“Yes.” Oh, that was from me. And it sounded like a wonderful idea.
“Oh darling, I could positively eat you up.” She licked her lips. Her tongue seemed too long for her mouth, and it was lengthening, turning thin and barbed, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to kiss her anymore. Oh… this was very wrong.
“Si—”
Sirius’s wandering hand clamped over my mouth. In one swift tug, he pulled me to my feet and marched me alongside him.
“You do not know what you are missing, little fleshling,” the eerie fae called.
“Sirius… something is wrong with me.” I touched my forehead. Hot. And tingly. All over.
“I’ve known that for a long while.”
“No, I mean—”
“Come.” He marched me quicker. “We need to leave this place.”
“Who is she?” I looked behind me, but the crowd had swallowed her up, and we were moving farther and farther away from all those pretty fae.
“Someone best left alone. Some of Faerie’s less savory types are gathering for nightfall.”
I wiped my mouth, tasting something bitter and sickly there. Whatever she was, she had been luring me into her trap, and it would have worked had Sirius not been there. I’d have stripped down and let her fuck me in the street if she’d asked. I’d always known Faerie through bars and saru legends, but not its reality. That had been… close.
I shivered off the dregs of desire and caught Sirius’s raised eyebrow. “Can you do that? What she just did?”
After a long stretch of silence, he finally said, “The glamour she was using is a shallow trick, used by those with no stronger talent. Humans are highly susceptible to it.” I figured that was all I would get, but he added, “If I were to glamour you, you’d lose your sweet-saru mind, fall at my feet, and beg me to fill the empty shell you’d become.”
I blinked. The image he presented scorched into my mind and opened all the doors to the dream-memories Eledan had given me. Did Sirius mean… fill?
“I wouldn’t fuck you if you were the last fae alive.”
He gave me an oddly amused look. “Finally, we’re in agreement.” And strode ahead toward a waiting carriage with four enormous horses in its reins. Their fetlocks glowed a fiery red, and as we drew closer, fire appeared to drip from their manes. The carriage windows were dark. Sirius opened the door and bundled me roughly inside. As soon as the door had closed, the carriage jolted, throwing me into a seat, and we were moving. The singsong sounds and pleasurable fog began to lift and further cleared when I saw Sirius seated opposite me, staring as though his stare alone could scrunch me into a tight ball and toss me out the window.
Damn my human DNA and its weaknesses. “Well, the docks were… interesting.”
He grunted and tore his glare away. “I would have liked to see her toy with you. It might have taught you respect for the old magics.”
“Then why didn’t you?” I snapped, my nerve endings fraying now that the reality of what could have happened was sinking in. I could fight and lie and manipulate, but I was as helpless as any saru if a fae like him truly wanted me on my knees. “In fact, why haven’t you glamoured me into submission? Wouldn’t that make your life easier?”
“Believe me, I’ve considered it, if only to have you obey me.”
Obey him? Like these horses pulling the carriage? Like humans of old who would have thrown themselves at him, knowing it was a death sentence? Like I was nothing but a tool like all saru?
“Do it, then.” I hissed, hating my own vulnerability. “What’s stopping you?”
“If I were to glamour you”—his attention flicked to the window—“I’d never be rid of you.”
I fumed in silence at my own weakness and tried to hide the trembling effects the glamour had left me with. He saw it all and scowled like I was a lesser creature sitting across from him.
I wanted to hit him, but I would probably end up with his tek hand around my throat before the punch got anywhere near that stubborn face. Even with a damaged arm, he could easily overpower me. The weakness reminded me of the impossibility of my task, of the futility of my being here at all. I wasn’t angry with him. Not really. I had to remain strong, keep my head up, and keep moving forward, because if I didn’t, if I gave in to the weaknesses crowding around me, the Messenger myth would crumble, and I needed its armor now more than ever. Saru needed it. Halow needed it. I couldn’t afford to be weak, but I didn’t have a choice either.
We rumbled over stones and around corners, leaving the capital city and the crystal palace behind us. When my mood had settled and my anger had waned, I sighed out the last of my frustrations. “Thank you.”
