Chapter 16
Wroth
She staggered, reaching out blindly, and I pulled her back to me.
“They no longer know you as human, Jesamin,” I said in her ear, her heart racing like a frightened rabbit’s beneath my palm. “They no longer know themselves to be human. There is nothing to be done for them now.”
She moaned breathlessly, hands curling into claws as she gripped at her hair like she meant to tear it out.
I took her hands, folding them in mine. “You can’t help them by hurting yourself.”
“All this way,” she whispered. “We came so far for nothing. I promised I would bring them back. I promised the children…I would bring them back.”
Tears slipped silently down her cheeks. She stared at the orchard of blood and bone with wounded eyes, lower lip trembling.
I cupped her face, drawing her gaze away. “There may be others.”
She stared at me with that same awful blank shock, uncomprehending.
“Some may yet live, lover. But we will not find them if we remain here. There is a time to keep going, and a time to mourn. Right now we must keep on our path, and when we have accomplished all we came to do, then we can grieve.”
“How long have you known?” she whispered. “You weren’t surprised. You knew.”
I forced myself to speak, to break her heart, and prayed she wouldn’t hold the blame against me. “I have suspected from the beginning that they were dead. It was only a matter of how.”
She blinked, tears clinging to her clumped lashes, then nodded. After several deep breaths, she looked up at me with a hardness I had never seen before in those soft eyes.
“I want to burn it.”
I studied her. Her limbs still trembled, but her jaw was set, and there was no frantic sense of vengeance about her.
“If they’re no longer really alive…then I would rather burn it all to ash than allow whatever lives here to feed on their remains,” she said, voice steady.
“We have no time to build up a fire,” I said cautiously, almost a question.
She curled her lip in a snarl, looking back with wet eyes. “When I get back to Talos, I’ll have the means. If you’ll allow it. One way or another, I’m ending this place.”
There was no question. Even if it were not Jesamin herself begging for their peace and freedom, still I would be loath to leave them in this state.
At least one of Bram’s children was in there.
“Let us find who we can while the chance remains, and when it’s over you can take this place down stone by stone if you please.”
She swallowed hard, nodded her head in a sharp jerk, and cast one furious glance back at the orchard. “Fucking Fae things,” she spat.
It was painful to see her so full of rage, but it was better to cling to anger in this place than to give in to melancholy and heartbreak. So long as she kept the fire of her fury burning, she would more easily pass through the territory of our progenitors.
It was yearning and despair they preyed upon, not anger.
I took her hand and led her from the orchard. We found ourselves in an open chasm, on a path that had crumbled away in places. We’d rounded the far end of the lake, the will o’ wisp lights in the distance aimlessly floating without an audience to entice.
Jesamin didn’t say anything as I led her down the chasm, helping her over the bits of fallen path too far for her to jump.
She was silent as we crept through a cavern of natural columns that had been carved with meandering, eye-catching swirls.
She didn’t speak as we crawled through a rough stone tube into what looked like a human’s home, an empty cottage room, the floor caked with centuries of sediment, broken glass, and bits of shattered pottery.
The only sign that it had actually once been inhabited by recent humans were the handmade lace curtains in a window.
They had calcified under the dripping, mineral-rich waters of the cavern into a yellowish blob that spilled down across the floor.
From the Forian lacework, I knew this was a more recent addition to the Below; yet another place and time stolen by the ancient workings of the Fae.
Sometimes I wondered if Owlhorn itself would ever be stolen. If one day, we would awaken to find our home buried in the earth, every door and window blocked by seamless stone. If a room or hall would simply vanish as though it had never been.
And if it did, would we know? Or did this place also steal all memory of what it took?
Beyond the open door was another chasm, the walls embedded with metal tools: fish hooks, needles, hammers, spoons, forks, gears, and a thousand other nameless pieces of detritus. Jesamin eyed the walls, shook her head, and carried on.
It wasn’t until we found ourselves in a dead end, facing a sheer wall of stone, that she finally opened her mouth.
“By the Light, we need to climb that?” There was a dullness to her tone, resignation rather than genuine alarm.
