Chapter Twenty-Five #2
The glowing light spins, brightening and fading each wedge of crystal one after the other. No wedge is illuminated for more than a second. Even when I bring us to a complete stop, the compass continues to show no stable direction.
“What’s happening?” I glance behind us nervously. Everything is so quiet, so still. Allor could be half a world away or right behind us. I want to keep going, but doing so without a heading seems almost more terrifying than facing Allor.
“It must be something with the old barriers that surround this place.” He curses under his breath. “Hopefully whatever is trying to throw us off course will be twice as bad for Allor or any of her allies that might be lurking.”
“What do we do, my king?” I ask, looking back. His eyes widen slightly. He realizes before I do what I said. My king, as if I am part of this world. One attack from Allor and my tone has shifted since the morning.
“We keep going straight,” he says after clearing his throat.
I purse my lips. We were utterly turned around in the scuffle.
And even if I somehow guessed north correctly, I know from my father’s sailors that it’s impossible to make any kind of accurate heading without a compass or other bearings.
But I also know, at this point, it would be worse to try and turn around.
Hopefully we’ll get lucky and the lake is just beyond our field of view.
“Eventually we’ll hit the road,” he says reassuringly.
“Or, even better, the lake.” I try to sound optimistic. I’m pretty sure I fail. “Do you think Shaye and Giles are all right?”
“I hope so.” He sighs heavily. “I was afraid of them coming, afraid of something like this happening.”
“You thought we would be attacked?” He could’ve fooled me.
His grip tightens on me for a second. “I knew it was possible.”
“Yet you treated me as if I were crazy when I shared my suspicions of Allor.” My words are a little sharper than I want them to be. I’m sure he can hear what I’m saying beneath them: I told you so.
“Even if I knew it was a possibility, I didn’t see it from her.” He sighs and holds me a little tighter. I can feel his fingertips against my hips, his body as he leans into me. “You were right, and I was wrong. Somehow, a human knew more about my people and my world than I did.”
“I don’t think that’s the case.” I scan the fog, trying to focus on anything but him.
The things this man does to me…the way he makes me feel…
it’s all going to be my undoing. “You trusted the people underneath you to keep you safe—to be suspicious for you. I was naturally hesitant, doubtful, ready to assume that fae were the dangerous creatures from the tales my father told me as a girl.”
He chuckles under his breath. It warms my neck. I pointedly ignore the heat that shoots through me at the feeling of it.
“Doubting everyone is no way to be a leader.” I force myself to continue speaking. “Real leaders have faith in those underneath them.”
“You speak as if you have experience with leadership.”
“When I was younger, my father had many people looking up to him in the trading company. I saw how he managed them. I also knew many of his captains and I could always tell the good captains from the bad ones—I could see if someone had the traits of a good leader or not.” Except for my father.
He was the one person my best judgments failed me on.
The one person I gave the benefit of the doubt to for far too long.
He was never the leader I saw him as. If he were, he would’ve managed our household better.
He would’ve curbed Joyce’s and Helen’s worst tendencies, not allowed them to be as cruel as they were to me.
I always believed he was oblivious, but there was no way he could’ve been that completely ignorant to their ways.
Some of it was willful disbelief. Conscious or not.
“So what do you think about me, then?” His question makes me glance over my shoulder. I scan the fog to see if anyone is coming up behind us, using it as an excuse not to meet his eyes. “Do you think I will be a good leader?”
“I think your kingdom is lucky that you’ve returned to them. Anyone is lucky just to be in your presence.” The words are as surprising to me as they are to him. His gaze softens, posture relaxes.
“That means a lot to me.”
“Even from a human?” I stare forward once more, reminding myself of what I am to him—of everything we can never be.
I can’t love him. Even if I were oblivious to the poison that was love, I couldn’t love him, of all people.
In the next day, the magic will be gone from me, and we will be nothing. He said as much himself.
“How many times must I say it? Especially from a human, so long as that human is you. Katria, I—” A noise from the right startles me. I jerk, nearly fall from the saddle. He holds on to me, keeping me in place. “What is it?”
