Not A Mildly Aggressive Candle
SERAPHAE
Idid not sleep.
The bed had no excuse for this. After nearly a week of dirt floors and makeshift camps, the mattress alone should have rendered me unconscious within minutes.
The linen was soft. The pillow was exactly right.
The hearth had settled into a low, steady burn, and the sound of it was the thing people paid for specifically to help them sleep.
None of it helped.
The problem was not the room.
The problem was that Caelan was sleeping a nightstand away, and every time I looked over, he was there.
Completely unguarded. Soft in ways that weren't possible when he was awake.
Black hair falling across his forehead, thick lashes still.
One arm tucked behind his head, the other hanging loose off the edge of the bed, the serpent tattoo catching the firelight.
I watched him.
This was not unusual. I was an assassin.
I had watched plenty of men sleep before I killed them.
It was professional due diligence. He had been my target once, technically, and old habits were called that because they didn't leave simply because circumstances had changed.
Watching him was instinctual. Muscle memory.
Nothing more than my body doing what it had been trained to do in the presence of someone I needed to track.
That was the only reason I couldn't sleep.
My head tipped back against Caelan's chest somewhere in the first hour of riding, which I was blaming entirely on sleep deprivation and the particular rhythm of the horse.
Also on the fact that he was very warm and it was very cold.
Twilight didn't snow, but winter had opinions about the temperature regardless. I pulled my cloak tighter around me.
“Bad night,” Caelan said. Not like a question. He shifted in the saddle, closing the distance that hadn't been much to begin with.
Survival first. Regrets later.
“Couldn't sleep,” I said.
“Mm.” A low sound. “What kept you up?”
“You snore.”
“I don't snore.”
I half turned. “You absolutely did. Loudly. Kept me up all night.”
“He doesn't snore.” Riven, from behind us. Offered plainly, like a piece of tactical information.
“Thank you, Riven,” Caelan said with genuine warmth.
“I couldn't sleep either,” he added.
“Lies.” I crossed my arms. “You were sleeping extremely comfortably.”
The silence that followed had a specific quality to it. I realized approximately half a second too late what I had just said.
Caelan lowered his head, tilting to look at me from the side.
I faced very pointedly forward. I could see his smile at the edge of my vision without looking directly at it.
“You were watching me sleep.”
I was significantly warmer than the weather or the cloak accounted for.
“Pfft.” I turned to face him because I was not a coward. Then immediately miscalculated the distance so badly that our lips nearly brushed. I turned back just as fast.
“I glanced. Once.”
“Mm,” he said, unconvinced.
“You were in my sightline.”
“Of course.”
“It's a small room.”
“Very small,” he agreed.
“I wasn't watching you.”
“No,” he said, mouth close to my ear. “Of course not.”
I stared straight ahead at the woodlands and said nothing, which was the most dignity the situation was going to allow me.
He said nothing either.
His arm stayed where it was on my thigh, easy and certain, like it had always been there.
I did not think about it.
I thought about it the entire way to the Hollow.
The Hollow was not what I had imagined.
I wasn't sure what I had imagined, exactly. Something geological. A crack in the earth, maybe, with a slope we would descend carefully and gracefully. Something that implied a bottom.
This was not that.
The trees had stopped growing about a mile back. Then the animals went. Then the birds. Then everything, incrementally, until there was nothing alive within a certain radius. Not plants. Not insects. Not a single thing that had made the calculation and decided to stay.
The Hollow was a gorge.
Not a small one. Not the kind with a visible floor and a reasonable relationship with depth. It was carved into the middle of the earth, wide enough that the far edge was a suggestion rather than a certainty, and I was standing at one edge looking down.
And down.
And down.
Pitch black. The kind of dark that didn't respond to light sources.
Something howled from inside it, deep and resonant.
The sound traveled upward and arrived with the particular quality of something that had been echoing for a very long time before it reached us.
Goosebumps moved up my arms before I could do anything about them.
“And we're going into that?” I asked.
Riven's jaw tightened. He said nothing.
Maelor said nothing either. No complaint. No creative commentary about poor decisions. Nothing. Just a man standing at the edge of a very large dark hole, being quiet as if he had looked at something and run out of words for it.
