Chapter 9
The petite redhead woke first, groggy and confused.
Audra tried to keep her calm, but the moment she spied her brother—pale, still as death, all bruised and bloodied—she lost it.
Gripping his shoulders, she shook him violently as she shrieked, “Callum,” over and over.
It took both Audra and Wilder to calm the woman down enough to explain that her brother was asleep, not dead.
Finally, she released the grip on her brother and even accepted water, which she gulped down eagerly.
The redhead, whose name was Cersha, eventually, if reluctantly, left her brother’s side long enough to allow Wilder to show both her and Audra to the lavatory.
Which was just a back room that the fae had converted into one.
As prison lavatories went, this could have been worse.
Multiple curtains had been hung for privacy, buckets were plentiful, and, according to Wilder, they were changed out numerous times a day by fae guards.
Basins filled with soapy and clean water were also provided for washing up.
Still, the whole thing was uncomfortable, pitiful, awful.
Wilder went back to doling out water. Cersha eventually fell back asleep, and Audra found herself alone once more. She was just beginning to doze when the door was thrust open. Audra and a few others sprang to their feet.
Audra’s body was tense, stretched tight as a bowstring as three guards stormed into the room. Their uniforms were a deep burgundy with brass buckles, and their weapons gleamed.
“Dinner,” one of them barked as the guards dropped three large canvas sacks onto the floor.
“Don’t approach the door until it’s been latched and closed,” another guard ordered when someone took a step forward. All three guards’ hands moved toward the swords secured on their belts.
The person froze.
The guards backed through the door, their gazes sweeping around the room.
The moment the last lock turned, there was a rush, a frenzy, as people raced toward the door.
One person attempted to run off with an entire canvas sack to themselves, while another ripped one open and began shoving food directly into their mouth.
Audra watched the frenzy with unease yet made no move to approach.
But Wilder, a natural leader, wasn’t having this.
She stepped in the way of the person fleeing with the entire sack of food and simply stood, her arms crossed.
A single moment of indecision, and he bowed his head, offering the bag to her.
A moment later, she was standing at the front of the room holding all three bags.
“I know some of you are new here,” she shouted over the few people protesting; most, Audra noticed, stayed on their bunks as if they knew the drill.
“But meals are regular. Three times a day, we get food, and it’s always been enough.
In about half an hour, fresh drinking water will also be supplied.
We do not have to fight over the food. If a few people will volunteer to help me sort it, the rest of you can go back to your beds.
Bunk by bunk, you can come up and get your share.
It will,” she said, cutting off the noble who looked furious, “be allocated evenly to everyone.”
Audra sighed. She might as well volunteer. And she wasn’t the only one.
Half an hour later, Audra sat on her bunk, tearing a chunk from her bread, a hearty roll brimming with dried fruit, pumpkin seeds, and roasted nuts, and she popped it in her mouth.
Under normal circumstances, she might relish the sweetness of the berries, savor the high-quality, nutrient-rich wheat, but under these circumstances … the roll tasted of ash.
There had almost been a real conflict—but Wilder had regained order so quickly.
Audra couldn’t help but admire her. There was something about the soldier that made people crave her approval.
They listened when she spoke, were eager to offer up help or take Wilder’s direction.
Even the noble who hadn’t lifted a hand to help anyone but himself didn’t protest when he received the same amount as everyone else.
Wilder had handed him the roll, her gaze firm, challenging him to make a fuss, and he had taken the hunk of bread and the beeswax paper wrapped around three strips of smoked fish without a fuss.
And for some reason, after the ordeal with the redheads and the food delegation, Wilder had grabbed her army-issued boots and empty sword belt and had just walked over to where Audra sat on her bunk, given her a kind smile, climbed up the ladder to the bunk above hers, and fallen asleep, choosing to bunk with Audra.
Audra swallowed the bread, pausing to listen to Wilder’s even breathing.
Forgotten gods, she wished she could sleep, but her mind was reeling, mulling over the pieces to the puzzle that Wilder possessed, and the pieces she had. Though some fit together, they weren’t creating any clearer a picture.
Audra’s mother used to tell her that she was a gift bestowed upon her parents by a goddess.
