Chapter 18
Chapter
Eighteen
A loud banging on our cupboard door jerked me awake in the early morning hours. Somehow, Kaden and I had ended up tangled together during the night, one of his long legs draped over mine and his arm locked around my waist.
He grunted when I gave a start, and I felt something hard pressing into my backside.
“Go away,” Kaden grumbled, pulling me tighter against him as I tried to extricate myself from his grip.
“We know you’re in there,” called a familiar masculine voice.
“Yes, open up,” a female chimed in.
Kaden stiffened, and I sucked in a breath, shock and relief surging through me.
Pausing to adjust the very noticeable bulge in his pants, Kaden knelt beside me on the bed and pushed the door open. Adriel and Sorsha stood in the corridor, looking tired and disheveled but otherwise unharmed .
Adriel’s sharp gaze bounced from Kaden to me before narrowing on the prince.
Sorsha let out a scandalized laugh. “Good to see you weren’t losing any sleep over our probable demise.”
“They only had one room,” I said, snatching my pants off the floor and hurriedly pulling them on.
“That's convenient,” the Morkahlf rumbled, a note of amusement in his voice.
My gaze snapped to Kaden’s royal guard, seriously considering running him through with my sword.
“I’m delighted to see that you finally made it,” Kaden quipped, completely unperturbed by their assumption that we’d slept together. He stretched like a cat and then reached for his pack, rifling through until he found a shirt.
“We were looking for you ,” Adriel growled. “Followed your trail halfway down the mountain, but then the snow covered your tracks.”
“The agreement was that we rendezvous here,” said Kaden.
Adriel glanced in my direction. “I thought you might be in trouble.”
“Since when is that anything new?”
“Well, nobody died,” said Sorsha impatiently. “Now can we please go get some food? Some of us have been traipsing all over that godsforsaken mountain on very little sleep, and I’m starving.”
“And here I was hoping for a romantic postcoital breakfast for two in this lovely room,” Kaden sighed.
My face heated, and I found myself wishing, not for the first time, that I had my witchwood blade.
“I’ll . . . go find us some horses,” Adriel muttered, looking intensely uncomfortable .
“I’ll go with you,” I said, grabbing my jacket and stuffing my feet into my boots before I put the prince’s immortality to the test.
The royal guard looked as though he’d rather gouge his own eyes out than have me tag along, but there was no way I was sitting through breakfast with Kaden looking so smug.
Mercifully, Adriel didn’t argue. He just stormed down the stairs ahead of a very chatty Sorsha and out the back door of the inn. He led me toward a dilapidated stable, where a gray-haired male sat whittling on an upturned barrel.
The faerie didn’t spare us a glance, though I knew he was aware of our presence.
“I need four good horses and tack,” said Adriel without preamble.
“Then you’ll need to look somewhere else,” the stablehand barked, not looking up from his work.
Irritation flared hot in my gut, but Adriel’s face was a mask of indifference as he withdrew a pouch from his pocket. “How much?”
“Not for sale.”
“Everything’s for sale at the right price. I’m certain I have more than enough gold for whatever sorry old plugs you have back there.”
The male finally raised his head, eyes narrowing on Adriel. “There ain’t no right price where your lot is concerned. Now move along.”
I bristled, looking from the stablehand to the royal guard, but Adriel’s voice was pure, dark velvet as he said, “If you won’t sell us the horses, I’ll have them by whatever means necessary.
” He shifted his weight so that the swords strapped to his back caught the light, and the stablehand bared his teeth .
“Are you threatening me, Morkahlf?”
He spat the word with such disdain that it made my insides curdle.
“Threatening a wretched old faerie like you isn’t worth my time.”
There was a long pause as the stablehand glowered, but then the barrel groaned as he got to his feet and shuffled toward the stable entrance.
After some snarled negotiations, Adriel had secured us a pair of flea-bitten mares and two geldings whose tails and manes were a tangle of burrs.
“The old faerie said she’s the gentlest,” Adriel told me, nodding toward a skinny palomino who was munching lazily on some roughage.
“Right,” I said, casting a sidelong glance at the mare.
As was the case with most animals, horses and I did not get along. I suspected it was my hunter blood. Animals could sense a predator in their midst, even if most mortals couldn’t.
The mare nickered as I approached, raising her head and rolling her eyes toward me as I reached for her lead. She shifted uneasily on her feet, but didn’t protest as I grabbed her saddle horn and mounted.
“What’s her name?” I asked.
“Sunbeam,” Adriel said with a smirk.
