He disappears.
“No no no!” Shah shouts. He scoops up another handful of dirt and throws it toward the space Fyel just occupied, watching it rain over the ground.
Then he pounces on me.
“No!” he cries, and his fist slams into the side of my face. The impact convulses up my jawline and swirls my vision. His other fist hits my shoulder. He strikes again and again. My cheek. My breast, my stomach. I can’t breathe as the orbs of fire shoot up my ribs and down my torso. He hits and hits and hits and—
“Stop!” I cry.
And he does.
I look up at him, one of my eyes already beginning to swell. Tears dance in his wide eyes. His hands are frozen in the air, unnaturally halted in their barrage.
He struggles, grunting through half-closed lips.
I stare at him, huffing short, fire-laced breaths. I scramble backward until my back hits the doorway, but Shah remains in the same position, a marionette held up by invisible strings, but his puppeteer has left the stage.
Shah stopped, but not of his own will.
Of mine.
And he stays like that for a long minute before his assuaged temper finally sets him free.
I found the key. Found it on the shelf after the air stopped from their bodies. I am away.
CHAPTER 14
My breathing is labored as I crawl backward into the house. It hurts. Everything hurts. Without the support of the splint, the mending bones in my leg erupt as I drag them behind me.
I grip the edge of the tiling beneath the water pump and heave myself forward until I can rest my forehead on the cool stone. My eyes close. Air breathes in and out, in and out. A dozen bruises in the shape of Shah’s hands sing through skin and muscle. The ones on my face hum into bone.
How? The simple question draws sluggishly across my brain. The red skin, and now this. The soil Shah threw—did it hurt Fyel? Is that why he left? Was he frightened of Shah, as I am? Could he have done anything to stop him?
No, I think, shaking, and I feel its truth. If Fyel could have stopped Shah or helped me, he would have. He would have done it long ago.
I trust you. I had meant it.
I reach up a hand and grip the pump handle in numb fingers. Crank it just enough to get that first, cool splash. It rains over my head and traces rivulets over the sides of my neck, bringing the faint taste of blood into my mouth. I wipe my face, wincing as I brush over the first bruise.
I hear Shah come into the room and feel his shadow hovering over me. I cower and hate myself for it.
He doesn’t speak but walks past me, a shuffle in his step. He disappears up the stairs.
I would escape, sneaking on the edges of my feet out the door, then bolting down the road, running until I passed out, until my body couldn’t run anymore. Until I found a savior, or at least a hiding spot.
Running until neither Shah nor Fyel can find me.
There are so many questions battling within me where before there had only been one. Part of me wishes I’d never gotten these wisps of answers. Thoughts of my own brokenness tear through the fancy, and I worm back outside to retrieve the pieces of the wooden boot Allemas fashioned for me. He was still Allemas then.
By the time I’m strapped back into it, Shah has returned with a flour sack stuffed with what I assume are his personal belongings. He grabs my forearms and heaves me to my feet.
“I’m not going anywhere with you!” I scream, wrenching my arm away from his clammy fingers. “I am not yours! I am not a slave!”
“I am not what I want to be!” he shouts back, matching my tone perfectly. “And it’s your fault! You! You!”
He chokes and hugs himself as I’ve seen him do twice before, dropping his bag. Squeezing his eyes shut. Hissing through his teeth.
The fit passes quickly, but not completely—he’s still hurting when he snatches my bandaged hand and yanks me to his chest. I can feel it in the hardness of his grip, see it in the crossing of his eyes and sallow color of his cheeks. He twists around and we lurch together, our surroundings warping into blurs of color. My stomach heaves. My head spins, and I shut my eyes to keep them from rolling out of their sockets.
We settle somewhere very cold. Ice-laced wind rips through my clothes and whips my hair. Everything is white and blue and smells of stone.
My breath fogs beneath my nose just as I’m whisked away again. Bile burns my throat.
When I feel something solid beneath my feet, I crumple onto it, biting my tongue to keep my last meager meal inside me. I double over and press my forehead to the floor hard enough to get a sliver between my eyebrows. I feel the floor now, smell it. Wood. Old, weathered wood.
