Chapter 46 Break
brEAK
SAERIS
THE WAR CAMP was bustling. Fae warriors milled around fires, eating from tin pots.
They wrestled in the mud. Satyrs wove through the mud-spattered tents, hawking grilled meat on skewers and roasted corn.
The smell of the food—and all the blood—was maddening, but I didn’t have any time for that.
I’d searched half the camp by the time I’d found what, or rather who, I was looking for.
She stood in the middle of a group of males, poring over a rumpled piece of paper.
When she looked up from whatever it was that busied her, she did not look happy.
“Saeris,” she said, folding the piece of paper and handing it off to one of her friends. “To what do we owe the pleasure?”
“I need your help, Danya.”
The hair she’d lost during the attack on Irrín would grow back, but it would take time.
The shorn side of her scalp was marked with stubble now, a darker blond than the rest of her hair.
The warrior crooked an eyebrow at me, her surprise at war with her annoyance.
“Help? From me?” She snorted. “Impossible. Not our precious Alchemist, admitting that something’s beyond her. My ears must be deceiving me.”
I did not have time for this. “Danya, ever since I got here, I’ve done nothing but tell anyone who will listen that I am not equipped to deal with the tasks that have been sent my way. I’ve never pretended otherwise.”
She spat on the ground, her face impassive.
“I need a word with you.” I eyed her friends. Alone.
“If this is about Carrion Swift, you can relax, Little Osha. I don’t have designs on your friend. Not long-term ones, anyway.” She used Fisher’s name for me in a cold way. Made it sound small and pathetic. Her friends bit their lips, snickering under their breath.
So this was how she wanted to play it?
Fine.
She was fucking with the wrong person if she thought I wouldn’t humiliate her in front of her friends.
I drew Erromar and Selanir and spun the blades in my hand, rushing her.
She reached for her blade. And she was a seasoned warrior.
She’d slain more feeders than I could count, but I wasn’t a feeder.
I wasn’t a Fae warrior, either. I had been human first, and now there was a good dose of vampire blood in my veins.
I was faster than I had any right to be, and I was stronger than Danya to boot.
With the edges of my short swords grazing her jaw, Danya had no other option but to surrender—
But she was stupid.
So fucking arrogant.
She raised her hands, but the action was a ruse. She tried to grab my right wrist, to punch my own sword back into my face, but trains of thought kindled and died in my head in the time it took her to curl her fingers around my wrist.
My right foot slipped behind her left. My leg hooked inside her leg, and I slammed my left palm into her chest, right between her breasts.
She left the ground and sailed through the air, and a part of me crowed with satisfaction when she landed on her ass in the mud ten feet away.
I kept that part of me hidden. A good leader never demonstrated pleasure at the embarrassment of an ally.
Not that I was Danya’s leader . . . and not that I was one hundred percent sure I could call her an ally, but it was still poor form to gloat.
Her friends weren’t laughing anymore. They averted their eyes, looking anywhere and everywhere but at Danya, as I trudged through the mud and held out my hand to the female. I kept my expression blank and my voice even as I repeated, “I need your help.”
She glowered at me, all venom and suspicion. “And why would I help you, Alchemist? You’ve been nothing but a thorn in my side since you arrived in this realm.” She sneered at my hand as if it were a dune asp, reared back and ready to strike.
“You’ll help me because we’re on the same team,” I told her. “Because, despite how many fights you pick with him and how angry you are with him, Fisher is still your commander, and you still love him.”
Her objection was instantaneous. “I don’t love hi—”
I cut her off. “Yes. You do. I don’t mean romantically, and you know it. You love Fisher because of all that he’s done for this realm. Because he’s always been there for you—”
“Until he wasn’t,” she snapped. I knew the anger that burned in her eyes too well. She was furious with Fisher, but not for the reasons that she pretended.
“Yes, until he wasn’t,” I said, agreeing.
“But you’re not angry with him for leaving you, are you, Danya?
You’re angry with yourself for not believing in him enough to start with.
You knew he’d never abandon his warriors, and yet you chose to hide behind the lie Belikon told.
That was easier than losing your friend, wasn’t it?
