He fixed me with a beatific smile. “I’m happy to help. Since you always ask so nicely.”
When I went to my room to get ready for bed, I couldn’t stop picturing the way he’d sat so confidently stitching his own wounds, the way his muscles flexed under his skin.
The Fae really did have bizarre magic, ensnaring mortals. Because I knew what a jerk he was. I knew I couldn’t trust him. And yet…I replayed the memory of how his body felt against mine when his thigh cleaved mine. How his lips had grazed mine the other day before I put a blade to his throat.
I tried to shake off the memories and the unwanted desire. I threw myself onto my bed with a groan.
My hand brushed something cold and metal under my pillow. With my heart pounding, I lifted it into the air: a long golden chain with an amulet at the end.
My heart hammered. Was someone setting me up to be accused of theft? We’d all heard the stories of mortal girls who stole from the Fae, and what happened to them afterward. Their fates made those night market cages seem merciful.
I had to get rid of it.
I paced the room. I couldn’t exactly fling it out the window, given that my room opened to an interior courtyard. Instead, I’d need to bring the rotted thing out to hide it somewhere.
Muttering curses, I shoved it in my pocket, and double checked that gold links weren’t dangling out to expose me. Gods, what time was it? It had been a terrible, long day, and tomorrow promised to be awful too. Either I would go to the Recruits’ Trials and earn the queen’s enmity, or I would betray Fieran and disgust Clan Bismyth.
I made it out of my room and cast a worried look at the table, afraid of shadows, but none of them rose into a growling Rees. I tiptoed to the door—as useless as my attempts at being quiet were around the Fae—and tried to pull open the arched door. At first I couldn’t tell if it was too heavy for a mortal or if it was locked.
Giving up on being quiet, I leaned backward, straining with all my strength to pull the door open. Nothing. I was locked in.
There was soft movement behind me, and I froze, certain that an enormous hound was about to lunge. After all, I’d failed Rees today.
“Hello,” Anayla said.
I turned, heart still pounding.
“Did Fear not give you a key?” Her tone was mildly exasperated as she reached beneath her collar. She must have already been dressed for bed, because she wore a loose, soft shirt and leggings, not her usual fierce corset. She pulled out a key on a loop. “Here, take mine.”
“Thank you,” I said, unable to hide my uncertainty.
“Are you worried about the Recruits’ Trials beginning tomorrow?” Anayla asked me gently as she held out the loop, and I took it from her.
“No,” I said, too bluntly, and she let out a surprised little laugh. I was too nervous at the moment about the stolen gold weighting down my pocket.
“You just need some air at midnight,” she confirmed, her voice teasing.
Oh. If that was why she thought I was fleeing the barracks in the middle of the night, then very well. I smiled at her, letting my embarrassment show.
“Fear would kill me if I let you go off on your own,knowing not everyone here is your friend,” she said. “Do you want to go to the sea overlook? I promise, I’ll leave you alone to think.”
“Thank you. But I feel bad disrupting your night?—”
She waved her hand airily. “Here, let me show you how the lock works.”
The lock was more magic than anything else. If I’d stolen a key, I never would have figured it out.
“Thank you,” I told her for the third time—before I realized I was repeating myself—and she smiled at me.
“Come on…I don’t think you’ve been up to the overlook yet, have you?”
I shook my head and followed her down more mysterious hallways. She stepped outside a doorway, and the wind lifted her hair as she turned back to me with a smile that lit her eyes, as if she were happy to share this place.
When I stepped outside, the night world opened up in front of us, but I could barely look away from the rippling dark of the sea.
The overlook stretched out along the cliffside, a sweeping balcony carved straight from the stone. Wind tore at my hair the moment I stepped onto it, cool and sharp with the scent of salt and something metallic from the sea below. There was a railing only by the stairs—as if Fae were too graceful to ever misstep—and the rest of the ledge opened wide to the night. A shiver ran through me at the thought of how easily one wrong step could send me tumbling into the pitch black.
A few kiosks dotted the balcony, draped with ribbons and pennants in jewel tones that snapped and fluttered in the wind, and in front of them were a dozen inviting tables. Magically lit lanterns floated above them, drifting like lazy fireflies, their glow casting ripples of blue and gold over the stone floor.
