Chapter 31 #2
“Do you like it?” There was a faint pride in his voice; I might not have heard it if my other senses hadn’t been sharpened by the dark. “At least that’s something then. As terrible as the rest of it is.”
“Don’t rush to let yourself off the hook for bringing me here.”
“Oh, I let myself off the hook long ago. I’ve you to remind me of all my faults.”
My foot slipped again, and he caught me, his other arm flashing around my waist to steady me. I tried to catch my breath. The feel of almost tripping in the darkness, with that unseen length of stairs in front of me, set my heart galloping.
“I’ve got you, Cara,” he reassured me.
I didn’t respond. I just started moving again, down with him into the grim.
The air around us began to grow lighter, and new scents rose up the stairs. Spun sugar, and something acrid and burning, and roasted meat, and fresh greenery.
We turned a corner, and the stairs widened like the grand staircase in a castle. At our feet was laid out a patchwork of stalls that stretched as far as I could see.
“We’ll come back through this exit. Only a few with special favor from the queen can exit the night market in any place. From here, you can reach almost every corner of the kingdom. One night market to unite us all.”
I shivered, despite his cloak.
Lanterns were strung across the high ceiling, casting the market below in flickering, unnatural colors of crimson, violet, and green.
There was too much to see, to make sense of the sights and sounds.
There must have been thousands of stalls, and crooked, crowded paths between them.
One stall held hundreds of weapons, many of them stained with blood.
My gaze skipped hurriedly to the next, where there were dozens of colorful powders in glass jars.
A squat low Fae with a wide mouth and bug eyes and a stall full of knives called, “Need a knife that knows the names it will slay? Need a knife that never misses? Need a knife of letting—”
Along with the voices, there was music. A harp played itself, a haunting, mesmerizing tune. Now, among the lights, I could pick out dangling cages, but the lanterns above them were too bright for me to see what was inside.
“Ready?” Fieran’s voice was patient, and I realized I’d come to a stop on the stairs.
“Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize to me now. I appreciate your consistency in hating me.” His voice was teasing, and that felt grounding too.
When we reached the bottom of the stairs, Fieran threaded through the stalls as if he knew his exact destination.
We passed the harp, which gleamed white—as if it were made of bone—and damp.
I studied it curiously, only for an eye to suddenly snap open at the top.
A deep brown eye—a mortal eye—regarded me just as curiously, still leaking tears, and I pushed toward Fieran, feeling a rise of bile in my throat.
We passed a shop filled with hanging cages; inside were plants, so that it was a profusion of gilt bars and bright greenery.
“Why the cages?”
“Those flowers try to kill their owners at night.” His fingers brushed over a little doorway, and when he took them away, the door yawned just faintly open. “As well they should.”
Then he was pulling me away behind him.
“You’ll have to explain that to me later,” I told him.
“It’s not the only cage I wish I could open.” He glanced up, and my gaze followed his.
Amid the lanterns hung a large cage, roughly my size.
A mortal face pressed suddenly against the bars.
I let out a gasp, rocking back. She stared out into the distance, not looking down at us. She opened her mouth and sang, her voice high and eerie and beautiful.
“Fieran—”
“It wouldn’t help her.” His voice was rough. “Trying to help her would get me banned permanently. What I’m trying to do will change things in a way that matters to more than one sad mortal girl. That matters more than one sad mortal girl.”
Something about his use of the word permanently made me think he had been banned before.
Later, I would think more about the way he’d said his mission mattered more than one sad mortal girl.
“Potions for beauty?” A tall, bewitchingly beautiful Fae thrust herself out in front of Fieran. Her eyes alight on me. “I can fix the flaws in your mortal! Make her look like your lost love—”
He pulled me around her without stopping. “Are you hungry?”
“Am I hungry?” I repeated, dumbfounded. “In a place where you’ve claimed that if I’m not in physical contact with you, I could die?”
“It seems like you’re always hungry,” he responded. “And as we already established, you’re safe when you’re with me. There’s no reason you can’t snack.”
