Chapter 14 #2
She rolls her shoulder against invisible tension—a tension I feel in my own shoulders with my bag straps digging into me all the time.
But I keep mine on for now and ask, “Is Arwyn really your brother?”
Loose down her back, her sharp, glacier hair glares in the torchlight. It bounces the light onto the old, scratched counter.
If she’s surprised by my sudden question, she doesn’t show it. She just rolls that shoulder over and over. “Brother. Yes.”
I wander to the service counter. “But you’re not the same kind of fae.”
Slowly, she angles to face me—turning more as I draw closer to the desk. “Not same.”
Behind the counter, a cheap metal rack leans against the wall, stacked full of brochures and leaflets.
“Why ask?” Her broken English is as harsh as the winter we trudged through.
I pull myself up onto the desk, then fling my legs around the other side before landing on my boots with a faint thud.
“I know they’re both different to the rest,” I say. “I just wondered why—and how.”
I throw her a lame look over my shoulder.
Mika steps closer, slinking, and her icy eyes glint against her sickly white complexion. It might be because she had to fight for her life against the poison, but she looks sort of washed out.
I turn my back on her.
“Not they,” she says, and her gravelled accent is closer now, right behind me with the desk between us. “Not Arwyn. You ask for Samick.”
I frown at the glare of brochures.
The light hasn’t settled against the filmy paper and ink, my eyes haven’t adjusted, and in a fleeting moment, I’m snagged on what she said—
I’m not asking how or why they are different.
I’m asking how and why Samick is different.
My mouth slants.
“Your smell is Samick.”
I eye the brochures.
If I don’t turn to look at her, then she can’t see the heat on my face.
I smell like him…
The letterings on the brochures are just scribbles to me. Can’t exactly read while Mika throws me into a pot of shame.
“I tell you.” Her voice softens into a breath, lighter than a sigh. “Males are…”
Her words fade.
I don’t know if she can’t find the ones she searches for, or she doesn’t quite know what to say to me, because she already said it.
“Bad,” I finish for her.
I turn to face her, a frown on my brow.
Mika is draped over the desk.
I didn’t hear her get up on there, but she did, ass planted, legs stretched out, and her back leaning against the wooden post.
Her gaze is fixed on the staircase. “I tell you evate.”
My mind churns for a short moment. “The mates?”
Her hum is faint. “Dokkalves have evate. Litalves have mate.”
“That’s the light fae?”
She turns a stark look on me.
I shrug. “My friend told me about the light ones.”
Her smile grows, sly and wormy. “The kinta.” She doesn’t say it kindly. The flicker of disgust is in her eyes, but she returns to watching the stairs. “Samick, Arwyn—no evate.”
I sink back against the metal rack.
“No mate,” she adds, then she turns her stare on me—and it strikes me how serious it is, the look she lands on me. “ísalf choose.”
I blink. “ísalf?”
Her hand flattens to her chest. “Dokkalf.” Then her hand flitters away from her. “Kinta. Litalf.” Then a curt, final wave to the staircase. “Samick, Arwyn— ísalf.”
ísalf, like ísabroch, like ice elf.
Litalf, like Licht, like light elf.
Dokkalf, like Dorcha, like dark elf.
We say fae—and they do, too.
But in their language, it’s closer to elf. Closer to what the Scandinavians would call them from their lore.
I wonder if their languages blend at all. And if this all means it’ll be not so hard to learn the language in Licht.
Then it’s like I really hear what she said, the meaning of her words.
“They—what? What do you mean they choose?”
Her sharp chin glints paler in the white light. “Choose one.”
“The one?” I frown at her. “So like humans then? We pick a person to marry—”
“No,” she says, grave.
Something slackens her face, like an unimaginable horror unfolds right in front of her, something I can’t see, and she turns that horrified look on me.
“Not human. Never like human.” The soberness of her voice, the panic that ushers beneath it, chills my spine. “ísalf choose forever. One. Forever.”
I shrug off the brochure rack and turn to face it.
This time, I actually focus on the letters until the words form under the stark light.
