by Elise Kova
I cross over to the tree and step behind it. After a second I glance back. My eyes meet Oren’s. I mouth the words, Don’t look.
He rolls his eyes and looks away. This is my chance. I dart from the tree to behind the crumbling wall of another long-ago-destroyed house and listen to see if he is giving chase. The forest is silent. I don’t think he saw me move.
I take a breath, brace myself, and make my escape.
Chapter 11
I wonder how much time I bought myself as I push away from the wall, sprinting straight back between oak trees. Eventually, Oren will come looking. When he doesn’t find me, I’m sure he’ll alert the others. I have to assume that they’re good at tracking. I’ve nothing to base that assumption off of, but I would rather hope for the best while planning for the worst. Given how my luck has been this past day, they can no doubt track a beetle across a mountain range.
Far enough that I know I’m out of view, I begin to cut left and head in the direction we came from. There was a creek not too far back. I’ve heard tales of people crossing bodies of water while being chased by dogs. Something about washing off your scent trail. Fae seem to be part beast, so maybe the premise is the same. It can’t hurt.
The small motes of light that illuminated the forest in the daytime have made their beds upon the dark moss, turning the forest floor into a sea of stars that ripples away from me as I run through and closes back in over my footsteps. The trees shimmer like water—what can only be described as magic pulsing off their trunks and into the leaves before falling back down to the earth as luminescent haze. Everything here feels alive, awake, feels like I’m being watched with every step by ancient beings.
I press my hand into my side. It aches and my lungs are burning. I catch my breath for only a second and keep running. If I can make it to the creek, then maybe I can throw them. I paid attention to the path we took today. I’ll find my way back and then I’ll head into the mountains. I’ll cross the Fade. If they can do it, so can I. After all, I have this magic of kings, or whatever it is that their ritual was supposed to create. I can do this; I know I can.
The creek comes into view.
I jump down the shallow bank, splash in the water, and leap across. It’s as my feet touch down on the other side that I see the blur of movement in my periphery. I spin toward the source on instinct.
A man pummels into me. He came from the sky—a blur of bloodred iridescence and starlight. We hit the ground together. I bring up my knee on instinct, looking for the soft spot between his legs that will surely shake him and instead finding his ribs due to the awkward way we fell. He’s half on top of me, pushing off the ground now, trying to catch my wrist as I struggle to free myself.
“Unhand—” A large palm clamps over my mouth.
Davien’s bright green eyes meet mine. The only thing keeping his nose from touching mine is his hand. His hair cascades over his shoulders and tickles my cheek.
“Are you trying to get yourself killed?” he snarls.
I try and speak against his hand, the muffled sounds unintelligible until he removes his fingers. “Your friends kept telling me all day how I’m going to die anyway. I might as well hurry it up.”
“And yet we’re still trying to keep you alive.” He has yet to pull away. His body is crushing mine against the creek bed. Water rushes against my side in cool contrast to the heat of his firm muscle.
“You know who else tried to keep me alive? My mother and sisters. You know how they did it? Locking me in rooms, preventing me from having friends, taking anything that brought me even the slightest amount of joy. They treated me like a thing more than a person.” I blink up at him, my eyes burning.
The words spill from me uninvited. I don’t want to be saying these things, not to him, not here, not now. But in this moment, it feels as though there can be nothing hidden between us. He’s compressed all the space where secrets could live into dust. It’s just him, assaulting my senses like he has been for weeks. Except now I can see him. Now I can stare into those bright green eyes as they expose me. Now it’s more than the barest of touches and I can feel his body on mine as his weight crushes my barriers.
“I want to live—more than anything—and because I want that, I refuse to spend my hours as someone’s thing. I’m going to live my life, the way I want to live it, or die trying. So help me live or be ready to kill me,” I finish, voice quivering.
He opens and closes his mouth. Still undecided on his words, he shifts his weight and presses a hand into the ground by the side of my head. With space between us once more, I can breathe again. I’ve never felt so laid bare.
“Get up,” he says, barely more than a grunt. “You’ll catch a cold if you lie in the water.”
Davien makes room for me to stand. I brush the dirt and rocks off of my tattered robe. My nightgown is alarmingly translucent on the side where the water flowed over me. I close my robe about me a little tighter. If he noticed the impropriety, he made a point not to look.
“Live your life the way you want to live it…” he echoes and laughs softly with a shake of his head. “What a selfish aspiration.”
“Excuse me?” It’s my turn to close the gap between us. I rise to my tiptoes to try and stare him in the eye and still come up short. “What did you say?”
“You want to live your life in total disregard for everyone and everything else. It’s selfish.”
“I made my sacrifices. I earned this.” I shake my head, backing away. “I don’t have to defend myself to you, or to anyone.”
“You’re right, you don’t, because you clearly don’t care for others.” He shrugs. “Not that I could understand someone who chose to live their life that way.”
“Oh? And how do you live your life? Holed up in a manor in the human world? Finding brides whose families have the things you need for your nighttime rituals? Am I even the first human bride you’ve taken?” I’m surprised at how much I want him to say that I am. How wounded I would be if I was just one of many.