A cool breeze. Birds protesting, their song sharp. Leaf bugs. Forest.
Lifting my head, I see the earth between two planks of wood. It’s far beneath me. My muscles tighten, whining beneath their fresh beating. Pushing up to my knees, I see that we’re on a platform in a tree, with a second, higher platform to our left, connected by a knotted rope ladder. This tree is old, for it’s four stories tall and thick as a millstone. The forest surrounding us is dense, filled with trees equally ancient, hiding the horizon in all directions, casting a broken, leafy film over the sunlit sky.
“Safe here,” Shah says, though his voice is a teaspoon too soft to sound normal. “He won’t find us here.”
I feel as though a rope, coiled within me, is being pulled out of my navel, leaving me empty. If he’s right, my one lifeline is gone. I can’t keep my shoulders from quivering.
“He?” I ask, forcing my voice smooth. Willing calmness into my chest as I would will it into a cake. “The ghost-man? I’ve never seen him before. I was so scared of him.”
Shah eyes me, his left eye askew. I force myself to hold his gaze. My words sound empty to my ears, as empty as the lies they are. Please, please let him interpret them as truth.
“He is bad,” he says.
“Bad?”
“Very bad. No talking to him. He is gone from our heads now.”
His gaze is penetrating.
I don’t think he believes my ignorance.
There is no ladder or stair that leads to the ground. Beneath the platforms, the tree is all trunk and no branches. Even if my leg weren’t broken, I’d have no hope of climbing down.
Shah knows this, so he is confident in leaving me here. He does so frequently and stays away for so long that I often wonder if I’ve been forgotten. There are no cellar walls to keep me away from the sunlight or the music of nature, but neither is there a water pump or a cupboard. Shah did not bring any of my baking supplies.
The day after my beating I am especially sore. The bruises mar my new skin with round and crescent shapes, purple and sage. It hurts to move. The lack of food and water drags on my body and eyelids, and I sleep more often than not, sometimes only barely registering Shah’s movements through our bizarre tree house.
My mind is not gone, however. I fear more than ever that Shah will see my crystal, that he will know what it is better than I do, and that he will take even that from me. Despite the discomfort, I break it off the necklace and wedge it into the side of my wooden boot, between plank and calf. I will not let him have it.
My head grows heavy. It aches when I rise, so I lie down for most of the day. My belly rumbles. My throat is dry. In Shah’s absence, I find myself wondering if this was the donkey’s undoing, if she was just forgotten and left to wither away just outside my bedroom wall.
But I have not slipped Shah’s mind. For whatever reason, he wants me alive. He brings me a pitcher of water first—I slosh half of it over the platform in my desperation to drink—and food later. I devour the apples and the flour, which I mix with water so I can swallow it. I leave the dried meat.
Shah is not entirely confident in the boundaries of my prison, however. At the end of my first week stranded in the treetop, he returns from one of his outings with a flour sack full of blazeweed and, with heavily gloved hands, spreads it over the e
dges of both platforms. My pie did make him smart, it seems.
Once, only once, I consider jumping. I wouldn’t survive it, of course. The thought passes and does not bother me again.
Halfway through the second week, a half hour after Shah has left on one of his mysterious errands, I climb up the short rope ladder to the second platform, hold on to a tree branch, and shout to the heavens, “Fyel!”
Birds chitter to one another. One flees its nest. The buzzing of insects beneath the sun’s heat fills my ears.
I call him again and again, begging him to find me. He never answers.
The sounds of the forest are constant even in the night. Owls calling to their mates, mice scurrying over half-rotted leaves, crickets singing in wide-open spaces. It is never silent, yet the melodies of nature are soothing and seldom wake me.
But tonight I stir, curled up in the center of the lower platform, where I won’t accidentally brush the blazeweed or tumble to my death. Covered in only an empty flour sack. I stir because there are voices nearby that don’t belong to the wood. Voices I recognize.
