“It means that someone tried to change her into something else. Some sort of… hybrid creature.”
Caduan pulled the cloth from over the Fey corpse’s head, revealing a face that was somehow astoundingly beautiful and gut-wrenchingly hideous all at once. Her features had been ever so slightly rearranged, seeming to blur no matter how I focused. Her skin was sallow and sagging, violet veins blooming beneath its slick surface.
Even I could not identify what was so wrong about it. Yet, it was uncomfortable to look at. This was the face that had once belonged to someone who loved and smiled and laughed. And it had been corrupted.
“Why?” I choked out. “Why would they do that?”
“And how?” Siobhan said. “A whole House? All at once?”
Caduan shook his head, still not looking away from the corpse. “I do not know.”
“Perhaps it’s weaponry,” I said. “A way to kill them all, quickly.”
“I know very well that they do not need to do this to kill. No. I think whatever this was, it was a failure.” He lifted his knife, pointing to the exposed innards of the body. “Even just over the last several hours, all of this has degraded. Her body is withering away as we speak. Her own blood is poisoning her. We didn’t kill this one. I found her beyond the walls, untouched by the fires. Likely drowned in her own dissolved organs. Slowly.”
His voice was calm and level, but his knuckles were white around the handle of his blade.
“I do not think,” he said, “that this is what the humans wanted to happen. I think that this is a failed experiment. They weren’t trying to destroy. They were trying to create. And what we are looking at now is a Fey caught in-between. Just as Aefe was caught in-between, last night.” His eyes flicked up to mine, bright and furious. “The land itself was corrupted, there. Don’t tell me that you did not feel it as I did.”
I had felt it, seeping all the way down to the core of the earth.
“Whatever they did, it killed their own kind, too,” he went on. “I found a human corpse not far from this one. The same corruption, same disfigurement. But in worse shape. There was not much to salvage.”
Ishqa let out a long breath through his teeth.
“Then what does this tell us but that the humans are ruthless creatures? We already knew that.”
“It tells us a great deal. And perhaps it could have told us more, if we had not torched the city before we could investigate.”
Ishqa’s stare hardened.
“You’re saying that they are trying to create something with Fey magic,” I said. “Fey and human magic melded. And…” I cleared my throat, the next word striking too close to the ones that had been hurled at me just hours before. “…Corrupted, as you call it.”
“I believe so. But I need to learn more to understand why, or how.”
“This is heretic magic,” Ashraia growled. “No Fey scholars would be studying such things.”
It was the truth. The Fey houses were different in so many ways, but one belief they all shared — perhaps the only belief they all shared — was that magic was a gift from the gods. As such, it was a sacred practice, treated with careful reverence, and never, ever to be used or studied blasphemously.
I knew those teachings well, of course. They were the same ones that condemned me for the magic that lived in my veins.
“No Fey scholars,” Caduan said. “But perhaps Nirajan ones.”
My head snapped up. I thought I must have misheard him.
“Nirajan?” I echoed. “You propose we write to Niraja?”
“I propose we go to Niraja,” Caduan said.
I almost laughed, because the thought was just that ridiculous.
Ashraia let out a scoff. “If we were to go to Niraja, none of us would ever be allowed to return home.”
“You say that as if there’s any possibility that we can go there,” Siobhan added. “But even if we wanted to, we couldn’t.”
“Not that I would ever walk into the kingdom of halfbreed traitors,” Ashraia grumbled. “I’m surprised you would want to speak to people who are willing to fuck the creatures that killed your kin. And I’m sure the Sidnee feel even more strongly about it than I.”
On instinct, I flexed the fingers of my right arm — the one covered not with shameful X’s, but my father’s esteemed stories.
Yes. To so much as suggest that we visit Niraja was… well, implausible wasn’t strong enough of a word. It was a small kingdom, an island that lay between the Fey and human lands, further south even than the House of Nautilus. It was exiled by all Fey Houses, because its founders had done perhaps the most shameful thing possible.
They had interbred with the humans.
And they had paid the price many times over for defiling Fey ways — with their exile, yes, but also worse. Some of that punishment came from the hand of my own people. My own father.
“We cannot visit an exiled nation,” I said.
“What’s stopping us?” Caduan replied. “What reason is there?”
“Exile is permanent, and all-encompassing,” Ishqa said. “By going among them, we defile ourselves.”
I had never seen Caduan show anger before. And even now, it happened slowly, as if bubbling up beneath the surface of an ice-covered lake.
“That is what the humans hold over us,” he said, quietly. “Ingenuity. Adaptability. They learn how to erase their weaknesses. Meanwhile, we’ll cling to our symbolic traditions as we watch our own people fall. How far away are any of us from heretic magic? Your people were never intended to half-shift. You learned how to do that. The gods did not give that to you. Is that, too, heretical?”
A wrinkle twitched over the bridge of Ishqa’s nose. “Our traditions are all we have. If we abandon them, then we are saving nothing at all.”
“Nothing? We are saving lives. Do you think I care at all about my House’s traditions? Our pointless rules? I would trade all of those things and more to have the souls I lost that day back. And if you say otherwise, then you either lack a brain or a heart.”
