The tools, I’m certain, are for the river valley refugees. Basten has never been one for words, but at night, when we lock my bedroom door and it’s just us, I manage to corkscrew out of him the details of his days: that he’s been busy meetingwith the refugees, gathering tools, seeds, cloth—whatever he can scrounge—for them to start afresh.
He’d snort if I said it out loud, but it’s plain as day: This is what akingdoes.
He’s ridiculous, really—this growlsome brute prowling around like a bull with a wheelbarrow, trying to help people. He embodied the beautiful, maddening contradiction of being human. He’s broken but trying. Caring and gruff.
Cold, pale fingers snap in front of my face, making me jump.
I jerk around to meet black storm cloud eyes.
“Lady Sabine.” Woudix’s voice rolls like rough velvet as he says my human name, which I’ve asked to be used in private. “Your attention isn’t on Calisyrune, is it?”
“Oh—no.”
Softly, teasingly, his lips purse in a scoldingtsk-tsk-tsk.
I blush, a guilty smile tugging at my lips, as I obediently return to the book’s architectural renderings. “Sorry—I don’t know what’s going on with me today. It’s harder to focus. I want to be here, I promise. I can’t tell you what it’s meant to me to learn about the fae world.”
Woudix drapes a long arm over his bent knee. His blind eyes are always distant, and yet, somehow, I get the sense he can see me clear as day.
“It’s the weather,” he says with certainty, lifting his face toward the highest tree boughs. “Do you feel that? This morning, the grass was covered in frost. Now, one could bake bread beneath that sun. The wind comes from the east, then the west. The world is restless. The seasons are changing. They’re affecting your focus. You’re letting yourself be shaped by nature, instead of shaping it yourself.”
I run my fingers over the book’s stiff pages, marinating in his words.
On impulse, I sneak another glimpse through the branches at Basten, but Woudix must sense the tilt of my chin, because he leans over to flip the page.
“Likeshedid,” he murmurs, tapping the open book to get my attention.
I marvel down at the book’s full-spread illustration rendered in sepia ink. I don’t understand how Woudix knows the contents of each page by memory, but it’s Immortal Solene in full fae splendor. She stands naked in a pond. Her gown is made from living river reeds that wind around her limbs to cover her nude body. Flower blossoms spill out of her hair, and in her extended palm sits a lime-green toad.
I’m so struck by the sheer power of this goddess, captured in ink, that it takes me a moment to notice the more minor details: actually, those aren’t reeds. It’s a rice field, and on the nearby shore, rail-thin villagers with hollow, hungry eyes kneel to her, hands clasped in supplication.
“This was the great winter famine of Western Golath,” Woudix explains. “Thousands were at risk of starvation. Immortal Solene thawed the frozen fields and sprouted a bounty of rice that matured within a single day. She fed a kingdom of hungry bellies.”
My fingers rub over the illustration, trying to grab it and make it real. A hunger pang thrums in my belly. It aches, how badly I want this. To help the river valley refugees just as Immortal Solene helped during the winter famine.
It’s like a splinter I can’t unearth. The urge—no, the need—to let my fey flow.
Tears sting my eyes as something dark and mean suddenly twists inside me. I slam the book shut, turning sharply away. I hug my knees to my chest.
“People need her now, like they did then,” I spit out. “And I can’t do anything butreadabout how powerful I was in the past.”
A sob catches in my throat. No matter how quickly I wipe tears off my cheeks, the warble in my throat gives me away. The next time I go to brush away a tear, Woudix grabs my wrist, tight like a shackle.
I freeze.
He’s…touching me. He’s never touched me.
I pause, breath held, eyes wide and wary of the god who commands death itself.
Slowly, he draws my arm toward him, gently but forcibly unfurling my tightly held fist until my palm is open to him.
Like a map of my secrets.
He drags one cold finger down the line of my inner wrist. Following the fey line that’s resting just beneath my human-glamoured skin. Wherever he touches, my body responds on its own, erupting in glowing silver light that I can’t tuck away again.
My heart slams against my ribs, quick and painful.
I feel more exposed—just from an open palm—than I did riding across half of Duren naked.
