"Where will we go in the morning?" My voice sounded tight, clipped—a world away from the softness it had held a minute ago.
"There’s a way out." Dorian still faced away from me. He paced toward a threadbare animal skin so worn it was hard to tell what creature it had once belonged to. He pointed. "Under here."
"A cellar?" Did he mean for us to hide down there until the trial was done?
"If it hasn’t collapsed on itself."
"And if it has?"
He didn’t answer. He struck off into the other room and began rummaging among the detritus there.
We didn’t speak again that night.
I slept on my rolled-up cloak atop the old padding, facing away from where Dorian eventually sat with his chair angled toward the door. I glimpsed him before I fell asleep: his sword lay across his lap, his body rigid, face forward, jaw etched in stone, eyes onyx.
A clamp of sadness closed over my chest. It felt distinctly like longing, which was stupid for so many reasons. He was a murderer, a kidnapper, a monster. And anyway, it wasn’t real. It was just my body responding, not my mind.
I had control over my mind, even if my body betrayed me.
I squeezed my eyes shut and pressed my face into the cloak, trying not to breathe in the scent of him. But it was impossible. It was soaked into the wood, into the mattress, into the air itself.
By the time sleep finally dragged me under, I could not feel sadness. I could not feel anger. That scent, maddening and inescapable, had erased everything else.
A hand touched my shoulder. “Eury.”
My eyes opened. I was fully awake the moment Dorian’s voice sounded above me. I had slept more deeply than I’d expected, but fear and its partner, exhaustion, were powerful sedatives.
I turned my face up to him. He hovered over me, his hair veiling his face in the crystal-light semidarkness.
“It’s time to go.”
I nodded once, and that was all we said.
We ate and drank in silence. Then we got on our gear and Dorian flung aside the animal skin to reveal a trapdoor set into the floor. He grabbed at a latch and pulled it open with a squeal of hinges and a plume of dust.
I stepped forward, but his hand went out to me. “I’ll go first.”He started down an old earthen set of stairs, ducking his head and disappearing inside. A few moments of silence elapsed. When I stepped toward the entrance, his face appeared from the shadows. He nodded me down.
The cellar was cold but not collapsed. Past the steps, a square of light from the cottage above showed shelves with ancient jars.
“This was my mother’s root cellar,” Dorian said as he pulled the trapdoor shut above us. We were enclosed in darkness.
Her root cellar. My mother had always fantasized about having a root cellar—but those were for the inner districts. Not us.
On instinct I reached into my pouch and drew out the small crystal he had given me. Its light grew between my fingers almost at once, as though my own body powered it. I held it up, and Dorian’s eyes lit fuchsia like an animal’s.
He half-smiled. “Brilliant light, for such a small thing.”
I turned the light toward the shelves. “You said this was your mother’s cellar?”
Behind me, he rustled with the shelving on a far wall. “A shock, I know—even evil Unseelie have mothers.” He yanked at the shelf, and when I turned I found it pulled away from the wall to reveal an opening. “Mine was a bit paranoid.”
I stared into the pure darkness. “Paranoid of what?”
Dorian ducked into the tunnel. He extended his hand back toward me. “Everything.”
What had happened to Dorian’s mother? If fae never died of old age, then…
It was a useless question to ask. He wouldn’t tell me right now, anyway.