“Do not thank me. I did what I had to do to keep you from falling victim at the docks and being found dead a few hours later, used up and discarded. Without you, there is no deal with the Dreamweaver and there is no polestar.”
I’d thanked him and he’d thrown it back in my face. “You just have to be an asshole, don’t you? You can’t take a simple thank you for what it is.”
“Not from you.”
“Do you have any friends? Does anyone love you? Anyone at all? Or have you always been this much of an emotionally stunted rock?”
His cheek fluttered. “Save your insults, saru, for someone who cares.”
“I’m not your fucking saru. I’d never be your saru to bespell the way you’ve tricked those fools back at that safe house.”
“They were not bespelled.” His tone deepened, darkened, and turned dangerous.
“They don’t know you, but I know who you are. I’ve known since Oberon cut me open and you watched. Since I begged you to help me and you just watched, like all fae who watch and do nothing. You saw what he did to me. Every day, every night, I would scream my throat raw and you would just stand there…” The tears surprised me. They shouldn’t have been on my face, but there they were. I brushed them off and closed my eyes against his sneer. I couldn’t bear to look at him and see that disgust on his face. “You liked it.” I looked at the window instead. “Admit it. Say anything about what you witnessed. Just one word. You saw it all. You must have something you’ve been dying to tell me all this time. Tell me I deserved it. That it’s all I’m worth. That I should be grateful for his precious fucking gifts.”
The ghost of the wound in my chest ached again, and the tears returned. I couldn’t stop myself from feeling any of it. I ached over the loss of everything I’d known, for losing Talen and Kellee and Aeon. And for me. Because I wasn’t some amazing, mythical messenger. I was just me, a saru trying to survive, but I couldn’t even be that anymore. I had to be all the things to all the people and none of it made any sense, and inside… inside it hurt. I didn’t want to be here, on Faerie, fighting this war alone. I didn’t want to see the hate on Sirius’s face for one second longer or feel like a pawn to be played with by all those who didn’t fear Oberon.
I covered my mouth to stifle a sob, not wanting Sirius to see me break. Damn him for seeing my weakness during all those years and for seeing it now. I was stronger than this. I had to be. I couldn’t cry here.
I kicked the carriage door. Once. Twice. It didn’t help. I just hurt some more.
“I had no choice,” he said so quietly I almost missed it.
Hours, days, weeks, maybe years of torture and he’d had no choice but to fucking watch Oberon torture me?
“Stop the carriage,” I growled.
“No.”
“Stop the fucking carriage!”
“No!” Fire ignited in his green eyes. “The carriage is mine. Someone would have noticed it, and they’re likely following us now. I cannot stop this carriage because you’re having an emotional episode.”
The ache was spreading through my lungs, cinching them tight, crushing my chest.
I didn’t care that we were being followed. My chest, my lungs, my heart, they were all breaking open. I couldn’t breathe or see around the throbbing ache consuming me from the inside. I reached fo
r the door. Sirius’s tek hand slammed into my chest, pinning me back. His fingers spread over my heart, over where Oberon had driven the nail in, and for a terrible, blinding moment, I saw Oberon leaning over me, the iron nail sinking in deeper and deeper until it plunged into my soul.
I screamed out the pain. Light exploded outward, splashing into Sirius. A light a thousand times too bright, too powerful, too alien. I screamed on, or he did, or maybe those were my old screams, the ones that still haunted me. The light flowed and burned and blazed, and as it did, it emptied me out, draining the heartfelt ache away until the pain and light were gone, leaving only ghostly scorch marks in my vision. My heart thudded hard and fast.
Sirius had slumped to his knees on the carriage floor, his head bowed. His tek hand still touched my loose shirt over my heart. I closed my hand around it and pushed him. The movement snapped his head up. His eyes… they were alight with… silver. Silver like Talen’s. Silver like mine when the power answered my call.
Outside, the horses’ hooves clipped and scraped against stone. The carriage rattled and rocked to a halt.
“S-Sirius?” I stammered.