I rolled my eyes. This would probably be the first time that a horse with a name like “Sunbeam” bucked a rider.
Horses secured, we made our way back to the inn, where Kaden and Sorsha were already waiting outside with fresh provisions. My stomach growled loudly as I watched Adriel dismount and distribute the supplies among our saddlebags.
“Thought you might be hungry,” said Kaden, passing me a small parcel that smelled like salted meat before taking hold of the larger bay gelding and mounting smoothly.
“Th-thank you,” I stammered, taken aback by his thoughtfulness.
Inside the cloth wrapping were two smoked sausages, two hard-boiled eggs, and a warm honeyed biscuit. I greedily devoured one of the eggs and broke off a bit of the biscuit as we ambled through the village.
The sun shone weakly through the thick cloud cover, and a chilly mist clung to the rundown wooden structures. We turned down another road I hadn’t seen on our way in, but just then Kaden reached over and grabbed my mare’s reins, hissing at Sorsha to stop.
“What —”
The question died on my lips.
They came from the skies, emerging from the clouds in flashes of red and silver. Huge wings gleamed in the early morning light, the steady beat the only indication of how many faeries soared overhead.
They moved in formation with such precision they couldn’t be mistaken for anything but an army.
“Shit,” Adriel growled, jaw clenching as his gaze snapped to Sorsha.
“Alfrigg’s soldiers,” Kaden muttered, leading my mare down a smaller side street as the faeries began their descent.
“What the fuck are they doing here?” the royal guard snarled, urging his mount to go faster.
We weren’t the only ones who’d noticed the newcomers. The faeries of Klod?sch had their heads turned skyward, some of them glaring at the approaching soldiers with a mixture of anger and fear. Others scurried outside with furs over nightclothes to round up younglings playing in the snow .
Sensing Kaden’s urgency to get his sister away from the prying eyes of Alfrigg’s soldiers, I nudged my mare with my heels and gave an encouraging click of my tongue.
Sorsha rode a few strides ahead, her long golden braid bouncing as she kept pace with Adriel, who was leading our charge out of town.
As the houses thinned, we lost sight of the soldiers, and that knot of tension in my chest eased. Soon the road became rough and rocky, with great rivulets of ice splitting the middle.
“Why were Alfrigg’s patrols in Klod?sch?” I asked Kaden, coming up beside him.
Judging by the reactions of the fae who lived there, the soldiers weren’t a common sight.
“I don’t know,” he said darkly, staring off into the distance. “What I do know is that no good ever came from Alfrigg taking an interest in a Drathen settlement.”
My stomach clenched as I recalled what Kaden had told me about Alfrigg’s campaign to exterminate the Drathen fae from Aerdale.
He didn’t say anything else about it, and I didn’t ask more. We fell into a tense silence, but after a while another question started to nag at me.
“What is Adriel?” I asked, keeping my voice low so the royal guard up ahead wouldn’t hear.
A crease appeared between Kaden’s brows. “I already told you.”
“No. You told me he wasn’t a demon, and I don’t think he’s fae. I heard the others . . . I’ve heard them call him a Morkahlf , but I don’t know what that is.”
“Why do you ask?”
“That stablehand who sold us the horses . . . He said something to Adriel that made me think . . .” I shook my head. “It seemed as though he didn’t want to sell to Adriel because of what he was.”
Kaden's mouth became a thin line. “I’m surprised the old fool noticed that Adriel is something different. He is . . . very good at not drawing unwanted attention. Without his wings, most assume he’s fae.”
I waited for him to continue.
Kaden sighed and rubbed the back of his neck as though choosing his words carefully.
“Adriel is what’s known as a Morkahlf , though it is not a term I like to use.
Morkahlf in the primordial tongue roughly translates to ‘child of the lowest clay.’ It’s a foul thing to call someone, but as there are so few like him, they haven’t exactly gotten together to come up with a better name. ”
“Why are there so few?” I asked. “Did Alfrigg —”
Kaden shook his head. “Adriel’s kind are made, not born. That is the only way one would sense that he’s different. His magic, to some, feels . . . off .”
As Kaden’s words sank in, I remembered that uneasy feeling I’d gotten when I’d first met his royal guard. At the time, I’d dismissed it as having to do with Adriel’s hostility, but perhaps it had been his unusual magic.
“When I was a youngling growing up at court, everyone knew what I was,” he continued. “No nobles wanted their heirs playing with the half-demon bastard, and I couldn’t exactly force myself on the other young ones. It was . . . lonely.”