Fae & Alchemy

The night was clear as crystal. Cold as ice.

In the sky above Ajun City, a banner of stars crowded in, innumerable diamonds glittering in the firmament. Pale towers rose up from the snowy mountainside, cast in quartz and ivory, glowing like slender ghosts. Within those towers, mothers sang their children to sleep. Acolytes pored over their books. In the kitchens, bakers kneaded the dough for the morning’s bread. At the infamous gate that warded the city, a hundred feet tall, sentries smoked black Lammarick root cigarillos to quicken the blood and fend off the cold.

All was quiet.

All was well.

But it wasn’t.

There were wolves at the gate.

All of them were with me tonight: ever-present Renfis, of course; His twin, Mirelle, wearing an easy smile; Danya, with her blonde hair flowing in a pale river down her back; Korrix, seated and silent in the snow, their hands resting on top of their fighting leathers; Foley, grinning like a rake, bouncing on the balls of his feet; Vashgidyan, with his shock of moonlight hair and his pale white eyes; Dark-haired Lorreth, the newest member of the Lupo Proelia, chewing on his bottom lip.

I faced down the slope, staring past my friends into the darkness, and fought back the urge to shiver. I was used to the cold. I’d spent half my life with a bitter wind lashing me — it wasn’t the temperature that had me shuddering inside my cloak tonight. It was dread.

As if a promise of what was to come, a frigid wind chased across the mountainside, cutting through my leathers, carrying with it the stench of rotting meat and the tang of brimstone.

Beside me, with his hair tied back into thick war braids, Ren’s face was the color of regret as he craned his neck, scanning the black sky for any sign of danger. I witnessed the moment that he saw the megalithic shadow, even blacker than the night. Blacker than the pit of hell itself. The beast’s form drank the light and devoured it. Silent Death, they called him here, but the beast had many names. The Drake. Old Blood. Grandfather Ash. Omnamshacry.

There was no thrum of monstrous, beating wings. The drake coasted over the city, riding on weak thermals, stalking the night like a wraith.

“I knew I should have stayed home,” Renfis hissed under his breath. Locking eyes with me, his hand closed around the hilt of his blade, and I saw from the furrows on his brow that he’d reached the same conclusion I had a moment ago: we were fucked.

Laughing silently, I winked at him, “Not too late to turn back.”

He snorted. “You’re joking. There’s no way down that hill now.”

“Ahh, come on.” I painted my words with sarcasm. “If it’s the vampires you’re worrying about, then don’t fret. Just go around them.”

“Just go around them? Hah! Sure. I’ll skirt around five thousand feeders on the side of a mountain. Let them march right past me into the city.”

I shrugged, scanning the sky. “Sure. Why not?”

“And I’ll just plug my ears when the children start screaming?” he went on.

“You could pack them full of snow. That would muffle the carnage.”

Renfis nodded, eyes glinting as he peered into the ink. “Who cares about the Ajun, anyway? They’ve guarded the gate and prevented untold horrors from spilling into this world for centuries, but so what? That bitter brew they make goes down way too easy. I always wake up with a hangover in Ajun.”

I smiled at that, though my stomach rolled as the air above us shifted. “Their food’s too good, too. I always overeat.”

“And their females are too pretty,” a voice added from behind us.

Crouched low, Lorreth leaned against a snow-capped boulder, sword clenched tight in his hands. Despite the freezing temperatures, a bead of sweat rolled down his temple and chased down his cheek, disappearing into his beard. “They make other Yvelian females look like bog witches. Pretty rude if you ask me.”

He hadn’t said much since night had fallen. He’d never come face-to-face with five thousand feeders before. Never witnessed what a mass of pure evil would look like, crawling up the side of a mountain on pulped hands and knees. And seeing the horde following so close on our heels, not seeing the dragon as it now patrolled the dark above our heads? Well, the newest member of our brotherhood wasn’t exactly feeling confident about our odds.

He knew how to pretend, at least. How to play the game. Ren and I had been playing for a couple of centuries now. Renfis grinned at the olive-skinned warrior mischievously. “Don’t you worry about the women here, Bard,” he whispered. “None of them are interested in you. Your charms being what they are, I’d be surprised if you could even talk a bog witch out of her underwear.”

Lorreth cast him a scathing sidelong glance. “Want that mouth washed out with soap, Pretty Boy? I would never… ever…”

My breath caught in my throat.

My friends’ bickering faded away as, all around us, the air thickened like tar.

It was too silent. Too still. Too warm.

“I bet you would,” Ren hissed.

“I bet one of those feeders is going to lay you out five minutes,” Lorreth volleyed back.

“Oh, really? What are you willing to wager on that?”

Lorreth growled like a dog. “Whatever you like. I’m not worried. If I have to pick you up off your ass once during the melee, I’m claiming that handsome dagger of yours. The one you keep fiddling with like it’s your second cock.”

“And if I have to drag you up out of the mud, I’m making you shave that stupid beard,” Ren retorted.

I closed my hand tighter around the hilt of my blade, staring up into the night sky. “Quiet, you two.”

“What’s wrong with the beard? It makes me look powerful.”

“It’s patchy. Makes you look like your balls haven’t dropped yet. And anyway, hell will freeze over before I go down in a fight.”

Lorreth snorted, gesturing out into the night. “From where I’m sitting, hell’s looking pretty frosty. Its foulest legions have crawled up its throat and are coming for us as we speak.”

Ren scoffed, as if this weren’t true. “All right, well—”

“Quiet!”

Their grins vanished as they both looked to me. My brothers. My friends. Right now, I wanted to knock their heads together. “What is it?  You hear something?” Ren asked.

I squinted back up the mountain, toward the graceful towers of Ajun and the thousands of innocent souls inside, so ignorant of the peril at their doors. “No, I don’t,” I answered on an exhalation. “I hear nothing at all.” The wind had died. The feral snapping of jaws from further down the mountain had stopped. Everything felt… wrong.

‘Move. You must go. All must move. All must go. Together. Together. Together. Go.’

As always, the rush of voices spoke only to me. I felt the vibration of the quicksilver in my eye and knew it must be shifting. Once, the restless movement of the metal had been uncomfortable, but I’d grown accustomed to it over the years. Now, I only realized it was happening when others witnessed it and forgot to hide their shock.

“Together. Move,” the quicksilver insisted. “Go. All must go. Now!”

A wave of nausea crashed down on me; the quicksilver felt strongly about this. It wasn’t going to let up until I gave it what I wanted. It made ridiculous demands all the time. I wasn’t about to give in to it. But then came the reek of sulfur and panic sank its claws deep.

I turned and bellowed for all I was worth. “RUUUUN!”

My friends were moving before I had time to suck down a fresh breath. Danya became a silver blur, tracing up the incline. To my left, Ren stuck close to my side, eyes alert. Korrix and Mirelle were behind somewhere.

Heat scorched the air. A ball of yellowed light flared brilliant as the forgotten sun. Dragon fire lit up the side of the mountain, illuminating not only our band of fighters but the foul shadow that had been nipping at our heels for the past two days.

The horde.

Not all of it. Malcolm wasn’t stupid enough to send all of his forces to claim this one choke point. Perhaps he’d sent a fifth of his demons to drink Ajun dry. Maybe he’d sent half. We hadn’t been able to confirm their numbers, but that was irrelevant now. A fifth. A half. It didn’t matter. He’d sent enough. Feeders swarmed up the slope, barely hindered by the waist-deep snow and the shelf of ice beneath their feet.

No one spared them a second glance. As we hurtled toward the city, all eyes were glued on a more pressing danger. Dragons had never been known for their mercy, but this one? Gods above, this one was death wreathed in hellfire itself.

The drake descended from the sky with tattered wings outstretched to cushion his impact as he landed. His scarred scales were black mirrors, flashing along the sides of his monstrous body. Baring rotting teeth the length of two men, Omnamshacry wheeled around, massive claws gouging into the snow, his split tail thrashing at stone and ice, and he roared.

The world trembled in answer.

One dragon, I’d faced before. Back when I was younger. A much smaller creature, with iridescent blue scales. The fire that dam had breathed over the battlefield had been white-hot, and had burned warriors inside their armor, incinerating them where they stood. The fire this old drake produced was nothing of the sort. When he arched his spined neck, tucked his head and unleashed his fury, molten lava and brimstone spewed from his jaws. It sprayed into the snow around us, hissing viciously, shooting thick columns of steam up into the air.

“Fuck!” The chaos exploding around us stole Ren’s cry. “We’re never going to reach the gate!”

“Not if you keep running like you just shit your leathers,” Lorreth panted.

“Move. Move. Together. Move,” the quicksilver chanted in my head. Behind the three of us, the rest of the Lupo Proelia moved as a pack, sprinting up the steep slope toward the city as if they had heard the quicksilver’s command. They sped up, gathering themselves around me, trying to protect their commander.

“Yes. Together. Together…”

“Fan out!” I roared. “Split up! Do it now!” The words tore out of me, nowhere near as loud as the second furious roar that shook the ground beneath our feet. My wolves heard me, though. They didn’t question the command. In a heartbeat, they were spread out, moving lightning fast on different trajectories, scattering into the darkness.

‘No! Together! Together, we said!’

“I will not use my men as a fucking shield,” I snarled.

“And why? Why not? You are more important than them. More important. Most important.”

“Shut… the fuck… UP!” I launched myself over an outcrop of jagged rock, spearing up through the snow. Inches below my feet, a spray of molten brimstone hit the rocks, liquifying them.

Fuck, fuck, fuck!

I called up a swell of shadows and rode on black wind, buoyed up just enough to carry me out of reach of the spitting lava, my heart lodged in the base of my throat. This was not the plan. We were supposed to reach the gate before the drake knew we were even on the mountain. We were supposed to have alerted the people of Ajun. We were supposed to have prepared them for the attack. The people of Ajun knew all about the attack now, though, and the guards at the gate were scrambling, running in fear, abandoning their posts.

The gate that secured Ajun was imbued by ancient, formidable magic. No fell creature could breach it. In all recorded history, the gate had never been breached. But there was one small problem. The gate only protected the city when it was closed… and right now the towering iron barricade stood wide fucking open.

“Late,” the dragon rumbled. “You arrive too late.”

To my left, charging through the curtains of my smoke, I saw Lorreth, white as a sheet and horrified as he sprinted. “They talk?” he hollered.

I didn’t have breath to waste on a reply.

“Back inside! INSIDE!” Somewhere, Renfis thundered the command at the people now spilling from the gates out onto the mountainside. The accord between the Fae and the dragon had held for over three hundred years, but now those who saw him painting the mountain in fire were afraid. They saw the pact was broken and had no intention of finding themselves trapped inside a burning city. They had no inkling of the thousands of Feeders waiting for them, though. No comprehension of the nightmares that waited of them out there in the cold.

“Get back! Back inside the walls now!” I joined Renfis in his cries, but not a single one of the Ajun Fae heeded us. They screamed, clutching babies to their chests, dressed in their night things, brandishing weighted candle sticks as weapons, their feet bare in the snow.

Fools.

They were already dead.

Even if they made it passed the dragon, even if they weren’t taken down by the feeders, then the mountain would end them sure enough. I spit a curse through clenched teeth, pressing onward to the gate. There were those still inside the bounds of the aery. Thousands of Fae. Innocents who didn’t deserve to die. But even as I ran, my mind calculated a darker form of mathematics. For years now, Malcolm had been amassing his numbers. Bolstering his army with as many new feeders as he could manage. Many Fae who received the midnight kiss never awoke from the slumber that came after. They died and that was it. But one in five did wake. And even though I wanted to save the lives of the innocents within the Ajun keep, I had to prevent Malcolm from claiming the twenty percent of them who would rise and join him. Nothing mattered more. If he exacted his toll, this freshly minted war between the living and the dead would be over before it had even begun.

“They’re sounding the horns!” a female voice cried. Danya, maybe? Mirelle? I couldn’t tell with my blood hammering in my ears. I couldn’t hear the horns blaring out across the mountain range, either, but yes. There it was, in the soles of my feet, the hollow of my ribcage, the roof of my mouth: the vibration of three twenty-foot-long horns sounding out into the mayhem.

The gates were close now, black, and twisted, and fearsome.

I halted, then, spinning around, sword raised aloft in defiance of the beast and the undead as I waited for my wolves to cross the city’s threshold. The dragon gouged its claws into the steep slope, sinking through snow, rock and ice. Nightmare made flesh, it weaved its head from side to side, golden eyes glaring as, one by one, we made it through the open gate into Ajun.