He pulled his hand back and looked at it anew. Complete metal fingers gleamed, the tek unmarked and as fully restored as the day I’d made it. That wasn’t possible. Magic didn’t heal tek. Tek fixed tek.
“How?” He looked up. “Your marks…” He plucked at my torn top, showing me.
The cotton bore the shadow of my warfae marks, as though they’d been scorched into the fabric. I lifted up the shirt and brushed my fingers over my chest, already knowing the marks were gone. Pulling the top aside revealed a circle of unmarked saru skin radiating out from my chest over my heart. The marks remained at my hips and arms, but those on my chest had vanished.
Whatever had happened, it had erased years of Oberon’s work.
“What are you?” Sirius whispered.
He knew. The knowledge shone in his wide, awestruck eyes. He jolted to his feet and burst from the carriage, leaving the door swinging open. Moments later, I climbed down and saw him pay his driver a fat bag of gems to keep his silence. Reins cracked and the enormous steeds with fiery fetlocks reared, screaming into the dusk light, then cantered into the gloom.
“We have to get off this road,” Sirius ordered.
He plunged into the roadside undergrowth, leaving me struggling with the spindly branches to catch up. My heart was galloping, flooding my veins with the same kind of anxious energy I would always get before an arena battle, when the crowd would chant my name, summoning the Wraithmaker from her cage. I wasn’t sure if the pressure was building again or if fear was tightening my chest. What exactly was this thing inside me that it could heal a tek arm?
I touched my chest. The magic was still there, but Talen was a million light years away. It wasn’t his magic. He had told me as much, told me many things, but I hadn’t believed him. Until now. By driving the nail in, had Oberon weakened his own warfae marks? Had he known this would happen, or had it been a mistake? Or was it Sirius’s tek hand that had caused this?
Talen would know. Kellee too. But all I had was Sirius.
The guardian stopped beneath the huge arching branches of an ancient oak tree, looking small beside its gnarled rotund trunk.
A silent wisp drifted down through the leaves, illuminating the hollow we stood in and his muddled expression.
He had always been careful to keep his emotions hidden, like he was the calm and composure of the Autumnlands made flesh, but that mask was slipping, so much so that he ran his tek fingers through his shaggy mop of hair and then pulled that metal hand down his face. It had to hurt, that metal on fae skin, but he did it anyway.
“I knew you were not saru.” He laughed, but its twisted sound made it clear this wasn’t funny.
“I am saru.”
“You are Faerie touched.” He pointed a tek finger at me. “I thought it was Oberon’s doing, but… not this, not what I just saw and felt. I saw you with Talen and with the vakaru. You are… you are something else, something Faerie and different. Something unique. Those males knew it. The king knows it. Whatever you are, it’s the reason Oberon has kept you close. The reason they all flock to you. Of course it is. There’s something inside you, something secret and hidden.” He looked up as another wisp dallied in the air between us, spiraling in its haphazard dance. “I should have trusted the king.”
“No, Sirius. Oberon’s actions—”
“He said he was trying to fix Faerie, and you… you are Light, calla. So much light. You cannot deny what just happened. I saw it!”
Sirius rushed in as though to grab me, only to stop when I stepped back. “No, no, I’m not. Have you seen the things I’ve done? There is no light in me.”
His brilliant eyes searched my face, and then he scrutinized me in the same cool, calculating way Oberon often did—seeing beneath my skin. Alarm widened his eyes. “Your light, it is… old.” He looked at his tek hand. At me. At the branches above us. Then he whispered, “You are the polestar.”
“No, I… I’m…” I laughed, only it sounded strained and insane. “What? No. That’s ridiculous.”
“You’re not the whole of it, that would be too much to hide, but a piece… yes, a small piece…” He staggered and reached out for the trunk, barely catching it in time to hold himself up. “You knew this... Everything changes here. This is… you are significant. You are more than significant. You are everything, just as Oberon said.”
He had heard him call me Mylana. My star. And there was no hiding this from him anymore. He had seen and heard too much. It was a wonder I’d kept him in the dark for as long as I had. Would he seek to use me and this thing inside me that I didn’t understand?
