44. Chapter 44
Chapter 44
I woke in the morning on his bed, alone. I waited for a few hours until Silver came to collect me, but The Raven never returned. He was quiet beside me, watching me through sideways glances cast as we meandered through the palace. I didn’t like the fact he did not banter with me, as was his nature. It had me on edge.
When another soldier appeared and pressed a sheaf of paper into Silver’s hand, I nearly jumped out of my skin. The two spoke in whispered tones, watching me the entire time. Silver finally nodded and dismissed the other soldier as he flipped open the simple letter. His storm-grey eyes traced over the contents and then turned to me.
“The Banfhlaith Oaken Rose sends you a message. She says to meet her tomorrow at sundown in the gardens.” Silver watched me as I struggled to keep the elation from curling up at the edges of my face. “The Captain has read this missive and instructs that you will meet him in the Ard Rí’s chambers to be prepared for this meeting, and he will accompany you to the gardens, as I will be otherwise engaged. Is this clear, daoire?”
“Excuse me?”
“Do I need to repeat the message or the instructions from the Captain?”
“You could start by telling me what the fuck has your dick twisted in a knot.”
“I assure you, you need not be concerned with my dick, twisted or not.”
I scowled at him.
Something was up, and I didn’t like that I didn’t know what secrets were being passed all around me and how they would impact the plans I had. It would be very hard to escape with The Raven there. Even harder when suspicion was building around me, and I had no idea how to slither free of its grip. Moving in secret and shadow was hard when someone insisted on shining a lantern on you the entire time.
We continued to wander, no specific destination in mind. When I asked him if we would be going to the salons or to the throne room, he merely grunted and did not answer further. We turned down a corridor that I knew would lead us to the Dúluachair wing and watched as Silver seemed to relax a bit as he entered his court’s home turf.
I was watching him carefully as we wound through the corridors and missed running into The Raven by a single step.
“Silvertree,” he said in a stern voice before turning his attention to me. “Cricket.”
“Asshole. Funny seeing you here.”
Pain bloomed across my cheek as Silvertree backhanded me with the metal plates of his armored gloves. I spun at the waist from the force, my hand coming up to meet the ache in my cheek. Fury burned within me as I rose and stared Silver right in the eyes. “What—and I can’t stress this enough—the actual fuck , Silver!”
“You will address the Captain with proper deference, daoire.”
My eyes flew between The Raven and Silver. The Raven stood with his hands clasped behind him, his feet shoulder-width apart, his hard evergreen eyes fixed on me with no emotion.
“Cricket.” The Raven pushed open the door to the room at his left and indicated I should enter it with an open palm.
Anger coursed through me, and I glared at Silver as I moved into the room. I felt something icy cold wash over me as I stepped over the threshold and turned as The Raven entered behind me, closing the door on us and shutting Silver out into the hallway .
“What did I promise you in the infirmary?”
“What?”
Ice gathered in his tone as he stalked me. “What did I promise you in the infirmary?”
I let him stalk me until my calves hit the baseboards of a large bed. “You didn’t promise me anything in the infirmary. I was never in the infirmary. I don’t even know where that is.”
“Good,” he barked, taking a candle holder from the side of the bed and pressing it into my palm. I let my fingers close in around it, confused. “I mentioned a promise to you last night. What was it?”
“In the storage room, when you were helping me walk around, you swore on your god that you would never lie to me.”
“Which god was it?”
“Feid—Feid something!” I screeched as he pushed me back on the bed, caging me in with the weight of his body.
“Say his name.”
“Feidlimid, I think?”
“What is your name?”
“What? What the fuck is going on?”
He sat back, his ass and weight pressing me into the bed until I could no longer move. “The question I asked is a simple one. What is your name?”
“Sóna Mac Raith.”
My heart was pounding in my throat, fear lacing around it like barbed wire. The ice around The Raven was scaring me.
“When did we first meet?”
“What the fuck is going on?” I hit him as hard as I could with the candle holder, and he reared back, hissing. Where the metal bit into his shoulder, the flesh sizzled and began to rot black under the hole in his tunic. “Iron? You made me hold iron?”
I threw the candleholder across the room, and he slammed his hand into my shoulder, the leather sliding to wrap around my pulse and hold me firm as he gritted his teeth through the pain of the iron bite. “When did we first meet? ”
I slapped at him, and he snatched my wrist with his other hand, shoving it under the point of his knee cap. He switched hands smoothly and, with a speed I had not seen from him before, snatched the other wrist and shoved it also under his other knee, effectively disarming me all while he held firm on my neck.
“I will ask one more time, and if you do not answer, your date with the Maw will not be as sweet as the last.” He leaned over me, the points of his knees digging into my wrists. “When did we first meet?”