Sleep presses into me, beckoning me back into my dreams. But I hear them, barely, even if I don’t see the speakers.
“No. No, no. No. No,” Shah says, each word clipped and punctuated.
Fyel’s voice answers. “You cannot leave any more than she can, but I can. I am in the earth upon which you stand, which you cannot avoid. Gods help me, I will crush you regardless of what eternal laws I break.”
Shah snickers. “Uh-uh. If you break them, you’ll never have her.”
A moment of silence is broken by Shah’s high-pitched giggle, and then there’s nothing else but silence and slumber.
I wonder if it was a dream, after all.
When I awaken, it is not on planks of old wood, but an uneven floor of rock. The sound of clicking metal snaps me to my senses.
I bolt up to my hands and knees. Shah crouches by my good ankle. He’s fastened a silvery cuff about it, which is connected to a chain that ends in a spike hammered into the rock. Rock is beneath me, above me, and on every side save for one. We’re in a cave of red and charcoal stone, porous and volcanic. Wisps of cloud pass outside the shallow cave’s mouth, and the coolness tells me we’re very high up.
But I dare not check how high, for not two feet before me lies an animal snare, identical to the one that seized me the day I tried to run. Beside it, another, and another. They sprinkle the cave like lily pads on a pond, their teeth slick on one edge, serrated on the other. Gaping maws waiting for the lightest touch to snap.
My chest constricts and my body burns. I jerk away from the traps, scrambling back until I squat over the staked end of my chain, but even that does not provide enough distance for comfort. The cool stone of the cave presses against my skin. A pressure not unlike what erupted in me at Daneen’s home builds in my gut and smokes into my breast.
“Please, please not here.” My voice is weak and toadish. I press hard into the cave wall, willing it to open up and let me escape. I don’t want to look at the traps, but I can’t pull my eyes away from their glinting teeth.
Shah walks away from me, taking a narrow path between traps. Two rest on his arm, and he sets them up behind him, cranking open their mouths until they click, click, click, and sets them ready to bite in his wake. No escape.
“I think I have a customer,” he says with a wide, gleeful grin at the front of the cave. The cloudy light makes him a gray silhouette. “This is good if we’re going to buy a new house. Don’t escape.”
He looks at the traps and doesn’t bother tacking a threat on to his words. He doesn’t need to. He steps over the cave lip and is gone.
I curl up as tightly as my body will allow, the top of my wooden boot scraping my thigh. The traps gleam, hungry, watching me. Waiting for another bite, another break.
I push the palms of my hands into my eyes and cry. The tears come too easily, as though there’s a reservoir of them behind my eyes and the water has become level with the dam holding it back. I cry and wish for Arrice, for Franc, for Cleric Tuck, for Fyel. I wish for my memory and for a healed leg and to gods not to be scared anymore.
I cry until my crying becomes weeping, soft and weak. My bruises are near healed, but rubbing the tears away makes my face ache. My throat is raw. I don’t know how long I cry for. I can’t see the sun, and all this place jumping and sleeping and starving has broken my internal clock.
Gods, why is this happening? What have I done? Surely something terrible to be punished like this. Something so awful that even my own mind has blacked it out. Why can’t I remember?
Maire.
“Maire.”
My heart lurches and a chill encircles me. I drop my hands, seeing first the hundreds of hungry teeth, then him, Fyel, hovering above them, untouchable, unfazed by their gaping maws. He is calm and heavenly and beautiful. A cool, sinking feeling drains my thoughts into my hips. The relief of his face and his voice crashes into me as an ocean wave, and I an empty seashell waiting to be filled.
But they fill my vision, the horrid traps, the sharp metal jutting up every which way. My leg aches. I feel the memory of every scar, of every break.
Fyel notices them, frowns, and lifts one hand, his liquid wing trailing after it. The ground quakes. I shriek and grasp mounds of rock on the wall behind me. The stone beneath Fyel cracks and splits, shooting up pebbles of rock. They pelt the traps, and they snap snap snap snap their teeth, gnashing and chomping as more tears slide down my face.
Thunder erupts overhead, though there is no rain.
