Chapter 16
SIXTEEN
It’s a horrible coincidence that I’ve been here before.
A long, long time ago—with my dad.
It was a little surprise bonding trip he sprung on me after my mum forced me on that plane with an attendant to watch over me for the whole flight, then Dad thought it was a great idea to distract me from how much I hated him with a camping trip.
Even better, he brought Liam along.
My ‘brother’.
I would have felt more related to a cousin—if I had any.
Liam was such a brat on that trip.
If my dad so much as handed me a chocolate bar, the moment it touched my fingers, Liam’s face would turn purple like a pickled beetroot, and he would scream, and scream, and scream.
Nothing could console him.
Even his own chocolate bar.
Didn’t matter. He wanted to be the only one.
Guess there was something we had in common after all. I just went about my dark, secret wish in a moody way, sulking the whole damn trip, instead of making everything a show, a performance.
I hated how my dad never did anything about it, either. He would coddle Liam. Tend to him.
I felt the stares of other campers. The judgement. And I was mortified.
More than the actual parent.
That’s a problem.
So I pushed Liam off the dock. It was one time, but I got a verbal lashing for it.
Not my fault he couldn’t swim.
I was just so fucking done with it all.
I’ve felt like a third wheel too many times in my life to count, but that was a week straight of it.
No escape; just tucked away in a mossy forest with a sweaty tent and damp socks, and other happier families around us.
If I had to rank the worst weeks of my life, that one would be pretty high up there.
Another thing I hated about the trip was how far away the bay was from the camping ground. And that each time I went out to get some air or watch the water, the tide would be up and the shore completely swallowed.
But this time, the tide is out.
It won’t be for long.
I remember being stuck in the tide, because Liam didn’t want to go back to camp, because I caught a fish (that I let go after I cried over it), and he didn’t catch anything.
So I had to stand ankle-deep in rising tide, and watch as my dad threw in the biggest fish from the catch-bucket into the water, hooked on the line, and put on a hell of a performance for Liam to reel it in.
Dad already caught it.
It was already dead.
But that was the only thing that got Liam to shut the fuck up that day.
Then I got in trouble for being too sour and bringing the mood down?
God, I really hated that kid. Dad, too.
The memory comes with so much sour intensity that I feel my mood darkening, like a storm cloud is coming to thunder and rain above me.
Samick’s cheekbone glistens as he turns to look at me.
The torchlights lifted around the camp dance over the pallor of his complexion.
His hand stills over the clasp of the satchel he’s crouched at.
He feels it, the darkness settling over me.
No.
Not feel.
He hears it.
I think of pots and pans clashing together.
It almost lifts the corner of my mouth, almost makes me smile—how fucking ridiculous it is. All of it. Darkness swallowing our world, fae warrior invaders, hordes of special captives, and him.
I don’t smile.
I spare him a cold glance before I shift around to face the water—
Just as Arwyn’s bare arse moves into my line of sight.
My face crumples.
I swerve my stare to the next fae, but that one is just as naked as Arwyn, like all the others I quickly learn.
A horde of bare bodies moving towards the water.
Some carry soap and cloths, others are empty handed, but they are all too bare-arsed for my liking.
Far down the edge of the shore, where the guards keep watch, kuris start on their chores.
Laundry.
I watch them work, because it’s better than watching naked fae in the water, and there’s nothing else to entertain me.
I should have fought harder against re-joining the unit. I forgot how boring it gets.
The kuris just do laundry. Wash leathers, take toothbrushes to chain-link armours and scrub.
It’s mundane work, but they get on ok. They talk. Mouths move through the gleams of torchlights, smiles are bitten down on, hidden, and they work together.
The kuris help each other.
Ankle-deep in the water, leathers are dunked and scrubbed, then tossed to the next kuri whose arms are outright and waiting, then the leathers are carried back to another group who wipe them down with towels, and on and on that goes.
Still, just because they have started to get used to their lives now doesn’t mean they get to be happy about it.
That’s madness.
These supposed distant descendants of halflings and fae and kintas. All to be rounded up and taken into literal slavery.
I’m still not so sure I even know what that means.
But I’m also utterly convinced my mind has gone into some sort of standby or default mode, a focus on survival only, and there’s no room left for all these spun stories of folklore come to life, of fae babies hidden in the human world and all that nonsense.
I see no signs of faeness in the kuris.
