The ear is on the floor where I dropped it, the blood soaking into the carpet.
I need to tell someone what’s happened, inform the guards that someone came into my chambers … into the private rooms of the king’s daughter … and left a bloody fae ear for me to find.
This isn’t something I can ignore.
Yet even as I think it, I can hear Maren’s voice in my head.
People are wondering what really happened during those days you spent alone with that creature. Maybe you grew closer to the beast than you’re willing to admit.
If I report this, if I make a scene, what will they think? The princess who defended fae is now being hysterical about fae body parts. They’ll say the fae did something to me, used magic somehow to enspell me. They might decide I’m a threat and lock me up.
Would my father do that? Would he imprison his daughter if he thought she had ties to a fae who brutally murdered an entire preserve? Would he have any choice?
I drop to my knees, hands shaking so badly I can barely grip the cloth as I wrap it around the ear again. Then I pick it up and toss it into the fire, watching as the cloth catches, the flames licking around it, and the flesh blackens and burns.
The smell hits me a moment later. Burning flesh. Burning meat.
I hug my arms around myself and watch until there’s nothing left but ash and the twisted remains of the metal tag.
TWENTY-TWO
CAIRN
The journey takes twice as longas it should.
Twelve horses. Three carts. And over fifty fae who haven’t walked farther than the length of a cage in centuries. The math was never going to work in our favor.
We keep to the road longer than I want. The carts won’t make it through heavy undergrowth and half our number can barely stay upright on flat ground. Every mile we travel in the open is another mile of tracks for the humans to follow. We might as well be leaving a trail of breadcrumbs.
I could mask them using magic, but I need to save my power for when we reach our destination. So there’s no other alternative for the moment. We have to hope that the road is quiet and no one crosses our path.
I walk the line constantly. The fae in the carts are safe enough. It’s the ones on foot who need watching. A female tumbles and goes down hard. I haul her up before she can panic, set her back on her feet and keep moving. Vel and Therin guard the front and back, watching for threats that could come from any direction.
Before the Sealing, I commanded warriors who could marchfor days without rest. Now I’m herding broken fae through a world that wants to kill us, and hoping we can find some way to survive.
We’re vulnerable. If the humans found us now, we’d lose most of our number before we could mount any kind of defense.
Yet somehow the humans don’t come.
When we finally reach the forest’s edge, I call a halt. The road twists to the west, and the hollow I found lies deep in the forest to the north. There’s an old road through this forest, abandoned and overgrown at the entrance where saplings and brush have reclaimed it. But further in, where the canopy blocks light, it’s still passable.
Therin stops beside me. “Through there?”
“It clears out past the first hundred yards.”
He eyes the tangle of brush. “We’ll have to cut our way through.”
“And cover our tracks behind us.”
He nods, drawing his sword. Vel appears beside him with a blade of her own. Together they hack at the undergrowth while the rest of us wait. When the gap is wide enough for the carts, we set off again. The first fifty yards are slow, but eventually the undergrowth thins and the old road emerges beneath us.
Behind the last cart, a handful of the stronger fae work to hide our passage, dragging branches back across the entrance and scattering leaves over wheel ruts. It won’t fool a determined tracker, but it might buy us time against a casual search.
“I need to mask the tracks that lead here,” I tell Therin. “Keep following the road, I’ll catch up.”
I don’t go all the way back to the Dell, only as far as I need to so I can ensure the tracks don’t lead the humans, who will eventually come to investigate, to the forest we’ve gone toward. I use a combination of glamour and manual labor to hide the evidence of our presence, then hurry back to join my people again.
The hollow appears as daylight starts to fail. The carts roll down the gentle slope, and come to a stop near the water. Therin peels away to walk the perimeter of the space. He disappears behind a rocky outcrop, then reappears a moment later.
