Now, more than ever, I wanted to be underestimated.
I watched Rhiannon’s smiling face as she drank deeply from her cups.Why hadn’t she asked me to share my secrets, as she apparently had with the others in the trial?It seemed she did nothing without a good reason and her silence seemed to hold its own message.
Dorian held the slack of my reticence. He laughed and offered charming repartee like I’d never seen him do, and I knew him well enough by now to understand that he was putting on a show so I wouldn’t have to.
The Dorian I knew was quieter, more thoughtful, wittier under his breath. And though it didn’t matter in the end, I preferred that Dorian—the real one I’d known at night in the Eldermaze, when the stars were out and he breathed against the shell of my ear in sleep.
Those felt like the only moments I could reconcile his two parts.
The fae who’d held a sword at my back, and the one who warmed my back.
At one point during the meal, he caught me watching him. His eyes softened—just a hair, just for me—and then he smiled atsomething a handmaiden said and the moment was gone. But it stayed with me, a flicker against the dark.
I thought of those moments more often than I liked. All my life but once I had avoided men’s eyes; it was safer that way. Yes, I had been with one of the guard during our three months of training. But he hadn’t seemed a man in that sense. He had been a boy—overeager and almost insistent, as though my body were his as much as mine.
After that, he’d ignored me. He’d become one of the day guard, and I only saw him in passing, his brown eyes avoiding me like I wasn’t even there.
I had expected a life like my mother’s. I barely knew who my real father was; some guard who’d died not long after my birth. And I didn’t care, just as she didn’t. Early on I’d decided men were optional, a garnish. I’d even relished the idea, like it gave me power over them.
And yet. Dorian had gone hungry so I would eat. He’d watched over me while I slept. He’d nearly consumed himself to get us out. And when he held me against the cold, I’d felt real and alive and considered.
It was during that dinner, watching him laugh with the handmaidens, that I realized how much his actions had spoken of who he was—and what he thought of me. Perhaps he thought I was worthy of awe. Was that so impossible?
After dinner, we parted for the night. I waited until the sun was so far down that the sky was lit only by moon and stars, and then I waited two hours more, listening for footsteps in the halls.
When the halls grew silent, I slipped out.
Sylvanwild’s forestswere different by night. I had known they would be, but nothow.
The forest felt alive with breeze-bent leaves and grass and shrieks and groans.And wraiths, I knew. But if I stayed on the path…
If I stayed on the path, Dorian had told me, I would be fine.
I wasn’t sure I could find the grove in the night, but I trusted the moon, its pale light marking a narrow walkway beyond the moat.
An hour’s walk brought me to where the grove lay, still and empty and without birdsong. The moon shone full and brilliant, reflected like a perfect coin on the pond’s surface. The silver beauty of the water and sky belied the ruthlessness of the Unseelie fae and their fall court.
I wondered if the winter court was worse, or better. Probably both, in ways I didn’t want to imagine.
At the pond’s edge, I slipped off my boots and knelt in the cool grass. I folded my hands over my heart and bowed my head. I didn’t know how the Sylvanwild showed reverence, but I knew how we humans spoke to gods: with hope, and no guarantee of being heard.
What to say?Make it like a prayer, Eury.
"My lord Spiritstag," I said, my voice loud in the stillness, "if you are near, I would speak with you. Tonight, if you’ll allow it."
Stupid, but I didn’t have better words.
I waited. All I heard was my own breathing.
I said it again, louder. And again, even louder.
No voice answered except the echo of my own. And what had I expected? This was a fae god. Not mine.
When I had waited so long my knees ached and the stillness pressed in on me, I lifted my head to rise?—
—and rocked back.
Across the pond, at the far edge of the water, the spiritstag stood staring at me.