“Forever is a long ass time,” I mutter.
The words are hollow.
They feel as empty as the lethargic smile I aim over my shoulder at her, the one that tries to shut the whole conversation down, because I don’t want to hear another word of it.
“Maybe why Samick watch you.”
Her shit articulation is getting easier to understand—but I wish it wasn’t.
“Maybe why Samick feed you. Protect you.”
Mika is saying things that shouldn’t be said, that should not even be thought.
I wanted to know why Samick can do the things he can—not about Samick and me.
I keep my back to her and pluck out a map from among the brochures. “I’m his ward,” I say. “He does all of that for Dare.”
Bootsteps come thudding down the stairs—and I’m glad for it.
It shuts Mika up.
Arwyn returns.
I tuck the map into the pocket of my rain jacket, then zip it shut.
It’s another while longer before Samick is back and we move into a large, carpeted room, not unlike those cheap rent-a-rooms for weddings and conferences.
They always look so awful going in, but they end up with the best parties.
Samick tosses seat cushions onto the floor, Arwyn sets out blankets he stole from the rooms upstairs.
Mika drapes herself over stacks of pillows, like she’s trying to nest, and steals more blankets than she should.
I cape a quilt around my shoulders and huddle against the frosty air.
We eat out of our supplies, not from the kitchens at the hotel. No hotpots to fill my belly, just sweaty sticks of fae-world salami and crisps. The meat-sticks—smoky and chewy—are suspiciously filling, like ate my heart out at a restaurant kind of filling.
I just finish mine off when Samick and Arwyn go over the map again.
I hate the whole silver lining mindset. That’s more Bee’s thing than mine. But maybe there is one here.
The map is spread out over the carpet, right in front of me, under the glare of the torchlight—and I can make it out a bit better now.
Signals are inked onto the map, little backwards Ps and stretched Ws and upside down Vs.
All that, I don’t understand. I don’t even try to.
But the trails, I do.
The black lines have to be the routes of other units. The red line is theirs.
Red curves through mountain terrain, winds around waters, then cuts through land that looks a lot like the page in the map I have in my jacket pocket.
But on my map, there are no foreign signals and letters. It’s just plain old English, subtitled with French, and it says, ‘NEW brUNSWICK’.
So I know that, if they unfold their map at the bottom, just a bit more, I’ll see the routes to Nova Scotia.
My dad lives just outside of Halifax.
Lived.
He’s dead.
Definitely dead.
I have no silly hopes or delusions that my dad is alive. And even if he was…
I wouldn’t give a shit.
Sometimes I wonder if something is wrong with me.
Mum used to wonder the same thing.
Took me to a counsellor once, when I was about twelve or thirteen years old. Then another. Then another.
Never found an answer.
Not one she shared with me, at least.
I curl up on the disgusting carpet.
I don’t need to study the map anymore.
I saw all I needed to.
I know where I am, I know where the unit is headed—and I saw it.
At the east coast, all the routes bow to meet at one spot. When I get a chance, I’ll mark that same spot on my own map.
But for now, the image is burned to memory, and I drift off with a cold mist of breath fogging around my face.
No campfires to keep me warm through my broken sleep, and it doesn’t feel very long at all before Samick wakes me and we’re on the move again.
Another long walk.
Maybe since I saw the map, and I saw with my own fucking eyes how close the end is, the patience in me snapped. Like when I hold in a pee for too long and I actually see the toilet, I’m suddenly bouncing and dancing around in a frenzy to not piss myself.
The plush cuff doesn’t tug on my wrist, my boots don’t scuff over the tough road, and not even the sharp winds slow me down.
Now, I keep up just fine through the dark.
I don’t let myself fall into the hope that I’ll see her soon. If I do, I’ll spiral. I’ll freak out. I’ll run and ruin everything.
Just a bit longer.
I’m almost there.
After months of this, I can take another couple of weeks. I can be patient.
I pick at the cuff. Not because it’s uncomfortable, but because it’s the opposite.