The dragon took a prowling step forward, and I reacted. Thrusting a hand in front of me, I forced the magic roiling behind my breastbone outward with all my might. It came fast, hungry, begging to be unleashed. Shadows blasted out of me, the power incomprehensible as they chased across the snow and built upon themselves to form a rippling wall. They blotted out what little could be seen of the mountain, obscuring the surging crowd of feeders from sight. There was no concealing the dragon, though. He was just too big. My shadows slipped up his body, sliding over his scales like silk until they reached his wings.

Lorreth watched in amazement. “What are you—” But the question died on his lips. Clenching my jaw, I pictured a spear in my mind. Even as I did so, the smoke coalesced, forming a replica of the shape above the drake. The beast snarled, sensing what was coming, but he couldn’t move. My shadows had formed shackles around his legs. They had solidified to hooks that bit into his flesh, anchoring him to the ground. In the blink of an eye, the spear I’d formed above Omnamshacry plunged downward point-first, staking him to the ice by the wing.

The dragon screamed. Blood flowed in sheet over the tough membrane of his wing, pouring out into the snow, stinking and black. “Cursed-born! Release… me!”

As if I would simply obey. As if I would be cowed by his temper or his threats. I stood and watched as he thrashed and bellowed, unmoved. It brought me no pleasure to see a living being suffer… but this was different. A dragon was a curse. Their hearts were hollow, black voids, where no good thing could survive. There would be no sympathy for this kind of evil.

“Will the feeders be able to pass through that?” Ren asked, gesturing to the wall of shadows that now formed a perimeter around the city.

The answer to that question was undeniable. “Yes.” There was no way to keep them out for good. My shadows were a part of me. My magic. They required energy to maintain, and the sheer size of the barricade I’d thrown up between us and the horde was too big to sustain indefinitely.

“How much time do we have?” Korrix’s dark eyes shone with fascination as he watched the dragon thrashing against its restraints.

I set my jaw, exhaling long and slow. Eventually, I answered. “Not long. Where’s Vash and Foley? Mirelle?”

“Inside already,” Korrix grunted. “Mirelle’s gone to prepare healing stations for when the wounded start to pour in. Vash and Foley are looking for the armory.”

“Good. Enter the city and round up as many of the weak and the vulnerable as you can,” I told him. “Lorreth, Ren, you two head to the top of the eastern tower and see if you can find someone who can scry a message out. The King needs to know what’s happening here.” We all knew the King wouldn’t care. He didn’t care about the fate of Ajun, and that was precisely why there were only eight of us here to protect it now. But if a message wasn’t sent, the bastard would pretend he knew nothing of the danger threatening Yvelia’s most northern outpost. I would be blamed. Somehow, some way, Belikon would lay the blame for all of this at my feet.

“We should stay with you,” Lorreth said.

I shook my head. “I’ve got Danya. Go.”

We’d found ourselves in predicaments like this before. Okay, perhaps those situations in the past hadn’t been quite this dire, but we’d always found a way out of them, and my brothers trusted me because of it. Wordlessly, they nodded and turned, sprinting into the city.

When I spun back to face the dragon, he had ceased his struggling and was watching me with baleful eyes, his hulking form wreathed in shadow.

“What now, Fae Thing?” Old ‘Shacry seethed. “You stand upon hallowed grounnnddd... but the gate stands ajar. The gate that cannot be touched. The gate that cannot be closed. Not by the likes of youuuuuuu…” His words buzzed the air, sank into the earth, and shook the very bones of Yvelia.

Were they through yet?

All of them?

Breathless, I cast around, but the only shapes I saw moving away from the city’s gates were the Ajun Fae, too gripped in their fear to think straight. It was done then. My friends would be safe, at least. The remainder of the city would be, too.

“Fisher! What now?” Danya shouted. “What do we do?”

Because the dragon was right. The Ajun Gate had been forged to keep out the abominations of this realm… but it had also been designed to withstand the tampering of the Fae as well.

Iron.

The Ajun Gate was forged from iron, and no member of the Fae, high born or low, King or peasant, could touch it without suffering the consequences. That was the reason why Malcolm had sent his horde now. The Ajun Fae were celebrating the Mayheillen Festival, which meant that the gates were kept open for five days and five nights — a symbolic gesture, supposed to welcome good fortune into the city and allow trapped spirits to escape out into the cold. Superstitious pricks. Of all the archaic, ridiculous rituals to observe, leaving the gates wide open had to be stupidest of all.

Only a few of Yvelia’s creatures were impervious to the effects of iron. The fire sprites usually charged with opening and closing the gates had been summoned by those blaring horns, but they weren’t going to make it in time.

Omnamshacry was already here. And so was the horde.

Taking a deep breath, I steeled myself, turning to face the dragon. “What bargain did he strike?” I called. “What treasure did Malcolm promise you that could convince you to break your oath?”

A low ticking sound emanated from the dragon’s gullet. “The dead who fall and do not risssseeee,” he answered. “His vipers bite, and his vipers drink… but they do not eat the flesssshhhhhh.”

“The Ajun have given you gold. Silver,” I snarled. “The most valuable gems yielded up from the earth.  All of it they gave to you in exchange for watching over this city.”

“Silver is good, yes. Gold is betteerrrrrr. Diamonds and rubies stud the walls of my lair. But a dragon has other appetitesssss,” he hissed. “A dragon must eat. Let me through so the feasting may begin.”

“Fisher! What the hell are you doing? Move!” Danya cried. “Get inside the city!”

But I couldn’t go inside. Not now. There was only one way to keep my friends safe. Not only them, but the rest of the Ajun, too. It would kill me, but it had to be done.

I took a step back, and I closed my hands around the Ajun Gate.

“Fisher, no!” The shout rang hollow out into the silence. “No! What are you doing? Let go!”

Renfis had been buzzed by an iron-tipped arrow once. The arrowhead had barely grazed his skin. Even such fleeting contact with the metal should have meant death for him, but he was strong. For a week, he’d sweated in a healer’s tent on the outskirts of our war camp, fighting for his life. I’d determined then and there that no iron arrow would be the death of me. I’d started conditioning myself, holding my hand over small amounts of iron filings at first. After a while, I’d progressed to pressing a fingertip against the ground-up powder. Over the years. I’d progressed so that even clenching an arrow tip in my palm caused no more than an uncomfortable nausea in the pit of my stomach.

But this was different. This was tons and tons of iron. Magically warded iron. And it wanted me fucking dead. My palms began to smolder the second I curled my fists around the thick bars.

“Fisher, what the fuck!” Danya rushed forward, pale blue eyes swimming with fear. “Stop this. The sprites are coming!”

I ignored her. “Take the children to the libraries. The observatories. As high up into the city as you can manage,” I told her. “Barricade them indoors. Dawn will be here in five hours. If the dead get into the city—”

“This is madness! Just stop. You’re killing yourself!”

If the gate had been made of any other metal, I’d have closed it with ease. But it didn’t matter how much the iron weighed. The magic rendered it immoveable. I groaned with the effort, shoving my weight behind myself as I threw myself at the gate.

“Go, Danya. Get them to safety. What… the fuck are waiting for?”

It didn’t budge. The iron burned a pathway into my skin, sinking through my flesh like a hot knife through butter. The metal only stopped once it hit bone. The agony was like nothing I’d ever experienced before, but I put it away. Shut it behind a door. Buried it. Moved on.

“You can’t… be serious.” Danya stared in horror down at my smoking hands.

Behind us, Omnamshacry laughed. “Ahh, that smell. Such a smell. Scorched Fae flesh. Soon it will be mine. All of it will be mine. A mountain of meat, yes. It will sate us for a thousand years and more. This place is but a graaaaveyard. I will pick your bones clean.”

The bastard could whittle my bones into chess pieces for all I cared. So long as I got this damned gate closed first, it could have whatever was left of me. Nausea slammed into me, rolling through the me like a tide. Behind me, the sound of maddened barks and snarls intensified. The horde had crested the summit of the mountain and weren’t far now. From Danya’s wide eyes, she could see them coming.

I wouldn’t look.

I hurled myself forward again, crying out, forcing my hands to lock around the thick iron posts. The soles of my boots found purchase against the ice… and slowly, too slowly, the gate began to move.

“Why does it always have to be you?” Danya whispered. “There are eight of us, Fisher. Let us help.”

The ground trembled as the feeders behind me broke into a run, and I gave everything I had to that godscursed gate.

“Fisher!” Danya sobbed as I pressing my shoulder into the spelled iron and roared. The skin beneath my armor didn’t touch the metal, but it smoked, too close to the layered spell work that had protected Ajun City and its people for millennia.

The gate moved. The feeders charged. In the courtyard on the other side of the gate, children wailed. Beyond the cacophony of sound, above it all, the dragon laughed. Blood ran in rivers from my hands, beneath my gauntlets, covering my chest plate and dripping into the snow.

Stark red on white.

Drip.

Drip.

But then, the crimson droplets falling into the snow turned a glossy metallic silver.

Like lightning, the magic that bound the gate forked down into my exposed bone and sang the most terrible song up my arms. I felt myself shatter from the inside. Felt the blood begin to boil inside me. Felt my body start to fail and my mind along with it. But there was still time. And there was the quicksilver.

“We do not bow,” it raged. Many voices, all speaking as one. Forever a curse crouching out of sight in a dark corner of my consciousness, it rose up and spread through me like a wildfire, galvanizing my veins and dousing the pain. “We are not bound by foreign magics,” it seethed. “Nor shall you be.”

Like the flame of a candle battered by a sudden wind, the magic that had been assaulting me guttered and blew out. The agony of the iron was still there, but with the magic now gone… I could do this.

“Quickly,” the quicksilver urged. “Faster, faster. They come. They come!”

I didn’t need telling twice. On the other side of the gate, Danya let out a choked scream, watching me work. Down the long, stone staircase on the other side of the interior courtyard, Ren and Lorreth finally reappeared, swords in their hands. They spat ferocious curses when they saw what I was about.

“Fucking idiot! What are you doing?” Ren was the first to reach the gate. He thrust his arm through the iron posts, attempting to push me away from the metal, but I bared my canines at him.

“Do not open this gate,” I snarled.

"What do you mean? It’s still fucking open! You can make it through!” Lorreth, this time, face splattered with blood and dirt. “We’ll close it from inside!”

“Don’t touch it. You touch this gate and you all die. You need to stay and help them.”

“Fisher! Ren, tell him!”

But Renfis withdrew his hand through the bars of the gate, a strange calmness settling over him. He looked at the gap that remained between the gate and the wall.

Seven feet now.

Six and a half.

He turned his gaze back to me, and his eyes didn’t leave mine again. “If he closes it from inside, there’ll be no one left out there to defend the city,” he said quietly.

“He’s one male!” Danya bit out. “One male against five thousand feeders and a fucking dragon.”

Gods. Hearing it out loud made me falter. Against such a force, what could I possibly accomplish? The truth was simple. I wasn’t going to hold them back. I couldn’t. What I could do was close this gate. In five hours, the feeders would either burn up in dawn’s light or would have to find cover. Belikon’s army would arrive, and the might of a thousand Fae Elite would take on Old ‘Shacry. It would be bloody. Many would die, but…

My boots slipped in the snow.

In a single breath, my grip was gone. I hit the ground with a staggering crack! the breath rushing right out of me.

Exhaustion fell on me like a hawk upon its prey. The small voice inside of me, the one that was all me and not the quicksilver, whispered quiet words that were hard to ignore. Just stay down. Finally. Just… stay down. All hope fled, then. It was over. Done. If I stayed here, lying in the snow and my own blood, it would be over, wouldn’t it? All of it. The constant fighting. The constant pain. The constant sacrifice—

“Get up.”

My mind stilled.

I opened my eyes, and there, on the other side of the gate, Renfis crouched, less than a foot away, his jaw clenched with determination. “Get up,” he repeated.

“I don’t…” I gasped. “I can’t.” The iron had done its work. I hadn’t just let it touch my skin. I’d held onto it with both hands, knowing what it would cost me. It was a miracle I was even still breathing. The cold leached into my bones. My life leached out into the snow. It was only a matter of time now.

“So that’s it, then? You ruin your hands and give up your life to save all these people, and now you’re just leaving the job half done?”

I raised my head at that, rankled by his tone. “I tried.”

“Oh, okay. Perfect. When the historians revisit Ajun in a couple of centuries, I’ll make sure they chisel that into your headstone, then. He tried.”

The asshole.

I knew what he was doing.

“Oh, wait, that’s right. I won’t make sure they come back and do that because I’ll be dead, too, won’t I? Me, and Lorreth, and Danya. My sister. Vash. Korrix. Foley. All those who matter most to you. Not to mention every single member of the Fae within these walls. Dead.”

“Bastard,” I groaned.