“Did you hear that?” I whisper.
“Hear what?”
There it is again—the sharp sound of a high note being played on a lone fiddle.
“It sounds…like music.” I continue to stare into the fog where the sound seems to be coming from.
“Music?” Davien hesitates. “Perhaps this is the haunting that everyone speaks of.”
I shift in the saddle and tug on the reins lightly, changing our course to the direction of the music.
“What are you doing?”
“I don’t know,” I confess.
“We should move away from it. We’re not far from the border of mer folk territory. It could be some kind of siren call.”
I don’t think it is, but I don’t know how to explain to him why I think that. As we move through the fog, a lute joins the fiddle. There’s the soft thrumming of hands on drums, and I hear the rattle of tambourines. I’m just about to make out the melody when Davien speaks again.
“Katria—” He places his hands over mine on the reins. “We should head in the opposite direction.”
“No.” I shake my head and glance back at him. “I don’t think we should.”
“This might be some kind of magic to lure those who aren’t heirs of Aviness away from the keep. I don’t hear anything.”
I recognize the song now. It’s one my mother played.
I can almost hear her voice on the edges of my memory, hazy, echoing back to me from a distant time.
A song of safety, a song of home—that was what she had called this melody.
It had no words but she would always hum along as her fingers danced on the lute.
I heard this song recently, didn’t I? When?
I search within myself but find nothing.
“You need to trust me,” I say firmly to Davien. “You didn’t with Allor. Do it now. My gut tells me that this is the right direction.”
He purses his lips. I think he’s going to say no. But then, to my surprise: “All right, but we ride for no more than an hour. If nothing changes by then, I get to decide our new course. And we flee at the first sign of danger.”
“Deal.” I bring the horse’s pace up to a trot. “Thank you for trusting me. I know you had a lot of reasons not to.” I think back to our time together at the manor and that fateful night that set us both on this path.
“You’ve also given me a lot of reasons why I should.” He lightly caresses my hips, fingers trailing down my thighs. I wonder if he realizes he’s doing it. I don’t point it out because, dangerously, I don’t think I want him to stop. “You saved my life back there. You risked yours for mine.”
“I acted without thinking.”
“And your instinct was to save me.”
“We shouldn’t speak. We don’t want to give away our position and I need to listen to the music.”
He sighs softly. He knows I’m cutting him off, that I’m avoiding this conversation. “Very well. We can speak tonight at the keep.”
I hope not. I hope never to speak about what I did. Because if I do, I might be forced to unpack all these complex feelings that I’ve been trying so desperately to ignore. But, even ignoring them, I did risk my life for him.
I push the thoughts from my mind and focus on the music. After a little bit, I begin to hum along. Davien sits a little straighter, body tensing.
“Is that the song you hear?”
“Yes.” Well, in all honesty, what he heard me humming was the harmonies my mother would sing to the melody. Wordless sounds that are more music and emotion than anything coherent.
Davien chuckles and shakes his head in disbelief. “Then, yet again, you were right.”
“What are you talking about?”
“That’s the melody of the Aviness family. It was played at all their coronations. It’s one of the oldest songs of the fae. If you’re hearing it here and now, then the barriers that protect this place must be calling out to the magic in you.”
I can’t fight the swell of pride I feel at being right. “See, it pays to listen to me.” I toss my head back to shoot him a grin. His grip tightens. He pulls me back in the saddle, and my head lands on his shoulder.
“If you smirk at me like that again, I won’t be able to stop myself from kissing that smug expression off your face.” His breath is hot on my neck, the words deep and gravelly. “Consider this your warning.”
He releases me and I straighten in the saddle once more, but there’s nowhere I can go. There’s no escaping him as we ride together. For a while now, we’ve been pressed against each other. I was able to ignore it while I was focusing on the music, but now he’s made that nearly impossible.
Blessedly, he doesn’t distract me further. The music guides us to the road, getting louder as we continue down the cobblestones. Without warning, the fog dissipates. We break through into a golden sunset shining down on a sheltered lake and a long-forgotten castle.