“At the Night Market! I was trying to get away from Rictus, and you tackled me like the asshole you are!” I spit up at him.
“Good. And how was Sóna Mac Raith collected?”
“I don’t even know what that means!”
His hand squeezed tight, and he leaned forward to whisper in my ear. “How was she tricked into coming to Magh Meall?”
“I answered a stupid fucking job ad. Should have known it was bogus, but I had just lost my job again.”
His grip lessened, and blood rushed to my head, hot and wild, making me dizzy. “What are you to me?”
I wanted to say I didn’t know. I opened my mouth to spit those words back at him, and my tongue burned like I was licking lollipops made of razors. Pain welled up all along my mouth and bit down my throat as blood began to pool at the ridge of my tonsils.
He grinned maniacally, reminding me of a hyena. “Welcome to the chambers of Senán. God of suffering, mourning, hidden things, grief, and most importantly, deception. Try all you wish to lie to me here. Every time you do, the curse upon this room will slice at your tongue.”
His gloved free hand pushed a stray hair from my face and caressed the heated mark on my cheek as I swallowed the blood. “I paid a king’s horde of stable magic to have access to this room and have no questions asked of me, little bug.”
“Why bother? You could have just fucking asked me.”
“You have lied so many sweet little whispers to me since you came here. They’ve all woven such a pretty little tapestry and kept me warm in the nights. Haven’t you? ”
I glared at him. I didn’t bother to deny it. I’d told half-truths and avoided so many of his questions.
“What was it? Rule number five?” His thumb pressed into the tender flesh of my brutalized cheek.
“Fuck! Yes. Five. Lying is only bad if the person you’re lying to is a good person.”
“And I am not a good person, am I, little bug?”
“Stop calling me that,” I hissed, struggling under his weight to try and get free. “No, you’re not.”
He squeezed, darkness encroaching on the edges of my vision as he leaned forward on his hand, his significant weight pressing my head and neck into the bed. “I am the worst of us all, little bug. I have told you this over and over. I have warned you repeatedly that I am not a sweet man. Not like Silvertree. Not in the least bit. And yet you keep flying closer and closer to me. Why?”
His hand released, air and blood rushing into the void. My head spun like a top, and I couldn’t see straight. Everything in me wanted to fight him, to fight the magic of this room, but that warm pit within me squirmed up and wriggled into my tongue.
“You know why.”
Okay, tongue. Sure, care to share with the fucking class because I don’t know why!
He tilted his head, his eyes narrowing on me as he watched me like the little bug I was, pinned under him.
In the absence of his next question, I pushed him back. “Why can’t you leave me alone?”
The dark-green grove of his eyes sparkled with mania in the pale light that filled the room, and he leaned forward again, this time not pressing in on his gloved hand.
His lips were dangerously close to mine. I could feel his breath teasing at the seam of my lips, and when he spoke, the thunder of his voice vibrated them with a dangerous promise. “Because I can’t get you off my mind. Every day, all day, all I think about is you. All I want is you. I feel your absence like a blade in my stomach. I feel your heart like it were my own beating in my chest. ”
“That sounds like a problem,” I whispered back to him as my heart began slamming in my chest.
Our eyes connected, and he held me in his sway. I fell into the depths and found myself swimming in the sea of green moss, naked and bathing in the light of his warm dawn.
“It’s only a problem because I didn’t account for it.” He shifted, freeing one of my hands as his knee moved over my thigh and pushed it wide to account for his hips “It’s only a problem because you make it so fucking hard to think when you’re not next to me.”
“You should think less.”
I didn’t think, didn’t consider that, the last time I touched him, he had pulled away. I was lost in the swaying of an old growth forest, leaning up to capture his lips with my own.
Fireworks lit and sizzled where our flesh connected. Our breaths tangled together, and his mouth opened, mine following his lead as he deepened the kiss. Our tongues danced together in perfect harmony as the sun of a new dawn crested over a sea of thousands of stars glittering in its golden rays.
He broke the kiss, leaving both of us panting, gasping for the breath the other stole from us. My arms snaked around his wide shoulders and rested against the back of his neck as I watched him war with something behind shuttered eyes.
“Sóna . . .”
“If you say I can’t, I’m going to ask you why. And I will push and push and push until the magic of this room turns against you and makes you tell me why.”
It wasn’t a bluff, but I dared him to try it and call it anyway. I needed to know why he wouldn’t touch me, why every time we got close, he pulled away. The question burned in my very bones.
He smiled a painful smile that curled at the edges of his mouth. “You pay attention.”