He gave me a grim smile. “Indeed.” But he said no more. Didn’t need to. His ploy had worked, and I was already hauling myself up onto my knees, then to my feet. Every cell of my body was on fire, but I lifted my ruined hands and wrapped them once more around the gate.

My brother rose with me. “You can do this,” he said softly.

So, I did. Not because I believed that I could. But because he believed that I could. And with my last living moments, I wasn’t going to let him down.

I pushed.

I grit my teeth together and I roared.

Slowly, through ragged breath and blinding pain, I moved the cursed gate.

“Four feet,” Renfis murmured. “Come on, Fisher. Push.”

“Come on, you lazy fuck,” Lorreth added. “I’ve seen you strain harder to take a shit. Push the damn thing.”

I let out a bark of laughter, despite all of it — the pain, and the blood, and the monsters straining against my wards. Tears streamed down my face. “I’m going to… haunt the hell out of you, asshole.”

“I’ll be pissed if you don’t,” he answered. I heard the raw emotion in his voice but couldn’t see it. My vision had narrowed, focusing down to one point: the two feet that remained between the gate and the wall. I panted, desperately trying to summon the strength to close that gap. It wasn’t far.

“Come on. That’s it, Brother. Push,” Renfis urged.

The wards were fracturing. One by one, piece by piece, I felt my shadows rushing back to me, returning home. Time was running out. I pushed with what little energy I had left, and the gate ground forward an inch.

Two.

Five.

Then, there were hands at my back.

Fuck!

My pulse soared. The feeders! They—

But it wasn’t the feeders. They hadn’t broken through the ward. Not yet, anyway. The sound of the voice behind me damn near broke me. “Come on, then, you stubborn ass. We’ll do it together.”

The hands at my back were Ren’s. Lorreth’s. Strong. Steady. Firm. The hands of my brothers, who stood beside me on the wrong side of the gate, ready to help me. Ready to stand with me. Ready to die with me. They had slipped through the gap, right before it had become too small, and now they were here with me. They couldn’t touch the gate itself, but they could lend me their strength to complete this task. And just as the ward failed and Malcolm’s ravenous horde broke through my shadows, I pushed at that fucking gate, and my brothers pushed me.

The sound of iron crashing against stone rang out into the night, thunderous and beautiful.

It was closed.

The people inside the city were safe.

I dropped like a stone the second it was done, my limbs failing me. The night was already so dark. I could barely see anything anyway, but the edges of my vision grew even darker, closing in.

“You shouldn’t have done… that,” I panted. “Neither of you.”

“I think you mean all three of us shouldn’t have done it.”

A flicker of brilliant white light flared into existence, briefly lighting up the dark, and there, twenty feet away, Danya stood with her sword held high, the flat of the blade rippling with iridescent blue-white flames. When she glanced back at me over her shoulder, I saw that she was grinning like a sinner in a whorehouse. “What? I wasn’t going to let these bastards claim all the glory, now, was I?”

She spun her sword — Celeandor — with a flourish, and wisps of flame crackled up into the air. I’d almost forgotten that her father had gifted her the god sword at last. It was good that she had it. With it, there was a chance the three of them might be able carve a path through the feeders and charge down the mountain. A slim chance, but…

“Your shadows,” Lorreth said under his breath. “The wall’s gone. They’re coming.”

I heard them, sure enough. The sound was unmistakable: an army of ravenous demons with the frenzy was upon them, maddened by the knowledge that they were about to taste blood. The jostling black tide flowed up the last hundred feet of the mountainside toward us.

It would be quick now.

Too quick.

There wasn’t much time.

“Renfis…”

He looked down at me, panic carved into the lines of his face. “No,” he whispered.

“Yes. End it,” I wheezed. “If I can’t fight, you can’t… let them… take m—”

“Gods alive, will you shut the fuck up,” Danya groaned. “None of us are going to kill you. You’re not leaving us with that kind of trauma. You’re going to be fine. We all are.”

The dragon further down the slope bellowed, his rage fouling the air with sulfur. He could sense it: the tiny fragment of power I still possessed was failing, and with it the shadow spear that still pinned him to the ice.

Danya’s blind assessment of the situation could not have been more ridiculous. Once ’Shacry was free, he would feast on us, but our bodies would already be cooling in the snow by then.

“You should g—gg—” I choked as a gout of salt and copper surged into my mouth. When I touched my fingers to my lips, I expected them to come away red, but instead they dripped silver. Why is there so much of it? Wh—

The sky exploded with light.

Not from brimstone or fire.

Daylight, sudden and brilliant scorched my eyes.

The world was still.

Calm.

Quiet.

I blinked, my breath catching in my throat. The pain was gone and with it the horror of the mountainside.

“Shh. Don’t be silly. He’s second handsomest,” a lilting female voice declared.

I was no longer on the slopes before Ajun. I was somewhere else. A warm sun beat down on me, melting the ice crusted to the front of my chest plate to water. Long blades of dry grass whispered and rushed all around me, swaying on a gentle breeze.

I launched myself upright, pulse pounding. “My friends! Where are my friends?”

Soft giggling sounded nearby.

I found myself in the middle of a sweeping range. Close by, a mighty tree stood atop a knoll, though far away enough that I could only just make out the shape of the figure seated on a rock beneath it. There was another figure up there, too. Slighter. A female, by the looks of things, though I couldn’t make out her features. I didn’t care about the male or whoever he was talking with, though.

I knew precisely where I was, and I was fucking furious about it. “Send me back!” I shouted. “Right fucking now.”

Twin females rose from the dancing grass, beautiful and grinning. They glowed with mischief, their dark hair floating on an invisible breeze as they picked up their skirts and laughed, rushing toward me with fingers pressed to their lips. “Shh,” the girl on the left urged. “Quiet, Fierce Heart. We aren’t allowed guests to visit without Father’s permission.”

I glowered at the girl, blood and quicksilver spilling from my mouth when I spoke a second time. “Send me back, Mithin.”

The girl — the goddess — looked wounded. “I’m not Mithin. I’m Ba—”

“You are Mithin. Now send me home.”

The godling pouted prettily, disappointed that her lie hadn’t taken hold. “You know, you’re the only one who has ever been able to tell us apart. Even Father sometimes confuses us.”

Next to her, the other goddess, identical to her in almost every way, dropped down into the grass. “You always ruin our games, Fierce Heart.”

“This isn’t a game. I have to go back. My friends need me.”

“Oh?” Bal eyed me coquettishly, fluffing out her skirts as she sat down beside her sister. “And what do you hope to accomplish, should we give in to your very rude demand?”

Mithin leaned forward, fingertips brushing my chin. “You’re very sick, y’know. If we do send you back, you’ll surely die.” She popped the tips of her fingers into her mouth, giggling when my blood hit her tongue. “Oh my,” she breathed.

Bal’s crystalline eyes flared; staring at her counterpart, she demanded, “What does he taste like?”

“Mm. Like hope.” She thought for a moment. “A little fear, perhaps. Unmet potential. And love.”

Love? That one caught me off guard. But what could a godling know of love?

Huffing petulantly, Bal balled up her fists and sulked. “That’s not fair. I want to taste.”

Quickly, she reached for my face, but I batted her hand away before she could touch me. There was no pain as I moved, but I felt the wrongness inside me. I was balanced on a knife edge, about to topple over a ledge of some sort…and even though I couldn’t see it, I sensed that the fall on the other side would be eternal. I didn’t have the luxury of ruminating on that right now, though. “I’m not your pet. You can’t just taste me without my permission,” I snarled, pushing away from the twins. I felt no better on my feet. No less disassociated from my body. “Why did you bring here? And answer truthfully. No games.”

Bal pouted, still stung that I hadn’t let her lap my blood from her fingers. It was Mithin who answered. “Our life here is very limited, Darling.” She threw herself onto her back in the grass, stretching like a cat. “We spend a great deal of time observing you. It stems the boredom. We couldn’t exactly let all those cruel creatures eat you now, could we? What would we do then?”

The gravity of what she was saying hit hard and fast. “So, you intervened. He let you intervene?”

Bal rolled her eyes, ripping a stalk of grass out of the ground next to her. “How many times have you visited us in our realm, Kingfisher?”

I didn’t have to dig deep for the answer. There had been the first occasion, when I was just a boy and Belikon had sent me into the Quicksilver without a relic. Then, there had been another time, three centuries ago, when the God of Chaos had approached me with a proposition — one that I had summarily rejected out of hand. “This is the third time,” I told her.

“And how many times have you seen our father intervene to prevent catastrophe in the universe?”

“Never.”

“Precisely. Your presence here has nothing to do with Zareth.” Mithin smirked at this, as if this was something she was very proud of. “We brought you here. As we speak, his mind is elsewhere. He probably doesn’t even know that you’re here.”

The Gods were full of misdirects and mischief. I had discovered this firsthand when I was little more than a child. But there was a tone in Mithin’s voice that snagged in the back of my mind, and interested or not, a part of me sat up and paid attention.

A scent blew to me on the breeze, then, electrifying every part of me. Like lilies, and sugar, and light, and laughter, and smoke, and…

I couldn’t fucking breathe.

“Who is that?” I gasped. “Up there on the hill with him?” No matter how hard I squinted, I couldn’t see her. The sudden ache in my chest was more powerful than anything I’d ever experienced before. It overrode everything.

Bal and Mithin laughed in chorus. They jumped to their feet as I began to head in the direction of the hill, stopping me, each of them taking one of my ruined hands. “That is the future,” Mithin chided.

“This is the past,” Bal added in a sing-song tone.

Every fiber of my being needed me to be on that hill. The goddesses were older than the bones of the universe, though, and their light touch on my hands was all they needed to anchor me to the spot.

“Our home is strange,” Bal purred. “Time exists upon itself here. Time upon time, upon time, upon time…” Her voice took on a dreamlike quality, blurring around the edges. “But that is not your place. Not yet.”

“She’s hurt,” I whispered. I could smell it: her blood, intoxicating, like a siren song, calling to me. “Some… something’s happened to her. She’s—”

“She is safe,” Mithin soothed. “Our father is telling her of things to come. Things not meant for your ears. Come.”

A bright lance of pain brought me back to myself. The goddesses were holding my hands tighter now, both of their own hands clasped tightly around mine. A brilliant white light spilled between their fingers and dripped into the grass at our feet. “He hasn’t given his permission to act,” Mithin said. “But our father knows all things that have been done and will be done. He has not prevented this, which makes it his will. You will be healed. You will be sent back…”

“But—”

It washed over me, through me, scattering me in every direction: so much power that, for one brief split second, I was no longer concerned about the inconsequential follies of the universe. I was the universe. And then I was not.

The goddesses dragged me back, away from that tumble into eternity. I came back into myself, and when I opened my eyes, a new weight had settled in my freshly healed hands. No longer their hands, but instead a glittering black sword.

I frowned down at it, unable to conceal my shock. “What’s this?”

It was beautiful in its way. Not traditionally so. It bore no elaborate engraving. Its hilt was bare. But there was a rawness to it that called to me, and when I closed my hands around its grip and held it before me, studying its dark edge, it felt as though a part of my soul that had been missing since birth had finally found its way back to me.

“An ancient blade,” Bal said coyly. She stepped back, linking arms with her sister, and the two of them watched me, quietly beaming with approval.

I twisted the weapon, feeling the rightness of its weight. “What’s it called?”

Mithin’s laughter rang out across the meadow like a bright silver bell. “That’s not for us to say. Only a sword’s true owner may name it. This one has been waiting for millennia for you, hasn’t it, sister?”

“Indeed,” Bal answered. “You will know what to call it very soon, we fear. Speaking of which…”

The twins began to walk backwards, their long skirts rustling in the grass. A panic spiked in my chest, then. They weren’t telling me something. There was something I needed to ask them. Something I needed to know. I…

I took one step forward and plunged face-first through their reality. Like I’d accidentally stumbled into deep, cold water. I flailed, gasping…

…and suddenly the meadow was gone. The goddesses, and the knoll, and the distant tree, and… something else, someone else was gone.

I came to, standing at the foot of the Ajun Gate.

The horde were mere feet away. My friends were bracing for impact. Renfis was screaming something, already running out to meet the dead, the beginnings of a blue orb of energy forming in his hands. I was exactly where I had been mere moments before…

Except that now I was whole.

And now, I held a god sword in my hands.

MY BODY didn't know how to shiver anymore.

The cold cut me down to the bone.

I took up another coin and tossed it, feeling nothing when it struck the ground and

bounced.

On the other side of the courtyard, Taladaius sat on the edge of a stone seat covered in ivy. The moonlight turned his hair to silver, the strands shining almost as bright as the mountain of coins behind him. He rested his chin in his palm, watching me as I went about my endless task, his facial features carefully controlled. His eyes were reflective pools - dark and swimming in silver. He wasn't infected with the quicksilver like I was, though. It was only the reflection of the coins in his eyes.