No pointed ears, no sharper canines, no off-coloured eyes, nothing peculiar in the way they move beyond exhaustion and cold and stiffness in their joints.
Joint pain, I can relate to.
My shoulders are stiffer than a corpse in winter, just from having my backpack straps tugging down on them for so long.
Now, that backpack is shrugged off and I get the slightest bit of relief—though it’s always temporary.
For now, I can just sit here and relax before the tide swallows the shore. Before then, we’ll get up and move on. As we always do.
I shift on the damp packed sand.
My backpack presses into the small of my spine as I try to lean on it. I don’t know if it’s the batteries wedging into my back, but it’s uncomfortable.
I draped my rain jacket over the bag when we first got here, since it’s not so cold, and I’m beginning to feel suffocated in all these layers all the time. But now, the rain jacket rustles and slips over the backpack as I try to get comfortable, and it’s annoying.
I give up.
I nestle into myself, chin on my tucked-up knees, arms around my folded legs. And I watch as, opposite me, Mika drops down onto the sand and baskets her legs. Her spine is straight, not a flaw to her posture, not like me when I basket my legs and suddenly turn hunchback.
She faces the water.
I look around for Samick. But he isn’t there, where his satchel lies on the sand, opened and parted, where he was just moments ago.
My neck twists painfully. I look up the shore to the general.
And there he is.
His back faces me.
Torchlight rolls over him, dancing on his tight leathers—tight with tension.
The general is small and slight, but now that I look at her, really look at her as a person almost, I can see why she is in her position. A lord overlooking almost a hundred male warriors crafted from bloodlust and sculpted from muscle.
She’s small, but she’s agile. She’s slight, but she stands as a picture of pride and power.
It’s her eyes that haunt me.
Even from across the shore.
Her eyes are voids, too bleak for any face, even the face of a fae.
She watches Samick. Not just listens to his words, she searches his face, his eyes, his soul for answers deeper than the ones he gives.
I have no doubt he’s telling her what’s happened since the prison—and maybe from a better perspective than what Rust would offer.
I wonder if he even tells the general that he killed Rust or if that’s been left out of the story.
Either way, he might be a while up there.
I shift onto my elbows, digging them into the sand, and slump on my bag. Still not comfortable.
Mika guzzles from her waterskin. The bloated leather belly of the container is recessing under her grip.
She draws the nozzle away from her damp lips with a breathy sigh.
“So long.”
Her voice is breathy and quiet. At first, it blends in with the gentle breeze brushing over the shore.
I almost miss it entirely.
Looking out at the flaming torchlights bouncing off the rippling bay water, she adds, “Too long.”
My face furrows. I echo her words back to her.
“Here,” she says, then tosses her waterskin to rest on her bag. “Too long in world.”
The nod I give is faint.
It has been a very long time.
Months upon months since I saw the fae walking down the road in darkness, and Ramona was killed.
I feel the sadness come over me, like a weighted blanket around my shoulders.
It feels like a lifetime ago.
“It’s almost over,” I say, and my voice surprises me, how thick and hoarse it is, like I’ve just coughed up a lung.
I reach for Samick’s waterskin beside the satchel. “Just a couple more weeks, and I’ll be back with Bee, and you’ll be… I don’t know, wherever you want to be.”
I drink.
But as I lower the waterskin, I notice that Mika’s face has turned to me—and there’s a small, slick smile painted on her lips.
Just the sight of it crawls over my skin. “What?”
Her smile stays glued onto her glassy face. “You not see friend again.”
A frown creases my face into something incredulous. “What?”
Her shrug is silk and ribbons, just like that smile. “Samick keep you.”
The waterskin sloshes under my tightening grip.
“Samick will keep me?” I echo, uncertain, a chill rising in my chest. “He won’t take me to her?”
I need to be sure I’m understanding her clearly through her broken English and harsh accent.
But a part of me wishes I didn’t ask.
Because Mika nods, and her smile fades, not with sadness but into something tranquil.
Her gaze slides back to the bay. “ísalf choose.”
She stares with longing, like all she wants to do is go in the water, wash, or maybe the sight of it reminds her of back home, a place she misses.
But I don’t give two shits about her sadness.
Her words are sinking in—and I’m sinking with them. A cold dread, like liquid metal, pools in my gut.
Then, slowly, my spine slumps, my shoulders droop, and my fingers slip away from the leather waterskin until it drops from my grip.