Chapter eleven
Iwoke to the sound of a gull flying somewhere nearby.
The memory that Kaed had landed us near the coast crashed in my chest. I had never seen the sea.
I was closer than I’d ever been to it now, though.
Even if it wasn’t the southern coast, it was a step in the right direction. I could get passage on a merchant ship.
Or, I might have been able to if he hadn’t taken my only source of funding.
The thought rolled around in my head like a marble.
The faebane was gone. I looked around the room I found myself in for anything that might suffice as payment.
It was indeed a room. I’d not dreamt that.
He hadn’t locked me somewhere dank and cold.
Wooden shutters swayed in a salty breeze. The storm had passed but must have blown them open in the night.
I’d slept right through it all.
The early morning sunlight had me squinting to take in the room I found myself in.
Tangled around me were teal blue silk sheets that washed over me like a tropical tide. I’d slept fitfully, even if I didn’t feel it. The bed looked like I’d been the nexus of the storm last night, not the Four Corners.
In the moonlight, the sheets had looked like the depths of the ocean: dark and inviting, calling me to get lost in them and drown my exhaustion. But the colour was transformed in the pale light of the morning.
White walls framed the entire room. The only colour breaking the monochrome was a large, stained wooden vanity with a mirror that sat opposite the bed.
There was nothing of value I could take with me, unless I felt like trading my bedsheets. The room felt empty and other than the furniture and the gulls outside, I was alone.
Alone, without Kaedian standing over me, casting his obnoxiously large shadow.
At some point during the night, I’d kicked off my boots and undressed to some degree, so the silken bedsheets became a makeshift robe as I crossed the room and tried the door.
Of course, it was still locked.
The handle didn’t even move when I pushed on it. Magic wrapped around it and had it welded in place.
Well, I suppose walking out to explore my new city in the morning air was off the table, then.
Something tightened my muscles at that. It wasn’t fear, exactly. I was used to being in places I didn’t belong. But tension was threatening to sour my morning at the door still being locked.
I was someone’s prisoner. Yes. But I wouldn’t remain that way. Whatever happened, I would be in control of my own fate here.
The situation last night had been a small hand dealt in my favour.
But it was a minor piece in a larger game that I didn’t even know I was playing.
Why did Kaedian—Kaed—need the faebane? He was fae.
Maybe he had more enemies than just those he picked fights with in meadows.
It wouldn’t surprise me if he had enemies wherever he went.
He was arrogant. Entitled. And not afraid of taking what he wanted.
Abandoning the locked door for the window, I sighed.
A clear, blue sky hung over the new world before me.
Hundreds of terracotta and sage green roofs stippled across the city below.
Far below. I hadn’t noticed climbing so many flights last night, but I wasn’t even sure I’d paid enough attention to have found my way out the front door, regardless of whether it, too, was locked or not.
There were at least four floors between me and the pavement beneath.
I was good at climbing. I trusted my feet to carry me, my fingers to hold me. But that was on terrain I was familiar with. It was on well-worn trails I’d spent months learning and wearing grooves into. One wrong step here, and I’d fall to the stones beneath and splatter the cobbles with my brains.
What a cheerful thought for the morning.
A soft knock pulled me from my downward thoughts.
The door pushed open to a flurry of chaos in a small package.
She was petite in frame, with a mass of soft, fawn-coloured floppy curls piled high on her head, exposing her rounded ear tips. Human. Was that a fork that pinned her hair in a messy bun?
“I’m Audrie,” she said by way of greeting as she moved to the bed and began straightening the sheets, save for the one around me. She was maybe the same age as Leesha, and my heart strained as I thought of my sister.
She moved to the other window and pushed open the wooden shutters. I hadn’t even noticed there was a second window. I was going to have to get better with details if I ever hoped to find my way out of this city, let alone this palace.
Hazel eyes gleamed as she moved through the room. She was quite pretty with a soft round mouth. A “hmpff” of dissatisfaction came from the tiny being as she put her hands on her hips after pulling open the vanity.
