Slade frowned. “You think they’ll refuse the alliance because of old history?”
“You were there the last time we attempted to negotiate with them. You saw what they did to that Midnight fae soldier.” I stared into the dark, but I was seeing something else. Somewhere else.
He grunted. “Does Aurelia know?”
I shook my head. “I don’t want to disappoint her. She’s put so much hope into this alliance.”
Slade snorted.
“What?” I asked.
“The princess is a big girl. I’d say she’s earned the right to process her own disappointments. And the sooner you figurethat out, the sooner you stop making a mess of this whole damned thing.”
I watched Aurelia turn in her sleep, hair sliding over her cheek, fierce even there.
Slade followed my gaze. “She’ll ask you again how to open the gates. To let her try.”
“I know.”
“You’ll say no.”
“Until it won’t kill her.” The wordkillwas a foreign body in my throat. I forced it out anyway. “Until then, I keep her alive even if she hates me for it.”
The following day, before the sun had hit its midpoint, a tributary of the Osphanis revealed itself with the arrogance of old power—broad and bright and slow at the surface, deceivingly serene until it was far too late. Underneath the surface, I knew, monsters lurked. Lights moved like eyes opening far down in the green murk.
We stopped at a bend where the bank rose into a little tongue of clay and root. From the looks of it, someone had camped there recently and left nothing but the remains of a small fire and the way the reeds leaned like they remembered a weight.
I said, “No closer.”
The others halted.
“What is it?” Aurelia asked.
“A traveler moving on,” Daegel said.
“Or a meal dragged Beneath,” Slade added.
Aurelia blinked, considering.
“From here, we let them come to us,” I said. “Aunt?”
Amanti stepped to the edge, tested the clay, and let out three sharp notes. They knifed through the lapping of water atthe bank; a signal. I watched the ripples carry the sound and wondered which kind of predator would come to answer it.
Aurelia’s fingers flexed at her sides, not a trace of furyfire beneath her skin. I stood where the bank gave me the best angle to intercept anything coming out of the water. Slade shifted to take our rear, eyes on the reeds. We didn’t draw steel; that would be read as rudeness, or worse, war. But my shadows loosened of their own accord, uncoiling along the ground like patient snakes.
“Whatever happens,” I said, without looking at her, “you let Amanti speak first.”
“I’m not an idiot,” Aurelia muttered.
I looked down at the water, at our reflections broken in the ripples.
The reedbed to our right shivered. Not wind. Rhythm. Something reverberating from Beneath.
I stepped half in front of Aurelia before I could stop myself.
“I don’t need a shield,” she said softly.
“I know,” I said. “You have one anyway.”
