by Lisa Henry
“It’s empty!” Harry called out.
“Let’s get you down,” Min said to Kazimir, encouraging him to slip farther over until he was essentially breaking the boy’s fall. The horse huffed and danced sideways a little as Min braced himself under Kazimir’s weight. He slung the boy’s arm across his shoulders, gripping his wrist tightly to hold it in place, and put his other arm around his waist. He shuffled toward the hut while Harry hurried back to see to the horses.
The hut was small and dark. It took a moment for Min’s eyes to adjust before the light slanting through the gaps in the walls—wonderful—illuminated the place enough for Min to get a sense of it. It was a single room only, and not the dwelling he’d initially taken it for. The smell was the first thing that gave it away: stale and smoky and meaty. The dirt floor had been dug into a firepit that took up most of the space, and a series of hooks hung from a crosshatch of narrow beams inside the pitched roof. It wasn’t a hut at all. It was a smokehouse. Judging from the mass of spiders’ webs in the roof, it hadn’t been used in some time. The wood in the fire pit had long ago burned into ashes. Still, spending the night here was a slightly better option than spending it in the open.
Surviving the night… well, that was another matter entirely.
Min eased Kazimir down onto the ground, where he curled up like a pill bug. Min knelt beside him and pressed a hand to his forehead. He was burning up.
“Kazimir,” he said. “Kazimir?”
Kazimir snuffled and blinked his eyes slowly open.
Min slid his fingers down the boy’s hot neck and felt his pulse beating rapidly under his touch. He pinched the edges of Kazimir’s shirt and pulled them up, threading them through the collar. Putting some small barrier between Kazimir’s skin and the iron that burned him. He hoped it was enough.
Kazimir blinked again.
“Better?” Min asked.
Kazimir nodded, his eyes slipping closed once more.
Harry stepped inside the hut, dragging their saddlebags. “How is he?”
“Not dead,” Min said, which seemed to be the best any of them could wish for, frankly.
“I’m sorry, Min,” Harry said softly. “For everything.”
“Don’t,” Min told him, sitting down on the floor and stretching his legs out. “Apologies are for lesser men than us.”
Harry’s mouth quirked in a quick grin, and he settled down beside him.
Min leaned against the wall and drew Kazimir closer. He let the boy curl into him and rest his head on his thigh. He kept one hand on the iron collar, making sure the fabric of Kazimir’s shirt stayed in place. Harry sat close, their shoulders bumping, until Min relented and put an arm around him.
“There are worse things to die for than love, I suppose,” Min said at last.
Harry nodded.
“Not that I’d know,” he added.
He wondered, as the darkness began to settle, if that was something he ought to regret.
MIN HAD more or less resigned himself to certain death and had just started to doze off when he felt Kazimir move. He glanced down. In the slanted lines of moonlight cutting through the gaps in the wall of the hut, Kazimir seemed almost to glow. Possibly it was his pale complexion, and possibly it was something to do with his fae blood.
“You’re out of your depth here, aren’t you?” Kazimir asked, his voice a little rough with sleep.
“Story of my life,” Min told him softly, aware that Harry was asleep against his shoulder. “And, apparently, my death.”
“Mine too.” There was a touch of amusement in Kazimir’s regretful tone.
Min wondered if at some point he ought to stop carding his fingers through the curls behind the boy’s ear. But then, he wasn’t getting any complaints, and there was something about the repetitive gesture he found soothing.
Kazimir’s shirt and kirtle had ridden up, and Min gazed down at his pale hip. He caught a glimpse of something underneath the scrunched-up fabric. Lines inked into skin. “Is that a tattoo?”
Kazimir shifted, tugging his shirt up to look. “Mmm. It’s my cat.”
“You have a tattoo of your cat?”
Kazimir frowned and blinked up at him. He pulled his shirt back into place. “No. The tattoo is a cat, I mean, and it’s mine. So it’s my cat.”
“Fair enough,” Min allowed. “Less annoying than the real thing.”
