“Don’t rush to let yourself off the hook for bringing me here.”
“Oh, I let myself off the hook long ago. I’ve you to remind me of all my faults.”
My foot slipped again, and he caught me, his other arm flashing around my waist to steady me. I tried to catch my breath. The feel of almost tripping in the darkness, with that unseen length of stairs in front of me, set my heart galloping.
“I’ve got you, Cara,” he reassured me.
I didn’t respond. I just started moving again, down with him into the grim.
The air around us began to grow lighter, and new scents rose up the stairs. Spun sugar, and something acrid and burning, and roasted meat, and fresh greenery.
We turned a corner, and the stairs widened like the grand staircase ina castle. At our feet was laid out a patchwork of stalls that stretched as far as I could see.
“We’ll come back through this exit. Only a few with special favor from the queen can exit the night market in any place. From here, you can reach almost every corner of the kingdom. One night market to unite us all.”
I shivered, despite his cloak.
Lanterns were strung across the high ceiling, casting the market below in flickering, unnatural colors of crimson, violet, and green. There was too much to see, to make sense of the sights and sounds. There must have been thousands of stalls, and crooked, crowded paths between them. One stall held hundreds of weapons, many of them stained with blood. My gaze skipped hurriedly to the next, where there were dozens of colorful powders in glass jars.
A squat low Fae with a wide mouth and bug eyes and a stall full of knives called, “Need a knife that knows the names it will slay? Need a knife that never misses? Need a knife of letting?—”
Along with the voices, there was music. A harp played itself, a haunting, mesmerizing tune. Now, among the lights, I could pick out dangling cages, but the lanterns above them were too bright for me to see what was inside.
“Ready?” Fieran’s voice was patient, and I realized I’d come to a stop on the stairs.
“Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize to me now. I appreciate your consistency in hating me.” His voice was teasing, and that felt grounding too.
When we reached the bottom of the stairs, Fieran threaded through the stalls as if he knew his exact destination. We passed the harp, which gleamed white—as if it were made of bone—and damp. I studied it curiously, only for an eye to suddenly snap open at the top. A deep brown eye—a mortal eye—regarded me just as curiously, still leaking tears, and I pushed toward Fieran, feeling a rise of bile in my throat.
We passed a shop filled with hanging cages; inside were plants, so that it was a profusion of gilt bars and bright greenery.
“Why the cages?”
“Those flowers try to kill their owners at night.” His fingersbrushed over a little doorway, and when he took them away, the door yawned just faintly open. “As well they should.”
Then he was pulling me away behind him.
“You’ll have to explain that to me later,” I told him.
“It’s not the only cage I wish I could open.” He glanced up, and my gaze followed his.
Amid the lanterns hung a large cage, roughly my size.
A mortal face pressed suddenly against the bars.
I let out a gasp, rocking back. She stared out into the distance, not looking down at us. She opened her mouth and sang, her voice high and eerie and beautiful.
“Fieran—”
“It wouldn’t help her.” His voice was rough. “Trying to help her would get me banned permanently. What I’m trying to do will change things in a way that matters to more than one sad mortal girl. That matters morethanone sad mortal girl.”
Something about his use of the wordpermanentlymade me think he had been banned before.
Later, I would think more about the way he’d said his mission mattered more thanone sad mortal girl.
“Potions for beauty?” A tall, bewitchingly beautiful Fae thrust herself out in front of Fieran. Her eyes alight on me. “I can fix the flaws in your mortal! Make her look like your lost love?—”
