’s glow too faint to reach.
The woman stood before us like a shade. Her garment wasn’t fabric but a shifting patchwork of the maze itself—woven from bark-slick vines, brittle petals, and faded moss.
Time had curled the edges and dulled the colors, staining it in streaks of green and ochre.
It hung unevenly from her thin frame, the hem trailing like roots, the sleeves loose and ragged to the elbow.
In the crystal’s dim glow the damp foliage clung in places, and where it thinned her skin showed through like a ghost half-formed from rot and bloom.
I pushed myself upright. Dorian helped steady me.
“What is this place?” I asked.
“Why, don’t you know?” the old woman said, amused. “You invited yourself in.”
“A hollow?”
“It’s been called many names,” she said. “But I call it home.”
Dorian stepped in front of me. “Where are you hurt?”
“My right shoulder,” I said. “And my head.”
“She landed hard,” the old woman said, drifting closer. Something metal flashed briefly in her hand, and I tensed. “You sure you want him as your guest?” she asked.
Dorian must have seen it, too. “We claim asylum,” he said. “One night of asylum, by the Hollowbound Rite.”
“Oh-ho-ho.” Her voice lilted, amused. “But I didn’t hear you say the word to enter. Only her.” Her white brows lifted, expectant.
“Name the rite,” Dorian whispered, quick and low. “Before you say anything else.”
“I claim asylum,” I said. “For him and for me. By the Hollowbound Rite.”
The metal vanished from her hand. She straightened. “Very well. You are granted one night of rest in my home.”
Dorian let out a breath, his shoulders lowering. I didn’t fully understand what had just transpired, but I felt the tension in the room break.
“I am Thalassa,” the woman said. “And what might I call you?”
“Dorian Crowmere.”
“Eurydice.”
“Eurydice what?”
“Waters.”
“Curious.” Her voice lilted again. “And where do you come from, Eurydice Waters?”
“The Kingdom of Storms.”
The crystal bobbed in the air as Thalassa spun away with surprising swiftness. She placed it into a sconce, shadows leaping across the wall. “The Kingdom of Storms! How wonderful. I’ve heard it’s a wretched place.”
“You’ve heard of it?” I asked.
“Of course.” She began moving around a darkened corner, pottering among objects I could barely see.
Only then did I realize we were standing in what must be her kitchen.
It was so rustic and buried in shadow it barely resembled a room—just the curved edge of a basin and the glint of wood worn smooth by time.
I heard liquid pouring into wooden cups.
“It’s the foremost bastion of humanity.”
I straightened, and my shoulder gave a fresh throb. Hearing my home discussed was like having a rod thrust down my spine.
“How did you make it this far into the maze, anyway?” Thalassa turned back to us with two cups in hand. “Past the thornstalkers, I mean. And the heat, the cold, the bloody doldrums.” Her footsteps shuffled closer, and she extended the cups, one to each of us.
Dorian murmured, “Droen.”
I accepted the other cup with both hands. Warmth seeped through the wood, and the scent rose up earthy and floral like the purple blossoms in the Sylvanwild citadel.
“It’s what you humans call tea,” she said, maybe winking—I couldn’t be sure in the dim light. “Is that it? Tea?”
I watched her. “Yes.”
A pleased, gravelly noise emanated from her throat and she turned to Dorian. Her expression shifted. She prodded him with a finger. “You’re bleeding. I smell thornstalker.”
I’d just taken my first sip. Bitter, acrid. Even so, I didn’t nearly spit the drink out until I heard those words. “What?”
The shadows obscured everything. Dorian’s cloak was still drawn close, and where it wasn’t, his dark leathers covered him. Except now I caught it. The faint metallic tang.
“Where?” I said.
He didn’t look at me. “I’ll be fine.”
Thalassa chuckled, already shuffling back toward the kitchen. “Fine? He drips on my floor and says it’s fine.”
“Drips?” I set the cup in the dirt and turned toward him. I felt Isa’s intensity in me. “Show me where you’re bleeding.”
“I’ll be fine.” But I heard it in his voice now—something slurred, soft-edged. Not just pain. Something more.
“What are those creatures?” I asked Thalassa. “The one he fought.”
“Thornstalkers,” she said. “Bigger than you. Claws like scythes. Sharper than hedge thorns. What they can’t rip, they bite. Nasty poison.”
Poison. Of course whatever lived in this place would have poison.
“What does the poison do?” I asked, not looking away from Dorian.
“Pain,” Thalassa said, still pottering in her dark kitchen. Now I heard the scrape of plates. “Then necrosis. Then death.”
She said it so simply, I thought I’d misheard. “You said death?”
“Aye. The poison’s strong enough that even a young, strapping fae like that won’t last twelve hours without the antidote.”
My head swam. “The antidote—what is it?”
“Ground-up braethorn leaves. And before you ask”—she grabbed a long spoon and prodded at a large bowl—“I already put it in his tea.”
“That’s why it tasted like shit,” Dorian muttered, his voice looser now, the edges softened.
Thalassa gave a dry laugh. “You’ll live, fae. As long as you drink every drop—and stanch that wound.”
I shifted closer to him. “Drink.”
He didn’t move.
So I said it again, lower this time. Steady. In Isa’s unignorable voice. “Drink.”
With a grunt, he raised the cup and drank it dry, avoiding my eyes the whole time. When he set the cup down on the dirt, he muttered, “Tethryn.”
From the kitchen, Thalassa let out that pleased sound, halfway between a growl and a purr. “I haven’t heard that word in four hundred years. Nobody’s ever solved the riddle to stay the night. And a human, no less.” She prodded harder at whatever steamed in the bowl. “Most unexpected.”
