Chapter 20
TWENTY
ARYELLA
Do not go south of Winterton’s border into Tugaf. Not until you’re as strong and practiced as possible.
Promise me. Please.
I’m terrified of what you might see.
—FROM THE BUTCHER OF NYRIDA’S LAST KNOWN LETTERS TO QUEEN ARYELLA I
Light footsteps on cobblestone ricocheted off ancient stone walls. My footsteps. And the walls in question formed a dark hallway on both sides of me. No visible end in either direction.
Fading torchlight flickered off shallow puddles where the walls met the floor, but I couldn’t tell where the water was coming from. I heard no dripping, only the echo of my own presence, the swell of my lungs as I breathed and the quickening thump of my pulse in my ears.
I didn’t know which way to go, but something about this place felt familiar.
Heat began to shimmer on one end of the hall, to my left.
A faint, white light filled with laughter.
A woman’s, I thought, and then with it… a man’s?
His unwavering calm swirled in contrast to her bright light, a soothing mix of tranquility and warmth.
I saw the flutter of a bird’s blue wings and heard the gentle, soothing ding of a single coin landing on a stone floor and decided that way . I wanted to go that way. I turned left.
“I can teach you…”
I froze and looked around but was unable to find the source of the whisper. Somewhere far, far away from here. Not inside the hallway or even this castle. I turned in circles, searching for it, able to move unlike I usually was in dreams.
Was I… really here ?
“I can teach you…”
It was a little louder this time, everywhere and nowhere all at once.
“Where are you?” I demanded.
“I can… teach you…”
“Who are you?” I shouted again. My voice reverberated back and forth down the hallway. “Answer me!”
Something invisible cracked and split around me.
I felt a veil—thick enough to protect me and keep out whatever or whoever this was—disappear.
Long, cold fingers curled around my neck.
I reached up to fight them to no avail as frigid lips touched my ear.
And then a sharp, dissonant scream in an airless, lifeless silence.
“Stop!” I begged. “Please, stop!”
“I can teach you more than he can!”
I tried to gasp myself awake and failed. My feet were now plastered to cobblestone as fingers like flesh-coated ice tightened around my neck.
Real. Too real.
The bridge between my dream and reality stuttered, like a door caught on a hinge that wouldn’t budge. When I tried to scream, no sound escaped. I jerked and thrashed, kicked my feet against the castle walls as they closed in.
“Don’t close me in,” I begged as if the walls would listen. “Don’t close?—”
“Breathe.”
My body snapped to attention and obeyed .
Hallucination or not, the sound of his voice—deep, controlled, soothing—was enough.
By the grace of the gods, my eyes shot open while I sucked in fresh air.
I searched for his eyes, for his anchoring hands, scarred and strong and home .
Instead of finding him, I heard a match strike.
A small burst of light from a nearby lamp glowed brightly enough to reveal sixteen pairs of eyes peering back at me.
It took me a moment to remember that I was Fera from Brinnea in Elias Winterton’s Barracks, and I’d just woken up my entire cabin of cadets. Some of them looked angry, others annoyed. Only Mavic and Mina looked concerned.
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled, scanning the walls and corners of the room until I’d looked at each person. “It was a nightmare.” I cleared my tight, aching throat. “I’m sorry.”
It had to be exhaustion playing tricks on my mind. At least, that was what I told myself. Stress had induced wild dreams in me before. I’d considered that the fingers around my throat might be Molochai’s, but his hands, chilled, taloned, and greedy, belonged to a human man.
This was something different. This felt… inhuman.
While the other cadets eagerly settled back into rest, my mind and body didn’t. I lay awake, eyes fixed on the ceiling, unable to let go of the feel of icy hands and that dark, unearthly voice in my ear.
I was starting to wonder if I’d ever sleep in peace again. The nightmares kept getting worse, and sharing a bed with Gavin for two nights, his protective body at my back, had ruined me. No matter how I propped up pillows, it felt wrong, and it wasn’t warm enough.
To soothe myself, I headed to the showers. I had to pass the window of Elias’s quarters to get there. Bright light filtered through the drawn curtains from inside.
“It’s not safe until we know who did it,” Valda’s voice came through the window.
“I know.” Elias’s voice was strained.
Intent on hearing more, I leaned against the building beside the window, relieved that nothing unsavory was happening inside this time.
