3. Delphine
We hadour ways of borrowing time, but any that we gained was not enough to allow for a single moment to be lost.
We had no time to gather our thoughts.
No time to reconsider.
No time to waste.
Four days. Though it was still not enough time, it was better than one.
The time shifts between the realms would buy us time, not if we were careful, not if we were lucky, but only if fate was on our side. I had to believe that fate was with us. I had no other choice.
Armene’s talk of spies left me unsettled as we slipped from the throne room into the war rooms beyond. The Sand Prince’s advisors were thankfully absent—or so I thought—until Armene swore the moment the doors shut behind us and whirled on the two soldiers that had returned, following close behind.
“Go,” he said, “gather my council and return here immediately. There’s much to discuss.”
The moment they were gone, Caldamir turned on Armene with a fire in his eyes.
“There’s no time for—”
“I agree.”
Armene cut him off, his hands already rustling through scrolls tucked away beneath the table. He pulled out a series of maps and began unfurling them, fingers tracing shakily over their stained pages before moving on to the next, and then the next.
“My council should have been waiting, but they’re not. You’ve seen how anxious they are to complete my ascension. The fact that they’re anywhere else means they’ve probably moved on to more important matters. They’ve already moved on from one scheme to the next.”
I knew what he meant.
They’d undoubtedly heard Deimos, heard his warning, heard his promise.
I’d seen with my own eyes the way they hassled the prince for every detail, every decision, down to every step he planned to take. They counted the very breaths that he took, as if the space between each one wasted precious time, and yet now … now, they abandoned him?
I understood the shaking of his hand all too well. I felt it in my core.
We knew we had to move fast. Now, we knew we had to move faster.
“Hand me that glass over there.”
Caldamir snatched the magnifying lens Nyx had somehow already begun to fiddle with and passed it to Armene, who leaned in close with muttered breaths that only ceased when he let out a short growl of frustration.
“We’d never get there unnoticed. Deimos would be on us the moment we stepped foot outside the palace walls.”
I leaned over the Sand Princes’ shoulder, and although the map was foreign to me, I recognized the dark blotch on the map for what it was. I’d traveled through the pools before, but more than that, I’d nearly been lost in one. I felt a shiver—not from the glamour this time, but from fear—at the mere memory. Never again did I want to feel that senseless emptiness, to wander through those empty planes, knowing how close I was to vanishing forever within them.
I had the power of the Starlight fae, but I didn’t yet know how to wield it. I could barely wield my own shadows. Maybe if Seren was here, maybe we could use the pools, but even then…even then the mere thought made me shudder.
“Isn’t there a … thin place we could travel to?” I asked, remembering the first time I passed from one realm into the other with Caldamir. Even with the last dredges of the glamour pulled up by the encroaching Midsummer, it was a small miracle he’d managed to take the two of us through it. Some might even say fate had something to do with it.
It was Caldamir that shook his head this time. “Deimos would have those watched. Or Mordrigal, or a hundred other fae that have been waiting for an opportunity like this.”
I saw Armene looking at a map of the palace, at a dark spot I recognized, and felt my heart sink. There was a pool in the palace. I’d sat beside Caldamir there, felt the last of the walls that remained between us start to crumble. The memory was drunken, but fond, now, looking back. Any fondness, however, was drowned out by that fear the very thought of that dark water instilled in me.
Armene traced his finger of the dark blotch on the map a second time. His eyes narrowed in concentration, a deep line furrowing between his brows as a wayward lock from his dark hair fell into his face.
“It would be a risk, a great one. I lied, before,” he said. “I don’t trust my men, the fae of my own court, the very walls that make it up.”
His words made my eyes lift to scan the sandstone that encased us, searching the outer corners for signs of watchful eyes, flickering to the door as I wondered if any listening ears lay beyond.
Armene was looking at me when I met his gaze. “Do you think you could do it, Delphine?” he asked. “If we risked the pool, could you pull us through it?”
I felt myself pale.
I remembered the last time I tried to use a form of magic that wasn’t intrinsic to my line. I remembered pulling the amulet through, but only by accident. I remembered better, still, the many failed attempts before.
I shook my head.
We couldn’t risk being lost in the dark spaces between realms.
“Can we reach Seren, somehow? Get him to help us?”
A slight shuffle, the creak of metal followed by a subtle snapping sound, drew all eyes back to Nyx.
He stood, wide-eyed and red-faced, in the corner.