He didn't speak. He'd learned over the years I'd been trapped here that it was best not to attempt conversation with me unless I was the one to initiate it. He'd come here for a reason, though. Soon enough, he'd have to share what errand Malcolm had sent him on and be about it.

"Fifty-five thousand, nine hundred and eighty-three."

Shinggggggg.

Nothing.

"Fifty-five thousand, nine hundred and eighty-four."

Shingggg...

Out in the maze, Morthil screeched. The sound made me fumble the coin I was holding.

The demon couldn't reach me in the court-yard. None of Malcolm's terrors could... besides Tal, of course. For the most part, I was safe in here. I hadn't had to face the spider demon in years, but the memory of it was still plenty fresh in my mind. Occasionally, it would come and prowl back and forth in front of the entrance into the shifting maze, whispering hate and madness, trying to goad me into coming out. I think I'd reacted to it before, back in the beginning, when I was still hopeful that I might accomplish my task here. I didn't waste my breath anymore.

"Fifty-five thousand, nine hundred and eighty-six."

Shinnngggg ...

"Five."

My head snapped up, eyes boring into Tal's placid face. We had grown up together, he and I. Apart from Renfis, I had known him the longest in the span of my miserable, piteous life. "What?"

The vampire sat back in his ivy-choked throne, clearly uneasy. Or maybe just... resigned. "Fifty-five thousand, nine hundred and eighty-five," he said. "You miscounted."

I just looked at him. "How foolish of me. I guess I'd better start over, then."

"Fisher."

"One."

Schinggg...

"Two."

Schinggg.

"Fisher. You didn't need to do that." Tal groaned.

I threw down the handful of coins I was holding, suddenly exhausted. We both knew it didn't matter. There were millions of coins here. All of them looked the same, but none of them were the coin. I had flicked all of them into the air at least a dozen times apiece, watching them spin in the air, and nothing had ever happened. The bargain Malcolm and Belikon had tricked me into in Gillethrye held fast, stubbornly refusing to release me from this prison. I would remain here and I would suffer until the world ended or I lost my mind.

In all honesty, I was pretty sure that had already happened. The burning corpses in the stands surrounding the maze were never quiet. Their chanting had become background noise a long time ago, and yet I still couldn't seem to block them out. Their cries of "Annorath mor! Annorath mor!" pounded in my ears like a second pulse.

The quicksilver never abated, either. It went through phases of being agitated and phases of being calm, but either way, it never shut the hell up. If the disquiet of my mind was, in fact, madness, then there was no peace in it.

I sank down, sitting heavily on a nearby slope of coins, and scrubbed my face with my hands. "Come on, then. Tell me something," I said.

Tal knew what I meant. He had started sharing what he could of the outside world with me a long time ago. The portraits he painted of the world beyond this place were the only bright things I had to look forward to.

"It's spring in the west," he said quietly. "There are flowers blooming on the slopes of the Shallow Mountains. Foxpaw and Pixie's Breath and Larrelian Foss. Some Vodinium, too, I think. Pinks and blues. White and orange."

There was no color in this dark place. Only shadows and death. My mind strained to conjure the vibrant shades Tal mentioned, but the memories of those shades were slow to come.

"The ice is still thick at Irrin, though. Your friends defend the banks with honor. Ren"

"No!" I scowled at him. "I've already told you. No." He knew better than to mention that name. I didn't want to hear any of their names.

Renfis.

Lorreth.

Everlayne.

Danya.

Te Léna.

They were here with me sometimes - figments of my imagination drawn close by loneliness. I ignored them as best I could. Acknowledging them meant missing them, and I couldn't bear the ache.

Taladaius sighed. He picked up a coin and stared at it as he turned it over in his pale hands. "Belikon moves his troops west," he said. "Toward Gilaria. Some say he'll invade the mountain Fae for their gold."

"And what does your master say?" I murmured.

Taladaius's hands stilled. His eyes remained locked on the coin. "My king says that only a fool would invade a mountain from its foot while its snows are melting. The mud would condemn such a venture to fail before it had even begun."

I grunted, chewing on the inside of my cheek. "What, then? The bastards know each other's minds well enough. Malcolm knows what he's up to."

"If he does, then I am not at liberty to say."

"Bullshit. You're his Keeper of Secrets. You know everything he know-"

"If he does... then I am not at liberty to say." Tal stressed the words, shooting me a meaningful look.

I know well what the Yvelian king is planning, but I cannot speak of it.

Being bound in such a way was a horrible feeling. There was always a boot on your throat. You forgot about it occasionally, until you accidentally stumbled in the wrong direction during a conversation and that boot crushed your fucking windpipe.

"You tell me what Belikon might be doing, heading east through the Wicker Wood," Tal said. "If he doesn't plan on assaulting Gilaria, then what other reason might he have for ordering his men from the palace in that direction?"

My mind felt rusty. Disused. For so long, I had been faced with just one problem, and that problem required no thought. Flipping coins was hardly a mentally taxing pastime. Tal goaded me into using my problem-solving skills whenever he could, especially when it meant that I might guess something he couldn't tell me and circumvent Malcolm's will in the process. There was always a way. And Tal hated the leash his master had fastened around his neck as much as any caged animal did.

So I thought for a while. "He wouldn't send his men through the Wicker Wood unless he absolutely had to." The wood was perilous enough as a single rider. The forest didn't welcome visitors at the best of times.

The ghouls that lived there wouldn't notice you if you were alone. Certainly, it was unwise to tread the paths of the Mourning Wood in groups larger than three or four. The tortured spirits would notice large groups, and they would climb into the bodies of the living any chance they got if it meant escaping their punishment. Belikon wouldn't risk sacrificing his troops to possession unless he absolutely had to... which meant the route through the woods was the only way he could reach his destination.

"North, then," I said. "He heads east so that he can turn his men north after. He's sending them through the frozen wastes."

Tal pouted, neither confirming nor denying, but there was a spark in his eyes that made me believe I had the right idea. "And why would he do that?" he pondered. "There isn't much up there, really."

He was prodding me, guiding me to think. "There are small settlements," I said. "Hardy folk. Fae who know how to carve an existence out of the snow and ice."

"Mm. I wouldn't think those people would be of any interest to Belikon. Would you?"

It was growing colder. "Other than those townships, there's only the Ice Shores, then," I said. "The Breach. And ... " Realization dawned. "Ahh. The Breach, and then the Balquhidder lands on the side of it."

Tal smiled softly, going back to staring at his coin. The fact that he could touch it meant that it wasn't the coin I was looking for. The coin I was looking for contained silver, which meant he shouldn't have been able to tolerate being near any of these coins, and yet here he sat.

"I wonder what Belikon might want from the witches," he mused. "The Balquhidder Clan hates everybody, it's true, but they hate Belikon the most. I wond-" He coughed, his breath catching in his throat. His face began to redden. It was different for everyone; some Oath Bound Fae couldn't breathe when they skirted too close to the secret they were forbidden from speaking of. For others, it felt as if they were swallowing a sword. For many years, I'd refused to ask Tal what it felt like for him. And then one day, when he edged particularly close to something he wasn't supposed to mention, smoke had started pouring from his mouth, and my curiosity had gotten the better of me. I had asked.

"Fire." Another puff of black smoke had come out of his mouth as he'd rasped the word. "It feels like... I'm on fire."

There was no smoke this time. Only the chagrined, apologetic look he sent my way. "I'm afraid I'm going to have to leave you to consider that one on your own," he said. "It seems I've said as much as I can on the matter."

Another furious shriek echoed through the maze. I didn't even blink at the horrendous sound, but I caught the way Tal flinched. "I don't have long today," he said. "Zovena's stirring up all kinds of trouble back at Ammontraíeth. Malcolm's tasked me with tamping down her little insurrection before it can find its feet."

The vampire's brow furrowed. It wasn't often that he mentioned that name. He didn't bring the female up of his own volition. Ever. Zovena was the reason why Tal found himself amongst the ranks of the Black Palace's High Blood population in the first place. In a round - about way, she was the reason things were always so tense between me and Tal, too. There were other reasons, of course. Too many to count, really. But Zovena was prime amongst them.

He registered the way my lip curled in annoyance at the sound of her name and laughed sadly under his breath. He said no more about her, though. Instead, he drew in a deep breath and sat up straight. "He sent me to make you bleed," he told me in a matter-of-fact tone.

"All right, then. Get on with it. As you can see, I'm very busy here." My sarcasm did not go unnoticed.

Tal got to his feet, his hand reaching for his waist. His fingers trailed over the dagger at his hip, but then he removed a small leather fold from his pocket and drew a pin from within it instead.

In the beginning, when Malcolm had first realized how much distress it caused Tal to come and torture me in the maze, he'd been very specific about how he'd wanted his Keeper of Secrets to hurt me. He'd prescribed which method of torture he wanted Tal to employ and gone into great detail about how long the assault was to last. My hands had been tied. I couldn't leave the courtyard to escape him. If I left, the maze's walls would shift, and it might have taken me decades to find a way back in again. I would have had to face the nightmares that prowled the maze again, which I had also been determined to avoid.

I'd stayed and let Tal exact his torture so that both of us could be done with it. I'd fought back. I'd hurt him as much as he'd hurt me. But hurting him had stopped making sense after a while. He had to hurt me. I didn't have to hurt him. I didn't want to hurt him...

And then Malcolm had lost interest after a while and had become vague in his demands.

"Make him bleed" was a common command these days.

Taladaius held up the pin.

I offered him my finger.

It was over in a second. The pin pierced the pad of my index finger, and a glossy crimson bead of blood welled up from my skin like a tiny ruby. Dutifully, I flipped my hand over and squeezed my finger until the bead wobbled and fell to the ground. It hit the carpet of coins at my feet, and Tal's task was complete. The maze had taken its tax.

The vampire averted his eyes politely at the sight of my blood. Even here, in this godscursed place, he always made an attempt to be civilized. "I'll bring wine next time," he said, tucking his pin back into his pocket.

Wine was a luxury. I couldn't eat food here. Couldn't drink water. Couldn't fucking sleep or turn my mind off for more than a second. But Malcolm hadn't considered that I might somehow gain access to a glass of wine.

Whenever he could, Tal secured a bottle and brought it with him when he visited me. I savored those interruptions to my coin flipping more than anything.

I exhaled wearily, considering my boots.

"Thanks."

"I'll see you soon." His hand landed on my shoulder for a moment, and then he left. I didn't watch him go. It was painful, how easily he vaulted up the hill of coins, hopped up on top of the maze wall, and just walked away. I had tried to do the same more times than I could count, but the deal I'd made prevented me from taking that final step onto the wall every time; the magic was unbreakable.

"Three."

Schinggg...

"Four."

Schinggg...

Should go. Should leave. Go, go, go, the quicksilver chattered. Go out.

It told me to do this a lot. In the maze, I would absolutely have been caught by Malcolm's demons. I would absolutely have been eaten by one of them. I would have died. And while that death was only a temporary oblivion, it was still a moment of peace. A moment I wouldn't have to be here, doing this.

"Five."

Schinggg...

The coin hit the ground, landing on top of the small pile I had made. I went to flip another, the sixth coin balancing on the back of my thumbnail, but... I paused, narrowing my eyes at the stack. Something was different. The coins were vibrating. They rattled softly, their edges tinkling together-

I felt it, then. Something I hadn't felt in over a hundred years: the will of a god sword tugging at my soul. Nimerelle was here with me. She was propped up against the wall ten feet away, where I'd left her after the drills I'd run a few hours back. The pull at my chest wasn't from her. She had no access to her magic here, just as I didn't. This was a dead place. Not even the faintest trace of living magic flowed here, which meant I couldn't draw it to me. Neither could the sword. But still, I felt...

"Argh!" I doubled over, clutching my chest. The sensation wasn't pulling anymore. It was tearing. "What the hell?"

The ground rocked beneath my feet, shuddering violently.

I toppled sideways, landing hard on the pile of coins I had been adding to when Tal had shown up earlier. The pressure tugging on my chest winded me. I was being drawn across the courtyard, beckoned by something. Almost dragged...

"Fisher!" Taladaius hadn't gotten far. Had he felt the strangeness in the air before the ground had started shaking? He wobbled on top of the wall, reaching out to steady himself, then dropped back down into the court-yard. As he landed, the ground rumbled, then cracked, crumbling, yawning wide open so that a fifteen-foot-wide chasm formed between us.

Coins rained down into the pit.

"Careful!" Taladaius shouted. "You're too close to the edge!”