I took a breath, glaring up the wall. It wasn’t untouched, natural rock; there were handholds and ancient anchors placed all along its face, where the human slaves of Liuridar had once used lifts and pulleys to access their masters’ city.
I estimated it would be a climb of sixty meters. Simple for me, but for her…
“I believe this is essentially the servant entrance,” I finally said. “I was only hoping I was correct until now, but look.” I gripped one of the handholds. “They used this path. This will access Liuridar proper.”
Jesamin’s eyes moved from my hand, roving slowly upwards as she picked out the hand-and toeholds, the iron anchors that had gone mushy with rust. Her brow furrowed. “Sometimes it astonishes me to realize they really, truly lived here.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, though I thought I knew exactly the feeling she was talking about.
“Most of this place…its like a museum, in a way. It’s strange and incomprehensible…
like those pillars. What possible reason could there have been to chisel swirls into every one of those five hundred pillars, and do, apparently, absolutely nothing with the rest of the cavern?
What was the point? Why did they steal tools, and sink them into a wall?
Why take a whole cottage and bury it? Why steal any place?
And yet it's so far in the past, and so alien, that I can look at it, think how strange it all is, and brush it off. But then we come across things like this, or the cell we slept in.” She reached out and brushed her fingers over the damp stone.
“Real people lived here. Real people touched this. I don’t mean your people, I mean…
humans. People who lived and bred and died in this unfathomable darkness.
Did they even know the world above existed? ”
I shook my head, silent. It was likely that uncountable generations had not. The Fae had stolen them, then bred them into generations of obedient drudges, erasing all memory that any other world had ever existed.
She fell silent for a long moment, her hand dropping away to curl at her side. “And if they didn’t…how in the hell did humanity escape the Fae at all?”
“Once their masters were gone, there was nothing stopping them from spreading through the Below until they found the doorways back to the world above, at least until my people took over.” I took a handful of grit from the floor, massaging it into my palms for better grip.
She followed suit, her mind elsewhere as she continued to scowl at the wall. “But where did the Fae go? That’s what rankles me. They left this whole city, rare materials, clean water…to go where? And almost worse is the question of why?”
I shrugged helplessly. Cirri had been translating ancient documents for years now, with that exact question in mind.
As far as she had pieced together from what little had survived from those eras, a thousand years before the start of the Red Epoch, most of the Fae had simply dropped everything and vanished, giving way for humanity to rise above and crown the first queens and kings of Veladar.
Their rule had lasted a mere handful of centuries before the royal highbloods rose from beneath the earth, slew the remaining Fae, and conquered the fledgling human kingdoms.
She sighed. “And yes, I know scholars have debated this for centuries. I know you don’t have all the answers. I’m just…thinking out loud. None of it makes sense. As far as we know, chthonium is only found in Fae Artifice and never as a natural deposit, so why leave the motherlode behind?”
Despite myself, I showed her my fangs in a grin.
It was far better to have her rambling on unanswerable questions than cocooned in a shell-shocked silence.
Eventually the dam would break, but for now she was putting the horror aside and seeing it through.
“Wait until you see the city proper, and what they left. The implications will keep you awake at night.”
She raised a brow, looking more like herself than she had for the last five hours, then leered. The pink tinge to her cheeks made my own heart race a little faster, as I scented the rising lust in her blood. “Surely you’ll find a way to help me pass those sleepless nights?”
I chuckled, opening the spare pack to find the coil of rope. “I would enjoy nothing better. We’ll be practicing for it right now, in fact.”
Jesamin’s arguments were minimal, mostly because she had no leg to stand on.
Would being tied to me impugn her dignity?
Slightly, but no one was around to see us.
Was she capable of climbing the rock face herself?
Possibly, but I wasn’t willing to risk her slipping.
Couldn’t I let her handle it on her own?
No, and as Lord of the Rivers, my word was law.
In the end, with Jesamin clinging to my chest, her legs wrapped around my waist and arms around my neck, tightly bound to me in the harness I’d wrangled around her, I began climbing the wall, smiling as she scowled into my mane.