He’d found something else to fiddle with, an intricate contraption made of many small metal wires that he’d irrevocably bent, rendering it useless. His face had fallen into one of deep sorrow, or, at least, as much as a face like his could fall. The slightest downward tilt at the corner of his lips and the even slighter slope of his brows…on him, the look was devastating.
“Well, we could have…if Nyx hadn’t just broken the way to do it,” Armene said, his voice so dry it sounded like the scraping of his own sand across the stone floor.
Nyx let out a desperate sigh. “Heaven and hell conspire against us.”
“Shut up,” Caldamir snapped. His eyes darkened for a moment, and one hand moved towards his sword as if he was considering if now, after all that had passed, was the time to finally use it on the Woodland Prince.
I, on the other hand, found myself reaching out to place a hand on Caldamir’s shoulder.
“Wait,” I said. “Nyx has a point.”
I lifted my eyes to meet his, and then Nyx’s, and then Armene’s, where they settled. His hands remained splayed across the surface of the scattered maps.
“We can’t use the pools; we can’t use the thin places. When all else is exhausted in this realm, there is still one last place left to look. We don’t have to leave Avarath on our own. We wouldn’t be the first fae to call on a god.”
I took a deep breath as I remembered what it was to look upon one of those eternal beings.
And then, I took an even deeper one as I remembered the price we had to pay for calling upon one the first time.
If ever there was a time to call on such a creature, such a power, it was now. And though I knew not how to summon them, I knew, at least, a good place to start—and we didn’t have to find a way out of Avarath to do it.
We just had to get out of this court.
This timewhen the sand enveloped me, wrapping me in the last of its sun-burnt warmth, I was prepared for it. I knew the suffocation that was soon to follow, the brief moment where I would be blinded in a darkness only broken by the flickers of sparkling light the glamoured sand of Armene’s court gave off, not too unlike the starlight of my own court.
I felt a brief stabbing pain at the memory.
I’d only known that court for a few weeks, but in that short time I’d not just been shaped by it, but welcomed by it. It had become a home to me like nowhere else in all of faerie. It was where my fae blood first sang, the very memory of it making something deep inside me ache.
And not just for the court, for the realm that melted in and out of the stars and the void between them, but for the fae that I knew had returned to them not so long ago.
A fae I may never have the pleasure of seeing again.
Seren.
So little time had passed since the Starlight Fae left, and yet my very soul ached for him. He should have been here, with us, now. He should have been standing at my side, his voice echoing amongst the rest of ours. He’d been a high king before me, and a king before that. It was not just his power, his experience, that I now craved.
It was his mere presence.
I ached for that.
I ached for him, and for Tethys, for the absence that they both left in their wake.
Here, now, with Caldamir, Armene, and Nyx beside me, I felt that absence more keenly than ever. It was as if I was no longer whole without all five of them beside me. The whole world, all the realms, might be falling apart, but if they were by my side, then at least something would be right.
I, at least, would be alright.
I was once so alone, so empty, so broken. I was barely human, not just treated like an outcast, an outcast within myself.
They’d changed that.
The most significant thing that had changed since I first laid eyes on Caldamir in Lord Otto’s study was not the change in Avarath. It was not the change in my body, transforming me first into a half-fae and then a being without a drop of human blood left in me. It was the change that had happened within, in that space between my ribs where not only that treacherous organ of my heart ached, but so did the very burning starlight of my soul.
I’d found my family. My home. I’d found myself.
But more than that, I’d fallen in love.
Not just with Seren, but with all of them.
With Armene, with Tethys, with Caldamir, even with Nyx—as maddening as that may be above all.
And I knew, I knew I wasn’t fighting for Avarath, for Elysia—as much as that place felt like a kindred spirit to my soul—I was fighting for them.
For a chance to be with them. All of them. However long that might take.
I knew it as the sand wrapped tighter, as I felt my very being suspended between the fabric of this realm, torn apart and put back together again in an instant just as the sand fell away and I looked down on a sight all too familiar and yet painfully strange at the same time.
I’d only known the Sea Court as a place where tempests raged, where the sea battered the sand so violently that it threatened to crush the prince that stood on its shores, shaking his fist at the god that had risen like a titan from its depths. I saw it now, the ghost of him as he fought for his very life, for his very existence, only to give it up in the final moments in order to save me.
Me.
The girl he’d once brought to faerie to kill, to save his kingdom.
I was alive now. More alive than I’d ever been.
His sacrifice was not the only one that they had made. And soon, I knew from the aching of my soul, it would be my turn to return the favor.
I’d save Sol, and I’d save them too.
Whatever it took.