46
BREAK
SAERIS
THE WAR CAMP was bustling. Fae warriors milled around fires, eating from tin pots. They wrestled in the mud. Satyrs wove through the mud-spattered tents, hawking grilled meat on skewers and roasted corn. The smell of the food—and all the blood—was maddening, but I didn’t have any time for that. I’d searched half the camp by the time I’d found what, or rather who, I was looking for. She stood in the middle of a group of males, poring over a rumpled piece of paper.
When she looked up from whatever it was that busied her, she did not look happy.
“Saeris,” she said, folding the piece of paper and handing it off to one of her friends. “To what do we owe the pleasure?”
“I need your help, Danya.”
The hair she’d lost during the attack on Irrín would grow back, but it would take time. The shorn side of her scalp was marked with stubble now, a darker blond than the rest of her hair. The warrior crooked an eyebrow at me, her surprise at war with her annoyance. “Help? From me?” She snorted. “Impossible.
Not our precious Alchemist, admitting that something’s beyond her. My ears must be deceiving me.”
I did not have time for this. “Danya, ever since I got here, I’ve done nothing but tell anyone who will listen that I am not equipped to deal with the tasks that
have been sent my way. I’ve never pretended otherwise.”
She spat on the ground, her face impassive.
“I need a word with you.” I eyed her friends. Alone.
“If this is about Carrion Swift, you can relax, Little Osha. I don’t have designs on your friend. Not long-term ones, anyway.” She used Fisher’s name for me in a cold way. Made it sound small and pathetic. Her friends bit their lips,
snickering under their breath.
So this was how she wanted to play it?
Fine.
She was fucking with the wrong person if she thought I wouldn’t humiliate her in front of her friends. I drew Erromar and Selanir and spun the blades in my hand, rushing her. She reached for her blade. And she was a seasoned warrior. She’d slain more feeders than I could count, but I wasn’t a feeder. I wasn’t a Fae warrior, either. I had been human first, and now there was a good dose of vampire blood in my veins. I was faster than I had any right to be, and I was stronger than Danya to boot. With the edges of my short swords grazing her jaw, Danya had no other option but to surrender—
But she was stupid.
So fucking arrogant.
She raised her hands, but the action was a ruse. She tried to grab my right wrist, to punch my own sword back into my face, but trains of thought kindled and died in my head in the time it took her to curl her fingers around my wrist.
My right foot slipped behind her left. My leg hooked inside her leg, and I slammed my left palm into her chest, right between her breasts. She left the ground and sailed through the air, and a part of me crowed with satisfaction when she landed on her ass in the mud ten feet away. I kept that part of me hidden. A good leader never demonstrated pleasure at the embarrassment of an ally. Not that I was Danya’s leader . . . and not that I was one hundred percent sure I could call her an ally, but it was still poor form to gloat.
Her friends weren’t laughing anymore. They averted their eyes, looking
anywhere and everywhere but at Danya, as I trudged through the mud and held out my hand to the female. I kept my expression blank and my voice even as I repeated, “I need your help.”
She glowered at me, all venom and suspicion. “And why would I help you, Alchemist? You’ve been nothing but a thorn in my side since you arrived in this realm.” She sneered at my hand as if it were a dune asp, reared back and ready to strike.
“You’ll help me because we’re on the same team,” I told her. “Because, despite how many fights you pick with him and how angry you are with him, Fisher is still your commander, and you still love him.”
Her objection was instantaneous. “I don’t love hi—”
I cut her off. “Yes. You do. I don’t mean romantically, and you know it. You love Fisher because of all that he’s done for this realm. Because he’s always been there for you—”
“Until he wasn’t,” she snapped. I knew the anger that burned in her eyes too well. She was furious with Fisher, but not for the reasons that she pretended.
“Yes, until he wasn’t,” I said, agreeing. “But you’re not angry with him for leaving you, are you, Danya? You’re angry with yourself for not believing in him enough to start with. You knew he’d never abandon his warriors, and yet you chose to hide behind the lie Belikon told. That was easier than losing your friend, wasn’t it? Easier than not knowing where he was and not being able to find him, not being able to help him. He doesn’t blame you, Danya.”
“Shut the fuck up,” she hissed.
“He knows you would have come for him if you could have.”