I wrapped my free leg around his hips and turned us over. He let me. With his bulk, he could have easily resisted, but he didn’t. I took advantage, quickly moving the volume of my skirts so that all that lay between him and I was the excuses and his breeches. His hands found their familiar place on my hips as he watched me. The suspicion I had seen last night was a mere ghost flitting through the dark-green treetops of his gaze.
“You look good up there,” he murmured as I swayed my hips on him, grinding against the firm length of his cock that burned beneath my soaked core.
“I’d look better naked and riding your cock.”
I threw caution to the wind. Let the excuse in the morning be this wretched room. Let it be that I could not lie. Let it be anything other than the fact that I wanted this and the summons from Oaken Rose meant that my time with him was growing to a close. Let it be that simple and pure before it turned bitter and hate-filled.
His fingers dug into my hips as he both guided and encouraged the slow sensual slide of me against him, his teeth ravaging his bottom lip as we both enjoyed the simple pleasures of the boundaries we had erected around us.
There was no need for words, no call for our usual back-and-forth. Something had shifted in him, and I knew what had shifted in me. I was saying goodbye in the best way I knew how. Letting him enjoy me and me enjoy him as pleasure built and swelled within me. It was nothing compared next to the pleasure of his kiss. It wasn’t the all-consuming heated fever that built when his skin touched mine, and there were truly no barriers between us, but it was enough. It was enough for me to enjoy this bittersweet moment that he didn’t know would be anything more than the thing that we both enjoyed.
His fingers captured mine, lacing together like they had been meant to curl around each other from the very moment that they had been carved of flesh and bone. It drew me back from the swirl of my own mind, looking down to connect with his gaze.
“Tell me to touch you, Sóna. Tell me to kiss you. Tell me to make love to you,” he whispered his silent plea.
I bent forward, my hips never ceasing their slow teasing ride against his imprisoned cock. My lips hovered over his, and the memory that this was a problem of his own making came flooding back to me. “Free me, and I will. ”
I pushed back up and then off the bed. I needed to hold on to that tiny shard of bitterness, that tiny little glass that cut my hands every time I held onto it because I could feel my heart falling out of my chest and into his hands when he looked at me like that. When he looked at me like I mattered beyond a simple little fuck. I could imagine myself curled up next to him, not caring that he had murdered everything that I held dear before I could even hold it. I could imagine myself slick with passion and sweat as he came to my bed after attending to his wife, just pleased to be held by him.
I deserved to be loved. I deserved to be held. I deserved all of that, but most importantly, I deserved to be the first choice and not a consolation prize. Even if I was a daoire.
He let me go. I would have never made it to the door and yanked it open had he not let me.
“I don’t own you,” I heard him whisper as I barged out into the hallway to a bewildered-looking Silver.
Rage best served by the beast in the bed behind me pulled my fist back as I cracked Silvertree square in the nose.
“As for you, you hit me again, and I don’t care if you’re the Ard Rí himself, I will gut you and feed your entrails to the birds. Am I fucking clear?”
He stumbled back holding a hand up to stop the rush of the other guards. Silver cast his gaze between me and The Raven behind me. I could tell by the direction of his eyes that The Raven hadn’t moved from the bed. I snapped my fingers in front of him. “Eyes on me, big boy. He’s dick drunk, and I’m the bigger threat.”
Silver snapped his attention back to me, his hand holding what I hoped was an agonized mangled mess and nodded curtly before making a sweeping gesture that asked me to lead the way. When his hand came away, I was disappointed to see only a red mark where my fist had collided with his face.
I silently took up the path out of the Dúluachair wing. I didn’t need Silver to guide me. I could see the path as clear as if there were neon signs announcing the exit. He was trailing behind me a silent shadow as I moved through the wing like fire was licking at my heels .
Anger and agony danced in hypnotizing circles within me as I walked away from The Raven. My heart clenched and hardened in my chest, the ice of the Winter Court curling around it.
We walked in silence for a long time before Silver finally broke it. “I’m sorry.”
I paused in my storming of the halls, the open courtyard we had come to echoing my sentiment with its emptiness. “What.”
Silver twisted his gloves on his fingers. “I said I’m sorry. The Captain said you were an imposter. I . . . I was so angry that someone had taken you, or that someone had fooled me into thinking they were you that I let that anger cloud my judgment.”
I threw my hands up in exasperation. “Is that what that was all about? He thinks I’m a doppelg?nger or something?”