Ishqa’s eyebrows arched. Ashraia looked as if he were actively holding himself back from decking the king across the face. I had to bite back a gasp, even as I also nursed a twinge of admiration.
How easy it was, for Caduan to discard the weight of society. Every day, I felt it biting into my skin like chafing ropes, reminding me of exactly what I was and what I could never be. Every second of my life was defined by it. And yet, to Caduan, it was inconsequential.
Caduan’s gaze flicked to me. The green of his eyes seemed brighter, somehow, with the intensity of his fury.
He simply said, “Aefe?” and I was struck, yet again, by the way he said my name.
I was silent.
Perhaps a part of me thought he was right. But that was the part that I spent my whole life choking back — the part that railed against the confines of my blood, that hated my father for discarding me just as much as I loved and admired him. I did not let that part of myself out of its box. And certainly not here, when I was not a disgraced Essnera, but my father’s chosen.
“We will have to find other ways to get answers,” I said. “The terms of exile are clear. And the Teirna would never allow it.”
Caduan flinched. He turned away — back to the corpse on the table.
“We will find another way,” I said.
“Of course,” Caduan replied, dryly. “I’m sure we will.”
We rode out that day, our route unchanged. It felt strange, to do anything as planned when the world seemed to have shifted so suddenly. We barely spoke, and at night, we set up camp and retreated to our respective tents with little discussion.
I lay there, sleeplessly, for a long time. Finally, I crept from my tent and into the woods. I found Caduan easily. I thought he would be practicing tonight. Instead, he sat on a fallen tree, head tilted up to the sky.
I paused.
His eyes were closed, the moonlight spilling down over his cheeks, illuminating his profi
le. It occurred to me that he had a beautiful face, all those sharp angles perfectly balanced, so still that he looked as if he could be a painting.
I was still, not approaching him. Until Caduan said, without opening his eyes, “So. I suppose we now know why you are not the Teirness.”
My cheeks heated, and I was grateful that the darkness hid it.
“You aren’t practicing tonight?” I said.
Caduan’s eyes opened, and he looked at me. It was a look that could slice through stone.
“How old were you?” he asked.
I hesitated.
I didn’t want to talk about this. I rarely spoke of it with anyone, even at home. “How old was I when I found out what I am?”
“When you found out that you are an Essnera.”
I flinched — the word always felt like a strike.
“What?” Caduan’s eyes searched my face. “You dislike the term?”
As always, he saw more than I wanted him to.
“Of course I dislike the term,” I muttered. I considered walking away. It would be easier. It was what I usually did, when I was asked uncomfortable questions.
Instead, I found myself settling beside Caduan.
“I was ten years old,” I said. “A priestess found it in me. She felt it in my magic.”
I still remembered it in flawless clarity. The priestess had been kneeling before me, her fingers pressed to my forehead. Her magic had been reading mine — Sidnee priestesses were the rare Fey who had the gift of seeing deep into the magic of others, into their blood. Her eyes had been closed, and I had been watching her dramatic seriousness while trying not to laugh.
Then, her eyes had snapped open, and she had jerked backwards. Before, she had addressed me with the reverent respect befitting of my station. But then, she had looked at me as if she had seen something terrible, something terrifying, within me.
“I didn’t know what it meant, at the time. She didn’t say anything to me, or to my mother. But she must have spoken to my father, because…”
Because that night, I had awoken to my father’s hands around my throat.
I forced myself to look at Caduan. I expected to see judgement. There was always some shade of judgement, after they knew. But not here. What was that? Gentleness? Pity?
“In the House of Stone,” he said, softly, “they kill Essneras.”
“Sometimes in the House of Obsidian, they do too.”
I didn’t fully remember that night. The memories were broken pieces that didn’t quite fit together. The sensation of my father’s hands around my throat. The razored edge of my terror. A light that spilled through the door — or perhaps I had imagined that, as I lost consciousness. I remembered begging. I remembered fading.
And when I opened my eyes again, my life had changed.
“My father spared me,” I said, at last. “But of course, I could not be the Teirness.”
Something I could not read crossed Caduan’s face.
“I’m sorry,” he said, softly, with a tenderness that I was not expecting. “I’m sorry that happened to you.”
I lifted one shoulder in a shrug, one that I hoped looked more nonchalant than I felt. “It is not up to me to judge the choices of the gods.”
The words felt ridiculous rolling off of my tongue. Caduan practically winced, as if they sounded that way to him, too.
He stood, pacing through the brush. Then he turned to me.
“I do not think you believe that. About the gods.”
I blinked. “What?”
“And I do not think you believe what you said this morning.”
“I—”
But his gaze bore into me, unrelenting. “Am I wrong?”
Mathira, I had always been so bad at lying. I said nothing, but my answer was written across my face.
“We have a chance at getting answers, Aefe,” he said. “Legitimate answers. Do you truly believe that we should abandon that in the name of—”
“It is the role of a Teirna to uphold our ways. What would you have him do?”
Understanding settled over Caduan’s face.
