Nadia
Reacting wasn’t an option.
That was the first rule, and it had kept me alive for longer than most of the people in this village had been born. You didn't break stride. You didn't telegraph that you'd seen them. You let them think they'd seen you first.
I drifted across the square with the meandering air of a woman with nowhere particular to be, paused at the village well to study a bit of mossy stonework that didn't require studying, and let the shadows tell me what they could.
A Shadow Fae.
Older than me, his face weathered with the kind of lines that came from spending decades in service to people who got you nothing but trouble. But I’d been gone from the Court so long, I didn't recognize him.
I knew the cut of him, though.
Shadow Court enforcement. Not an enforcer himself: they wore black braids on their cuffs and never traveled without paired blades. This one was something quieter. A messenger, maybe. Or a scout.
I considered the geometry of the square. The exits. The relative cover. The angles to the Three Crowns, where Enzo was still inside making arrangements. The angle to my favorite dagger, which sat in its sheath at the small of my back where it always did.
Then I sighed internally, and walked toward him.
He came out of the shadow as I approached—easily, no aggression, palms loose at his sides. He inclined his head fractionally. "My lady."
The way he said it wasn’t the same way the smith had said it. This one carried weight. Recognition. A specificity that no traveler in leather and blades should have earned.
I gave him nothing.
"I won't keep you," he murmured in the tongue of my youth—the smooth, practiced cadence of someone who spoke in Court every day. "I was asked to deliver a message."
"By whom?"
He smiled, small and dry, as if the answer were already sitting between us. “An old friend of your family. She says the road suits you poorly, but then, you always did mistake running for surviving.”
The dread that settled in my stomach was old enough to know its way around.
"She asks," he continued, "that you consider how easily a journey through unfamiliar provinces can be… disrupted. The roads are dangerous. The companions one chooses may not survive them. She would prefer, of course, that you return to her care."
"How thoughtful of her," I drawled.
"She is, indeed, very thoughtful." He tilted his head.
"She’s also asked me to mention that the prince at your side has associations that certain courts might find compelling, were they to become public.
His brother's choice of bride, for instance.
The hybrid telepath. Most courts would find it irregular at best."
So the threat against Merrit was also on the table. Lovely.
"You may tell her," I replied softly, in a dialect considerably less polite than his, "that I've considered her concern, and I find her thoughtfulness extends only to the boundaries of her own interests, which I have long ceased mistaking for mine."
"That's unfortunate, my lady."
"For her, perhaps."
He smiled again. "She thought you might say that."
Then he moved.
He was good—fast, trained, moving with the ease of someone who had spent decades doing this exact thing. He came in low and angled, a blade I hadn't seen sliding out of his sleeve in the half-second before contact.
I was faster. Mostly.
I stepped sideways into the shadow at the corner of the closed shop, came out behind him, and put my dagger between two of his ribs before he'd fully completed the turn.
He gasped.
Across the square, the children shrieked around the well, and the smith’s hammer rang once, twice, loud enough to cover the small sound he made when my blade went in.
He was good enough, even then, to try to drive an elbow back into me. Unfortunately for him, I was better. I moved with him, kept the angle on the blade, twisted once, twice.
And then he folded.
All told, it took maybe six seconds, but those six seconds cost me.
I caught his weight before he hit the cobblestones, but not for his sake, for the noise.
Shakily, I dragged him backward into the deeper shadow under the shop's awning.
The whole square was twenty feet away and not one person was looking in this direction.
The afternoon was overcast. The shadows here were deep.
It was the only piece of luck I'd been handed today and I took it.
I knelt beside him. He was alive but he wasn't going to be for long, and we both knew it.
"Was there more to the message?" I asked, knowing whatever came out of his mouth next would be his last words on this earth.
He let out a wet cough as blood stained his lips, looking up at me with eyes that had gone glassy and amused at once.
"Just," he managed, "be careful." A pause, his eyes going distant. Then, very softly, in a dialect so old I hadn't heard it spoken aloud since I was a child: "... Mrachenya."
The word landed like a struck bell.
Daughter of the dark.