A wisp buzzed near my face. I gently swatted it away and used the motion to step away from Sirius, moving closer to the undergrowth behind me. “It changes nothing. We have to find Eledan’s heart and body, and we need the other pieces to fix Faerie.”
“The polestar…” He was laughing again, and it didn’t sound altogether like the Sirius I knew.
If I ran, there was no knowing what awaited me in the wilds of Faerie. I could run straight into something far worse than Sirius. No whip, no coat, no armor, just a light that had been with me all along but I could not control.
“The marks… yes… it makes sense now,” he continued. “He marked you to hide you from the Dark Legion. All this time I thought… I thought he was rewarding your actions, but it had nothing to do with you at all.”
A pang of something like sadness tugged on my frayed emotions. I had told him I was nothing, but he had chosen not to listen. And now he paced and ranted, animated in a way I’d never seen before. His beloved king had been right, and now Sirius’s purpose as a Royal Guardian was honorable once more. He would take me back to Oberon. Everything I’d said, everything we’d done, would be for nothing if he took me back.
“Sirius… please, we don’t have long. We need to find Eledan—”
“The Dreamweaver… he will seek to control the polestar for himself. That… that cannot happen. The king clearly has a plan—”
“First, we must find the pieces, and only Eledan knows where they are. We need to make him whole again. Everything else must come from that.” I eased another foot backward. He had the oddest look on his face, one of determination and delight, and in the constantly moving light, it made his smile garish. Was he determined to take me back to Oberon or save Faerie? “You said you were Faerie’s guardian first. You told me to remember that. Have you forgotten, Sirius? Just because Oberon was hiding me it doesn’t absolve him of his crimes. He does not want to fix Faerie. He wants to control it like he controls all the other systems. He destroyed Valand and Halow. Sol is next. And for what? That is not Faerie’s wish. Talen told you how to fix Faerie, and you know what must be done. Oberon is wrong. He drove out half of Faerie, and she’s been dying ever since.”
“We cannot know his true intentions. I should not have
been so quick to turn my back on him—”
“He nailed you to a cross!”
“And you? You healed a nail to the chest… It’s so obvious now. Why did I not see it before?”
Because in your eyes, I was always a worthless saru—the perfect hiding place. I sighed.
I needed another way around this to get him back on my side. “Oberon is… weak. He cannot find the polestar without his brother. We must find it for the king. We made a deal, remember? We will find the polestar and take it to him. That deal still stands.”
That caught his attention. “It was not my place to doubt my king. His punishment was just.”
No, you were just starting to see the truth, and you’ll see it again, but not now…
“Time, Sirius. We do not have much of it. We made a deal, back on the warcruiser, to bring Oberon the polestar. That is what we’re doing, and we need Eledan—”
Something large rustled in the bushes behind Sirius. The guardian spun too late. A white beast sprang from its hiding place, jaws wide, and slammed into the guardian, knocking him to the ground. The cu sith clamped its jaws around Sirius’s tek arm and rattled the guardian in its grip.
Further bubbling snarls erupted nearby.
“Run!” Sirius bellowed.
I wasn’t running. Running from the fae always ended badly. I bolted for the oak’s trunk, sprang, caught a branch, and swung myself into its leafy canopy.
Two more cu sith exploded into the clearing and tore into Sirius like Calicto wrecking balls in fast one-two blows. The guardian buckled beneath an onslaught of jaws and claws. Teeth sank in, tearing at fabric and flesh and bone. Sirius’s muffled grunts mixed with the snarling wet sounds of torn meat.
They knew to eliminate Sirius first and then come for me. Without a weapon, and without Sirius, I would be easy prey.
Sirius’s living flame blazed, outlining the guardian in a blue-orange fire. The cu sith cringed back, but they weren’t giving up. They circled, snapping and snarling as Sirius straightened. Eerie liquid magic dripped from his fingers like blood and sizzled on the carpet of oak leaves. He waited as they stalked around him. A cu sith sprang, and in one sweeping whirl, Sirius grabbed it by the back of its neck and slammed it into the oak’s gnarled roots at his feet. The hound yelped, signaling the remaining two to attack.
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