Easier than not knowing where he was and not being able to find him, not being able to help him. He doesn’t blame you, Danya.”
“Shut the fuck up,” she hissed.
“He knows you would have come for him if you could have.”
“You don’t know what you’re fucking talking about!”
“I know Kingfisher,” I said slowly. “But I haven’t known him anywhere near as long as you.
He was your brother—your blood—for centuries before I was born.
And I know there’s no way you fought alongside him all those years without forming an unshakable bond with him.
This rage inside of you is a shield. It protects you from the emotions you can’t face.
From the guilt and the knowledge that you left him in Gillethrye.
You were with him on the battlements, weren’t you?
You helped him defend that city. When it fell, you helped him burn it.
And then you listened to the vicious lies of a male you knew to be evil, and you left your friend there, to suffer in that eternal maze—”
“Stop.”
Her tone lacked its previous acid. The word was small, a hiccup of a thing, jarring the air between us.
Danya stared at me, propping herself up on her elbows in the mud, her eyes reflective as drowning pools.
She was as stubborn as they came. She wouldn’t admit that I was right.
But she couldn’t deny that I was wrong, either.
“What do you want from me, Alchemist?” she muttered.
“Want? Hah!” Laughter boiled up the back of my throat.
I clamped my lips shut and caught it before it could burst out of my mouth and make me look crazy.
Feeling crazy was enough, thank you very much.
“It’s very simple, Danya. You’ll probably even enjoy it.
I want you to punch me in the face as hard as you can. ”
Danya’s eyes widened. “What?”
“I need you to knock me out.”
She recoiled, sinking deeper into the mud. “You’re insane,” she said.
“Probably. But it’ll help save Fisher. Now, do you want to abandon him to his fate for a second time, or do you want to help him, Danya? Because there are at least three other people I can ask—”
“I’ll do it,” she rushed out. “I mean, I’ve been wanting to knock you out cold ever since I met you. I’d be a fool to turn down the opportunity, wouldn’t I?”
“That’s the spirit. You should hit me right here, under the—”
The female leaped to her feet. She swung, and I saw it coming. I did nothing to stop her. I’d asked for it anyway. What would have been the poi—
Dust motes hung in the frigid air. They caught the eerie light that prowled in through the windows but didn’t move, as if they had been frozen in place.
The dining table was set for eight. In the center of the table, a copper tureen shuddered, its lid rattling.
The plates were piled high with delicacies: roasted fowl, buttered vegetables, miniature pies, and trenchers full of gravy.
All of it was rotten. Maggots crawled among the meat.
Flies crawled over the silverware and feasted on the decay.
At each place setting, crystal goblets overflowed with viscous black liquid, moving .
. . gods, there was something moving inside the glasses.
My surroundings drew in tight as I realized where I was. This wasn’t the huntsman’s cottage. I’d focused very hard, right before Danya’s fist had found my jaw, to make sure I wouldn’t wake up there. I was right where I needed to be—in Cahlish.
The windows were all smashed out in the dining room, just as they had been the first time I’d encountered the feeders.
A fire spat in the hearth, but the flames were not yellow.
They weren’t even the strange green of evenlight.
They were gray and black, the color of smoke and shadow, though there was nothing brilliant or magical about it.
It was just a lifeless fire, all the vibrancy drained from it and gone.
The rot covered the walls and crept along the baseboards.
Black tendrils of malignant power, searching for something biological to feast upon.
It had already drained the house. The paint peeled from the cracked walls.
The rugs were worn to ash, the floorboards beneath brittle and dry as ancient old bones.
Even here, in my dream, Cahlish had been claimed.
It was a hollow shell of what it had been just yesterday, and seeing it like this, so faded and dead, tore something at the root of my soul.
The faces of the males and females in the paintings on the walls, Fisher’s ancestors all, looked down on me with consternation, as if they blamed me for the state of their home and hoped that I would do something about it.
But there was nothing to be done. Cahlish was gone.
“Fisher!”
My shout echoed through the infected estate. I held my breath and waited.
Waited . . .
“Kingfisher! Where are you?”
Only my own panicked shout came back to me.
Where are you?
. . . are you?