I rolled onto my back and panted, holding my chest, staring up at the night sky. As always, the sky was thick with clouds. Flakes of ash rained down, landing on my face as I tried to catch my breath.

"Did ... you do this?" I called.

"No. It wasn't me," Tal answered.

He sees us. He hears us. He sees us. He hears us...

The susurrus of whispers washed over me, flooding my head. I didn't ask Tal if he heard it. I knew what it was. I'd heard it chanting to me like this before, a long, long time ago, and the quicksilver didn't whisper to the dead.

He sees us. He hears us. Come to us. Come... the whispers beckoned.

The tearing in my chest grew even worse.

Gasping for breath, I struggled to my feet. I saw it immediately, down below. There had been rumors of a quicksilver pool at Gillethrye - rumors that the city's officials had stoutly denied. Belikon had sent people to search for any signs of a hidden pool, but they had always returned unsuccessful. Obviously, they hadn't thought to look beneath Gillethrye's amphitheater.

It was large, about twenty-five feet across. And it was awake.

"Gods alive," Tal hissed. "How? It-" He shook his head, not believing his eyes. "It should be sleeping."

Come. Come to us, the silver urged. It churned, volatile, its surface rippling and spilling over the sides of the pool below. I stared at it, my mouth growing drier and drier by the second.

Nimerelle.

I needed my fucking sword.

I moved.

"Fisher? What are you doing?" Tal called.

"What does it look like?" Blue sparks kicked up from the god sword's point when I snatched it up and dragged it to me. I slid it into its scabbard as I paced to the lip of the giant crack in the stonework. I looked up at Tal. "I'm getting the fuck out of here."

His eyes went wide. "You don't know where that leads," he said.

"It leads wherever I want it to lead," I said. "But something is calling to me from the other side of that portal right now, Tal, and I'm going to find out what it is."

He hesitated, and I saw it in his eyes: as one of Malcolm's lords, it was his duty to stop me from fleeing. It didn't serve his king's interests to let me go... but Malcolm hadn't ordered him to stop me if a situation like this arose. The vampire king hadn't foreseen something like this happening. Tal's jaw worked. "And if you die?" he asked.

"Then I die, and I'll be gone. But at least I won't be here."

He thought about this for all of a second, then nodded his head. "All right, then. Go. And... good luck."

It was a goodbye of sorts. The only one either of us could manage. I might have been escaping my prison cell, but I was leaving Tal to his. In another life, we'd find the words we needed to say to each other and maybe even stumble across a way to forgive each other, too. But for now, the nod he gave me and the nod I returned to him would have to suffice.

I jumped.

Holding my breath, I waited for the mo- ment that the bargain I'd made with Belikon stopped me from falling... but it never came. Whatever magic pinned me here bowed as gravity took hold, and that was it. I slipped through it, a wave of energy stretching, stretching, and then snapping. I hit the quicksilver like a stone.

He came. He is with us, with us, with us...

The quicksilver probed at me, trying to find a way in. I felt the moment that it recoiled.

He is us, it seethed. We are him!

It hadn't been expecting to find a piece of itself within me. I could still feel the overwhelming force of it, trying to find a crack in my mind wide enough so that more of it could slip in, but the chain around my neck grew heavy and hot, warding the quicksilver back.

Not this time, I thought. Now let me through. I concentrated, relaxing my body, allowing the strange tugging sensation at my solar plexus to take root. I stopped trying to fight against it, and I let it take me.

The top of my head breached the pool first. I registered the steps beneath my feet, and I climbed. The quicksilver rolled away, its whispering quieting as it went, and I found myself in a large, echoing chamber.

Gods, it was like stepping from an ice bath into a furnace. The air was arid, so hot that it scorched the back of my throat. A male writhed and screamed on the floor to my left - FUCK! I recoiled, lifting my boot, catching myself just in time. There was a female lying on the ground. Her black hair was plastered to the side of her face, her skin pale and drenched in sweat.

I snarled, reaching for Nimerelle. For the first time in over a century, a current of energy shot up my arm when I closed my hand around the god sword's hilt, and I could have wept. It felt like coming home. I hefted the blade up, already knowing exactly what it would feel like to cleave the female's head from her shoulders. The second it was done, I would-

Shock rippled through me.

What in all five hells was I seeing?

She was holding a sword, and not just any sword. She was holding Solace. The last time I'd seen the god blade, it had been in my father's hands. I lowered Nimerelle, numbly studying the female again.

She was human. Her ears were rounded, her frame smaller than it should have been. And there was a giant fucking hole in her stomach.

"Graceless gods," I rumbled. "What's this? A fucking joke?" If it was a joke, then it was in poor taste.

The male to my left was shouting, but I ignored him. I was too focused on the girl to think about anything else. Her eyes rolled back into her head. She fought valiantly to stay awake, but she was clearly fading fast.

I realized with no small amount of horror that I knew her face. I had seen it a hundred times, sketched into the pages of my mother's notebooks. I knew who she was supposed to be to me - the one my mother had told me would come. My counterweight. The female I would love and scourge the worlds for. And she was beautiful. Breathtakingly so. The way she stubbornly clung onto life, refusing to die even as her body failed her, was remarkable.

But she was human. She wouldn't survive her injuries, no matter how hard she fought. Even a member of the Fae would have struggled to overcome that wound in her belly, and she was so much weaker than one of my kind. What cruel kind of irony was it that I would find the one I was destined to spend my life with at last, only to discover that she wasn't long for the world?

And Solace, a quiet voice nudged in the back of my head. The blade. How can she be

holding the blade?

Blood swelled out of the hole in her stomach, the creeping crimson pool she lay in ever-growing as her life slipped away.

"Unfortunate." I sighed. Turning my attention to the male-the man-rolling on the ground, I demanded, "Where's Madra?"

It didn't take a genius to deduce where I was. The heat had been the first clue. And

then the sword. My father had been sent to Zilvaren to hide the Daianthus heir amongst the humans. The gates had closed not long after. Of course this was Zilvaren, which meant that the Immortal Queen must still be here somewhere, and I had every intention of fucking destroying her. The male scrambled on the ground, though, whimpering unintelligibly. "The ground. The passages. They m-move. In the ground. Obsidian. O ... obsid... obsidian... "

I had been about to kill him, but his words caught me off guard. Moving passages? In the ground. Made out of obsidian? He was talking about the maze. How could he possibly know about that? But then I noticed the quicksilver venturing up his body. It had already made contact with his skin and was showing him things.

Now that I was standing over him, I saw that he was dressed in outdated military dress. "I can't pull it out of you. Your fate's sealed, Captain. You deserve far fucking worse." This kind of death was too easy for anyone who chose to fight for the likes of Madra.

When I went to end him, I found that I couldn't bring myself to do it, though. Snarling under my breath, I brought Nimerelle's pommel crashing down onto his head instead. The captain let out a pained, wordless cry and then went still.

It didn't matter in the end. Where I lacked the conviction to end the man, the quicksilver did not. It snaked up the side of his face and rolled into his ear-a thin trail of metal, seeking and finding a way in.

I walked away. I had been waiting for this moment for longer than I could remember. I'd daydreamed about it, and now I was here, in Zilvaren, with a god sword at my side. I was going to kill Madra, and I was going to take my time...

I'd taken three steps toward the door when I ground to a stop.

The pulling sensation I had felt back in the maze was growing weaker by the second. I could barely feel it. It had become faint - a gentle pulse, as light and delicate as an Oshellith's wings, fluttering inside my chest.

It hadn't been the sword that I'd sensed, back in the maze. It had felt like the same kind of pull, familiar and insistent, but the sword was still here. Closer now. The tugging should have been stronger, but in reality, the sensation was ebbing away.

No, it hadn't been the sword calling to me. It had been the girl. And she was dying.

I clenched my teeth until my jaw cracked. "Gods and martyrs," I spat under my breath.

This kind of chance didn't present itself every day. If I left and went back through that quicksilver, who was to say I would have this kind of opportunity again. Madra had to die. She'd taken my father from me and cut off Yvelia, severing our trade lines to the other realms. She-

There it was again. Soft and light as a butterfly's wings, the feeling even lighter now but still clinging on.

The girl's face was there when I closed my eyes. My heart was fucking pounding. What was wrong with me? My feet had already turned me around and were walking me back to her before I'd consciously made the decision.

I stood over the girl's broken body for a moment, taking stock of the state of her. There was hope. If I took her now, then yes, there was hope. But the one place that would offer her the best chance of survival was the one place I absolutely did not want to go. Not after being stuck in the maze for so long. It was insanity, trading one enemy's prison for another... but the decision had already made itself in my mind. I was going to have to take her to the Winter Palace.

"Pathetic," I murmured. "Absolutely... " I gave up. There weren't words to describe how crazy this was. I was being pathetic. I should have gone and taken my revenge, and yet here I was, giving in to the fluttering of a butterfly's wings in my chest.

Huffing unhappily, I unhooked the relic that had protected me just now when I'd come through the quicksilver, unfastening it from my neck.

"If you die before you can give this back, I'm not going to be happy," I muttered. Once I had it fastened around her throat, I lifted her into my arms, and the fluttering in my chest stopped.

I couldn't hear her heartbeat anymore.

Fuck.

I-

She drew in a reedy breath, and the sensation in my chest returned. But barely.

I stepped into the quicksilver with my own heart trying to climb up into my throat. Her eyes were on me, liquid and afraid. They rolled back into her head as I began to make our descent. It was probably easier that she'd passed out, anyway. "You had better pull through this, Oshellith," I told her. "For better or for worse, I get the feeling that you're about to turn everything upside down."

Most slaves were nameless, but not this one.

This one had a name.

Orlena Parry stood at a window on the third floor of the Palace of the Undying Queen and watched as twelve hundred Alchemists burned alive in the courtyard below. She'd never considered herself lucky to have been born deaf, but tonight, she thanked all seven of the Gods that she couldn't hear their screams.

Naturally, the magic wielders were all Fae. They were heaped haphazardly, one on top of another, to form a monstrous mountain of flesh and bone. The flames that devoured their bodies rose to greet the twin suns hanging in the bleached sky over the city.

Around Orlena, Queen Madra's coronation celebrations flowed in a silent but chaotic tide, but it was the strange vibration rattling the glass in its frame and the scent of molten metal hanging in the air that eventually drew the slave away from the window and down the hallway, toward the Hall of Mirrors where the ominous quicksilver pool lay.

No one else had noticed the trembling glass or the metallic reek. They were too busy drowning in their cups and cavorting like devils, distracted by the festivities. But Orlena had noticed because Orlena

was deaf. With the loss of one of her senses, her others had sharpened

to well-honed points; they were rarely wrong. She was perceptive

even beyond this, too, feeling things and anticipating events that

had not yet come to pass, but the unease that had come upon her as

she'd poured wine for the city's elite-the very same unease that had

drawn her to the window and the horror show beyond it in the first

place-was more than that. The pull at her gut had no explanation,

but Orlena gave it the attention it demanded. She would have been a

fool not to.

Quickening her pace, she bowed her head, eyes on the floor as she rushed through the palace. No one questioned her. The empty wine pitcher in her hand gave her a reason to be moving through the palace at such a fast clip, even if she was rushing in the opposite direction of the cellars. Her heart beat hard as a war drum the closer she came to the Hall of Mirrors. Fear climbed her spine like a ladder, but she didn't slow. Didn't falter.

Glancing up and down the hallway, she made sure no one saw her as she heaved upon the heavy, carved doors and slipped through them, drawing them closed behind her. Inside the hall, the walls and columns were studded with a vast array of mirrors. Long and tall, short and wide, the polished glass formed the sense of unending pathways, heading off into forever. A thousand Orlenas stared back at the original as she clutched the wine pitcher to her stomach for comfort, as if it might steady her nerves. She still shook as she darted from one huge stone pillar to another, keeping to what shadows the mirrors afforded as she skirted the perimeter of the vaulted room.

Hurry

Hurry.

Hurry.

The pull drew her onward, becoming more urgent with each step she took. Now that she was here, though, her fear had her by the throat. She wanted to return to the feast and continue serving the revelers. There was something wrong here. She'd stood before the quicksilver portal only once, when she was twelve. The king, Madra's father, had demanded that all of the new slaves at the palace be sworn into his service before the sheet of rippling silver, Orlena amongst them. Everyone else had spoken their oaths, but not her, She had knelt on the freezing marble floor and pledged her loyalty to the king in writing, her name scrawled in black ink on a piece of crisp parch- ment, owing to the fact that her profound deafness meant she'd never learned to form the shapes of words out loud.

