Chapter 21 #2
He reaches for my clenched fist and squeezes it, just once. It’s enough to slow my racing pulse. I take a deep breath and uncurl my fingers to squeeze his hand back. I didn’t expect him to reach out to me, to care about comforting me.
“Cruelty is tantalizing for fae. A taste and it becomes an addiction,” he warns me. “I think that’s why fae are so fond of inequitable contracts.”
I gently run my fingernails across the lines of his palm to his wrist. He shivers. Then I trace the crescent moon inked there. “Like ours.”
“It protects you,” he says. “It was the only way I could think of to protect you.”
“How? I’m the one who dies if I cross you. And you trust everyone else enough that you didn’t make a vow with them.” That’s bothered me ever since I arrived.
Desmond says nothing. He lies back and gazes skyward, as though the answer lies within the emerging stars.
I lie beside him and let the cool earth soothe my headache. We stargaze, our hands clasped between us.
Then I turn my head to face him, and the soft crimson glow on his golden skin is almost as entrancing as glamour. The dark grass brings out the earthy green of his eyes, and the dying light cuts umber shadows across his elegant cheekbones. He’s beautiful—and it’s not just the fae in him.
My stomach flips. I must still be inebriated. “Was it hard?” I ask to distract myself from it. “Growing up as half-human in the Hollowlands?”
“It was at times. I don’t age at the same rate as pure fae,” he confesses. “You would think that outpacing my peers would be a blessing, but the high fae who look my age have decades of experience on me.”
“Like Auri and Finnian?”
“They’re twenty-two years older than me.”
Gods, that’s longer than Evie has been alive. I raise a brow at him. “Then how old are you?”
“Forty-five.” A smile dimples his cheek. “If I were fully human, I would be around thirty.”
“And in ten more years, you’ll look a lot older than the other fae?”
He nods. “Odd, isn’t it? I’m out of sync with my own people.”
No kidding. His disadvantage must be astronomical, and yet they respect him as their leader. Auri even harbors affections for him, a thought that makes my insides twist.
“Does that ever make you feel more human than fae?” I ask. His nineteen years on me aren’t disconcerting. I already knew that time ran differently for the fae, although I didn’t realize by how much.
“My father wasn’t around to influence me, so I never felt human,” he answers. “It didn’t help that the fae saw me as half-enemy. Though few dared to voice it since my mother’s wrath is so unforgiving.”
Half-enemy. I swallow the lump in my throat. “In Avedor, we’re taught that the fae are amicable to the truce.”
He laughs, low and quiet. “If you suggested as much to them, they’d fight over who gets to roast your entrails.”
I scrunch my nose. “How lovely. Are there other half-fae?”
“We were more common when the Hollowlands doors weren’t guarded by Avedor. Now there aren’t many. They died in battle.”
My heart wilts for him. I remember the vision of Desmond that Gashil forced me to witness.
It was so vivid that I can’t help but believe it was a memory.
The plumes of fire, the screams and the bodies, his soldiers following him with gruesome injuries.
The haunted look in Desmond’s eyes as he left them behind.
I’ve been taught that the war had to happen. Before it, changelings were common as weeds. Unseelie fae hunted Avedorans for sport. We were captured and enchanted to satisfy their whims, then discarded when they tired of us.
Or were the stories not true?
“What is your sister like?” he asks.
“Kind, a little naive.” Remembering her, a pang of homesickness threads through me. “Growing up, I saw myself as her protector. But then the innkeeper’s son bullied her, and I didn’t notice until I caught him shoving her face into the dirt and telling her to eat it. I felt nothing but rage.”
Tears had streamed from Evie’s blotchy eyes. When she saw me, a hopeful smile had quivered on her lips.
“I slammed his face into the ground and told him to see how he liked eating dirt,” I continue. “He lost a tooth. I lost my butter privileges for half a year. It was worth it.”
I’ll never forget how Evie, so meek at six years old, could finally relax while shooting marbles and playing tag between the houses.
She had snuggled up to me in bed that night, resting her head on my shoulder.
The “thank you” she whispered meant so much, making up for all the trouble I was in.
That must be how his own sister felt when she fed him salt to free him from the berries’ enchantment.
“I’d do anything for my sister, even now,” I tell Desmond. I mean every word.
Yet my parents don’t see me as a protector. To them, I’m just a farmgirl with an Average Gift. They warned me. They said the world is no place for solitary mortal women, that if traffickers didn’t take me, the fae would rip me to shreds.
I clench his hand as if it can anchor me as waves of sorrow rock through me.
His thumb brushes over the back of my hand. “What’s wrong?” He must feel it through our bond.
“I left home to prove that my parents are wrong about me. That I can take care of myself. Once I return with Olin’s treasure, they’ll have to see that. I don’t know what I’ll do if they don’t.”
“Leave.”
“Leave?” I raise my brows at him. “It’s not that easy.”