Despite the gods abandoning all humans centuries ago, her parents had prayed for a child anyway—and somehow, one morning, their wish had been granted.
Through divine intervention, baby Audra had appeared: a happy, curly-haired baby sleeping between them.
Of course, when Audra was older, her parents admitted the truth: her birthmother was a Nightly, too young to be working in the brothels on the wharf.
She should have never been put in that predicament, and when Audra’s birthmother had fled the brothel, leaving her baby behind in Fernwell Inn, she had been left as a miracle to slumber between two loving parents, but swaddled in a pillowcase, left all alone in a room; Audra’s birthmother hadn’t even given her a name.
But still, before she was old enough to hear the truth, Audra had believed her parents’ happier tale.
If she were truly a gift from the forgotten gods, she must be magic too.
She would climb into the sea caves hunting for magical artifacts (which she never found, of course), so she settled for ordinary local flora and fauna.
She would chant made-up spells as she mashed seaweed and kelp together in a wooden bowl and dripped seawater into her potion, all while wishing for it to be magic.
She would make up stories, telling her mother and father that it had worked.
She even tried to sell these potions to their guests: love potions, potions to increase one’s speed, or ones for good luck.
Of course, Aisha put a stop to it when a merchant’s kid actually drank one and threw up saltwater, crushed fish bones, and seaberries.
Audra had balked at her punishment; he’d been older than she and should’ve known better!
Her childhood potions were just disgusting concoctions that, thankfully, weren’t poisonous, but they were not magic. Because long ago, the fae had left Khaveah, and they’d taken their magic and the gods with them.
Magic did not exist anywhere in all the realm.
The crown liked to pretend that it was the humans’ ancestors who had won the thousand-year war and banished the fae nations from Khaveah as penance.
Depending on what nation within Khaveah you hailed from, it was always that nation that forged the Mist using the last remaining vestiges of magic—to protect humanity from the evil, monstrous fae and to prevent another thousand-year war.
But everyone above the age of seven knew the truth.
Humanity had no more say in the forging of the Mist than whether or not the legendary red whale was going to swallow one of them whole.
One night, magic had disappeared.
The fae couldn’t or wouldn’t live without it, so they left en masse. They put the Mist in place so that humans, mere mortals cursed and abandoned by their own gods, couldn’t follow.
That being said, the fae weren’t supposed to be able to wield magic on mortal land. Somehow, they had used the Mist to conceal their ships and had wielded it as a weapon to descend upon Salt Hollow, confusing and distracting the inhabitants.
Wilder had said it was the same for Fort Royalta. Or ‘Ta Town, as she called it.
Audra fluffed her pillow and tried to get comfortable.
She’d eaten the rest of the bread and fish, so Audra chewed her lip. Sleep loomed no closer. Afraid her thoughts would turn to her family, she redirected them to her current predicament.
The key must be in who was aboard this ship. Who, out of thousands in Khaveah, were chosen to be aboard this ship.
High-class, low-class. Soldiers. Civilians. All in their twenties. And as Wilder had pointed out, multiple sets of siblings.
Some of them were parents. Audra’s heart ached for all of them, but especially one woman—Margaryte. She’d been the one screaming when Audra had first awoken.
According to Wilder, Margaryte hadn’t stopped screaming since she’d woken on the ship—the fae had torn her newborn babe from her arms, before tossing him to her husband as if the infant were a cabbage.
Eventually, while Audra slept, two veiled priestesses, their heads bowed, entered the holding room, descending upon Margaryte.
They held something to her nose, Wilder thought herbs of some kind, and when her wails quieted, they smoothed her hair back from her tear-slicked face and gave her a draught.
Margaryte swallowed it down without a fight, and finally she slept.
When she’d awoken, she hadn’t begun screaming again, but she seemed incapable of silence, as though she needed to drown out her own thoughts.
Even now, Audra could hear Margaryte humming to herself in her bed across the way, picking at the bloody scabs where her fingernails had torn off in the wood grain of the wall, her eyes open but unseeing. Margaryte’s baby was so new, milk dripped from her breasts through her nightgown.