“You don’t know what you’re fucking talking about!”
“I know Kingfisher,” I said slowly. “But I haven’t known him anywhere near as long as you. He was your brother—your blood—for centuries before I was born. And I know there’s no way you fought alongside him all those years without forming an unshakable bond with him. This rage inside of you is a shield. It protects you from the emotions you can’t face. From the guilt and the
knowledge that you left him in Gillethrye. You were with him on the battlements, weren’t you? You helped him defend that city. When it fell, you helped him burn it. And then you listened to the vicious lies of a male you knew to be evil, and you left your friend there, to suffer in that eternal maze—”
“Stop.”
Her tone lacked its previous acid. The word was small, a hiccup of a thing, jarring the air between us. Danya stared at me, propping herself up on her elbows in the mud, her eyes reflective as drowning pools. She was as stubborn as they came. She wouldn’t admit that I was right. But she couldn’t deny that I was wrong, either. “What do you want from me, Alchemist?” she muttered.
“Want? Hah!” Laughter boiled up the back of my throat. I clamped my lips shut and caught it before it could burst out of my mouth and make me look crazy. Feeling crazy was enough, thank you very much. “It’s very simple, Danya.
You’ll probably even enjoy it. I want you to punch me in the face as hard as you
can.”
Danya’s eyes widened. “What?”
“I need you to knock me out.”
She recoiled, sinking deeper into the mud. “You’re insane,” she said.
“Probably. But it’ll help save Fisher. Now, do you want to abandon him to his fate for a second time, or do you want to help him, Danya? Because there are at least three other people I can ask—”
“I’ll do it,” she rushed out. “I mean, I’ve been wanting to knock you out cold ever since I met you. I’d be a fool to turn down the opportunity, wouldn’t I?”
“That’s the spirit. You should hit me right here, under the—”
The female leaped to her feet. She swung, and I saw it coming. I did nothing to stop her. I’d asked for it anyway. What would have been the poi—
Dust motes hung in the frigid air. They caught the eerie light that prowled in through the windows but didn’t move, as if they had been frozen in place. The
dining table was set for eight. In the center of the table, a copper tureen shuddered, its lid rattling. The plates were piled high with delicacies: roasted fowl, buttered vegetables, miniature pies, and trenchers full of gravy. All of it was rotten. Maggots crawled among the meat. Flies crawled over the silverware and feasted on the decay. At each place setting, crystal goblets overflowed with viscous black liquid, moving . . . gods, there was something moving inside the glasses.
My surroundings drew in tight as I realized where I was. This wasn’t the huntsman’s cottage. I’d focused very hard, right before Danya’s fist had found my jaw, to make sure I wouldn’t wake up there. I was right where I needed to be —in Cahlish.
The windows were all smashed out in the dining room, just as they had been the first time I’d encountered the feeders. A fire spat in the hearth, but the flames were not yellow. They weren’t even the strange green of evenlight. They were gray and black, the color of smoke and shadow, though there was nothing brilliant or magical about it. It was just a lifeless fire, all the vibrancy drained from it and gone.
The rot covered the walls and crept along the baseboards. Black tendrils of malignant power, searching for something biological to feast upon. It had already drained the house. The paint peeled from the cracked walls. The rugs were worn to ash, the floorboards beneath brittle and dry as ancient old bones.
Even here, in my dream, Cahlish had been claimed. It was a hollow shell of what it had been just yesterday, and seeing it like this, so faded and dead, tore something at the root of my soul. The faces of the males and females in the paintings on the walls, Fisher’s ancestors all, looked down on me with consternation, as if they blamed me for the state of their home and hoped that I would do something about it. But there was nothing to be done. Cahlish was
gone.
“Fisher!”
My shout echoed through the infected estate. I held my breath and waited.
Waited . . .
“Kingfisher! Where are you?”
Only my own panicked shout came back to me.
Where are you? . . . are you?
Gods. This was not good. I’d had so many questions back in the huntsman’s cottage. Pertinent questions that I should have asked, like, “Hey, how does any of this work? How did we end up here? How do we control where we go or what we do in this place?” And, most importantly, “Will you always be here if I’m here?” But I hadn’t asked any of those questions, because Fisher had seemed as bemused by the whole thing as me. He hadn’t had the first fucking clue why we’d ended up in that cottage, even though we were in entirely different realms.