“You are.” He gives me a glare so cold I shiver. “And I did not accept you as my bride lightly. Had I a choice, I wouldn’t have. I never wanted to involve you in any of this. If your father had just given me that damn book when I first demanded it years ago, none of this would’ve happened. I had to wait and prepare an offering I knew your family could not refuse.”
“My father’s death—”
“I had nothing to do with it,” he interrupts firmly, but still somewhat gentle around the delicate subject. “Nor do I or did I find joy in it. I sent Oren expecting him to negotiate with your father, not Joyce. I didn’t even know he’d passed to the great Beyond, only that he was away and rumor of your family’s hard times.”
I heave a small sigh of relief.
He continues, “But last night…when I finally, finally had everything I needed in place, years of work all coming to fruition for a cause much bigger than myself—much bigger than you will ever know…I—I…”
“You?” I whisper when the silence stretches on to the point that I’m afraid he won’t continue.
“I still thought of you. I left you that letter in an attempt to make it easy should anyone claim that you didn’t have a right to that land, that home. You would have been taken care of for the rest of your mortal days. And all you had to do was follow the rules I gave you for your own benefit and stay put.”
My stomach churns, and not because I ate food from the fae world. I’m sick because I don’t smell smoke and fae can’t lie. He’s telling the truth.
All I had to do was stay put. One final night of heeding the rules and the total freedom I’ve always craved would have been mine. Davien would’ve been out of my life and his riches in the Natural World would’ve been mine.
“And here we are again.” He shakes his head. “Another night where you risk everything by not staying where you were put.”
“If you want me to go along with this, you have to start telling me what is happening. Treat me
like an equal. I know I should but I can’t follow rules blindly.” Joyce has scarred me too deeply in ways I’m only beginning to understand for me to go along with something without question.
“Do you think you deserve that?” He arches his eyebrows.
“If you have any fondness—no, any respect—for me, then you’ll do this. I am not a relic that you can store on a shelf until your next ritual. I’m a breathing person. Don’t treat me like a thing and I won’t have a reason to be out of place because the place I’ll be in is the one I’ve chosen.”
Davien sighs heavily. He runs a hand through his hair. Half of it slicks back thanks to the water of the creek. The other half falls into his face. “Do you promise that’s all it will take?”
“I swear it.”
“Give me one reason why I would think you would keep your word? You swore if I unlocked the door, you wouldn’t leave. You lied.” There’s hurt on his face. Maybe that’s why he never wanted me to see him before. The man is an open book of emotion. He spent so much time in physical isolation that he never had to learn how to guard himself.
Whereas me? I learned that skill very quickly thanks to Joyce and Helen.
I shake my head slowly. I can’t think of anything I could offer him to prove I’m telling the truth. I could tell him how I taste metal when I lie. But he has no proof of what I can taste or not. Laura never said she could smell metal on my breath, the few times she indulged me with a sniff.
“I guess you don’t have any reason.” I shrug. “I guess the best thing I can do to prove it to you is to start acting in good faith myself. I’ll head back to camp, right now.”
His emotion changes. His brow softens slightly and arches upward. His eyes narrow, just a little and for only a second. It’s like watching thoughts dance across a person’s mind, exposed in a way I’ve never seen before.
I cross the creek and splash up the bank on the other side. I’m several steps away when I realize he’s not following me. “Are you coming?”
“Are you honestly planning on walking?” He chuckles. His mighty wings—all four of them—unfurl on his unspoken command and spread out behind him. So it’s true what he told me about the fae being able to summon and dismiss some of their animal features. The wings had vanished after we’d toppled in the stream and now they seem to grow in size. Slightly translucent streaks pick up the light of the forest floor. He’s positively radiant. With a mighty flap, he half jumps, half glides over the creek and steps next to me. “There’s a much faster way. And if I’m treating you like an equal, then I should extend it to you as well.” His arm wraps around my shoulders and pulls me to him. Once more the strong length of his body leaves me breathless. “Do you trust me?”
“I don’t know,” I whisper.
“What a state we’re in, aren’t we?” he says with a smile so dashing it should be a crime. “I can’t trust you and now you seem to have some reason why you can’t trust me.”
“Well, you did betray my trust, too,” I admit.
He seems genuinely surprised by this. “What? How?”
“You lied to me about who you are.”
His brow furrows. “What should I have said?” he asks softly; I’m staggered by the sincerity. “That your new husband was a fae who was destined to leave you? Would that have made you happy?”
I can’t meet his eyes anymore. I don’t have an answer. “I suppose I just wish things were different,” is all I can say. He hooks my chin and guides my face back to him. His eyes are open and inviting.
“I have spent my whole life wishing things were different. And we are on the cusp of it all changing. And once it changes for me, it will change for you too.” Truth. Truth. Truth. “Once I have the power that’s in you, I will see you back to your world. You’ll still have that house. You’ll still have all the riches I left behind. You will live with every comfort you want and whatever joy you can buy.”
“What about the fae in the forest?”
