Chapter 14
The next day, as we slogged westward through the snow-choked forest in our furs, following Posey’s lead, I began to lose all sense of time, but I didn’t realize it until Gemma, to my left, stumbled and nearly fell.
Before leaving the safe house, she had cast glamours around herself, Farrin, and me to disguise our godhood, which, as we’d learned, the Old Country’s magic made far too obvious. The glamour’s magic rippled against me with a quick lash of cold, faltering just as Gemma did.
Talan caught her arm and held her to him. “Gemma? What is it, love?”
She shook her head, leaning hard against him. Her face gleamed with sweat, and her skin was shockingly pale.
“I’m fine, I just need a moment. Something…” She looked around, squinting as if into a bright light. “Something has changed. My joints are on fire.”
Talan glanced at me. “We have to stop,” he said, his voice uncharacteristically annoyed. “We’ve been going for hours, she’s exhausted, and I’m starving.”
That surprised me and sent a chill down my spine. “But we just stopped to eat lunch.”
“Did we?” Farrin touched her temple, frowning. “I don’t remember eating.”
Ryder bit out a curse. “I do, and it was only five minutes ago.” He hefted his crossbow from his shoulder with a fearsome glare at the trees around us. “What in the name of the gods is going on here?”
Posey, who had kept walking, turned back to look at us from the top of a nearby ridge.
“What’s wrong? Why have you stopped?” Then she saw Gemma, and looked past us all at something in the trees.
Her eyes widened with horror, and though I wanted to whirl around and prepare to fight whatever was coming for us, I couldn’t.
I was stuck in a mire, my limbs heavy and my senses dulled.
I watched in a daze as Posey dropped her pack and sprinted toward us, yelling something I couldn’t understand.
With the only scrap of strength I could find, I reached for Farrin and Gemma, and as my skin touched theirs, my mind cleared, and a current of rejuvenating power passed between us.
Gemma’s breathing steadied; Farrin stood a bit straighter.
Their hands still in mine, I turned and saw Posey racing through the snowdrifts to put herself between my dazed Roses, who were wandering about as if in a dream—and a gaping chasm in the earth that I was certain hadn’t been there moments before.
The only Rose who still seemed to have hold of her senses was Tressa, our beholder, pale and freckled and small, her honey-colored hair in a braided crown.
“Stop! Don’t you see? It’s a trap!” She was shouting at the top of her lungs, desperately trying to guide the others to safety, but it was as if some inexorable force was pulling them forward.
Even with the strength of my sisters flowing through me, I was moving too slowly to help, my sentinel power dulled by whatever magic had ensnared us. “Help me,” I said to my sisters through gritted teeth. “Concentrate.”
Fresh power surged into me from each of their hands just as Gareth pushed past us, staggering and unbalanced, and caught himself on Ryder’s arm.
When he spoke, it was in a fae tongue, the same short phrase over and over, and though his voice was hoarse and thin, it did the trick: Danesh and the other Roses stopped short only a couple of paces from the chasm’s edge.
Posey, breathing hard, guided them to safety as they returned to themselves.
“What just happened?” Danesh demanded. She glared around at everyone, her hands in fists. “What was that?”
“You nearly stepped off a cliff into a chasm,” said Tressa, her arm around our alchemist, Glynis, who looked as if she’d just woken from a nightmare.
“Not just a chasm,” Posey said darkly. “That was a trap. We must be close to Gothyn.”
“We must be?” Danesh said. “I thought you knew where we were going.”
“I’m trying my best to find it based on what I remember, but the borders of Gothyn—and its protections—are always changing.” She glanced at Gareth. “The chant of unveiling—how do you know that?”
Gareth, still holding on to Ryder, pushed his glasses up his nose and took a shaky breath. “I read it a few years ago in a book of fae lore excavated from ruins in Aidurra.”
Posey raised her eyebrows. “You can read the Unremembered Languages?”
“All seventeen of them, yes. Though I’m less comfortable with Hartha and Immendor.”
“I can barely read Hartha.” She looked him up and down, smiling. “No wonder you didn’t see the need to bring any of your colleagues.”
Ryder gave Gareth a bracing pat on his back. “The most useful know-it-all to have ever lived.”
Gareth smiled ruefully, then glanced at me and caught me looking at him. In the wake of what had just happened, his face was unguarded, a flicker of hope in his eyes. He opened his mouth, then closed it and turned away from me, drawing up the hood of his coat once more.
