Back to the southern district, where I’d climbed the wall as a girl just to see what was on the other side. By night I arrived at the top and peered between two battlements and I saw nothing, nothing at all. It was darkness and the firelight babbling beside me.
I remembered the night Elisabet’s parents disappeared. The return of the guard, the great doors opening and a mournful horn blowing. How I’d watched from high up, peeped their torches, wondered who the horn blew for.
The next day, and every day after that, her brown eyes were faraway. Like a part of her had disappeared, too.
The day Theo and my almost-father took me to the great spire in the southern district. We sat against the hot white pillar and we split a round of wheaten bread and drank stickleg—“It’ll make your legs go stiff before you’re done drinking it,” Aldric said when I’d taken my first sip and coughed it all over the dirt. Theo’s red hair glinted, his teeth white as he laughed with his head tilted back against the spire. How high it went, straight into the sky.
I remembered being in my mother’s arms. Sometimes she still held me as she had done when I was very small, her hand stroking through my hair, and there was nothing better in the world. No memory—not even the day it rained without acid—could outweigh the comfort of her hands.
And then I thought of nothing at all.
Voices soundedbeneath the thundering falls. At first I thought I dreamed them, imagined them in my dying haze, but then something cold and hard touched my throat.
“She’s dead.”
“Not quite.”
I opened my eyes, slow and crusted. I must have dropped to my side; now I lay in the fetal position on the cave floor. In the crystal’s faint light, a face hovered above me.
Faun’s partner, holding a sword to my throat.
Behind him, Faun’s slender, cross-armed form stood just in front of the crashing water.
“See,” Faun said. “That one resists death.”
“It would only take a poke.” The sword’s tip was set over my carotid. I should have been terrified; instead, after hours of delirium, I couldn’t bring myself to feel more than discomfort.
“We’re Sylvanwild, not Noctere.” She lifted her chin. “Stand up, pettifey.”
I considered whether I could stand. My breathing, I realized, was no longer audible in my ears. My throat didn’t sound like an instrument. I breathed deep, long, sharp.
The solacebloom had worked.
I got my hand under me and with slow effort pushed myself up to a seat. My vision was still partially obstructed in one eye, my face warm and puffy, but it no longer burned.
“Tethryn,” Faun’s partner breathed. “What happened to your fucking face?”
“Where’s Dorian?” Faun said to me.
I only stared up at her. I didn’t otherwise move.
If she thought I would tell her where Dorian was, she had entirely the wrong impression of me. I hoped he was safesomewhere, warm, that he had some comfort tonight. I hoped he was far from here.
Faun understood. Her lips thinned, and she nodded to my sword at my hip. “Rise, and draw.”
“Faun—” her partner said, his sword still at my throat.
“It won’t be two versus one,” she snapped, her hands falling loose at her sides. “And we won’t kill her while she’s not on her feet.”
I pulled my legs under me and set my hands on the ground. I rose, swaying. My eyes fell on the red feathers on the arrows rising over Faun’s shoulder from her quiver. “It was you,” I said, voice hoarse. “Your arrows.”
She didn’t answer, which was my answer. They had followed me, tracked me to this place. But now I knew they hadn’t found Dorian.
I didn’t move to take up my sword. “We don’t have to kill each other.”
Faun’s partner snorted.
She didn’t so much as smile; her eyes were twin gems on me. “Trust me,” she said, “this is better than what you’d receive from the Wild Hunt.”
