Chapter 8
EIGHT
The new cuff is soothing around my wrist. Already, I feel relief from the aches and scratches. The fur lining glides over my flesh with the sway of the rope—but it’s the only pleasant thing about this moment.
Samick’s solid shoulder brushes mine with every step.
Crammed in side-to-side, the unit moves through the darkness of the prison. All the torches are lifted, light glaring down concrete corridors, and I’m glad, for the sake of my human eyes.
Still, I hook my fingers around the swaying rope.
I bump into Samick too much.
But I don’t hear any of his curt sighs of annoyance as the narrowness of the corridor widens into a doorway. He keeps his cheek to me.
Not at all like the snarls and dark looks he once threw at me every chance he got.
Suppose he’s gotten used to it.
So am I, in a way. Like now, the back of his hand brushes mine, and even through the glove, I feel the natural coldness of his touch.
There was a time I would’ve recoiled from that.
But I recoil from the frosty winds at the end of the corridor instead.
My bones cringe at the high-pitched whistle piercing my ears, and I brace myself as we go spilling out into the cold.
Instantly, my cheeks prickle and my breath fogs in front of my face.
I don’t know why I expected the air to be calm now that the hailstorm has passed, but the muscles in my body sure weren’t expecting the beating I walk into.
Like strings lifted, my shoulders hunch against the sudden onslaught of violent winds.
The prison spits us out—and I wish it would take us back.
But even if the unit turned around and went back inside, it would only be for a few moments.
Because, torchlights are raised in the distance…
Not ours. Another unit.
One that’s marching right for us.
For the prison.
The prison that gave me a bed I haven’t had in so long, that showered and sheltered me.
I don’t think about the other things that happened in there.
I shut that out before the memory can flash longer than a second in my mind.
With Samick able to somehow sense what I’m feeling, and that I don’t even know myself what I feel, it’s best to just let the shock fade—then figure out what the fuck that was if I ever get a moment to myself.
My eyes shut tight, wrinkled, as though to clamp down on the rushing thoughts, and as I open them again, all I see is the growing red gleam of torchlight illuminating a line through the blackout.
We march towards it.
Bootsteps in rhythm.
But the ground is uneven.
It jerks and slants beneath my boots.
Even with the torchlight, it’s hard to see through the shadows wisping at my ankles. But as I stare down at the earth—what used to be soil and grass—I see ice.
Not the kind that frosts over a lake, or the slippery kind that glazes roads. This ice is a whole new terrain.
It has grip, it has a deep grey hue like smoky quartz, and it’s rough.
I move slow—we all do.
Much slower than our race to the prison.
The hail didn’t melt or even settle on the earth as scattered hunks of ice. It…
I don’t know what it did.
I can’t even imagine how a hailstorm turned the ground into a fucking icy terrain that doesn’t look at all temporary, like I’ve been transported to Antarctica or some shit.
I fling a baffled look at Samick, as though I’ll find an answer with him.
But his profile is stone.
Chin lifted, the lettuce green of his eyes is aimed at the unit advancing on us—and when I drop my gaze to the rope, to my finger hooked around it, I see that he holds it, too.
His hand is fisted around it, firm.
But the rope is tethered to his belt, so he shouldn’t need to hold onto it.
Yet he does.
Something is off.
The other fae, Rust, could be close by.
The icy terrain—it might mean bad news.
The other unit—maybe they shouldn’t be here.
Maybe this isn’t their route.
Or it isn’t ours.
This is the unit that abandoned camp and fled to shelter in the hailstorm.
So it’s us that came into their path.
I don’t know what that means, if it means anything at all.
The air tightens, threads pulling taut between two groups that were never meant to meet out here.
For one stupid, fragile moment, hope sparks in my chest.
Bee.
My heart slingshots through my body.
Beneath me, my boots stagger, and I straighten up, chin lifted, to see the faces coming closer and closer and closer.
Samick tenses beside me.
His grip tightens on the rope—but he does exactly what I do.
Scans the faces of the other unit as we start to pass, like ships in the night.
No one stops to talk. Just some head tilts here and there. But we all look, stare, scan, searching for familiar faces.
The faces I see are too sharp and too strong and too bright with unnaturally coloured eyes, and the bodies are too muscular and too tall, and all of them are too wrong—
Fae.
Just fae after fae after fae.
They walk in pairs, more ordered than this unit, more structured.
Stricter.
That much I can tell just by passing them.