And now, here I was, unconscious in the dreamscape version of Cahlish, and I had no idea if Fisher was here.
I’d tried to go to sleep, but my thoughts had been spinning so fast I knew there was no way I was going to fall asleep naturally. Ergo, finding Danya at the camp. Ergo the black eye I was bound to have whenever I woke up . . .
“Fisher!”
No cry came back to me. Nothing. Only the sad, desolate echo of a house that had been full of life only yesterday. Was this what it was like in reality?
Was the rot choking the stonework and rooting into the foundations of the building?
It was heartbreaking to see the estate like this, under attack and dying, but I didn’t have time to lament the loss. I’d hoped Fisher would be here, so I could talk to him and find out where the hell he was in reality, but if he wasn’t here in this dreamscape, then I couldn’t afford to linger. I had another task to tend to, and I was praying I wasn’t too late.
The door fell off its hinges when I tugged it open. It crumpled to the floor, dry as a husk. The rot snaked a path across the floor, filaments of glossy black corruption rearing into the air, searching for . . . me? Was I real here? Could the rot sense me as I hurried down the hallway? Could it infect me here? It wouldn’t pay to find out.
My footfalls echoed loudly as I hurried along the hallway, passing drawing rooms, the library, and a dozen other closed doors as I made my way to the stairs. The sole of my right boot had just hit the first step when there was a prodigious groan overhead; I looked up just in time to see the crystal chandelier
above fall from the cracked ceiling.
“Fuck!”
I leaped back with no time to spare, and the crystal prisms and festoons shattered against the steps. My pulse beat out an erratic tattoo as I looked at the spot on the stairs where I’d just stood, and the giant hole that now yawned open like a snarling mouth in the ceiling. The rot dripped from the ruined plasterwork, pat, pat, patting onto the ground beside me.
Gods alive, this place was not safe.
I needed to get out of here and fast.
The foundations of the house shuddered as I skirted around the chandelier and bolted up the stairs, taking them two at a time. The rot hadn’t succeeded in smashing the windows up here yet. The glossy black vines spiderwebbed up the walls and almost covered the glass in the windowpanes completely, though, shutting out the fading light.
At the end of the long hallway, Fisher’s bedroom door was closed. I went to open it and wrenched my hand back, cursing through my teeth. The handle was cold as ice. Colder. The metal felt as though it had been forged in the fifth circle of hell itself. A red welt marked my palm, as angry and painful as if I’d just closed my hand around a poker that had been left in a fire too long. It hurt to make a fist. It fucking hurt to keep my hand open, too.
Another fit of cursing under my breath.
“You don’t want me to go in there, do you?” The accusation was for the rot.
For the house itself. Clearly, neither wanted me here. I took a moment to study the door—why wasn’t it splintering and dry like all of the other woodwork in the house?—and quickly assessed where best to show it to the sole of my boot.
Decision made, I kicked the door right by the handle as hard as I could . . . . . . and nothing happened.
The door held strong.
I tried again.
And again.
And again.
The wood didn’t even scuff, and I put everything I had behind my kicks. My Fae and vampire strength combined should easily have brought the damned thing off its hinges, and yet it didn’t budge. A scream built in my throat, gaining momentum, but I clamped my jaw shut and focused.
I didn’t need brute strength for this. I had something better. I’d blown a twenty-foot-wide hole in the side of Ammontraíeth’s library with my power, hadn’t I? I could take out a fucking door.
Hand outstretched, I summoned my power, trying to remember what it felt like back in the library, right before I’d blasted that hole in the stonework. The prickling, the tingling, the powerful rush, and then the wave of adrenaline that had cascaded through me as the magic fired out of me.
It rose inside me. I closed my mind around the surging sensation, attempting to stem the flow a little, to control how much of it would jettison out of me . . . and it worked. Kind of. The bolt of white-blue energy that burst from my hand wasn’t quite as astronomical as it had been back at the Black Palace, but it was pretty damned close. Surprise rocked me as the magic slammed into the wall. I hadn’t even really believed my magic would work; this was a dream, after all.
The very instant the magic came into contact with the door—and its frame and three feet of wall on either side—I knew I’d made a mistake. The tendrils of rot that covered the wood pulsed, flaring white, then doubled in size right before my eyes.
