Chapter 5
FIVE
However long I’ve been restrained to the cart, I’m not exactly sure to the minute, or even the hour, but I know it’s been long enough for naps to drape over the camp, then consciousness to return.
I can hardly feel my arms anymore.
That numbness throbs in my veins, pulsing through my arms, and I squirm against it, like if I can find the perfect angle to sit, then it will relieve the numb ache and get my blood flowing again.
My attempts halt the moment a human man rushes by me, his boots smacking on the earth much too close to mine.
I cringe my boots back, closer to myself, and watch him rush up the camp to the peak. The creases of a frown burrow into my sleepy face.
I must have drifted off again, passed out, because the restrained human is gone and, with a heavy glance around the carts, the other is, too.
The tents that were erected down the camp, most of the ‘stage’—the throne and table and whips and maps and post—has been dismantled and packed away.
Now all that’s left up there is a wooden crate-like box of blackwood, slick and glossy. The human man grips it by the brass handles then, straining with a face that’s fast to turn into a beetroot, he leans into his own weight and heaves it away.
For a while, I watch him struggle with the crate. Must be heavier than it looks, and not of this world. He hauls it onto the back of a cart, the kind that are steed-drawn by the skeletal beasts.
The man wrestles the crate onto the cart, shoving his weight into it, the toes of his sneakers sliding over the frosty dirt. It goes on a while until, finally, it’s pushed against the throne, already packed on there and fastened to the edge of the cart with rope.
I wonder if they brought the throne with them, here to our realm, or if the dark fae are running around old castles and stealing thrones before burning down our historical landmarks.
But then, even in my haze and stupor, I can make out the resemblance between the crate and the throne—
The material.
They are both crafted from some sort of glossy black wood that I’ve never seen before, not like it’s painted, but rather raw and fresh and unstained, yet still rich with a natural inky hue.
It must’ve come from their realm.
Just like that chalky metal that makes up some of their weapons, or the slender black rope around my wrists, or even the metal hook that I’m tied to. None of those materials are familiar to me, and all of them seem otherworldly.
Not all of the camp comes from their realm.
The food is mostly from ours.
I watch another man—human with an overgrown beard and weathered eyes—drag a hefty bag of rice across the dirt to the cart that’s closest to their end of camp.
This past hour, or what feels like an hour, I have come to learn the purpose of the captive humans.
Slavery.
The camp is being packed up. The humans are the ones doing it.
But the dark fae are unhurried.
Their movements are casual, relaxed, as they pack their satchels and wipe down their leathers and fill their waterskins and sheath their weapons.
Each song of a dagger sinking into its casing shudders my spine. Knives are tucked into sleeves, into the edges of boots, some carefully coil whips around their forearms, others draw scabbards over their heads to sling across their backs.
The procession of movement is somewhat lazy on them, a calm routine, with muttered words and shared looks between them, a familiarity that sits uneasy in my gut.
Some even share smiles.
Then a stocky woman draws in my dull gaze. Another captive. Short, but as tall as some of the swords carried by the warriors. I guess her to be around 5ft, but she’s strong, and she’s hauling a stack of laundry baskets through the camp, full of glistening leathers and black armours and chain-links.
The baskets are balanced on the bone of her hip, practiced, as she moves through the camp, stopping here and there at dark fae.
Most of the warriors don’t pay her any mind, don’t so much as glance her way.
A few linger their stares over her, looks of disgust furrowing their smooth, perfect faces.
Others, just a couple, watch her with more interest as she places folded leathers and delicately draped armours on the ground beside them.
Then their dilated stares, the gazes of bored predators, follow her on to the next.
The enslaved people have purpose here.
Before now, I never paid any thought to how the dark fae keep their leathers clean or feed themselves or dished out duties in their camps.
They don’t.
That’s the answer.
They keep human slaves for chores.
And when fresh, clean leathers are returned to them, those are packed into the satchels as spares.
From watching the camp, I learn that there are plenty of roles to be filled by the captives. The dousing of campfires, dismantling the dozen tents erected up the upper end of the site, lugging buckets and plastic cases of water to the carts, washing dishes and pots as tall as my legs.
Then my observations are jolted out of my mind when the cart I’m tied to jolts against my spine.
I flinch and swerve a look up at the edge.