“Audrie, is it?” I felt like I shouldn’t be here. She was busy, and I was in her way.
“Hmmm?” She turned to me eventually. “Yes, sorry. I just thought he would put something here for you to wear. I didn’t know I was meant to bring that sort of thing.”
Confused, I said, “Who did you think was putting clothes in here?”
Maybe the poor girl was lost. She looked to be in control of her faculties, but then again, not everything was visible.
“Can I help you, maybe?” I tried again after my last question fell on deaf ears.
As if realising why she was here, she cleared her eyes and looked at me. Really looked at me. It was as though she was wading through water and had gotten lost in her own riptide.
“I’m so sorry.” Her body tensed a little as her eyes went wider.
And then she took a breath. “I’m here.” She looked like she was trying to slow a galloping horse.
“I’m here to help you today. That is, Kaedian sent me to …
” Her eyes squished shut like she might disappear into their depths if she tried hard enough.
“Lord Kaedian—He is your lord—” she said, almost to herself, under her breath, as if berating herself for the slip up.
“You’re afraid of him?” I hedged. Maybe she could give me more information on my host. “He’d hardly lock you in a cell for not using his title? He’s not that terrifying?”
As if caught with her hand on a hot iron, she dropped the fabric of her skirts that she had been twining between her fingers. “Yes—No. I mean no.”
“You said yes?”
“I mean no. It’s just. I am here under the patronage of his family. And I just … I just don’t want to mess anything up. My family doesn’t come from a noble line. We’re not lords. I’m not a lady,” she finished in a rush.
Patronage? A lord. What sort of lord resorted to kidnapping people for crystals? I didn’t feel in immediate danger of my secret being pried from me … but perhaps he was the sort to torture someone if Audrie was so skittish.
Surely, he had enough stores of gold and jewels if he was a noble. “I’m studying at the Vivernan library to be a historian,” she said when I was too dumbfounded to have used any words of my own.
“But you’re …” I paused and touched my own ears.
“Human? Mm-hmm. Lord Kaedian really doesn’t mind.”
“Doesn’t mind? That you’re not fae?” I wished I had kept my damn clothes on.
From what I’d seen in the city so far, humans and fae coexisted far more easily than Shadowfall and the rural peoples I’d met had led me to believe.
Audrie shrugged. “I don’t know. But he hates the divide the war caused between humans and fae. He might not say it often, but he misses the way things were before.”
“Before?”
“Before the war.” Audrie was busy now picking up my discarded clothes from the night before.
Before the war.
“But that was over two hundred years ago?”
“Mm-hmm.” Audrie sniffed a sock and winced as she held it aloft, far away from her.
Kaedian was over 200 years old? No wonder his magic was like an extension of him. He’d had two centuries to perfect it. He didn’t need to think about it. He used his magic so easily.
I was about to blurt out a slew of questions off the back of that deluge of information, but another knock at the door cut me off.
Audrie had bounded to the door as if we’d not just been talking. A butterfly caught on a breeze.
“Oh. It’s you.”
I didn’t know who she was expecting, but she sounded disappointed. Or just less excited.
Gavrin stood on the other side of the door. Shirt closed, mostly.
“And how old are you?” I jabbed the question at Gavrin. Was he some two-hundred-year-old fae too?
“What?” His quizzical look was a bit disarming.
“What do you want? We were busy.” Audrie pushed her chin out as she spoke.
Were we?
The dismissive tenor of Audrie’s little voice was something to behold. But more so, the way Gavrin shut up and stammered for an answer.
“Well? What do you want?” The tap, tap, tap of her tiny slipper on the wooden floor was comical.
Finally, he found his words. “He wants to see her.” Gavrin flicked his eyes to me. “Both of you, actually.” He straightened his shoulders as he looked to Audrie. “And I’m—” He cleared his throat. “To escort you.”
Audrie flung a hand back. “She’s naked. We can’t go yet.”
I blushed.
Gavrin chucked a laugh to the ceiling. “I don’t think Kaed will mind that.”
“Wait outside.” Audrie shut the door in his face, and his laughing ceased.