The threads of dark power expanded, working itself into knots, forming a hard shell over the door— “Oh, come on! You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me!” The rot had absorbed my power. Tiny white-blue orbs glowed inside its vines, traveling through the
crosshatched network of threads that now barred the door. I’d made it worse, infinitely so, and it was my own fucking fault. Fisher and Ren had used their power on the infected feeders, and it had only made them more powerful. I should have known my magic would do the same thing here.
Idiot.
Okay. So I couldn’t use my power. I couldn’t force the door open. So what could I do? What was missing? There had to be some way to get inside that bedroom. This was a dream. It shouldn’t have been this hard. This was— I stilled, chewing on my bottom lip as I stared at the cursed door.
This was my dream.
I was here right now because I’d willed it. Back in Zilvaren, I’d made a game out of changing the face of my dreams as a child. I’d willed the sky pink. I’d willed it so that the desert became an ocean. Later, when I was older, I’d willed
it so that my mother wasn’t dead.
I would will this godscursed door open.
I closed my eyes and focused. I pictured the door. I imagined it free of the rot. In my mind, it opened easily, swinging open. I opened my eyes again . . . . . . and the door was still closed.
The gods and all four winds take this fucking place. I gnawed on the end of my thumbnail, thinking furiously. How was I going to do it? I could run back down to the forge and get a crowbar. No, that wouldn’t work. I’d used enough force to kick the thing down just now and it hadn’t even cracked. A crowbar wouldn’t work, and I couldn’t risk touching the rot. The door was obviously warded.
Magic was keeping me out, which meant that I’d need magic to get in. A different kind of magic, then. Something . . .
I stopped chewing my thumbnail, staring down at the back of my hand.
Wow. I wasn’t thinking clearly at all.
The quicksilver rune was sealed there in metallic blue-black. The brimstone rune was outlined, requesting to be sealed. I had work to do before I accomplished that. There was research to be done, and challenges to be faced.
Edina had said that sealing the rune—and being able to access its magic as a
result—would cost me dearly. I hadn’t even felt a glimmer of power coming from the brimstone rune yet, so that was no help. But then there was the third rune. Gods, the third rune, which the Hazrax had given me! It was right there.
And what had he called it? A rune for undoing? For breaking? He’d said it didn’t give me magic. It gave me an ability. If I used it on the door . . .
I closed my mind and sought it out. There was an energy there. I’d felt it the other night, quiet but powerful, when I’d gone to Tal’s bedside and severed the spellwork he’d let Iseabail ink into his chest. I’d been afraid of it, then. I hadn’t been in control, hadn’t had a clue what was happening. But now . . .
I reached for the Hazrax’s rune and held it as tightly as I could. It woke and answered inside the same breath. The ink didn’t light up on the back of my hand. No energy surged through me. I knew it was listening thanks to the faint, barely there vibration that buzzed at the ends of my fingertips.
“Break,” the Hazrax had said.
I probed for the warding spell that guarded the door. I found it there, wispy and intangible, the vaporous strands of magic slipping through my fingers as if it were sentient and determined to elude me. I lunged for it in my mind, grasping with all my focus, and before it could slip away again, I broke it.
The Hazrax’s rune tingled briefly, and the rot that encased the door crumbled. It had been thrumming with power a second ago—admittedly, an awful lot of that power mine—and now its vines were desiccated husks. They withered and broke apart as the door opened at last . . . and revealed Kingfisher sitting in the high-backed chair in front of the fire.
“What the hell are you doing? Didn’t you hear me trying to kick the door down?”
Fisher stared into the fire. His hair was wet, the ends made spiky, curling in every direction. Water dripped onto his leathers and onto the wooden floorboards, where it formed a large puddle. He had been sitting here for some
time.
The room was cold.
The fire in the grate was colorless, all shadow-black, blizzard-gray.
“Fisher? Fisher, look at me!”
He didn’t move.
I stepped into the room and something crunched, gritty, beneath my feet.
Sand. The sand from Yvelia that Fisher had poured from his boots only days ago. There were still two piles of it, sitting there, in the middle of the floor. The sight brought tears to my eyes. He’d held me that day. Laughed with me. Shown me what it meant to be loved and worshipped by someone body, mind, and soul. He had told me here, in the bed on the other side of the room, that he would sacrifice the sun and surrender the stars if it meant that he could keep me safe.