A man’s head bobs.
Just… bobs.
I blink, once, twice—
Then deflate with a breath.
Yeah, my head is seriously fucked up.
It takes me seconds, long and weighted seconds, to realise that the human man is moving things around, that his head isn’t actually floating around the cart.
He’s hunched over in a way that makes my own back hurt, in a way that would have a physiotherapist cringing, and he stacks firewood. Bags of it, plastic-wrapped, and precut.
I turn my back on him.
The thudding of the cart annoys me, rattles against my back, but I ignore and search for the cold one.
Been a while since I saw him, and he was down at the guarded circle, taking his serve of the meals that he missed out on when he was disposing of his steed.
Now, he’s at the head of camp.
Where the throne once was, the general stands, proud. The cold warrior towers over her in height alone, but his weight is leaned back onto one boot and his chin slightly tucked.
Samick.
My mouth curls.
I hate that he has a name.
I don’t quite know why I hate that, I just do.
For him to have a name… it means that he has an identity, a life—friends and family, even, passions and hatreds…
Just to acknowledge that feels like I’m humanising him in some twisted way, and I get that same disgusted curl in my chest as when I watched the fae share smiles and laughter.
I want them nameless.
Him, most of all.
The darkness of my stare simmers.
The light of the fires is dimming, extinguished one by one, but the remaining flames flicker warmth over his profile.
His eyes are untouched by the warmth, they are icicles in the low light, aimed at the general.
Their conversation doesn’t look all that friendly.
The general might be smaller than him, smaller and thinner, but she is still packed with muscle, and the way she considers him, a lifted chin and upright gaze, it carries a sense of superiority, like she’s somehow still looking down on him.
Threads of dark reddish hair are braided to her scalp in a way I’ve never seen before, something that—at first glance—looks like a slick-back.
But the longer I stare, the better I make out the slightness of those braids going from her hairline to her crown, where the ends are all bunched in some kind of knot.
She wears her authority in the black crown pinned to her head over that ugly-as-fuck hairstyle.
Then, she gives a mere jerk of her pointed chin—and the cold warrior dips his head, curt, before he pushes away from her.
He turns on his heels…
And starts for me.
I throw my gaze away before our stares can lock. But I feel his advance, his stare.
My shoulders curve inwards, tense, the sting of the wound burning at my flesh, reaching deep into the surface of bone.
I bite back a wince.
And before I know it, the warrior is towering over me.
I’m not the general.
I don’t stand tall and proud.
I shrink even smaller at the sudden appearance of his thin-soled boots on the frosted, dead earth.
My own boots are tucked so close to myself that the heels press into the curve of my ass, and still, I try to shrink even more.
The cold warrior says nothing as he drops to a knee, then reaches for the hook above me, the slender black rope tethered to it, that same sort of rope that the net was threaded with.
Bee couldn’t cut it, couldn’t saw through it—even with Emily trapped in the net.
I have no delusions of thinking I’ll get my wrists free of the rope. Might as well be iron.
And it’s apparently tied intricately. Seconds pass, and still, the warrior patiently works on the braided knot of the rope.
I lift my chin from the bite of my knees and fix my stare at the dried blood on his black leathers.
That poor steed.
Ghastly, otherworldly, it doesn’t matter.
That death will haunt me to the end of my days.
I’ve seen that before. A throat just ripped out by brute force, a strength so powerful that I didn’t even see the struggle of it, it just… happened.
One second, he was reassuring it. The next, a throat was pulsing in his hand.
I blink, and it’s different, it’s Ramona’s throat, it’s a fiery fae with embers for eyes and a rage stirring in him.
I shake off the memory, forcing my mind back to the twitching, whining steed.
I almost weep for it, the creature.
But the moment my throat thickens, the chest in front of me tenses—and it’s like watching a dark stream run over boulders.
That tension ripples through him.
I don’t dare look up.
Cringed, I wait out his moment of tension, his stillness, his stare burning into my head.
Then, finally, a guttural sound catches in the back of his throat, like a curt scoff, and he starts back on the knot.
The pull on my wrists jangles with his harsh attack on the rope, pulling and grabbing, and my arms are rattled with the motion.
Still, I wait for the braid to be undone, feeling the seconds pass me by in dread.