“I wouldn’t know.” Kazimir finally moved, shifting his head off Min’s thigh and sitting up. He leaned back against the wall and rolled his shoulders.
“Are you feeling better?” Min asked.
Kazimir nodded. “It helps, I think, not to have it touching my skin.”
Min pressed his lips together tightly.
Kazimir’s expression seemed soft in the gloom. “I know you’re not doing it to be cruel.”
Min met his gaze. “That’s irrelevant, don’t you think?”
Kazimir’s brows drew together in a slight frown. “Motive is never irrelevant.”
“It is, actually,” Min said. “Motive is the most irrelevant thing in this entire scenario. You should know that better than anyone. You’re the one being abducted, after all. Besides, don’t fool yourself. If I wasn’t doing this for Harry, I might have done it for the money.”
“Would you really?”
Min sighed. “Maybe not this job. I didn’t like the smell of it from the start. For good reason, right?”
Kazimir’s mouth twitched in a quick, bitter smile.
“But people living in poverty can’t afford luxuries,” Min told him. “And foremost amongst those luxuries is conventional morality.”
Kazimir shifted slightly and peered at him intently. “You have a gentleman’s name, though?”
“I did not come by that honestly,” Min told him with a grin.
“What do you mean?”
“My mother is a whore,” Min said. “There’s a certain tradition in her particular circle to take the name of their first paying customer. Decourcey it was. She swears it was the lord of the House himself, but my money’s always been on some younger bastard by-blow. It makes no difference to me, certainly. Whichever Decourcey he was, he had no input into my existence. I came along years later.” He smiled at Kazimir’s wide eyes. “So, there you are. People like me pick up our names where we find them. Whereas you, Kazimir, discarded yours for a lesser one.”
“Stone is a hedgewitch’s name,” Kazimir said, stumbling over the words a little. “A-a name from nature.”
“You were never a hedgewitch, though.”
“I wanted to be one.” Kazimir scratched his scalp and then sighed. “I wanted to be one.”
“Enough to give away the name of your House?”
“They never wanted me,” Kazimir said.
“They want you now.”
Kazimir huffed and shook his head. “Now I’m some use to them. My grandfather wouldn’t even look at me when I was a child. All of my cousins called him Grandfather. I had to call him my lord.”
Min had no answer to that.
“I don’t know why he thinks I am useful to him,” Kazimir said, frowning into the gloom and chewing his bottom lip. “It doesn’t matter, does it? As soon as he finds out what I am, he’ll keep me in iron for the rest of my life.”
“There you go again,” Min said. “Assuming we won’t die tonight.”
Kazimir gave him a sideways look. “You have a strange way of looking on the bright side, Aramin Decourcey.”
“You’re not the first to comment on it,” Min said. “And it’s Min, by the way.”
“Kaz,” Kazimir replied with a slight smile.
They settled into silence as the night drew on.
FIREFLIES, MIN thought as he jolted awake with a start.
The tiny dancing lights froze as Min moved, and Min’s blood turned to ice. He could make out figures in the soft green lights. Sharp faces, clawed hands, and the rapid burr and whirr of dragonfly wings. There were two of them to begin with, and th
en those two dipped close together, and when their light parted again, there was a third creature with them, bobbing around like a wasp in a bottle.
Beside him, Min heard Harry’s breath catch.
The fae made chattering, clicking noises like insects and floated closer to them. To Kazimir. Their green light illuminated the pale planes of his face and was reflected in his dark eyes. As Min watched, he thrust his hand into one of the saddlebags and pulled it out again. Then he opened his fist and scattered something all over the dirt floor. For a moment Min wondered if the iron had somehow failed and the boy was attempting to use his Gift, but then he realized what the tiny pale flecks on the floor were: oats. Oats for the horses.
The tiny fae buzzed down toward the scattered oats, needle-sharp teeth clicking as they chattered away.
“Count them,” Kazimir said, his voice shaking.