And now he was missing and lost to me . . . because I could already tell he wasn’t here with me now.
I didn’t want to cross the room and stand in front of his chair. I didn’t want to turn around and face him . . . but I had to.
I covered my mouth with my hands, stifling a sob when I saw him. His eyes were clouded over, the vivid green turned to murk and shadow. His pallor was deathly, his skin cadaverous. His bottom lip was split wide open, and a steady, thin trickle of blood ran down his chin and dripped down onto the silver wolf- head gorget he still wore around his neck.
“Fisher?”
He didn’t answer. Worse, he showed no sign of having heard me at all.
Whatever his eyes were seeing, it wasn’t the fireplace or his room at Cahlish. Or me. Wherever he had gone, it was somewhere I could not follow.
“Fisher, please.” His hand was freezing, his fingers stiff. He could take on the entire realm with these hands normally, but when I lifted his left hand and took it in mine, it was so limp and lifeless that for a terrible moment I thought that he was dead.
His rasping breaths refuted this, but it was hard to trust the shallow rise and fall of his chest when his lips were so blue.
I squeezed his hand, begging him to respond both out loud and into his
head.
“Fisher. Fisher, you promised.”
Had he promised? I couldn’t remember. The Fae were loath to make promises they weren’t one hundred percent sure they could keep. He wouldn’t have been able to promise that he would never leave me. Death would have claimed one of us eventually . . .
“Wake up,” I whispered. “Wake . . . the fuck . . . up. Are you seriously going to do this to me? Are you going to leave me here alone, to fix this without you?
This—” I huffed, my desperation rising. “This is your fucking realm, Fisher.
Your friends. Your people. And you’re just going to disappear and leave it to everyone else to defend them?”
His right eye twitched—the tiniest flicker of movement—but then he was still again. Could he hear me? Did he know, wherever he was, that I was here?
There was no way of telling.
“Fisher, if you love me . . . If you care about me, or . . . or any of us, you will figure this out and wake up right now. We need you. I need you—”
“Save your breath, King Killer.”
The voice took me by surprise. I’d been so fixated on Fisher that I hadn’t heard it enter the room. The Hazrax hovered by the bed, its hands tucked formally inside the belled sleeves of its robes. Its pale skin was shot through with black veins—the same kind of black veins that marked the infected feeders.
The former Keeper of Silence drifted across the floorboards, making that eerie ticking sound in the back of its throat.
“Wait. Stay over there. This isn’t your dream, okay? You’re not welcome here.”
The Hazrax snorted. “I am welcome everywhere, Saeris. Do you forget so quickly that you and I have a deal?”
“The deal was for you to observe the Blood Court. I hate to break it to you, but the Blood Court doesn’t exist anymore, so you’re going to have to find someone else to observe.”
The Hazrax grimaced, showing its needle teeth. I’d been around it long enough to know that it was smiling. “You’re really hopeless at this, aren’t you,
child? I almost feel bad for you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“That means that when you asked me in the forge if I wanted to strike the same bargain with you that I struck with Malcolm and I said yes, the details of my deal with the old vampire king became the details of our arrangement, too.
The fine print of the deal I made with Malcolm stated that I could observe him, not his court. Him. It is irrelevant whether the Blood Court exists, Saeris. It is you who I observe. Wherever you go, whatever you do, you have given me permission to follow and witness alongside you.”
Gods fucking damn it.
Again! I’d walked into another terrible bargain again! If I made it out of this nightmare and life somehow found some level of normalcy, I was going to make sure I had someone on hand at all times to vet the agreements I made. The sneaky, underhanded, vile piece of shit! “Why? Why do you care about what I’m doing? This has nothing to do with you!”
The Hazrax’s slitted nostrils flared. “Naive child,” he said in a piteous tone.
“Of course it does. I have a hand in everything, but you will learn that soon enough, I suspect.”
“Wait! The—the favor! You said I could call it in at any time.”
The Hazrax made a hiccupping sound, but it nodded. “Yes. That is true.”
“Then I want to use my favor now. Can you bring Fisher back to me?”