My mother’s name for me. A name he shouldn’t know but could only come from one place.
"I'm always careful."
"No," he said, his lips curled into a rueful sort of grin. "You're really not."
He was still smiling when he died.
I sat back on my heels in the deep shadow under the awning of a closed shop in a village whose name I'd refused to learn, with a dead Shadow Fae bleeding into the cobblestones beside me, and tried to think.
I couldn't leave him here.
A body in the village square would bring questions, would bring inquiry, would bring Enzo's brother's province under suspicion again, would bring her next move down faster than I could afford. The village had already been through enough today. They didn't need a second body to add to the count.
I had to hide him.
There was only one way to hide a Shadow Fae, and it was the way that would cost me the most. The deep would take him—not because I could open the door, but because he was already part of it. Shadow Fae returned to shadow. All I had to do was push him through.
Pushing required power I didn't currently have a surplus of.
I closed my eyes anyway.
I pressed my hands against him—against the place where his ribs had stopped rising—and reached for the surface shadows.
They came easily. Cooperatively. I gathered them around him like a shroud, the dark thickening, the cobblestones beneath him going liquid under my hands as the boundary between the world and the deep thinned where he was lying.
Then I pushed.
Pain cracked through my palms first, sharp enough to steal the breath out of me. Not physical, not exactly. Worse. The kind of pain that came from pressing against a locked door and feeling home on the other side, warm and unreachable and mine in a way nothing else had ever been mine.
It was like pushing a boulder uphill. Everything in me strained.
Everything I'd been carefully not thinking about for three weeks—the closed door, the locked sanctuary, the hollow ache where home used to answer—surged against me and refused to give way.
The deep was there. I could feel it. He was already partway through. He just needed the rest of the push.
I pushed harder, and something finally gave.
The body dropped through the cobblestones like a stone through water, the shadows folding over him as the boundary sealed.
Then he was gone.
The cobblestones were dry beneath my hands. The shadows had thinned back into ordinary darkness. Twenty feet away, the village square carried on, bright and loud and entirely untouched by what I’d just shoved into the deep.
I was the only evidence left behind, and I was cold down to the marrow of my bones.
I sat back on my heels for a moment, breathing carefully, and waited for the shaking to stop.
It didn't stop. Standing up would be a problem.
Standing up and walking back to the Three Crowns without being noticed would be a larger problem.
Standing up and walking back to the Three Crowns without being noticed by Enzo was likely to be impossible.
That fucker noticed every flinch, every adjustment, every tiny shift of expression, every thought that crossed my eyes like he could read my damn mind.
It took far too much effort, but I stood up anyway.
I only made it three steps out of the alley before my legs gave out on me.
I had time to register that the cobblestones were coming up to slam into my face, and then his arm was around my middle.
He'd moved without sound. Maybe he’d followed when I left the saddler. Maybe he’d only looked up at the exact wrong moment and noticed me come out of the alley with death still clinging cold to my hands. Either way, he reached me before the cobblestones did.
I should have been furious. Was furious, somewhere, distantly. Was also, more immediately, just very tired and very cold and very glad I hadn’t gone ass over teakettle in the middle of the street.
His face was very close to mine, and his hazel eyes weren't doing the careful, contained thing I'd grown used to.
They were doing something else entirely—something hot and absolutely furious, banked down hard but visible at the edges to anyone who knew how to look.
His arm was iron-tight around my waist, his jaw set.
He was livid.
"You're freezing," he said quietly. The words came out even, but I could hear the cost of keeping them even.
It wasn't a question. It wasn't really a statement, either. It was the first sentence of a much longer conversation he was very deliberately not having yet.
"We have to go," I forced out, my gaze unwillingly held in his grasp. "Now."
Enzo searched my face. I watched him swallow the next three questions one after another.
Watched his jaw work. Watched him choose, with visible effort, not to demand the answers he wanted right there in the alley behind a closed shop in a village whose people he was responsible for, twenty feet from a body neither of us could afford to explain.
"Can you ride?"
Could I? Probably not, but I would fake it for as long as I could. "Yes."