The fae buzzed like angry bees, and Min remembered old stories of impossible tasks the fae were compelled to attempt if asked. Hammering a curly hair into straightness, making a rope out of ashes, carrying water in a sieve. He just wasn’t sure how impossible a handful of oats was to count. The fae seemed to be having no problems, until Kazimir leaned down close to the ground and blew at the oats, enough to send them scattering again.
The little fae flashed toward him, green light pulsing, and hovered close to his face.
“Count,” he rasped.
Their wings whirred as they buzzed around the tiny space, jostling into one another and bouncing away again.
Min heard the scrape of another saddlebag on the dirt floor as Harry dragged it closer. One of the fae, no doubt suspecting further treachery, zipped toward him, and Harry held up his bundle of rowan twigs. The fae made a tiny sound that seemed almost incensed, and flitted back toward its fellows again.
Shit.
Was it possible this was working?
Were they really defending themselves from the fae with iron, twigs, and oats? Or at least the fae equivalent of insects, because these creatures were nothing like the ones Min had glimpsed in Anhaga, tall and stately and terrifying.
Harry flung another handful of oats to the ground.
“Count,” Kazimir said again to the furious little creatures.
Count.
Count.
Count.
Min lost all track of time. He felt as though he was trapped in some nightmare. Between them, Kazimir and Harry kept blowing the oats around or adding to them. Once, Harry darted out a pale hand and stole some back while the tiny fae shrieked at him in outrage. Min felt as though he was caught in some intricate balancing act with no end in sight and that a stumble was inevitable. How much longer could they last? And what would happen if the fae completed their task?
It took Min a long while to notice dawn was creeping in, softening the brilliant moonlight into muted tones of gray. The light of the fae seemed dimmer as the dawn slowly brightened. When the first glimmers of sunlight filtered in through the walls, the little fae seemed to fade suddenly. They swooped toward Kazimir, chirping and gesturing wildly, tiny faces pulled into fierce expressions, and then, abruptly, they were gone.
Outside, Min heard birdsong.
“Holy fuck,” Harry said at last, his voice pitched higher than usual.
“We should go,” Kazimir said. “Before the Hidden Lord learns we were here.”
Min blinked at the oats scattered on the floor. “I think it’s highly likely that he already knows, don’t you?”
“Those were wisps,” Kazimir said. “Only fools believe the words of wisps.”
Min felt a sudden chill. To his knowledge only the most Gifted sorcerers in the Iron Tower could speak with any certainty about the fae. To hear Kazimir announce it so casually, as though it were something everyone knew, was unsettling. It reminded him that not only was Kazimir a necromancer, a practitioner of the darkest sides of the arcane arts, but he was also part fae. Min wondered if his knowledge of the fae had been obtained from the moans of the mouthless dead or if it was blood-born. Both were terrifying in their own way.
Harry climbed to his feet first and held his hand down to pull Kazimir up. Kazimir’s shirt and kirtle rode up a little as he stood, and Min caught a glimpse of the cat tattooed on his hip. Its tail trailed around to Kazimir’s lower back, and—perhaps it was in part a trick of the early morning light—Min swore it flicked a little from side to side as Kazimir stood and his muscles shifted under his skin.
Min’s knees ached as he stood, and he rolled his shoulders to ease the stiffness in them. Then, laden with saddlebags, they headed outside to see if the horses were still there or if the fae had driven them off in the night.
To Min’s relief, they were still there, reins tied around the scrubby bushes outside the hut.
They seemed unharmed and unfazed, but, Min saw, sometime during the night tiny fingers had woven pretty little flowers into their manes.
THEY STOPPED at the place where the road forded the creek and let the horses drink. Harry picked the tiny flowers from his horse’s mane and let them fly away on the breeze.
“Flowers,” he said when Min caught him watching. He wrinkled his nose and shrugged his skinny shoulders. “I wasn’t expecting flowers.”
Min snorted. For all they knew, the fae liked to decorate their victims before tearing them to shreds with their teeth and claws.
Kazimir squatted down by the creek and reached out to dip his hands in the water. His wrists were still red and raw from yesterday’s iron shackles. He cupped his hands and raised them to wash. Water slid down his face, his throat, catching the sunlight and making his pale skin gleam.