I gathered up my leathers from yesterday. They were a little stiff, and Audrie’s wince hadn’t been exaggerated. They weren’t particularly fresh.
I ducked behind a privacy screen to dress.
“Here.” A hand appeared, holding a crystal bottle with pink-coloured liquid inside. It shimmered as Audrie shook it. “Here.” She pushed. “It will help.”
I tapped out a few drops of the sweet scent onto my neck and wrists.
That crystal liquid certainly managed to mask something. But it was heavy and cloying. Like candied cherries stuffed in my nostrils. But at least that was what it would do for anyone unfortunate enough to pass by me before I could find a tub.
I came back around the screen and handed Audrie the bottle. Which she opened and dumped another few splashes on me.
A series of coughs cascaded from both of us at the noxious smells now suffocating us.
“Everything all right in there?” Gavrin’s voice broke something in me, and I laughed.
A lot.
I laughed and coughed, and Audrie followed suit. It was contagious.
“Hey? Need me to come in?” The door rattled with uncertainty.
“No!” Audrie wheezed with a strangled laugh as she wiped her hand across her now red eyes.
We fell into ribbons and laughed again.
Once the laughter died down, I turned my back to her.
“Can you?” The strings of my leather corset hung loose. I’d manage myself, but it was so much easier when someone helped.
I swayed as Audrie tugged each lace tight.
“I’m not very good at these. My mother never wore them, and I’m not sure how to—Are you crying?”
I was.
I didn’t even feel the tears. They just happened.
Maybe I was more overwhelmed at everything that had changed than I’d realised. I’d slept in silken sheets and woken in a new city surrounded by new people.
And opportunities.
It wasn’t all bad. It was just all new. And my senses didn’t really know what to do with themselves.
But this was what I had wanted. Newness. Adventure.
I turned to Audrie, who wiped a stray tear away with her thumb.
“I … My whole life just … changed yesterday, and now I’m a prisoner—I think—in someone’s gilded cage of silk and stone.
” Saying it out loud actually made the reality less daunting.
Prisoner, yes. But not wholly. I was locked in here, for now.
But something about this situation felt nothing like it should.
My breaths were fractured as my body and mind reconciled.
“Shhhh.” Audrie’s eyes were gentle.
I would get out of here. Once I got what I needed from this place.
A few more hitched breaths and I found a rhythm.
“He’s not that bad, you know,” Audrie said.
I looked at her with drying eyes.
“Kaedian. Lord Kaedian.” She muttered a curse to herself and threw her eyes to the skies as she corrected herself. “He’s not that bad. Well. No. He is that bad. But …”
“You’re not helping much here.” I sob-laughed.
“At least you’re not in a cell.”
I nodded to her.
“It’s really his father who is worse.” Audrie continued as she turned me to finish lacing my bodice. “I’ve never met him personally. But there are stories.” She paused and glanced at the door. Checking.
“Stories?”
I felt her nod as she tugged another string.
“He … People say … people say he punished Kaedian after it happened.”
My eyes pinched as I tried to understand.
“After his mother died. His father was said to be inconsolable. And he took it out on Kaedian.” Audrie shook her head gently.
I didn’t know what to say to that.
“I’ve never seen the marks. Obviously. But it’s hard to believe as a juvenile fae he endured so much.”
I turned my head to see Audrie’s face was contorted like she could feel the pain she spoke of.
Something cold twisted under my skin. Marks?
His scar that blazed from his brow to his cheekbone was fully visible.
There were more? I hadn’t considered how he’d gotten that particular scar.
I’d just assumed it was something stupid he’d done, a situation he’d gotten himself into.
Arrogant fae male behaviour. But a layer of snowdrift settled onto my bones as I considered its potentially new origin.
I swallowed hard and turned to her.
“Now. All done,” she said at full volume.
Gavrin clearly heard that because he opened the door without invitation.
“Oh! Your hair. Let me do that.”
“No. We don’t have time. Move.” Gavrin’s gruff demand stopped Audrie’s hands before they could fix my hair, and we were ushered out of the room.