In a breath, it’s over. The cave is still, and the traps have folded in half, deprived of their prey.
My limbs turn loose and weary. I hadn’t realized how much strength it had taken to stay small and far away.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
Fyel nods, but his ghostly image seems to ripple as he looks toward the mouth of the cave. He is listening, his ear cocked skyward, toward the thunder. His jaw is set behind a thin-lined mouth.
“I wish you had listened to me,” he mumbles.
“When have I not?” I ask, and the question startles him.
Did he mean before?
I creep closer to the traps, still wary of them despite their docility. I stretch my back, arching it, then snap back into a slouch. “Can you shake the rock to free me? Help me climb down?”
His face is drawn before I finish the request, his gamre eyes shimmering nearly green. “Believe me, Maire, I wish I could, but even my small workings have created too much interference with this world. There are laws that still my hand. I should not have done even this.”
He gestures weakly to the traps and cocks his head once more, listening, but there is no noise beyond us.
“Once the souls come,” he continues, returning his attention to me, “the crafters withdraw. My jurisdiction over this world has ended.”
I swallow. “Then how does it obey you?”
He lets out a long breath, and his shoulders slacken. “It recognizes me, I suppose.”
I hate this answer, yet another wall between me and freedom, me and answers, me and safety, but I accept it. I don’t dare meddle in the affairs of gods.
My stomach tightens at the thought, but maybe it’s just hunger.
“Have you remembered anything more?” he asks me, floating a little closer. I shake my head, stopping him. He accepts the answer without a word.
“What can you tell me?” I ask, just above a whisper. Not because I fear being overheard—I believe Shah will be gone for a long time—but because I don’t have energy to dedicate to my voice. “Help me remember, Fyel.”
He hesitates. I recognize that look on his face. He’s scared, too.
“How did we meet?” I try.
He looks at the cave roof for a moment before answering. “There were rings.”
“Rings?”
“Rings in the sky.” He’s being vague, I know, but I’m attentive. “Across the heavens.” He g
estures, his hand drawing an arc. “They created shadow and light, mimicking the stars. You told me you liked them.”
I lean back and look at the cavern ceiling, imagining that I can see through it, that I can see these “rings” floating through the sky. I picture them like a rainbow, cutting from one horizon to the other. A wide swath of stars. For a moment, I think I see it, too—the image I’d formulated in my mind changes to something different, something curved and bright. I wonder if it’s a memory. It calms me, this idea of sky-rings.
Yes, I would like something like that.
“You made them?” I ask.
He nods.
“Crafter.”
He nods again.
I smile. I smile and hold on to it, cherishing it, for it’s become so much harder to smile, and I so desperately want to. “You must be very talented.”
He smirks. I think he wants to smile, too.
A new thought comes to me.
“Shah . . . He told me once that I’m much older than I think I am.” I’m remembering back to my first days with him, just before he gave me an actual bedroom. “I don’t remember . . . anything from before, but I know my name, and I’m fairly certain I’m twenty-four. But he said . . . Well. Will you tell me how old I am?”
He considers for a moment, hovering just a smidgeon closer to the trap-littered cave floor. “Older than I,” he answers.
I feel my forehead crease. I study him. It’s hard to consider every facet of Fyel, as my eyes so easily pass through him, but he appears older than me by a few years, maybe more. About Cleric Tuck’s age.
“How old?”
He licks his lips, considering again, and says, “Older than Raea.”
My gut seems to stretch thin as flatbread. “What? I couldn’t possibly be—”
“Stop!” he shouts, and he surges toward me, his voice echoing off the cave walls. “Gods, stop, stop! Listen to me, Maire!”
My breath catches in my throat. I choke on it when I see pearly, translucent tears in his eyes.
“You can—” The words stick inside of him. He falls to his knees, still hovering, and cradles his face in his hands for a moment before he tears his fingers away. “You cannot deny it, please. Please.” More tears. I can’t move. I can only stare, breathless, wordless, cold. “I am begging you. You must believe me. You must trust me. The moment you do not—”
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