But then, Samick’s grip flexes on the rope.
I consider him, the feathering muscle slashed along his cheek, the sudden flickering in his eyes.
I trace his stare to the other unit—
To the face looking back at him.
Across the shifting torchlight, I find a set of blue eyes. They’re startling, even in the dim light. How lovely those eyes are, like pieces of ocean trapped in a place that has never known the sun.
But an ugliness is slashed across the fae’s neck. Ridged and pale, a scar that is undeniably a throat-slashing. One so deep and brutal that he should be dead.
The dark-haired fae isn’t looking at me.
He’s looking at Samick.
There’s something tangled in that stare. Something soft behind the clenched jaw and determined bootsteps.
Something dangerous.
Yearning.
I read it on him, that his instinct wants him to step forward. Cross the invisible boundary keeping them apart. Like he might reach out, pull Samick into an embrace.
Friends, I think.
Close friends.
Like me and Bee.
‘You’re like a sister to me,’ she said once, and it was strange to hear, because I had a sister, and she died before I ever knew her, and so I don’t mourn her, and then my mum died, and I had no one but this friend who called herself my sister.
I never had that sort of deep love in a friend before.
But Samick and this fae do have that.
I see it in the pair of them.
The dark-haired fae with ocean eyes, and Samick who stares back in an unwavering moment between them.
Brothers.
The thought lands heavy and hollow.
Then the moment is gone—because we pass.
And pass more fae.
And more.
Then the kuris at the end of the other unit.
The humans walk in formation, just like their warriors. In pairs.
But something’s different about them. Or the way that they are kept.
None of those kuris have been gifted with boots and jackets and extra food. They are tattered, in ruins, and barely upright as they stagger behind the warriors.
And I don’t see her among them.
Bee isn’t with that unit.
A sadness sinks my gut. And with it, the other unit passes by entirely, headed for the prison.
My chin brushes my shoulder.
The look of longing I spare them is noticed by Samick. Again, his grip flexes on the rope, this time to tug me that bit closer to him.
I look up at him.
And I know he reads it on me.
For some reason, I just thought I would see her with that unit. Maybe it was his tension before we passed the others, maybe it was stupid na?ve hope.
But I thought I would see Bee’s face among them.
My face falls and I look ahead to the woods we’re advancing on. The icy terrain wobbles us all the way to the trees.
And once we’re in, spreading out just so we’re not tripping and tumbling over each other, a quiet rests over us.
The ground is the same in the woods—ice. Ridged, curving, rocky ice.
At least the winds don’t lash us in here, not with the covering of thick trunks all around us.
But that doesn’t relax me.
Beside me, Samick looks… off.
Months, I’ve been with him—and not once in that time have I ever seen him look worried. Not like this—this quiet, rigid tension.
There’s something in the way his eyes flicker around, scanning every shadow lurking behind every tree.
Movement shifts around me.
Arwyn, Shark, Mika encircle me.
Not loosely. Not casually.
They form a shape around me, a diamond. Tight, deliberate. Every angle covered.
Samick’s words of warning before we left the prison echo in my mind—and all I can think is, Rust.
I don’t look, but I know he’s there, somewhere in the shadows, tracing us through the icy woods.
This must be it.
All that time, all that waiting, all that scheming.
This is his chance to take me out.
Among the trees, in a tired unit where half the fae are barely awake from that medicinal powder—like Mika, on my left, with her heavy lashes and parted mouth, as though the sheer amount of muscle strength it takes to close her lips is just more than she can afford—and we’re all spread out.
My heart sinks down to my writhing gut.
I wonder if Samick can feel it, if my fear is an annoying sensation crawling over his skin.
Then his face vanishes, because everything abruptly goes dark.
The torches are lowered. Faint orange flickers through the trees are gone in a heartbeat, and we’re plunged into darkness.
It’s so not the time for this.
A ragged breath escapes me, like the tension in me is trying to restrain any sound I might make, as though to breathe means to announce my exact fucking coordinates in the dark.
That tension extends outwards.
There’s a tautness in the blackout, like stretched rubber bands ready to ping at my skin, and even through my layers of warm, dry clothes, my skin pebbles.
It should be quiet.
But I hear too much.
Trees creak in the winds, foliage and ice crunch under the weight of bootsteps, someone slips up ahead, and even the breathing of the fae that were injured in the hail is too loud—too raspy.
Not all of them were ready to move on.