Both of those reactions said more than words would have.
Then Caelan opened his mouth.
“Well,” he said. “At least the fall would be quick.”
We all looked at him.
He looked back at us like he had offered a silver lining and was waiting for appreciation.
It did not come.
“So we climb down, then walk the rest of the way,” I said.
Caelan looked personally wounded at the mention of walking.
The descent was not graceful.
There was a section of ridge that people apparently used to descend, which I knew because of the bolts hammered into the rock face at intervals that suggested someone had planned this and then run out of either time or optimism partway through.
Or they were very tall with very long legs, and I was not blessed with either.
They were poorly placed. Each one required a moment of trust in both the metalwork and whatever deity you had been maintaining a relationship with.
The rope was worse.
Weathered to a degree that suggested it had been here longer than anyone currently holding it, and we were with a two-hundred-year-old fae, so that was saying something. It started at the top of the ridge and presumably reached the bottom. All four of us descended on this rope, one after another.
I was wearing pants.
I was glad I was wearing pants.
Caelan was below me on the descent. He looked up at some point very innocently and said, “Why are you wearing pants today?”
I kicked dirt in his face.
He sputtered.
We kept descending.
Halfway down, whatever light twilight had offered disappeared. Which wasn’t much to begin with.
Not gradually. One moment it was there, the next the dark swallowed it whole, complete and immediate. I opened my palm and summoned light. Small, steady, just enough to cover us all. It felt insufficient. I held it anyway.
I kept expecting something to appear at the edge of it. Something with too many teeth and a specific interest in people making poor decisions on a rope above a bottomless pit.
Nothing appeared.
That wasn't reassuring.
It just meant whatever was down there was patient.
We reached the bottom after Maelor had finished a fae prayer that was longer than I thought prayers were allowed to be. I dropped the last few feet without waiting, too done with the rope to negotiate a better landing. The ground was solid. That was the best thing I could say about it.
Caelan brushed dirt from his shoulders. “That wasn't so bad.”
None of us answered him.
Something in the dark did. A low growl, distant, the sound rolling upward through the gorge. As if it had been watching us descend the entire time and had simply chosen not to make a sound until we landed.
The soft clink of hands finding hilts was simultaneous.
Against the better part of our judgment, we kept moving anyway. The orb lit the path ahead, and we walked like people who had decided dying in here was preferable to climbing back up that rope.
Maelor kicked a rock.
It skittered across the ground, and the sound it made was too loud.
“Can you not?” I said.
He kicked another one.
“You're going to give away our position.”
“Apologies.” Another pebble. It bounced off something in the dark. “But my rocks aren't giving away more than your lantern already is.” He paused. “Besides, we're already being watched.”
I didn't answer that.
Mostly because he was right and I didn't want to say it out loud.
We kept moving.
The trees in this part of the Hollow were not trees. Maybe they were, once. Now they were pitch black and rotted through. Other parts glistened with something dark and wet that I made a point of not looking at directly.
“What does veil ash actually look like?” I asked.
Caelan turned in a slow circle, fire rolling in his palm, eyes moving through the dark. Then, “Ah.” He walked to a patch of ground and crouched. “This.”
I leaned down beside him.
Fine black powder, faintly luminous against my orb. Spread across a small area of earth like something had exhaled it there.
“That,” I said. “Dust. That's what we came for?”
Caelan swept it with exaggerated care into a folded square of parchment, creased it neatly, and slipped it into his pocket.
“It’s not dust,” he explained. “It’s magic that burned out. The ash is the residue of whatever created this hell.”
Maelor grinned. “Well. That was easy.”
I was not a superstitious person. Assassins definitely did not believe in karma. But there were certain things you simply did not say out loud, in certain places, because the universe had a sense of humor.
The Hollow had been waiting for exactly that.
They came without warning.
Came was the wrong word.
They peeled out of the bark and rot like the forest had been carrying them the whole time, gestating in the dark, and had simply decided now was when we'd find out about it.
I couldn't move. My legs stopped. My hand found the hilt of my dagger, but the rest of me just stared.