“The Teirna,” he said, softly. “So you were not giving me your opinion. You were giving me your father’s.”
“I am here as my father’s chosen. It doesn’t matter what I think.”
“I believe it does.”
“You say that as if I’m something other than a disgraced Blade,” I scoffed. “The truth is, Caduan, I am honored to hold this position. And I will not jeopardize it by telling my father to abandon his ideals.”
His lip curled. He began to pace. “Ideals are worth nothing to corpses. Not the one I had open on my table, and not the ones I crawled away from in my home. And you should know that more than anyone. You, of all people, should have no patience for their pointless games.”
What was that supposed to mean?
“My father doesn’t play games,” I shot back. “And you should watch how you speak of him. He respects you.”
Caduan whirled to me, his green eyes starker than I’d ever seen them, furious. “He doesn’t respect me. He thinks I’m useful. There is a great difference between the two. And for that gift, he should be beyond reproach? Should I allow your house to be slaughtered as mine was if it means avoiding damaging his fragile ego, all because he thinks I have potential?”
My father’s voice rang out in my mind:
I do think you have… potential, Aefe.
My blade was out on nothing but instinct. That was so often how my temper bloomed, in fits and starts, acting on my behalf before I even knew what I was doing. Two breaths, my body was pressed against Caduan’s, his back against a tree and my blade at his throat.
We were close enough now that I could watch each rivulet of moonlight drip across his face. I could see every twitch of his expression, every strand of color in his eyes. We both wore light clothing. I could feel the shape of him against me, the rhythm of his breathing. Mine was heavy with my anger. But Caduan’s was still light, calm.
“I warned you,” I snarled.
He regarded me silently. There was no fear in his stare, not even anger.
Perhaps just a shade of satisfaction.
“Fair enough,” he murmured.
Goosebumps prickled over my skin.
I did not like the way he looked at me. It made me uncomfortable, to be examined so closely.
I lifted my chin.
“Disarm me,” I said, tersely. “You haven’t practiced in four days.”
Still, he did not look away. His fingers found my wrist, and for a moment, they hovered there, brushing the sliver of bare skin at the edge of my leathers.
I resisted the urge to pull away from that touch — the strange intimacy of it.
Then, he struck, one quick blow to my elbow, reaching for the hilt of the dagger and pushing me to my knees. I slipped his grip, but he countered me again, blocking my recovery before I had the chance to right myself.
And the next thing I knew, I was on the ground, and he was draped over me, hands at my shoulders.
I held up the dagger. “Fail. I got the knife back.”
His eyes narrowed at me. “Perhaps,” he said. “But you look disarmed, nonetheless.”
I felt disarmed. No matter how tightly I clutched the steel in my hand.
I cleared my throat. “Get off of me, please.”
He obeyed, rising gracefully, while I pushed to my feet. I did not look at him as I dusted dirt and dead leaves off my clothes.
“I will write to my father,” I said, carefully examining my sleeve. “I can’t make him see as you do. But I can make the recommendation that we visit Niraja.”
But he will not listen, a voice in the back of my mind whispered. And you will prove his ugliest assumptions about you right.
Nevertheless. When I turned, there was something akin to pride in the way that Caduan looked at me then, hidden in the corners of a barely-there smile. The kind of admiration that made it seem like the right
thing to do.
And so, when I returned to my tent, I withdrew my pen and parchment and began writing in my neatest script. I told my father of our terrifying discovery in the House of Reeds. I told him of Caduan’s suspicions.
I had to gather myself before I wrote the end.
Caduan believes that Niraja may hold the answers to what the humans are trying to accomplish. He believes that they are unique in this potential. I am well aware that they are in exile. However, given that we are facing grave danger, and given what we have seen, I urge you to consider permitting us to travel to them. The humans are clearly working in heretic magics; we must go somewhere that knows such things to learn how to counter it.
Another pause. Then,
Forgive my disrespect. I write this only with the mission of protecting you, mother, Orscheid, and the Sidnee ways.
My pen hovered. I fought the overwhelming urge to strike out the previous words, to replace them with ones I knew my father would prefer to hear — the reassurance that the Sidnee traditions alone would protect us.
But instead, I signed my name, folded the letter, and sealed it up with my dissent carefully nestled inside.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Max
When I arrived back at the inn, the ground floor was oddly quiet. My eyes landed on a familiar set of blond curls. Moth was at a pub table, sagging over a mostly-empty glass of what looked to be piss-poor mead.
Ascended help us all.
I approached him. “You look like you’re having an incredibly good time.”
Moth lifted his head and gave me a grin that made me roll my eyes.
“You’re thirty years too young to be this drunk alone at a pub, Moth. Actually, you’re too young to be drunk at all.”
“I wasn’t alone! Not until…” He looked around, as if realizing for the first time that all his friends had gone.
“Ascended above. How many of those did you have?”
“Just two,” Moth said, taking another gulp out of his glass, which was roughly the size of his head.
“May the gods be with you in the morning.” I sighed and settled into the chair beside him. I was feeling my own wine. It had been quite some time since I’d drank that much.
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