I reached over his arm to the clasp at his throat. He flinched when I touched him, eyes flaring in the dim light—but he didn’t stop me when I began to undo it.
I slid the cloak off his shoulders. The wound was unmistakable. The cloak was slashed in five clean lines, and through the tears in his leather jerkin, I saw his skin—raw, bloodied, striped with long diagonal gashes from his right shoulder to his left side.
“Fuck,” I said.
Dorian gave a low, pained laugh. “Not what you want to hear when a woman takes your clothes off.”
“Or maybe it is,” Thalassa said with a titter.
“First aid,” I said, remembering our brief training in wound care. It all felt so faraway and hazy now. “Do you have anything to treat him?”
She turned and waved behind me, vaguely annoyed. “That way. Cot and whatnot. I’m making food for two, by the way—he won’t want to eat.”
I set my hand on Dorian’s arm. “Come on. Up. That’s it.” With a low growl, he rose—but stayed bent. The low-growing hedge overhead wouldn’t allow him to stand fully. “This way.”
I guided him in the direction Thalassa had indicated, deeper into the darkness of her hollow. As we moved, another white-blond crystal flared to life, revealing more than I expected—two additional rooms, one with a low bramble cot draped in a blanket of moss and scree.
I led him to the bed and helped him sit. When he swayed, I grabbed his shoulder. Holding him up felt like trying to brace a horse. “I need to stop your bleeding.”
He nodded—whether in agreement or delirium, I couldn’t tell.
I turned to take in the room. The branches here had grown thick and twisting. Some had been repurposed into shelves, bottles tucked among them like Esterday treats for children.
“Gauze,” I called, loud enough for Thalassa to hear.
“Gau-ze?” she echoed, already shuffling closer. “You’ll need moss and antiseptic to treat that.” She studied her wall of bramble-embedded bottles—where had she procured glass?—then plucked out one and pressed two items into my hands.
One was a soft moss. The other, a small bottle of cloudy liquid.
“Coagulating,” she said with a nod. “Keep them. Might need them once you’re out there.” Then she turned and shuffled away.
She had just given these to me to keep? And what the hell did coagulating mean?
I came behind Dorian and knelt. I set the moss and bottle on the edge of the bed.
“I’ll need to cut your jerkin to get to the wound.” My shoulder flared as I reached back and drew out my knife. I flicked it open. “Hold still.”
“She solves fae riddles and now she heals,” Dorian muttered without moving his jaw. As I slid the blade into the torn leather, he grunted. “What else does she do?”
“I’m terrible at riddles,” I said, cutting as gently as I could. Every time I neared one of the slashes across his back, he flinched. “But I wasn’t half bad at battlefield triage. At least in training.”
“Training?”
“Every guard learns how to treat a wound.”
“But had you ever seen a battlefield?”
I paused. “Not until the night you attacked us.” My fingers tightened around the knife. Stitch him, Eury. Don’t stab him. “The nurse who’d been treating me was crushed by a piece of wall bigger than my house.”
Dorian winced again as I resumed cutting. I wondered if that was because of what I’d said or the pain. “Treating you?”
“My nose was broken.”
He turned his head slightly, eyes catching mine. “I remember that. Why?”
He had noticed that my nose was broken?
I focused on the jerkin, slitting another seam. I thought about staying quiet. But then I said, “I couldn’t whistle.”
I peeled away the last of the leather. The wound was worse than I’d feared—deep gashes, deep enough that muscle gleamed through. Blood welled sluggish but steady. He would need stitching.
“Whistling,” Dorian said, almost to himself. “What fucking difference does that make?”
A breath of laughter escaped me—wry, dry. As if that made what came next any easier. “None. None at all.”
A beat passed.
“How bad is it?” he asked.
“Not so bad.”
“You’re a shit liar.”
I exhaled through my nose. “You’ll need stitches.”
“Learned that in training too, did you?”
“Nothing goes together like battlefields and stitches.”
He gave a soft laugh despite himself—then groaned, and his wounds began to seep faster.
“Don’t do that again.” I lifted the moss and uncorked the bottle. One sniff told me it was antiseptic. I pressed the liquid into the fabric. “This will take time.”
“It’s coagulating,” he rasped.
“The antiseptic?”
He didn’t answer. I took that as permission.
I dabbed the corner of one gash, and Dorian let out a deep groan. But as soon as the liquid touched the wound, the bleeding stopped.
“Coagulating,” I echoed, half in wonder.
By the time I’d cleaned all the cuts, he was soaked in sweat and drifting—barely conscious, lost to the pain. I would have let him sleep, but the wounds needed to be closed first.
I rose and crossed into the main room of Thalassa’s hollow. The scent of something yeasty wafted from her kitchen—a strange counterpoint to the suffering behind me.
“Thread and a needle?” I asked.
She turned at once, almost cheerfully, and shuffled over.
“Yes, yes.” From the branches of her medicine wall, she pulled out a long, stringy batch of fibers.
Not moss; finer, the same color as her white hair.
She pressed it into my hand. It was her hair.
Into my other hand she set a long, slender claw, bone-white and even sharper than the hedge leaves.
This had once belonged to some kind of creature. Thornstalker?
“Not to worry.” She patted my wrists. “The hedge grows so thick, screams can’t penetrate.”
I gave her a wan smile and a nod.
“You’ll need to press hard. Fae skin is tougher than what you’re used to.” She tottered back to her pots, humming to herself as though this were all quite ordinary.
Wonderful.
When I returned, Dorian’s face was half in shadow—but his eyes found mine, practically glowing in the semidarkness. “Yes, I overheard.” His voice sounded drunk.
“I was hoping you were too delirious.”
From the kitchen, Thalassa let out a high, delighted chortle. “He will be,” she called. “He will be.”