“The cadets are in danger?—”
“What do you suggest, Val?” Elias snapped. “That we interrogate everyone in this fortress until someone admits to slitting the throat of our messenger?”
“Yes!”
I blanched. The dead man had been one of our people.
“And what kind of precedent does that set?” Elias challenged. “The moment something is amiss, we just start baselessly pointing fingers?”
“He was murdered in cold blood, Eli! You spent two days alone in the forest dragging his body home so his brother could bury him.” Her voice trembled with emotion. “The Brinnean needs to pay .”
Elias gave a heavy sigh. “Val, it wasn’t Fera.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I know .”
I couldn’t risk looking through the window without being seen, but I imagined Valda’s sharp, judgmental eyes on her commander. She criticized him in a way he tolerated from very few others.
“You know she’s innocent, or you just want to believe she is so you can have her warm your bed at night guilt-free?” Valda countered.
I scoffed to myself. He wasn’t getting me anywhere near his bed, but I’d have paid a handsome sum to peek in the window and see his reaction to that.
“She didn’t kill Isaiah Cross,” was all Elias answered. “I’ll form a team. We’ll find who did it.”
“You don’t deny my other point,” she grumbled back.
“What do you want me to say?” he snapped, his patience thin. “That she’s not fucking gorgeous?”
My eyebrows shot up and insides burned with heat. His attraction to me was obvious, but I assumed he was attracted to most women. Like toys or playthings.
Elias Winterton is a smarmy little shit who sticks his cock inside anything that moves , Gavin had said. So far, that seemed to be true.
“We don’t mix with our cadets, Eli,” Valda warned. “You’ve always followed your own rule.”
“Well, she’s not exactly one of ours ,” he retorted.
My stomach dropped so violently I thought it might land at my feet.
“Though I don’t think we can afford to think that way.
In fact, we never should have. This sense of ‘other’ that Simeon holds on to, as if the people in the unprotected northern villages mean less than any of us because they don’t live with us.
I can’t pretend like I’m not guilty of it myself, but it’s not right. ”
I slumped against the wall, not expecting to hear that sentiment from him.
“We spent a long time hoping our queen’s magic would win this war for us,” he continued.
“We’ve been lying low and waiting for hundreds of years.
We’ve prepared to support her while praying she would defeat Molochai herself so fewer people would have to die.
But that’s not the reality now, is it? We’re going to need others.
We’ll need to recruit from every region, from every town.
I still don’t fully trust Fera, but we’re going to need her, and we’re going to need many more like her. ”
A long bout of silence followed. I didn’t want to admit that I respected his reasoning, but I did. We needed reason.
“The queen wanted to welcome and save as many as possible.” Elias’s voice was tinged with sadness. “I feel inclined to try to carry on her generosity in spirit.”
My chest warmed. I didn’t want my chest warming in regard to him or his words, but I wasn’t so cruel not to allow a man I disliked to have a good trait.
Gavin, with his death grip on my heart, was wildly flawed.
And weren’t we all? It would be hypocritical to think Elias Winterton was all bad or all good. Humans didn’t really work that way.
“I agree. We need to help where we can. But Eli.” Valda’s voice grew gentle. Intimate in the way a good friend might say something difficult to hear. I started to back away, feeling like I was intruding. “I know you’re mourning the queen?—”
“Mourning a girl I never met,” Elias grumbled.
“Yes. Which is why you can’t hold on to her like this. You’ll just be stuck longing for a dream for whatever life we all have left.”
“I’m not holding on to her.”
“You are.”
“I’m fucking whoever I want, just as I always do.”
Valda laughed ruefully. “And you know that’s not what I mean.”
He released an irritated sigh. “I don’t want to have this conversation.”
After a long bout of silence and a relentless tapping sound—Elias with his pen, probably—Valda asked, “Who even found the body?”
I arched my eyebrow, waiting for the truth.
“I did,” Elias answered.
My jaw dropped, and something other than distaste bloomed in my chest for Elias Winterton.
He had made me a target for the entire group of cadets during the first challenge, but now he was trying to protect me from his own second-in-command.
Either he was overly intrigued, or I’d convinced him I was trustworthy.
Maybe I was winning. Elias might have handily won our fight on the mat then stolen a piece of my heart from around my neck and left it hidden in the middle of a lake full of deadly fish. He might have singled me out and isolated me. But right now, I felt like I was earning my place.