The Hazrax shook its head. “That is not within my power, I’m afraid. There
are accords that prevent it.”
“Then tell me where he is!”
“I’m sorry. I cannot do that, either.” The Hazrax didn’t sound apologetic. It
sounded amused by the situation I found myself in and pleased that it couldn’t help. I’d had enough of it. “Fine,” I snarled. “I’ll use my favor for this, then. I want you to go away and not observe me for the rest of the term of our one-year agreement. And when you come back to renegotiate the deal for another year like I stipulated, you should know ahead of time that I will not be interested in renewing.”
“Be careful, Saeris,” the Hazrax warned.
“What, don’t lie to me and say that you can’t do that. I’m literally asking you to leave me the fuck alone. That is definitely in your power.”
“It is,” the Hazrax said, laughing its strange, stilted laugh.
“Then don’t bother threatening me—”
“I’m not threatening you, silly child,” it snapped, its humor suddenly gone.
“I’m suggesting you err on the side of caution because, per our agreement, you only get to ask me for one favor. And you desperately need that favor right now, Saeris Fane.”
“Of course you’d say that! Just honor the request!”
The Hazrax shivered, as though the magic that bound our agreement were trying to force it to comply. I’d never seen anything like it: a being capable of denying a bargain, even for a moment. “First, answer me this. Why did you
come here, child?” the Hazrax demanded.
“I came here for him!”
It shook its head. “No.”
“I came . . .” I remembered, then. The realization I’d had on the steps in Inishtar. The piece of information that had come back to me as Carrion had addressed the satyrs.
“I will allow you to change your mind,” the Hazrax said. “You have one minute to fulfill the task you came here to complete and request a different favor. I suggest you move.”
One minute. In exactly sixty seconds, the Hazrax would disappear, and I wouldn’t see it again for a year. And that would be bliss. But . . . what if it was
right? What if I needed my favor for something else?
Another shudder rippled through the Hazrax’s body. “You’re wasting time!” it hissed.
I let go of Fisher’s hand and sprinted across the room. The nightstand by the bed was cluttered with books. So many books. There were pencils, and an empty water glass that I knocked over. It shattered on the ground, but I ignored the broken glass. String. A length of leather cord . . . Where the fuck is it?
I put it here, I know I did.
“Forty seconds . . .”
“Shut up! That’s not helping!” I vaulted over the bed and picked through the sparse items on Fisher’s nightstand. I hadn’t put it there, but maybe it had been moved? Fisher was tidier than me. A single book. An ivory-toothed comb . . . no, no, it wasn’t here.
Shit! Where else could it be? Where else? Where else! Fisher’s desk was bare. The windowsill, choked with black veins of rot, was empty. The shelves . .
.
“Twenty-five seconds.”
I didn’t waste my breath admonishing the asshole this time. There was
nowhere else to look! There was . . .
No. Wait. There! On the bookshelf.
I’d seen it before. When I’d found Archer in here, drawing me a bath. His friends had been helping. One of them had been looking at the items sitting on the shelf in front of the books. Lady Edina’s favorite thing in the world . . .
I ran across the room and picked up the tiny ceramic figurine of the kingfisher bird.
Its left wing was chipped. Its blue and orange glaze was a little faded, thanks to the many years it had sat on this shelf, but otherwise it was perfect. I saw what had been placed underneath the figurine immediately: a small, crumpled piece of paper.
The same crumpled piece of paper I’d dumped on my nightstand a week
ago, along with all the other bits and pieces I’d been carrying in my pockets.
But it wasn’t a crumpled piece of paper.
It was a folded piece of paper . . . artfully crafted into the shape of a stargazer.
It was the first little bird. The one that had lost its magic and fallen to the ground when it had left the library.
The missing page from Edina’s journal, not torn out, because it had never been bound in. I’d had it here all along!
“Ten seconds, Saeris!” the Hazrax warned.
My hands trembled as I unfolded the bird and frantically began to read.
The words ran together, Edina’s neat handwriting swimming on the paper as I tried to process the information she had written there.
“Five seconds!” There was genuine concern in the Hazrax’s voice.
I looked up from the paper, suddenly covered in a nervous sweat, and spoke as quickly as I could. “I’ve changed my mind, watcher! I beg you for my favor. I need you to transport me to the Wicker Wood!”