“They were after me, not you. Without me there, no one will come and harm you.” His arm tightens once more. “So I will ask you again, an impossible question to a human, from a fae…do you trust me? Will you trust me? Can we start over?”
I should say no. Every human instinct in my body screams no. I can’t trust this man. His very design as a fae is to be my enemy.
And yet, in a small breath, I defy even myself when I utter, “Yes.”
His movements are a blur. In one fluid motion he pulls me to his chest while reaching with his free hand to catch the backs of my knees. He bends forward and sinks low into his legs. Then, he jumps upward with a mighty flap of his wings.
We take to the skies.
The canopy rushes past us. I try and shield myself with a hand, pressing my face into his chest. Davien shifts as well, taking the brunt of tree limbs with his shoulders and neck. The forest becomes a distant memory as we break through its leafy barrier and slow to hover among the stars.
“Look,” he whispers.
I peel my face from his chest and shoulder as we begin to descend. We’re falling much more slowly than should be naturally possible. Davien stretches out a leg and points his foot. With just the tip of his boot he meets one of the upper branches of an oak tree and then pushes off once more with another flap of his wings. We arc back upward, magic sparking like embers off the wings behind him.
“See, it’s not so bad.” He looks down at me with a grin. I bite my lip and finally admire the world around us now that I’m at least somewhat confident I’m not about to fall.
Even though I know I should be afraid. Even though my stomach has fallen from my body. My heart is soaring.
“Not so bad…” I repeat, the thought getting lost among the splendor.
From this vantage I can see the entirety of the Bleeding Woods. They spread all along the distant mountain range and thin as they near a vibrant city at the top of a hill in the distance. I can make out the spires of a castle against the dark sky. It’s the only significant sign of life that I can see. Above us, the heavens have never been so bright. The stars look more like the sandy shores of an ocean, rather than the tiny specks I’ve always known them as.
“It’s incredible,” I whisper. I loose a hand from around his neck and point toward the castle. “What’s that?”
Whatever it is, he doesn’t like it. I can feel his shoulders tense before a scowl sweeps across his face. Even the brilliance of his eyes seems to dim with the shadows of trauma.
“That is the High Court. It’s the hill on which the first kings were crowned, where the glass crown of the fae resides, and where the Fae King lives and rules.”
“And you want to kill him.” The words are easier to say than I think they should have been. But I have no horse in this race. I hardly care about fae kings and queens.
“How do you know that?” He glances down at me as his toe touches another treetop and he launches us off again.
“You told me you wanted to become king once.” I relax more into the safety of his arms.
“You didn’t forget.” He chuckles. “I thought you would’ve written that off.”
“I would’ve, if I’d smelled smoke.”
“Smelled smoke?” He furrows his brow. I realize I haven’t told him about my gift.
“Well, you see…” Every time I try to tell someone about it, things end badly. I tear my eyes from him, looking away. That’s how I see the motion in the distance. There’s a blur of shadow. I blink and the figure is gone, only to appear from a puff of smoke closer. “Look out!” I shout. But I’m too late.
Davien turns. His eyes widen as he sees what I see. A man has come seemingly from out of nowhere. A shawl of shadow identical to that on the woman in the woods that day is around his shoulders. He condenses darkness and hurls a spear of it right for us. Davien tries to react, but not even he’s fast enough.
His cry fills the air as the spear punches through his shoulder, blood pours down on to me, his arm goes limp, and I slip from
his grasp as we plummet back down to earth.
Chapter 12
A tree branch raking against my back is the first thing that jolts me out of my haze of shock. I quickly turn myself into a ball, bringing my knees up and shielding my face with my forearms. I want to make myself as small as possible. I know I am going to hit all manner of branch and tree limb on the way down, but the smaller I am, hopefully the fewer I hit.
My strategy works, for the most part. At least until one unlucky limb has me doubled over on my side. All the wind is knocked from me. I wheeze and roll off the branch, narrowly missing another one on my way down. A final branch I allow myself to hit. Prepared this time, I’m able to brace myself and catch it with both hands. My fingers are ripped across the bark, torn up in an instant. But it slows my descent.
Though it doesn’t stop me from hitting the ground awkwardly. Luckily, the thick blanket of moss cushions my fall. I’m wheezing and aching all over. My body is covered in bruises and scratches. This is why Joyce forbade me from heights after the roof. Nothing ever goes right when I’m high up.
A heavy thud next to me steals my attention. I get up and rush over to where Davien has landed. He’s so very still. It isn’t until I’m on my knees at his side that I can see his chest moving.
“Thank the gods,” I whisper. I may not know fully where I stand with this man. He might have betrayed my trust in some murky ways. But I know that he is the best chance I have of surviving this world and getting home.
The man who launched the spear descends gracefully through the canopy. He moves from branch to branch on his tiptoes, nothing more than a whisper of smoke between. With a pop he materializes on the ground not far from me.
“You’re alive.” He tsks. “How utterly disappointing. I expected this to be far simpler. To think I couldn’t kill a fae with stinted magic and a human. I’m losing my touch.”