His lips quirked. “You should know the night market is twisted. Literally. It’s never the same two nights in a row, anchored only by its entrances and exits.”
He was paying me back for an unanswered question.
I ignored my stab of irritation. “What if we get separated?”
“We won’t.” It was one of those purely confident Fieran promises, like a god deigning to answer prayer.
“If we do.”
His lips tightened. “Then hang on and remember I’ll come find you, no matter whathappens.”
Twin pulses of fear and worse, of warmth—an embarrassing desire to be protected that I had to smother—rose at his words. “As long as I’m useful to you.”
He ignored that, stopping me with a hand on my arm and turning me toward him. “Don’t eat anything I don’t hand to you personally. It can be cursed. Especially for a mortal. And you need to hold my hand.”
“Hold your hand? Like a child?”
“If that’s what the act means to you,” he said dismissively. “Then yes. Be a child…the kind of child who isn’t taken by the monster under their bed.”
He held his hand out to me, and with his other hand, gestured toward the door before us.
A forest spilled out of the building’s open windows. Ivy clambered desperately up the stone walls, growing in front of our very eyes. Twisted brown limbs jutted out the windows, reaching every which way, reminding me of hands reaching out for help.
I blinked, certain it hadn’t been there a moment before.
“Cara. I wouldn’t have brought you here if I didn’t trust deeply in your survival impulses.”
He was still holding out his hand. I took it, and I wasn’t sure which one of us threaded our fingers through the other’s first, but my palm was anchored tightly to his.
“Were you ever afraid of the monsters under your bed?” I asked as we walked toward the door. “You grew up training to fight monsters.”
“Don’t we all?”
The doors swung open before we reached them. There should’ve been wild greenery, but instead there were only stone steps descending.
“I grew up training to serve.” My voice came out light, high, slightly strained.
“I doubt that very much,” he told me dryly.
Hand-in-hand, we stepped into the darkness. The stone was slick underfoot, damp and slimy.
“Just because I’m a terrible server doesn’t mean I wasn’t trained to serve.” It was only thanks to him that I hadn’t left the village a disappointment.
The air carried a damp, loamy smell, like earth, but not fresh like anewly turned garden. Something made me think of graves. I couldn’t see more than a few feet further down the stairs, but the steps themselves were illuminated by a faint glow.
My foot slid on a slanted, slippery stair, and he squeezed my hand before he said, “I think you’ve been training to fight monsters all your life. But yours were different from mine. Hunger, maybe? Want? Whatever threatened your family? I have little love for mine.”
My breath came short, but he didn’t seem to notice. Or maybe he did, and that was why he kept up his prattle.
“Still, learning to stand against one monster is learning to stand against all.”
I wasn’t even really hearing him, but his deep, rich voice was comforting, and so was his hand against mine, reassuring me that I wasn’t alone.
The stairs were turning. Another turn, and there was a long crack in the wall; flowers grew out of it, wild and blooming and dripping luminescence.
“Everything is prettier here than home.” It was just my own prattle. “Even when it’s terrifying.”
“Do you like it?” There was a faint pride in his voice; I might not have heard it if my other senses hadn’t been sharpened by the dark. “At least that’s something then. As terrible as the rest of it is.”
