Melia gagged and fought for breath as the last dregs of the nightmare slid out of her. The moment the cold was gone, she pushed Ferisa away, disgusted, and jumped out of the chair. “Get away from me,” she screamed.
Ferisa swallowed, took a deep breath, and started laughing. “That was quick,” she’d said.
Chapter 11
Liana
She had tolet go of him.
The guards fussed over Amron, his bruises and cuts, and the servants at the palace even more so. In the tumult their arrival caused, he barely managed to catch Liana’s eye and mouth a silent “I’ll find you” before they led him away.
She was left standing in a torchlit courtyard, surrounded by guards. Not a prisoner, but feeling like it.
“Lock her in the servants’ quarters,” the captain of the guard barked. “I’ll interrogate her later.”
Although it was long past midnight, the palace didn’t sleep, but the sounds were muted, the lights soft as they climbed up the back stairs, through the narrow corridors, high up to an empty servant’s bedchamber under the rafters of the palace, with a slanting ceiling and a single bed in the corner. Some kind soul remembered to feed her, bringing her a fish pie and a jug of water. Liana paced the bare wooden floor for a while in a tight circle, hoping that Amron would come for her, but the night dragged on and he failed to appear. The anxiety that kept her awake retreated before her sheer exhaustion, and sometime around the quietest, darkest hour of the night, she crashed on the bed and slept.
• • •
Liana was dozing,propped against the white stag’s massive flank, when a rusalka touched her shoulder lightly, and she opened her eyes. The pale face framed by greenish-brownhair was unfamiliar, but the rusalke were like birds, always flocking around her mother—interchangeable, fickle water spirits.
“Come,” the rusalka said, “I want to show you something.”
Liana patted Snijeg’s silken coat. She was waiting for her mother to return, but when Lela wondered off, it could take days—sometimes weeks—before she remembered her half-human offspring.
“Come,” the rusalka urged. “It will be fun.”
Her mother’s retinue had a strange notion of fun. It was mostly hunting and luring hapless animals and humans into clever traps, but sometimes the rusalke would sing, or the leshy would dance, and Liana would watch open-mouthed, awestruck by the beauty no human, or half-human, eye had ever seen and lived to remember.
Liana rose and followed the rusalka through the undergrowth. At six, she was a true forest creature, light and fast, but she didn’t possess the rusalka’s watery aspect, she couldn’t just glide through the branches and leaves, and the speed soon left her breathless.
“Wait,” she pleaded.
“Just a little further,” the rusalka said. “Come on.”
The rusalka lied, as all rusalke did—it was a long way off. By the time they slowed down, Liana was winded, tired, hungry, and too annoyed to pay attention to the faint pop in her ears and a slight change in temperature and light, as if walking from a sunny patch into a shadow on a summer day.
The dirt road lay before them, winding through the trees like a very long slug. The human road. The rusalka stood on it, her tiny, lily-white feet not quite touching it, and urged Liana forward. “Come on.”
“No. Mother told me I should never go near the humans.”
“Your mother is not here. And I have something amazing toshow you.” The rusalka smiled her charming smile. “Something you’ve never seen.”
Liana hesitated. Lela had given her a stern set of instructions, but she was too lazy, too disinterested, too absent ever to enforce them.
“Come,” the rusalka said. “You’ll love it.”
Reluctantly, Liana followed her down the road to a tiny village, a handful of cabins on the edge of the forest. To Liana, who slept in the open when it was dry, and inside caverns or massive tree trunks when it rained, it seemed strange that anyone would want to shut themselves inside a small wooden box.
The rusalka led her behind one of the houses and motioned for her to peer around the corner. Holding her breath, Liana looked.
Two girls sat on a dry, sunlit patch of grass. Both were auburn-haired, with faces as round as the moon and tiny rosebud lips, one probably as old as Liana, the other slightly older. Their hair was smooth and clean, free of leaves and branches, tightly braided and tied with red ribbons. They wore proper clothes, dark brown tunics with colorful belts, yellow and green. To Liana, they looked wholesome and pristine like newborn fowl.
Liana had never met any girls her own age and, despite caution and fear, the two little creatures attracted her like sweet honey. They chatted in a language of humans, which Liana understood but rarely used.
Forgetting about the rusalka, about the forest at her back, she made one tiny step towards the girls, quiet and light-footed like a young fox. The girls held something in their hands, two little wooden dolls with woolen hair, dressed in the tiny versions of the girls’ tunics. Liana, who’d never had any toys other than twigs and leaves and stones, felt her fingers itch with the desire to hold them.
“Hello,” she tried to say, but it came out as a hoarse whisper.
