No. Fi would rather he flay her. She’d rather—
Another surge of energy hit her temple. Before Fi could cry out, her thoughts blurred, a swift tumble back into unconsciousness.
7
Being this obnoxious is a talent, actually
Fi jerked awake in a cold sweat, heart hammering. The world was all dark outlines, groggy thoughts as sleep kept its claws in her.
Void alive, she’d had an awful nightmare.
Her head flickered with memories of falling buildings. Paralyzed limbs. Forest shrines and shadows shifting in the trees, the kind of bone-deep dread that kept a hold long after waking. Fi squinted her eyes shut and burrowed into the furs of her bed, eager to escape into more sleep.
But this bed… felt strange.
Itsmelledstrange, sharp like ozone.
Still groggy, Fi poked at the pelt draped over her. At home, she’d assembled a blanket of snowshoe hare from her traps, plus a skin of aurorabeast fur she’d bartered off Boden for a cask of Autumn Plane hard cider. The blanket wrapping her now consisted of silver fox. Beneath her, soft mink lined the mattress. Not her bed. Then where…
Adrenaline dragged her fully awake, pieces clicking together, breath shallowing in slow-dawning horror. Fi’s flight through the forest was no nightmare.
And she was in a daeyari’s bed.
Anangrydaeyari, last she recalled.
She clamped her mouth shut on a curse, not wanting to reveal she’d woken. No sign of the beast—for now. Just an empty room where she lay swaddled in blankets. Void save her from whatever twisted power play this was.
After checking to make sure all her limbs were intact, Fi scanned for escape routes. The bed sat upon a rock slab. The entire room appeared chiseled out of stone. Stone floor. Stone walls with recessed shelves, stuffed with books and odd pieces of scrap metal.
Dim light drifted through a doorway.
Fi lowered a foot to the floor. Warmth bloomed beneath her, a spark of red around her boot that made her recoil. When no calamity followed, she tried again. Crimson energy glowed around her foot, emitting heat. She kept a furnace at home, powered by an energy capsule that required daily charging. She’d never seen such thread-thin conduits glinting against stone, heat diffusing through the ground.
Wasteful. Of course, an immortal could afford as much.
Fi’s head throbbed when she stood, still sore where she’d struck the wall, less foggy after some rest. She crept toward the door, red splaying beneath each footfall.
This place, wherever it was, must have an exit. A front door, a window to dive out of. She’d run home and hide in her cottage for a month. Move to a new territory, if she had to. Anything to get away from scheming attendants and vengeful immortals. Speaking of which… Fi paused, listening. A rumble sounded down the hall.
Wind. She could hear the wind. That meant an exit.
The next room was larger, brighter, also cut out of stone. No exit doors. Or windows—technically. Fi’s heart sank at the sight of the far wall, completely open to the wind. No rail guarded the edge. Cautious, she stepped closer.
Under better circumstances, the view would have been magnificent. Beyond the ledge, the world fell away, this chamber carved into the highest cliff overlooking Thomaskweld. The valley lay beneath a lavender sky—dusk, not morning, to her horror. The river snaked silver through dark conifers and the lights of the city, energy conduits like golden fractures from the factories.
But thecold. Upon the ledge, the floor heating faded, and cold bit into Fi like teeth, wind lashing her Void-and-rainbow hair. She still wore a borrowed tunic of thin gray cotton. No coat.
This wasn’t a window she could leap out of. One glance at the dizzying fall sent her empty stomach flipping.
Ok, different plan. Fi spotted no Curtains on the cliffside, but a full night’s sleep had replenished some magic. She unfocused her gaze and Shaped energy out of a tired bicep, into her fingertips, intent on cutting her escape—
“Don’t try it,” warned a voice behind her.
Fi spun, arms raised like a shield.
What good would that do against claws?
The daeyari loomed at the back of the room like a shadow slipped off the wall. She hadn’t spotted him a moment ago, hadn’t heard him enter. Even now, he could have been a figment of the dark, betrayed only by the crimson glow of his eyes and the swaying tail. The old stories couldn’t capture that deathly stillness. That twist in Fi’s stomach like the instincts of a prey animal, urging her torun.