She remembered the quicksilver in haunting detail. The shimmering fifteen-foot-wide pool had stretched out before her, its prickling energy snapping against her skin as if it were probing her, looking for a way in. It had haunted her dreams for months, beckoning to her, and even after the dreams subsided, Orlena had struggled not to think about the pool. Thinking about it seemed to draw its focus, as if it felt her mind turn toward it and fed greedily upon the attention.

That had been years ago. Now, tiptoeing across the hall, Orlena felt the tamped-down panic of her childhood rising once more as she took in the undulating pool. It wanted her. To what end, she was too scared to imagine.

Orlena, come. Join us. Save us. Give yourself to us.

The voice startled Orlena. Other people experienced their thoughts

as the sounds of words, she knew. But her own thoughts were a kalei-

doscope of emotion, pictures, and feeling, rather than language. She

understood the words she heard in her head now, though it should

have been impossible. This was the voice that had called her away

from the feast hall. It was the sense of urgency that had nipped at her

heels.

Terrified though she was, she stepped toward the edge of the quicksilver. The toes of her battered boots met the edge of the pool's engraved stone lip, and that was as far as she could go.

The voice in her head whispered that that wasn't true.

Come to us. Join us. Save us.

A shiver started at the crown of her head, shooting down her back, making her teeth chatter. Orlena stepped back from the pool's edge, and a startled gasp leaped from her mouth when the surface of the fluid metal pulsed.

Back.

Back to the feast.

She had to go.

It was safer there, even with the lecherous guardians that groped at her every chance they got. At least the feast hall was full of life. This place stank of death more and more by the second. Orlena bit down on her lip, her hand tight around the handle of the wine pitcher. She didn't dare look away from the pool lest something jump out and try to grab her. As if reading her thoughts, the surface of the pool began to churn, fulfilling her nightmare, the liquid inside slopping over the sides of the stonework. It behaved so strangely. Instead of running like spilled wine, the liquid gathered together, forming perfect globes of reflective, shimmering fluid. They rolled toward her feet, blindly seeking her.

Orlena screamed. The cry tore up and out of her throat, certainly producing some kind of sound. Staggering back, she put six feet between her boots and the rolling spheres before they quit their probing and, all at once, streamed back into the pool.

Come, sweet Orlena, Come to us. Lie with us. Be with us. Save us.

Such a conniving, clever thing, that voice. The quicksilver seethed restlessly, its surface turbulent. And then, out of nowhere, the voice and the churning motion of the pool stopped.

It was then that Orlena saw, or thought she saw, the shape of something emerging from the silvered surface. What kind of cruel trick was her mind playing on her? At first, the distorted oblong shape looked like the coil of a snake. Dune asps made their way inside the palace sometimes, seeking out a cool hiding place to weather the blistering heat. Both aggressive and poisonous, they were ruthlessly hunted. Guardians were paid half a chit a head for every asp they brought to  the gate master's post. The snakes didn't last long if they made the mistake of seeking refuge within the palace walls, but it stood to reason that maybe one had made its way down into the Hall of Mirrors and had fallen into the pool.

But the oblong shape became an arm. A tiny arm. A second later, a small hand breached the surface of the pool, dripping in silver, its fingers opening and closing, reaching for something it could not find.

It was a baby.

Later, in the relative safety of the forlorn, one-roomed apartment she escaped to, Orlena would again doubt her sanity; What woman would have willingly, knowingly stepped into that awful pool? To dip her hands in and pull out a squalling, half-drowned child?

Such wonderings weren't prudent in the moment, though. For now, she got on with the business of it.

The silver was liquid ice, licking at her bones, crawling along her veins. It gnawed on the edges of her mind, a thousand voices roaring. The unholy clamor pulled the air out of her lungs and introduced Orlena to a whole new kind of deafness.

Two heartbeats. Maybe three. That was how long it took her to fish the baby out, but the seconds dragged on for an eternity. She was panting, retching, and bereft of all hope when she scrambled from the ankle-deep pool and sagged to the floor, clutching the naked baby to her chest.

Orlena didn't hear the child's plaintive wail; she felt the juddering rush of air filling the child's lungs, and then the creature's muscles going taut as it arched its back and screamed.

Covered in shining silver as if it had been dipped in paint, the baby screwed up its little face and bawled. It shook as it wailed, so slick in Orlena's arms that it nearly popped out of her grasp like a piece of wet soap. Around its neck a fine chain hung, bearing a miniature disc with the shape of a leaping stag embossed into it. A family heirloom, perhaps? Someone had placed the chain around the babe's neck. Someone cared about the child. The chain was supposed to keep it safe.

It came upon Orlena all at once and with startling clarity, then: she had to escape the palace.

Under normal circumstances, such a feat would have been impossible. The guardians kept an eye on the comings and goings of slaves. Orlena had to get a token from the cook before she was permitted to leave the palace boundaries. Without the serpent-headed disc to hand over at the gate, she was a prisoner within these walls. Tonight, the gate master was run ragged, though, scurrying all over the palace, attending to one issue after another, trying to ensure all ran smoothly with the queen's celebrations. The gate would be guarded, certainly, but by none who would apply much scrutiny to a woman like her.

Or so she hoped.

It never occurred to her to put the baby back. Not for a second. The child had emerged from the unholiest of places, but Orlena didn't fear the baby itself. She was gripped by a fierce and urgent need to protect the infant. It was brand new, after all. Days old by the looks of it. What could a baby, so freshly introduced to the world and ripped away from her mother's breast, have done to deserve such a harsh start at life? It was innocent, no two ways about it, and Orlena wasn't about to doom the poor thing to a life of-

Her thoughts stopped dead.

A strange prickling stung the back of Orlena's neck, burning to the point of pain. The baby seemed to feel it, too.

Something was happening.

Someone was coming.

Light on her feet, Orlena darted into the shadows at the back of the hall, holding her breath. There, she wrapped the child up tight in her apron, folding the baby into the material the same way she'd seen other women swaddle their newborns, and she held the child close to her chest as she waited. For what, she didn't know, but she swayed with the child in her arms, holding her breath regardless, praying it wouldn't make a sound.

It happened all at once - a flurry of light and movement. The heavy doors flew back, and five guards marched into view, followed by a brilliant flare of copper in the dimly lit hall. Orlena had seen the queen from a distance earlier, of course. The newly minted twenty-nine-year-old regent had presided over the feast with the detached calm of a woman accustomed to the weight of a thousand eyes upon her. In her gown of blood-red silk and matching elbow-length gloves, she was magnificent. Up close, Orlena saw why the city officials whispered such lewd things about her. The top section of her thick blonde hair was braided and wound into intricate knots, but the lower half remained unbound, tumbling in lush waves down to the small of her back. Her skin was so pale and flawless that it was clear she had never endured the punishing suns on her face. The guards didn't approve of the new queen's height - she was taller than most women - but when Orlena eavesdropped on their conversations, watching the men's lips move as they spoke to one another, she learned that they were in favor of her ample chest and narrow waist. 'So pretty,' all of them said. 'But such an ugly temper.'

Madra did have a fearsome temper. It boiled out of her with only the slightest provocation. Orlena had not only heard tales of her vicious tantrums but had seen them from across the throne room at least twice, which was why she inched back, breathing in, trying to become the shadows themselves as the Queen strode purposefully toward the quicksilver pool. As soon as Madra arrived in front of the pool, she turned and held out a hand to the closest guard expectantly. Harron, his name was. The captain of the recently formed Queen's Guard. Handsome as hell, the captain had covered himself in glory on the battlefield and had been chosen to serve as Madra's personal body-guard. He seemed to hesitate for some reason, but the queen snapped her fingers, gesturing to him angrily. Orlena wasn't as proficient at reading lips from this distance as she was up close, but she could still make out the queen say, "Give it to me." Reluctantly, Harron reached to his hip and withdrew a dagger from a leather sheath, then handed it to the queen.

"Thank you." With that, she turned to face the pool. Orlena couldn't see what she did from there, but she could guess. The queen's arms jerked out, and when she handed the blade back to Harron, its edge was slick with red. All five guards tensed as the queen held her hand over the shining pool. The two at the rear of the group even took a step back as droplets of blood fell from Madra's palm into the quicksilver. A moment later, Orlena understood why the guards were so on edge.

If the pool had churned for Orlena, then it raged for the queen. The metallic fluid sloshed and pitched, and the biting current that traveled over Orlena's skin grew so fierce that she had to bite back a gasp of pain. In her arms, the baby writhed, rubbing its face aggressively into Orlena's chest. She couldn't tell if the child was in pain or simply looking to nurse, but thank the gods, it didn't cry at least. Orlena swayed gently, trying to calm the infant, not daring to move too much in case the shifting fabric of her skirts gave her position away.

Horror sank its claws into her as the surface of the quicksilver swelled. The pool bulged upward, stretching and straining... and then the crown of a head broke through. The liquid metal rolled off of the man who emerged from the pool, leaving the dark, studded leather armor he wore and his curling, jaw-length, wavy black hair free of silver. Up he came, rising a step at a time as if climbing a set of stairs out of the pool. In the center of the leather protector that covered his chest, a bird in flight, cast in silver with wings outstretched, caught and flashed in the torchlight. Over his shoulder, he carried a heavy black canvas bag that he set down on the edge of the pool.

The stranger's cool green eyes flashed with fury as he regarded the queen. Orlena took in his unnatural height, the sweeping strength of his shoulders, and the upward slope of his pointed ears, and a chill of shock rippled through her.

He was Fae-by the looks of him, one of the warriors wreaking so much havoc on the dunes east of Haeland. Standing before the queen's guard, he cut the figure of a monster. A single word flared in Orlena's mind at the sight of him. The word was lethal.'

The male looked around, scanning the hall, searching for something.

Did she imagine it, or could she feel the male's eyes settling on her in the dark? Could he see her there, hiding in the shadows, clutching the naked baby to her chest? She prayed to all four winds that he couldn't.

Orlena watched the queen's mouth move. "You came,"she said.

At last, the male tore his eyes from the darkness where Orlena hid and turned his attention to Madra. His lip curled when he spoke. "Of course. I was honor bound to come. You are the oath breaker, not me."

A cloud of fog bloomed on Orlena's breath as she let out a shaky exhalation. Had the temperature really plummeted so low in the hall? So quickly? The shivers wracking her body confirmed that it had, but how could that be possible? The only logical source of the chill that fogged the hall's countless mirrors was the foreboding male himself, but the fury rolling off him felt red-hot rather than cold. He looked poised to attack. To maim. To kill.

"Explain yourself, Madra,"he commanded.

Again, the queen spoke. Again, Orlena couldn't see what she said from her vantage point in the dark. After a moment, the anger flaring in the warrior's brilliant jade eyes faltered. "Gods. If they're no longer welcome here, then send them home. They have families. Children-"

The Queen had turned. "Too late for all that,"she answered, a satisfied smile playing over her mouth. "They already burn in my courtyard. Can't you smell them cooking?"

The warrior's anger turned to dismay. "Impossible." He dropped his bag at his feet. "There were thousands-"

The captain cut him off. "And now there are none. We've cleared the city of all magic users. As of now, you are the last of the Fae in Zilvaren. And even you won't survive this conversation, Finran."

The warrior's gaze darted back toward where Orlena hid, then quickly darted away again. "When the king discovers this treachery-"

"The king is blind and in the dark," Madra told him. "I'm closing the portals. Here. Tonight. He'll never know it was me."

Orlena closed her eyes, afraid to see any further. She was a slave. She had no part to play in the games of regents and immortals. She didn't want to watch the violence that she could sense building in the air. The baby's tiny fingers grasped at her hair, pulling on the strands as it wriggled.

All was calm behind the shield of Orlena's eyelids. Until the voice that had drawn her to the hall spoke again.

"The child. Take the child. Leave."

"And go where?" Orlena thought. "I'm a slave. I have no home."

"Hide," the voice told her. "Find somewhere. A place they will never think to look. Do it, or the child will die."

Orlena opened her eyes.

The violence she had predicted unfolded before her like a nightmare. The captain and four of Madra's guards surrounded the warrior, falling upon him with their blades. Black smoke trailed from the male's weapon, his limbs streaming with shadows as he spun and blocked their attack. Like water, he flowed. Like the shifting sand of the dunes during Evenlight.

She thought she saw him glance in her direction again. Her suspicions intensified when the warrior bent low and kicked the bag he'd dropped, sending it sliding across the smooth marble floor toward her. The guards paid the bag no heed. Nor did the queen. Madra's men attacked the warrior at once, crashing down on him in a wave. Still the warrior held them back, moving with preternatural grace that turned his defense into a dance. Orlena watched with confusion as the male seemed to purposefully trip and drop his sword.