A thank-you hovered on the tip of my tongue, an apology for everything I’d said last night just behind it.
But before I could say a word, an eerie hush fell, cloaking the forest in silence.
Darting shadows, tinged silver and gold, rushed out of the trees and snaked all around us.
In the wake of Gareth’s chant, my mind was clear, and my sentinel instincts caught fire.
In the space of two seconds, I clocked the shadows, pulled my sword from its sheath at my hip, and whirled around, ready to strike.
My sword’s blade met another, this one slender and slightly curved, engraved with strange markings.
“Careful, daughter of Kerezen,” said the fae beyond our crossed blades. His skin was a beautiful inky black, his hair a wreath of elaborate silver braids, and his limbs long and knobby, like they belonged to the trees. “Drawing a sword in these woods is a challenge I doubt even you want to face.”
My peripheral vision showed me that we were surrounded by at least a dozen fae, all of them clad, as my opponent was, in what looked like boiled leather armor dyed the colors of the forest. But I kept my gaze fixed on this one’s violet eyes, my expression hard.
Daughter of Kerezen. Did he know about Mother?
Or could he simply tell from my speed that I was a sentinel?
I desperately hoped for the latter.
“I would not have drawn my sword if you had met us with courtesy,” I said, “and not with tricks of light.”
“Ah, but tricks of light are our specialty,” the fae said smoothly. He glanced past me. “Frinthian cousin, you are green of skin and far from home. And why are you in the company of humans?”
“They are my friends and allies,” Posey replied. If she was intimidated, her voice betrayed nothing. “We make for Gothyn to request an audience with Lady Ifanna.”
“Yes, we know,” said the fae, dragging his gaze back to me. His smile was sharp, his teeth sharper. “We have been tracking you since you set foot on our land two days ago.”
“Two days?” Danesh blurted. “You lie. We have only been walking since the morning.”
Ryder hissed sharply, and the fae raised his silver eyebrows, his smile widening, but I cut him off before he could chastise her or, more likely, send his blade flying at her throat. Accusing a fae of lying was a terrible insult.
“It is her first journey into the fae realm,” I lied, making a note to wring Danesh’s neck if we made it out of this alive. “You will, I hope, pity her for her ignorance and escort us to the Court of Shadows?”
The fae cocked his head, examining my face, and then lowered his sword. I followed suit.
“Pity a human?” he mused. “A fascinating idea. I shall consider it. And yes, daughter of Kerezen, we will take you to the Queen of the Veil.” He offered me his arm with a mocking bow. “We are cousins, after all, you and I. Our veins carry the blood of the same goddess.”
It felt dangerous to refuse him, so I took his arm even though my entire body screamed with the urge to run. Instead I recited the old prayer to Kerezen that I’d learned as a child.
“For sight and sound and taste and touch,” I said, “for the scent of the wind and the strength of my limbs, thanks be to Kerezen, god of my body, maker of bone and blood—”
“And so it shall ever be,” he finished. “Are you surprised that I know the prayers of Edyn? You shouldn’t be. We in the Court of Shadows are great admirers of human customs.”
I didn’t trust anything about him, especially not the false kindness in his voice. “And do you admire the humans who create these customs as well?”
Laughter was his only answer. I regretted asking the question.
The forest had grown dark, the only light coming from the snow crunching beneath our feet, which glowed with the same silver sheen as the Mist did.
I didn’t dare look back at the others. Seeing fear on my sisters’ faces would summon my own.
I let my escort guide us all into the trees.
***
I couldn’t say how long it took us to reach Gothyn.
One moment we were trudging silently through the snowy forest. The next, the trees seemed to twist and turn around us as if we were looking at them through a rippling mirror.
Though I easily kept my balance, I heard some of the others stumble behind me.
Then, suddenly, we were there.
The Court of Shadows, some called it. Others, the Veiled Court.
And it was magnificent.
Our escorts led us through a massive hall of iridescent stone.
Mammoth trees cloaked in violet moss rose up on either side of us, their branches twining with the dark wooden rafters overhead.
Thousands of lanterns and candles, some hanging from the trees’ branches and others hovering in mid-air just over our heads, lit the room with shimmering pools of light.
The walls were made of gleaming onyx and tangled trees, their shape and color changing with my every step.