I didn’t accept his hand, and he didn’t push it. I kept two steps behind him as we passed through the narrow tunnel. He had to hunch, and his shoulders were nearly too wide. It seemed perfectly suited for my size, if not overgrown with roots and crawling with bugs.
“We could stay down here,” I said. “Until the trial is done.”
He snorted. “Why, Eurydice, that wouldn’t be in the spirit of the Sylvanwild Court. What would our fair queen say?”
“She wouldn’t have to know.”
“Keeping secrets from our monarch?” He tsked. “Risky. Butthatwould be the Unseelie way.”
“So?”
“We can’t stay down here. Soon the Hunt will follow your fear to this tunnel.”
I paused. “And not yours?”
“Yours is… far more potent.”
“And why is that?”
He stopped and turned back, his eyes purple in the light of my crystal. “We’re nearly at the other side.” He’d ignored my question. “Once we’re up there, we’ll head to Virellan Falls. It’s half a day’s walk.”
“Virellan Falls?” I echoed.
“Waterfalls at the edge of our lands. We can spend one night there, beneath the falls. The water should mask our scent that long.”
“So that’s the plan? Move from place to place until ten are dead?”
“It’s the best plan we have. We’ll never win against the other fae or the Hunt. I haven’t the power to protect myself against them, much less the two of us.”
I nodded. He was right.
“Eury.” He turned toward me in full. “How good is your memory?”
I didn’t know the point of his question. “My mother always told me it was a trap.”
“That fits.” I didn’t know quite what he meant, but before I could ask, he said, “What about directions?”
“You saw the inside of my district.” I knew it like the whorls of my fingerprints, but that was exactly how it had felt to me as a girl: whorling, easy to get lost in. I’d had a lifetime to learn all the alleys and turns.
“Yes, I did.” He dropped to the ground and gestured for me to get to my knees.His finger began moving in the soft earth. “From here, it’s southeast to the falls. Keep the sun a little to your left before noon, and a little to your right once it’s past its arc.”
I watched his finger trace a line between two spots. “Why are you telling me this?”
“If we’re separated?—”
“You said we won’t be.”
His hand stilled, but his face remained angled down. “Because I’m no hunter, Eury. Not like some of the others. I’ll do everything in my power to keep us together. But should you end up alone…”
I swallowed.Then I’m dead. “All right.”
Dorian nodded and continued with his directions. When he had finished, he made me repeat them: keep the sun on my left, then on my right; halfway, I’d find a rock in the shape of a woman’s reclined body; once at the falls, I should follow the river and push past overgrowth to find a path behind the falls.
“You wait for me at the falls,” he finished. “I swear, I’ll find you there.”
“You’ll find me there,” I said, my voice thin.
When he was satisfied by my recitation, he rubbed out the tracing he’d made in the ground. That felt like the ghost of his mother acting through him. We rose, and we continued through the tunnel until we reached another set of stairs carved into the earth.
