I want to know more. I need to know everything. But before I can ask, a shout booms through the tunnel.
“Foreman!”
Pax and I both jolt, turning as a Fae male looms over us, the bright, pristine colors of his clothing a jarring contrast to the soot and ash clinging to everything else.
Pax bows instinctively. “Yes, sir.”
“We need men to lay the new tracks,” the Fae says. “Now.”
There is no invitation for discussion. No room for refusal. Pax understands this immediately and nods once.
“Yes, sir.”
He doesn’t say goodbye to me. That would only slow him down, only draw attention where none is welcome. Instead, he gives me a brief glance before turning away and rallying a handful of nearby miners into a work crew. They follow the Fae male down one of the tunnels and disappear into the dark.
I spend the rest of the day working.
Much of my paperwork was destroyed in the collapse, and I’m forced to rebuild records from memory and fragments, but the task is almost soothing in its familiarity. Numbers settle. Columns align. This is what I’m good at. This is how I make sense of the world.
Still, Pax’s words cling to me.
When dusk finally falls and it’s time to return to Castle Frostwyn, they follow me all the way to the carriage. I stare out the window as snow drifts steadily from the sky, watching the dark shape of the castle rise into view.
If the demon in the tunnels can slip inside you, wear your voice and your face, twist your thoughts, and force you to do unspeakable things, just how powerful is it?
Powerful enough to seize a miner.
Powerful enough to hollow out a man.
Powerful enough to control a Winter Lord?
The question settles deep in my chest as Castle Frostwyn looms closer through the falling snow.
17
That night, when I return, Lord Luceran is no longer in my bed.
I should not be surprised. What does surprise me is how thoroughly his presence has been scrubbed away. Sheets changed. Pillows fluffed. The bed made.
I wonder if Atilia took care of it.
The thought is almost funny now. Lord Luceran’s noble Fae mother making my bed. Me, the irritating human girl who never does what she is told.
I do not see him for a day or two after that, Atilia either, but I hear them. Muffled conversations through the stone. The low creak of the floors in the dead hours of night. Enough to know they are there, keeping themselves confined to his wing of the castle.
I go about my days as if nothing has changed, but most nights I lie awake staring at the wooden boards over my windows, my thoughts circling endlessly. Wondering. Fearing. Imagining that thing beneath the lake clawing its way into the open, watching me, waiting to take me the way it took Erold.
When I am not consumed by fear of the demon beneath the Aurevault, my mind turns instead to Luceran.
To the stories.
I flip endlessly between believing them and rejecting them, between accepting that time has warped the truth, and fearing that the truth may be exactly as terrible as the legends claim. It is my nature to let imagination get the better of me, but I find myself hoping, desperately, that there is another explanation. That something else shaped the tale. That he is not capable of what they say.
That something else made him do it.
And then I spend even longer wondering why I care at all.
He is Fae. Bewitched or not, their nature is as ingrained as my own. They crave power. Dominion. Control over lives like mine. There is no goodness in them. At least, that is what I have always believed.