The weapon clattered to the ground, and the reflections in a thousand mirrors shivered at the impact. Why would he have done it? Disarming himself meant disaster.

Sure enough, the guards pounced as soon as they realized their good luck, and the queen did the same. Madra snatched up the sword in her gloved hands, mouth open in a victorious cry. The weapon was too heavy for her to wield, though, and so she hauled the weapon toward the pool, the tip of the blade kicking up bright blue sparks as she dragged it behind her.

The guards had the warrior on his knees now, restraining him as best they could.

"Let me help, Your Majesty." The captain offered his hand to the queen, but she turned on him, snarling.

"Don't touch it!"

Bowing his head, he retreated. "Of course."

Straining with the effort, Madra heaved the massive sword up, up, up, her arms shaking as she held the thing aloft. It looked as if she would drop it, but the queen gathered herself, took a deep breath, and brought the weapon down hard and fast, plunging the blade into the pool of quicksilver.

For many nights after this one, Orlena would debate whether she had heard the furious roar that came next or if she imagined it.

All at once, every mirror in the hall exploded into glittering shrapnel.

Instinctively, Orlena spun and turned her back to the hall, cradling the child within the hollow of her body. Shards of glass tore through her clothes, drawing blood and ruining flesh... but none of them harmed the baby.

Thrum.

Thrum.

Thrum.

Orlena's pain was a second heartbeat pulsing in her ears. It stole her breath and forbade her from drawing in more. In her arms, the baby had opened its eyes-twin pools of palest blue-and it was looking up at her as if it already knew her.

Don't worry, child. I've got you.

When Orlena straightened within the confines of her hiding place again, most of the torches in the hall had gone out, but she could see that the metallic liquid in the pool no longer moved; the quicksilver had transformed into a solid sheet of metal. A foot away from where Madra stood observing her handiwork, the warrior's sword jutted upward, buried halfway up its blade, its hilt topped with a crescent moon glowing softly.

The warrior himself stared straight ahead, his hands bound tight behind his back. Orlena knew she wasn't imagining it now; he was looking right at her, and in his piercing green eyes, she saw his plea.

Run.

Orlena Parry, slave of the Palace of the Undying Queen, snatched up the bag the warrior had kicked toward her...

She clutched the baby to her chest.

She ran. ool il ffols

At the palace gate, a group of half-naked women had gathered and were flirting with the two guards who stood watch, presumably hoping to relieve them of a freshly minted chit with the new queen's likeness stamped upon it. Orlena observed from the shadows for a moment, rocking the child, holding him to her chest. How was she supposed to leave with a babe in arms? There was no way to rush on by without being seen. And-

Wait.

The answer presented itself mere seconds later.

A short man wearing a tunic that was two sizes too big for him approached the gate house, carrying a heavy hessian sack with him. The sack was stained bright red at the bottom, as though it had been dipped in blood. The two guards recoiled as he held out the bag for them to inspect its contents. They peered inside, pulling faces of disgust as they counted up the carcasses of the dead creatures inside. Snakes. Rats. Mice. The guardian on the right snapped something angrily at the man, but he reached into a small leather pouch strung to his belt and drew out a couple of copper chits. The man accepted his payment for the pests that he had killed and went on his way, still carrying the sack. It didn't take long to find a sack of my own. When I returned to the gate, I was carrying a now-full hessian sack, containing the child and the warrior's bag along with it. This might just work. But if the babe cried...

I kept my eyes glued to the ground until I reached the guardians. My palms were slick with sweat. One of the women canvasing for business had allowed the top of her dress to slip dangerously low, and was seconds away from spilling out of her corset. The guardians didn't even notice my arrival, until the bawdy, curvy woman laid eyes on my sack, saw that it was squirming, and cried out in horror.

The guardians noticed me then, all right. "What in all five hells are you doing?" the one on the left demanded. I watched the words form on his lips, flinching as he spat each one of them at me.

I held up the bag, shrugging.

The other guardian squinted at me suspiciously. "What's in there?"

Naturally, I didn't say anything. Instead, drew back my lips, bared my teeth and hissed like a snake.

"Dune asps?"

I nodded.

"You're supposed to kill them before you drag them through the palace," the first guard said irritably. "What else have you got in there?"

I showed my teeth again, but this time I scrunched up my nose, wiggling it, cupping my hand and sweeping over my ear, pretending to clean myself.

"Rats?" the guardian with the chits asked.

I nodded.

"How many of each?"

I had no idea what to say. I held up my free hand, holding down my thumb.

"Four? Of each?"

I nodded again.

"We'll have to count them." The other guardian went to take the sack, but I snatched it away, snapping my teeth, pretending to bite him.

"Martyrs. She ain't right in the head," the woman with the lowcut dress exclaimed. "And look at her. She's covered in cuts and scratches and bleeding all over the place. She fought for her life to get the critters into the cursed sack. If you open it up now and a bunch of rabid rats run underneath my skirts, you can forget all about-"

"All right, all right!" The guardian scowled at the woman, then back at me. "If I can't count 'em, I can only give you half," he said.

I shook my head rapidly, drawing my brows together. Any other rat catcher wouldn't be happy about half pay; I had to be outraged if I was going to pull this off.

"I won't be scammed by the likes of you, girl," the guardian said, rocking on his heels. "You get half or nothing at all."

I did something risky, then. I rolled my eyes and held out the sack, making a show of handing it over to him.

The woman folded her arms beneath her ample chest. "I mean it, Malhern. Don't you dare. I can't stand rats. I hate snakes even worse!"

The guardian considered, first me, then the sack, then the dark-haired woman. I saw the moment he surrendered. Reaching into the pouch at his belt, he withdrew four silver chits bearing Madra's unsmiling profile. "Go on then, girl," he spat. "Take it and go. And make sure to take that carrion with you."

Three hundred and seventeen years,

five months,

and three weeks ago...

AS ALWAYS, IT had started with a look - a brief moment when eyes snagged across a room and failed to continue wandering. Over the years, there had been many different colors of eyes. Brown. Green. Blue.

These were hazel-an unusual mix of all three colors, the sharp, black points of the pupils rimmed with tawny gold. They were the kind of eyes one only saw once or twice in a human lifetime. Beautiful enough to have stopped me in my tracks.

The rest of her face was fascinating, too, but those eyes. Gods, but they were beautiful.

Her hair was as black as a raven's wing. It hung to her waist in braids each as thick as my wrist. I wanted to wind those braids around my hands and pull-

"Well, then? Can you do it? Or...? "

The dining hall snapped back into focus. I jolted, my gaze wrenching free of the siren at the far end of the table and settling on a far less appealing visage. Pollus Andrax was an eighth-generation nobleman. I had vague recollections of one of his ancestors being raised out of the gutter for uncovering a plot to murder the queen. She had been moderately less paranoid back then. Less inclined to execute all involved parties in a conspiracy, including the whistleblower who brought the treason to her. She'd rewarded the Andrax in question with a low-level peerage and a town house in the Hub. The boon had been a double-edged sword, of course. A lovely thing to have, no question about that, but instead of facing inward, toward the gardens at the very center of the Hub, the house faced the wall that protected the Zilvaren elite's little enclave.

An ugly view, but moreover, it was a reminder: This is all that stands between what is and what could be. You may find yourself on the other side of this wall at any moment.

For a long time now, the Andraxes had been preparing for an inevitable fall. Madra had a long memory, and treachery was carried in the blood. If an Andrax could betray his neighbors eight generations ago, what was stopping him from betraying his queen now?

I blinked at the balding man as I took a sip of my drink. "Or?" I repeated.

Unimpressed, Pollus arched an eyebrow at me. "Or do I need to go over your head? There are plenty of others like you in Zilvaren, you know."

I laughed softly into my wine. "I can assure you... there's no one else like me in this entire city."

Pollus snorted, unimpressed. He mistook the comment for hubris. It was only natural; I was more self-confident than most. I had every right to be, but that was neither here nor there. The fact of the matter was that I was Fae and everyone else was not.

The magic that had been bound over me upon my delivery into this hellish city hid my heritage perfectly. I was taller than most, but genetics had always accounted for that. A fictional father from the East. A fabricated mother, who had been famous for her extraordinary height among the residents of the Sixth Ward, or the Eighth, or whatever ward I was not currently pretending to hail from. The lies protected me easily enough. The people of Zilvaren expected all kinds of things from Carrion Swift. What they didn't expect was magic. It was there, though, beneath my skin, like a creature pawing at a drawn curtain, unable to find a way in. Sometimes I had to lock myself away in a dark room and scream to release the pressure building in myn marrow.

No one noticed.

In certain wards, screaming was to be expected.

"Lesh has bolts of silk," Pollus said airily. "All kinds of satins, too. I could easily take my business to her."

My turn to snort now. "Lesh's fabrics are all reclaimed. Moth-eaten and full of holes."

"Salwin, then. He has contracts with the skiff captains looking to trade goods."

I shrugged, holding out my cup to a passing servant, pausing as I waited for her to top up my wine. When she was out of earshot, I said, "Go ahead. Trade with Salwin, then. Be my guest. But be ready to spend double for half the material. There's a reason everyone buys from me.

My fabrics are of the best quality, and you don't need to sell a vital organ to afford them."

The balding man scoffed. He was sweating - something the queen reportedly found distasteful. Damp patches beneath the arms were an offense Madra couldn't abide, according to her ladies-in-waiting. Pollus had perspired right through his shirt and the flocked jacket he was wearing, which explained why he kept his elbows glued to his sides whenever he tried to take a drink from his own cup. For the most part, he'd kept his nervous sweating hidden, but there was no hiding it from me; I could smell him.

Next to me, Pollus snorted. "Come on, Swift. Zilvaren's full of merchants. You're ten a penny. You have what I want. I have what you need-"

"What I need is a moment's peace. I didn't even want to come to a fucking Guild dinner. I've only been here ten minutes, and you've been hounding me for nine of them. Don't you think it'd be more appropriate to discuss this at the shop?"

"How am I supposed to talk to you at your shop when you never open the damned thing? I've trekked all the way from the Hub, through the Tenth and Ninth Wards, all the way into the Eighth, and guess what? Every time I've arrived at your shop, it's been closed."

"Mm. Yeah. That's unfortunate. You must have come on a Friday. I don't open on Fridays."

Pollus waved off the excuse. "When you are or are not open is academic. You don't seem to have any of the fabric I require! You promised delivery a week ago-"

"A promise I would have honored had my stores not been picked clean by thieves."

Pollus rolled his eyes, his pate reflecting the candlelight through his sparse comb-over. "It amazes me that you haven't gone and taken the stock back yet. You know who took it. You know where he's keeping it. Just go to the guardians and ask them to accompany you-"

"No." A definitive response. There was no arguing with the finality of the word. Pollus had argued with me plenty of times before and had learned that the hard way. As a result, his expression was both frustrated and resigned. He was right, of course. I did know who had stolen from me.

Wes Carinn was a terrible hawker and didn't know the meaning of subtlety; half of Zilvaren had known he had raw silks for sale half an hour after he'd lifted them from my stores. But I couldn't go to the guardians. I'd spent many lifetimes avoiding the attentions of Madra's guards. I wasn't purposely about to present myself to them now. Besides, a feud sounded like fun right now. I hadn't had one in a while, and things had been kind of boring lately. Meticulously exacting my revenge over the next few decades - if not lifetimes - would go a ways toward entertaining myself. I'd always been fond of a long game.

"The point of the matter is that the Evenlight Ball is in three days, and I've been charged with commissioning the queen's gown. It has to be better than that gold poofy thing Virania commissioned last year, or she'll chain me naked to the wall and leave me for the crows. Now, just answer the question. Can you provide what I need by tomorrow or not?"

He'd blustered and threatened, but here was the truth of it: his fear, riding the edge of his words, so electric that I could taste it. The dress was a big responsibility. Madra's courtiers participated in a mandatory lottery every year. Being selected to design and present the queen's gown in time for the Evenlight Ball was framed as a high honor. It was, in fact, a horrifying responsibility, both politically and financially. The cost of such a gown could bring a household to its knees. "Winning" the lottery two years in a row certainly would bankrupt a house - and had done so many times before, when a family found itself out of the queen's good graces.

Pollus had never truly been in Madra's good graces, and his turn had come at last. The queen had demanded golden thread for her dress this year - an outrageous demand, since the palace was the only place one might possibly source such a thing, and the royal seamstresses had refused all of Pollus's petitions to obtain the thread. There was a solid chance one of Madra's guardians had encouraged Wes to steal the fabric from my stores, too, just to really stack the odds against Pollus.