“You’re not cocky at all.”
“I’m pretty sure everyone in this kingdom is afraid of me except for the Fae Queen.” He gave me another one of those sunny, untouchable smiles. Was this a new mask I hadn’t seen before?
“So unless she appears, I’m safe?” I asked.
He stopped at a stall that smelled of sugar and honey and cream.
The cart gleamed like a jewel box spilled open, piled high with sugared blossoms and glassy candied fruits that shimmered.
Some of the cakes seemed to glimmer like starlight trapped in sugar.
Some of them pulsed faintly, as if they had a heartbeat. “Two honey cakes, please.”
The vendor smiled at him broadly, a bit too broadly in my opinion, as he plated them, then held out two glistening golden cakes, topped with a bit of honeycomb. My mouth watered at the scent despite my best intentions. Since Fieran held my hand, he could only take one plate.
“I don’t need a honey cake in a place where it might be enchanted to…what? Turn me into a mushroom? Enslave me as a servant?”
He handed me his honey cake with an unapologetic look. I surrendered and took it to get us moving. “If you don’t want yours, I’ll eat it too.” He took his own and thanked the vendor before moving on.
He paused in a doorway—stairs led up from here, though this entrance was bight—and took a bite. His evident pleasure seemed dramatized to tease me, but my mouth still watered.
I’d never eaten honey cake. It was sold in the bakery around Solstice, and it had never been in my budget. “You promise this won’t have any terrible effects on me?”
“Don’t worry, it won’t sweeten that collection of sharp edges you claim is a personality.” He nudged my plate up with the edge of his own. “You know you can trust me when it comes to your physical safety. Even if that’s the only thing you trust me with.”
That was true. So I took a small nibble, as if a tiny bite would keep me from becoming enchanted. The cake melted on my tongue, bursting with addictive sweetness.
I reminded myself that I was never going to forgive him, even as I ate the rest of the cake far too quickly.
But as its sweetness clung to my tongue, I felt a sudden lurch of guilt for enjoying anything while surrounded by cages. I clung to what he’d said about changing this place in a way that would matter. “Tell me why you want to save us all, Fieran.”
“Mortals don’t want to know the truth,” he said.
“Probably not,” I said impatiently. “But we also never get the opportunity to hear the truth.”
“There are mortals who know Fae secrets.” He dropped his plate, his carelessness surprising me, but it vanished in mid-air. “Not every one of them is a victim. Some are complicit—and they reap the rewards of serving immortals.”
“Talking about secrets, aren’t I shocked that you all aren’t just so caring for mortals and desperate to help us.”
“What’s been done to the shifters is more of a secret than the shifters themselves would choose, if we had a choice.”
There was a crumb at the corner of his lip. It made him look more approachable, less intimidating than usual. “You want to change things for the shifters. You think somehow I can play a part in that?”
He clicked his tongue. “I can’t tell you that until I can trust you not to tell my secrets, Cara.”
“And when will that be?”
He gave me another one of those wide grins. It was alarming, the way he seemed so different depending on whether it was his setting and his audience. “Maybe after we’ve married?”
I stared up at him in shock.
“Too soon for the subject, probably,” he said, unrepentant. “After our bargaining is done, when we don’t have to be quite so clear-headed, I’ll get you some wine, and we can discuss.”
“I know you’re playing some game, but it’s an especially ridiculous one. I would never marry you.” I hate you. Despise you. I didn’t say the words out loud, but I felt them—and he seemed to know, and not even care.
“I’m not talking about a love match. A wedding would guarantee your safety. It would protect you from being compelled by Fae. I have powerful enemies, and there are enchantments that can protect you…if we’re married.”
“Then spare me those enchantments.”
He didn’t seem hurt. We were still holding hands, of course, and he just tugged me behind him out into the path. “I knew it was too soon.”
“I’ll never marry you.”
“You’ll ask to marry me,” he promised with all his glimmering confidence.