“Don’t know what a doppelg?nger is, Miss Cricket, but, yes. The Captain came down to the barracks last night on a rampage. He wouldn’t say at first what happened. Just took the whiskey from us and sat brooding in the corner. Any time any of us got near him, he’d punch us. When the boys all went to sleep, he confided in me that he thought someone was impersonating you. I asked him why, and he wouldn’t tell me. He said that he had his reasons.” Silver shrugged. “I haven’t seen him like that since after the war. He asked me if the Righ-cuicidh of Dúluachair would give up his quarters for a fee. Senán blessed that room himself long before this place was much more than a holiday home for the courts to gather. Every metal surface in there is iron or cursed to uncover deception.”
“You hit me.”
I didn’t much care about why The Raven was determined to uncover some secret or find out why he thought I was an imposter. All I cared about was in my grasp, and all I had to do was wait and bide my time. Silver would be an issue if I didn’t handle him carefully.
Pink bloomed in his cheeks. “And I’d do it again if someone took your place, miss. I’d beat them within an inch of their lives.”
“What does it matter if someone takes my place, Silver? I’m just a daoire.”
He snorted, and it developed into a derisive laugh. “You don’t know what happens when someone takes your face, do you?”
I tilted my head. I wasn’t familiar with it, having only met the one skin changer, Brittle Spear. “No.”
His gaze flew down the intersections and tangles of hallways that surrounded us as if he was about to impart some heinous knowledge that was beyond forbidden. “It’s not like what happened to you and the other humans, Cricket. To take someone’s face is to take their entire essence. Sure, they can’t mimic memories or knowledge if they just craft an illusion, but to fully crawl into someone else’s skin you have to kill the original person. So, if someone had taken your place, that would mean they had murdered you in cold blood.”
Ice ran through my veins as I thought back to the young face that Brittle Spear had found me with in the throne room and the implications of the Bandrui’s twin.
“What about if they are using magic to appear as someone else?”
Had I fucked a dead man’s mien? Had I cum all over the cock of a man Brittle Spear had murdered to fuck me?
He shook his head. “No, illusion magic is something else entirely. Only the most skilled of the Abhartach can do that, and there’s always a tell. Sometimes hard to find it, but there’s always a tell. If the Captain had thought someone was using illusion magic to appear as you, it would have been a simple thing to break the illusion. For him to ask for the Righ-cuicidh’s chambers that meant he thought someone had taken you fully.”
I nodded and began moving through the hallway, leaving the courtyard behind. Silver kept up, not commenting on the fact that I knew where I was going. “I forgive you, Silver. I meant what I said, though. If you ever hit me again, I’ll tear you apart.”
“I don’t doubt that you will, Cricket.” I cast my glance sidelong at him. “You’re different from the other humans. I don’t know how or why, but you are. Not even the old ones are like you. There’s . . . I don’t know. There’s something about you that makes you . . . almost Fae.”
Oh, sweet Silver, if you only knew. I was different because, unlike the other humans, I wasn’t human at all. I was Fae. A Fae raised by humans and born on the back of the heinous war that the man I could not stop thinking about perpetrated. I wished I could tell Silver all of this. I wished I could tell anyone all of this.
I felt alone and sequestered by the secrets I had to keep from everyone around me. Not even my rules were comfort in a time when everything around me and about me was dangerous to one person or another that I wanted so badly in my life.
Silver led me back to the warrens and left me be, alone in the dark tunnels of the human quarters as I stewed.
Violet, Green Man, and Emerald found me there hours later, sitting on my cot staring at the single candle where I had first found the star bead.
“Tomorrow,” I whispered to the lonely little candle as they huddled around me, Goose standing sentry at the entrance to my alcove.
Emerald flashed a myriad of celebratory images. Fireworks. Streamers. People dancing. People cheering.
“Keep it down, Emerald,” Violet hissed.
“Be ready. Near sundown. I’ll send Goose like we planned for.”
The three nodded, all of them near to vibrating with excitement. I couldn’t share in their joy, though. I kept thinking of all the things that I would be leaving behind. Not just the potential for more with The Raven, but my mother’s body. The library I never got to explore. The rest of the humans that I couldn’t free.
The others wandered away naturally when they saw I was in no mood to be chatty, none of them questioning the solemnity that came over me as they reveled in their own impending freedom. I only hoped that their celebration did not rouse the suspicions of the others.
I lay down on my cot, stared up into the black ceiling of the warrens, and went over the plan, running each step through my head. It was not a complicated plan. There were no great trials or risky steps. It was a simple, clean, efficient plan that held very few options for things to go wrong.
The only true complication in the way was The Raven. I doubted that given the shifting of his opinion on whether I was a skin changer, that he would alter his plans to escort me to his betrothed. I would need to deal with that.
Goose found his way up onto the small cot and lay his head on my shoulder where we both fell asleep.
I dreamed of golden suns dawning over horizons of glittering cosmos swimming between the sun and stars.