Chapter 53
TINK
When I wake, the first thing I notice is how cold the bed feels on my back. How hard. How my muscles feel as if they haven’t moved in centuries.
There’s something else that feels different, too. Something that I can’t quite place. My eyes flutter open, and the first thing that strikes me is the colors.
Dust flecks flutter in front of my eyes, suspended in streams of blue and pink light.
If this is death, it’s not as terrible as I would have thought.
If this is death, perhaps I shouldn’t have spent my entire life in fear.
But there is still pain here. I feel it in my chest when I think of the Nomad. How once again, I allowed myself to trust. How once again, that trust got me nowhere.
I take in a grounding breath. Will my fingertips to move, and they do as they’re told. The first place my hands check is my stomach, but there is no sign of a wound. No sign that only moments ago, a sword was thrust through my body.
I really must be dead then. Because if I were alive, even if it had been days before I woke up, a wound like that wouldn’t have healed so quickly.
When I turn my head to the side, a crick in my neck makes its ugly appearance. Strange, that my abdomen has been completely healed, but I have a crick in my neck. Death is an odd place.
But then my eyes remember how to function, and the room comes into focus.
It’s beautiful, the kind of place that reminds me of the great temples built to the Fates in each of the kingdoms. There are stained glass windows on the far side of the room.
That explains the colorful streams of light.
My cheek presses against cold, hard, white stone.
A table—no, a dais of some sort. When I turn my cheek to the other side, my stomach falls through my spine.
Because that wall is lined with tapestries.
Fear grips me, and I shoot up on the dais.
Something drags behind me, tangles in my fingertips.
My entire body stills, and slowly, I crane my neck to look down.
Golden hair spills out across the dais. My hair.
If my hair has grown out long enough to be past my waist, perhaps I could have been asleep long enough for my abdomen to heal after all.
“Zora.” I hear a voice, strangely familiar, too close.
I turn to find a man—no, a fae—in a wooden chair next to the dais. I’m not sure what appears more out of place—the dark-haired, pale-skinned male who looks like a shadow compared to the light in this room, or the simplicity of the rickety wooden chair compared to this grand hall.
“Who?” The voice that echoes through the hall is scratchy and melodious and deep and feminine.
And very much mine.
I gasp, and even the shrill sound is beautiful as I grasp my throat with my hands.
The male, thinking I’m panicking and mistaking the tears streaming down my face, jumps from his chair so quickly it topples over. He’s in front of me faster than I can blink. “It’s all right,” he says, the words punctuated by the choking sound in his throat. “You’re all right.”
He says it as if he too is taking a moment to actually believe it.
He’s crying too, his tears like the water dripping from a marble fountain, or rain on a marble statue. He’s beautiful, and I feel no attraction to him, but there’s a deep longing for his presence all the same.
“Where am I?” I ask, though it doesn’t seem like the right question. Who am I seems more accurate, but it’s a question I’m too terrified to ask.
Disappointment flashes across the man’s face, but he composes himself quickly enough. “You’re in Queen Abra’s palace. You’ve been asleep for… well, for quite some time.”
I frown, feeling my brow crease. The motion feels choppy, unfamiliar, as if my forehead hasn’t done it in quite some time.
“Queen Abra? Of what kingdom?” I ask. I rake my mind, but I’ve never heard of such a ruler, although I suppose if I’ve been asleep for quite some time, she could have come to power in the interim.
“Mystral,” he says, but frowns when he observes the blankness in my expression. “You don’t remember, do you?”
I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be remembering, and now I’m wondering if this is just another one of my nightmares, and the Nomad will come waltzing through the door any moment now to kill me.
Still, there’s something about the fae before me that tells me I can trust him. Not that that instinct has served me well in the past, but it’s not as if killing him and escaping into a kingdom I’ve never heard of is going to get me very far.
“The last thing I remember, the Nomad had a blade to my throat, so I stabbed him first.”
The male before me blinks. “The Nomad?”
It’s the kind of question that’s asking who is that, and not the kind that makes it sound like the other person doesn’t possibly believe I could have encountered the Nomad. If this male doesn’t know who the Nomad is, then I certainly am a long way from home.
“I’d been stabbed in the stomach,” I say, my hand finding my waist, and there’s something about that sentence, being able to express it, that has my voice choking up. “I don’t know who healed me,” I say, all of a sudden, not speaking about the wound to my abdomen, “but I would like to thank them.”
Understanding dawns on the man’s face. “This Nomad—he didn’t happen to look like this, did he?”
The man pulls over a tapestry, one that’s hanging off the side of a chair, and lays it next to me across the dais, so that part of it spills over the side. The part that’s smoothed out over the dais displays a fae with sandy-blond hair and ice-cold eyes.
My heart thuds, and I can’t untangle the fear from the pain. “Yes, that’s him.”
“Zora, can you remember what he was doing when you killed him?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know a Zora.”
“Of course. Sorry,” says the man. “Even so, can you remember?”
“I already told you, he was holding a dagger to my throat.”
“After you’d already been stabbed by someone else?”
“I never said it was someone else,” I say, suddenly frightened.
“I know,” he says, but the words are more comforting than condescending.
“Why do you keep calling me Zora?”
The fae’s light eyes go mournful. “I’ll explain. I promise I will. But it will be easier if I know exactly what happened before you woke up.”
I don’t know why I trust this man. I don’t know him, and even men I’ve trusted because I thought I knew them had betrayed me.
But there’s something about the way he looks at me, like he wants nothing from me except for me to be here with him, that has me answering.
“Yes, someone else had stabbed me. A young guard. I think he thought I was going to attack him.”
“Was it a fatal wound?”
I blink, my hand finding my abdomen. “It should have been.”
“And it was only after that that Fa—I mean, the Nomad—held a dagger to your throat?”
I nod.
“What did he say?”
I consider holding this back. It feels too vulnerable to share with a stranger. But for some reason, I keep talking. “He mocked me for…well, for trusting him.” I squeeze my eyes shut, my cheeks flushing. “For loving him, when I should have known he’d betray me in the end.”
“And that’s why you killed him,” he says. “Because he taunted you.”
“It was self-defense,” I say, my voice hurried. My voice sounds hurried.
“But you said you were already as good as dead.”
“Clearly not,” I say, beckoning to my very-alive body. I’ve decided this is too strange to be death.
“And what was he doing before you were stabbed?”
“He had this tapestry, and he’d stolen a flute from…well, from someone. The flute had some sort of magical powers. It was changing what was woven into the tapestry.”
“And did you see what he changed?”
“There was a woman. A sleeping woman, and when he played, she—” I stop, my eyes going wide. I swallow. “She woke up.”
Thankfully, the fae male knows better than to explain this part to me. Tears well in my eyes.
It’s then that I notice something else. I’d been so overcome with regaining my voice, with waking up alive and unwounded, that I hadn’t noticed that something was missing.
The weight tethered to my spine.
I run my hands behind me, searching my back frantically.
My wings are gone.
“Who is Zora?” I whisper.
The fae gives me a pitying smile. “Why don’t we get some food in you? Then I promise to tell you the whole story.”