If Pollus delivered a substandard dress for the ball, Madra would, indeed, chain him to the wall. If he delivered no dress at all, then she'd host a feast so that everyone in the Hub could gather and watch as she had him publicly disemboweled. I didn't care for Pollus. He was pugnacious and never paid his bills on time. I'd be waiting five years for him to clear his debt if I did help him with this dress. But as much as I disliked the man, I disliked seeing Madra win these petty power plays even more.

Making a show of looking bored, I sighed, swirling the wine around the bowl of my glass as I glanced down the dining table. Gods and martyrs, but that woman was the most breathtaking thing I'd ever seen. Her cheeks were flushed a delicate pink, her skin as pale as porcelain, as if it had never even seen the godscursed sun.

"I'll have the fabric ready for you in the morning, Pollus," I said distractedly. "The thread, too. Twelve percent accruing interest. I suggest you pay your bill off as quickly as you can, or you'll start losing fingers."

The man stared at me, mouth agape. "The thread, too?" he whispered.

"Yes."

"But... how? She didn't mean yellow thread. She meant gold. Spun with actual-"

"I know perfectly well what she meant," I said darkly, leaning back into my seat. "And I have it. But if you breathe a word of where you got it, I will cut out your tongue with a rusty fucking razor. Do we understand each other?"

I clenched my jaw, turning a cold glare on the man. He'd been in shape in his youth, but in the past decade or so he'd gone to pasture. Even at his fittest, he wouldn't have been able to take me on. I'd learned how to fight with my fists in the backstreets of the Third. Pollus, the milksop, had been raised here in the Hub and hadn't had to fight for anything beyond his father's approval and his position in Madra's court. If he threw a punch at me and I stood very still for him, he'd probably still miss.

I set my glass down in front of me and pushed away from the table.

"I'll be at the shop at eleven," I said. "Don't be late."

"Eleven?" Pollus squawked. "Six! You mean six! I'll lose half a day if I - Okay, yes, yes, you're absolutely right." He held up his hands as he backed away. "I'm forgetting myself. Eleven will be fine. Just perfect. I'll be there on the dot."

I left him behind, wringing his hands and chewing anxiously on his bottom lip. I straightened my jacket, smoothing down the material, already trying to formulate what I was about to say to the stunning raven-haired beauty with the starburst eyes when a short blond woman appeared in front of me, as if conjured by the blackest, foulest magic there was.

"No," she said, shoving a well-manicured index finger in my face.

"What do you mean, no?"

"I mean no," she repeated, curving an eyebrow at me. "I've been watching you from the other end of the table, and I know exactly what you're about to do. Before you get any ideas in that pretty little head of yours, you can turn around and head back the way you came, Carrion Swift."

I hated when she used my full name. Made me feel like a toddler who hadn't yet learned how to behave in polite company. Fortuitously, I knew that she hated it, too. "Apologies, Amberline Swift, but I'm afraid I have no idea what you're talking about."

Once, Amberline had been an infant, crawling around my feet. All too quickly, she had become a petulant teenager, and then a young woman, and ever since had settled into her role as a permanent thorn in my side. Her mother had been one of my favorites. I had been one of hers, too, which had been part of the problem. Amberline had always resented my presence in her mother's household. She'd always resented the secret that she'd been born into-the heavy burden that she'd had no other choice but to carry. She'd never liked how free I was with my affections, either.

Amberline frowned at me seriously. "I mean it, Carrion. That one's not for you."

"That one? Rude. At least refer to the lady by her name."

"Best you don't know her name." She took me by the arm and attempted to spin me back around, but much to Amberline's eternal chagrin, she was far smaller than me. "Gods alive, Carrion. I mean it. This is our first invitation to a Guild dinner, and you're about to ruin all our hard work by attempting to seduce the chamberlain's daughter?"

"The chamberlain's daughter? Nice! Beautiful and influential-"

"Beautiful and dying," Amberline whispered through her teeth.

"She's twenty-four years old and she looks like that. Do you see a husband sitting next to her at this table? No, you do not, and there's a very good reason for that. She's infirm, Carrion."

I squinted at the girl over Amberline's shoulder, giving her a once-over. "I don't know. She looks pretty firm to me."

The remark earned me a thump to the shoulder. "She has sun sickness, you dolt. She can't spend more than ten seconds outside before her skin starts to blister. And not just that," she added when she saw that I was about to interrupt her. "Her body is failing her. She relies on constant medication. Rare medication, brought in every week on sand skiffs from the East. The captains say the herbs required for her tonics are growing more and more difficult to source. Eventually, they won't be able to supply them, and that will be that."

I frowned down at the angry woman, who was still trying to steer me back in the direction I'd come from. The raven-haired girl was on her feet now, though. She'd seen me coming, and I was trapped. Inexplicably snared by the anticipation in her lovely eyes. "Amberline, you are being terribly pessimistic. The medicos might find a cure for whatever it is that ails her."

"She's a walking miracle. They didn't even think she would see her tenth birthday. She has months left. Weeks, even. Getting involved with her now would be unkind. It would be... " She sputtered, trying to find the right words to dissuade me from my course of action. There were none to be had, though.

"If what you're saying is true, then all the more reason to go and introduce myself, don't you think? Listen, just because you've decided to abstain from fun doesn't mean that everyone else should." Leaning in a little closer, I whispered so that only she could hear me. "No one should have to die a virgin, Amberline."

"Carrion-"

"Just tell me her name."

"No! Not this time. If I have to drag you ba-"

"It's Temm." The voice was like silver. Cool and sweet. The skin between my shoulder blades prickled, something buried deep inside me stirring at the sound of it. Her dress was the color of the crushed Gollish nut husks that the skiff captains perpetually chewed on - a ghostly, foreboding shade of purple so rare that it didn't even have a name in this bleached-out city. Her skirts swirled around dainty bare feet as she stepped toward us.

Temm.

She was perfect.

"Gods help us," Amberline muttered under her breath. "I won't stay and bear witness to this foolishness. I'll see you back at the shop." Whirling around, Amberline dipped into a shallow curtsy, giving the girl, Temm, a lukewarm smile. "Thank you for a beautiful evening, Temmora. Please thank your father for inviting us."

"You're not leaving, surely? The main course hasn't even been served yet." Temm was trying to give Amberline her full attention but was doing a poor job of it; her gaze kept finding me. I could smell it now - the faintest perfume of sickness lingering on her skin. Nothing that anyone else could smell, I was sure, but even suppressed by the glamor that cloaked me, my nose worked better than most. The scent wasn't necessarily bad. It was delicate. Sweet. And beneath it was the smell of something at once both familiar and foreign. It was that scent that had me stepping closer.

"I'm afraid so," Amberline was saying. "There's so much to do in preparation for the ball. We've been commissioned for so many new gowns and coats, and with the unrest in the Third causing so many disruptions to supply lines throughout the city... "

I could see her pulse fluttering in the hollow of her throat.

Her hands were small, her fingers stacked with a variety of rings. Guild master's rings. Signets from many of the most important houses that resided inside the Hub. Despite what Amberline had said, a lot of men wanted to marry this woma... and she had claimed all of their rings and turned them all down by the looks of things.

Her shoulders were so narrow. She looked at me, those fascinating eyes flashing as she addressed me, and... oh gods, she was talking to me. What the fuck had she just said? "Mm? I'm sorry?"

The siren named Temm laughed, and that was it, all over in a matter of seconds. I was done for. "I asked what you thought of the queen's plan to close off all the walls and annex the wards. The Third in particular. It seems that Zilvaren's most hot-blooded, violent people have found themselves housed there."

I answered without thinking. "It's a terrible idea. Madra will have a revolution on her hands if she's not careful."

Temm let out another bark of surprised laughter. "Careful! Revolution's a powerful word. Many of the men in this room have the queen's ear. They might turn you in for saying that kind of thing." She smiled teasingly. "Are you trying to tell me that you aren't afraid of cutting through the Third during reckoning, when all the thieves and bandits are driven mad by the heat and go on killing rampages?"

I raised both eyebrows, considering her. "Killing rampages? I think someone's been telling the chamberlain's daughter tall tales. When was the last time you walked through the Third and witnessed that?"

Her smile dimmed a little, though it still hovered at the corners of her perfectly shaped lips. Lips I had already imagined kissing at least three times in as many minutes. "Oh, I don't know. It's been a long time since I've been outside," she said.

"Mm. Yes, I suppose I have heard something about that."

"Oh, really?" She beamed, her whole face lighting up as she accepted two glasses of wine from a servant passing with a tray, thanked them sincerely, and then handed one of the drinks to me. "Sounds like someone's been telling you tall tales, too... " She cocked her head to one side, silently asking a question, and I realized belatedly that I hadn't even given her my name.

"Carrion," I blurted out. "It's - I'm Carrion. Carrion Swift."

She smirked this time, nodding a little so that the ends of her braids bobbed up and down. "A strange name. But... " Her gaze moved from my boots, roving upward until she'd assessed every part of me. At last, she met my eyes again and nodded. "It suits you."

I slapped a hand to the center of my chest. "Ouch!"

Temmora chuckled softly. "Tell me, Carrion Swift. What other tall tales have you been told about me?"

"Straight to the point. I like it." I sipped from my wine. "I've heard that you're very sick and you don't have long to live."

I waited for the flinch. For the fear. For the offended hurt. Instead, Temm's smile spread until it seemed to make her whole face glow with amusement. "You aren't afraid of hurting my feelings, then, I see?"

"Should I be?"

She shook her head, sobering. "No. No, I think I'm rather tired of people babying me and trying to avoid hurting my feelings. No one says anything real to me anymore. Apparently, reality, or at least my reality, is far too scary for me to handle these days."

"They're wrong."

"It isn't too scary?" she asked.

"No. Well, I mean, maybe it is. But you can handle it."

This elicited a smaller, coquettish smile from her that made me want to scoop her into my arms and take her away from this place. Somewhere dark. Somewhere quiet. Somewhere we could be alone. "Because you know me so well already, of course," she said.

"Of course," I agreed. "Naturally. I know there's no artifice to you. Your emotions are all right there, in your eyes. Or... I suppose you could be an exceptional actress?"

She shook her head, her braids swaying. "Unfortunately, not the case."

"There you are, then. You're an open book. I know everything I need to know about you, Temmora...? "

"Shand."

"Temmora Shand." I held my glass out to her, waiting for her to clink her own drink against mine, but instead she drew it farther back, toward her chest, out of reach as she arched a dark eyebrow at me.

"Well, I know nothing about you, Carrion Swift."

"Does that matter?" I asked.

"Yes!" she cried. "Well, a little, anyway. I'd like to know at least one very important thing about you before we dance the rest of the night away.

"Oh? We're dancing, are we?"

She nodded very seriously. "Yes, we are."

"All right, then. We'd better get it out of the way, then. What is this one very important thing you must know about me?"

"Stop grinning at me like that! I can barely think straight around you as it is."

I stopped grinning, training my features into the most stoic, sensible expression I could manage... but it was hard. Why was it so hard? I'd only just met the girl. The implications of what she'd just said were making the center of my chest warm, though. I was affecting her. "All right. No more grinning," I said. "Spit it out."

For a second, she looked like she was rethinking what she'd said. But then she breathed deeply and narrowed her eyes at me, pinning me to the dining room floor. "Are you the kind of man who fusses over fragile, broken things, Carrion Swift?"

Dutifully, I shook my head. "Me? Oh no. I'm not that kind of man at all."

"Good." She took another, much larger gulp of her wine. "And... are you the kind of man who might fall in love with a dying girl and then spend the next ten years of his life mourning her when she kicks the bucket?"

I pouted, feigning confusion. "What's a bucket?"

"Answer the question, Carrion Swift!"

Again, I shook my head, biting back a smile that was threatening to resurface. "No. I'm not that kind of man."

"Excellent. So we'll dance. And when you hear that I'm gone, you won't be sad. You'll lock yourself away in the Third and throw your lot in with all those thieves and bandits."

"Obviously. I am known for being hot-blooded and violent."

"Do you promise?" she demanded.

I nodded just once. "I promise."

Satisfied at last, Temmora Shand held out her glass and knocked it against mine. With a flick of her wrist, she threw back the remains of her drink and downed it in one. "All right, then. Let's go not fall in love, Carrion Swift."

And I followed her.

Out into the hall, where musicians were playing and others danced.

Hours later, to her bed.

For the weeks that came after, I followed her around her father's house, existing with her inside the small little world he had created, where his precious Temm would be safe.

And when the day I feared so dreadfully finally came, I found myself a liar.

I hadn't broken her trust on purpose. I hadn't had a choice, I wasn't the kind of man to fall in love with her, nor the kind to mourn her for a decade. I wasn't a man at all. I was Fae, and I had not known my own heart.

She had shown it to me.

And she shattered it when she left.