“Does it still hurt?” Min asked him in a low voice.
Kazimir blinked up at him, droplets glistening like tears in his dark lashes. “What?”
“The collar.”
“A little.” Kazimir shrugged. “It’s not so bad if I keep my shirt pulled through.”
Min hated the guilt that rose up in him. He nodded and turned his gaze away. When he looked back, Kazimir was holding a small black feather by the quill between his thumb and forefinger, twisting it around. As Min watched he flicked it into the creek, and the shallow water carried it away.
THEY HAD been riding for hours when Harry spotted the riders—or at least the haze of dust they conjured on the road ahead.
“Min!” he called, twisting around in the saddle.
Min straightened up and peered ahead.
Fear twisted in Min’s gut. Had the fae discovered them after all? The riders were approaching from the south, but what was geography to the fae? They’d proved yesterday that the shadow realm operated under none of the usual rules. Direction and distance were as meaningless to the fae and to their world as they were in those places shaped by dreams.
The knot in Min’s stomach loosened as he saw the glint of sunlight on graying hair. As the riders drew closer, Robert Sabadine’s sharp profile became clearer.
“It’s Sabadine!” Harry called back, the relief in his tone swamped quickly by a guilty, hangdog expression as he looked at Kazimir.
Kazimir’s heart beat fast under Min’s palm. When had he slipped his hand higher? Min was shocked when Kazimir raised his own hand and curled his trembling fingers around Min’s palm. A futile gesture. An unbearably pathetic one. What a miserable fucking life Kazimir had stretching out ahead of him if he sought comfort from his kidnapper in this moment.
Kazimir must have realized it too. He dropped his hand quickly.
“Decourcey!” Robert called as he and his men drew close. “We thought you must be dead.”
“Not dead,” Min said, resisting the urge to tighten his grip on Kazimir. “Just detoured.”
Robert nodded, reining his horse in. He looked Kazimir up and down, some expression that Min couldn’t read crossing his face before he schooled his features. “Kazimir?”
Min could feel Kazimir shaking as he lifted his chin to meet his uncle’s gaze.
“You will ride with me,” Rober
t said.
For a moment Kazimir didn’t move, and Min thought he would refuse. And then he was slipping awkwardly down onto the dusty road, fingers digging into Min’s thigh to steady himself.
Robert hauled him up onto his horse as though he was no more than a chattel. Which, well. Min had no right to judge Robert for that when he was just as much a part of the ugly transaction, did he?
Robert said something in an undertone to Kazimir that Min didn’t catch. Kazimir’s scruffy curls bounced a little as he nodded in response. He kept his head bowed.
Robert and his men turned their horses and pointed the way south again.
Min and Harry trailed along behind them.
There was nothing to say.
There was nothing to be done but hope to hell they made it back to Pran tonight and then Amberwich. And then Min could demand Edward Sabadine have his sorcerer remove the curse mark from Harry’s cheek, they could put this whole sordid business behind them, and Min could fall into a barrel of beer for a week and not come out until he’d forgotten all about Kazimir Stone and the misery Min had helped heap upon him.
The sooner Anhaga was well and truly behind him, the better.
Min slouched in the saddle as they headed south and didn’t dare look over at Harry.
He could hear him sniffling for miles.
Chapter 8
MIN WAS almost shocked when dusk found them not at the creek ford with its wind-twisted trees, but at the Sabadines’ manor house outside of Pran. Like the first time they had approached the manor, the gathering dusk urged the company faster, and like the first time, there were servants waiting to take their horses.
Harry and Min dug their belongings out of the saddlebags and were amongst the last of the men to enter the house before the doors were bolted.
The small entry hall was illuminated by candlelight.
“This way, sirs,” a servant woman said and drew them up the stairs. Min tried to catch a glimpse of Robert and Kazimir, but they had already vanished somewhere else into the house. The woman led them along to the same bedroom they had shared the last time they had stayed here.