It used to be a rope. Sleek and silky to the touch, a deceptive feel to it—but after a short time of having it bound to my wrist, it became sandpaper against my skin, tugging back and forth, back and forth.
Samick didn’t give a shit about that.
He wasn’t careful about the way he handled me, so why would he give two fucks about a rope around my wrist?
Somewhere along the way in this journey, he did notice, he did give a shit, and he sewed some soft, fluffy wool to leather, and made this.
The cuff that I pick at in the dark.
I know what Mika was implying—
Because I’ve thought it myself.
A few times.
But I just can’t risk it, the rumination, the fear, the fucking delusion of it all.
Because I’m almost there…
I can block the dangerous thoughts from my mind, lock everything away in the vault, but I can’t block out his cold voice—
“You are quiet,” he says, and it’s like a whisper of the winds, a breeze through the darkness.
I frown at him, or where I estimate him to be, but I might be frowning an inch away from his face for all I know.
“I talk a lot, actually.”
“No.” His answer comes through the dark like frost in the air—so soft that I don’t know if Mika and Arwyn can hear him. Then I feel it, the pressure of his fingertips on my breastbone. “You are quiet.”
The urge to strike his hand away runs through me like ice down my arm, all the way to my curling fingers—but I don’t do anything, and his touch disappears after a moment.
“Quiet?” I echo. “You hear people’s feelings, too?”
I thought he only felt them, like bubbles swelling through the air. That’s the picture I had in my mind, at least.
For a long moment, faint and soft bootsteps are all I hear—until his answer comes, and it’s so quiet, I almost doubt I even heard it, “Yours.”
I blink, once, twice. “You hear mine?”
Silence is the answer I get.
Maybe he nods in the dark and forgets I can’t fucking see him, or maybe he just stares at me in that way he does, sometimes annoyed, sometimes observant.
I press, “You hear my feelings? Do you hear others?”
Bootsteps, soft and treading on the road, then, “I hear you. You are… loud.”
An incredulous look crumples my face—because that definitely sounded like an insult. “I’m loud?”
“You are…” he pauses, as if to find the right words, maybe the right translation, then settles on, “clattering and clashing. Very loud.”
A scoff catches in my throat and jerks my shoulders. “Don’t invade my world and kill all my people, then? Maybe that’s why I’m loud?”
Dick.
I don’t know why I’m so offended.
It feels like an insult, but there’s so much he’s done and said already that I should be pissed about—yet it’s this that rises something ugly in me.
His gravelly accent comes soft, “I heard you the first time I saw you. In my life, I have never heard pain or fear. It is grating.”
My upper lip curls into a silent snarl.
Before I can snap at him, he adds, “But most grating when you are quiet.”
The snarl fades.
My face softens into something blank.
I stare straight ahead into the dark, the rope swaying my wrist at my side.
“Sometimes,” I start, and slide a meaningful look into the blackout, “quiet is best. Sometimes, quiet is needed.”
I almost expect him to retort, to yank the tether just to trip me up, or give one of those spine-chilling snarls.
But moments pass by, and nothing happens.
No chill of his anger in the air.
No frost climbing up the cuff.
He’s just quiet.
So am I.
Because it’s best that way.
Not everything has to be said. Not everything should be.
Like now…
Now, my mind is flittering back to the first time I saw him. I watched him and his unit walk through the darkness, watched Rust slaughter Ramona on the street, and saw Samick’s cold, unfeeling face in harsh torchlight, utterly unfeeling.
But he wasn’t unfeeling.
He was confused, baffled, curious—all of it and maybe more.
Because for the first time in his life, however long that’s been, he heard someone’s terror.
I wasn’t an echo.
Now I know why he was staring at me. Me, who didn’t lift the gun, didn’t shoot at them.
And I hate that I think back to then, when fae were monsters from the dark, and I saw them only as that. I didn’t see them as people, individuals, with personalities and preferences and friendships.
Because now…
Now I know, Samick is a creative. He sketches and draws and sews and cooks.
I hate that I know that.
I hate that I know about his family, his pain, his childhood.
I need, desperately, for him to be a monster again.