“If I set you down next to the wall, can you lean on it to stay upright for a moment?” I asked in a breath against her ear.
She didn’t answer, too focused on staring at the horse.
“Celeste?” I prompted again.
She nodded—too quickly to have actually assessed herself, in my opinion—so I lowered her to the ground carefully and then waited to be sure she had her footing before releasing her and turning to the horse.
“Why doesn’t it move?” she whispered uneasily as I unslung the pack from my shoulder and began to buckle it behind the saddle.
I cast her a wary glance as I finished strapping it on.
She was staring at my mount.
“What do you mean?” I asked, confused. It moved just fine when I wanted it to. Right now, I didn’t want it to.
The river was loud, but this still wasn’t the best time to be talking. I double checked that her pack was secured and then gathered her up in my arms again. I tucked her cloak and the extra blanket around her before stepping into the stirrup and hauling her up into the saddle with me. A little more magic ensured we were properly shrouded in shadows and then it was time to set off toward the road. We’d stick to the soft ground beside the cobblestones until we were out of hearing range.
“It doesn’t look around or twitch its ears or shake its bridle,” she whispered.
“That’s because it isn’t real.” Did she think I created flesh and blood animals out of nothing? A summoned wraith had no care of its surroundings, nor did it suffer from boredom or agitation.
I kept our mount to a walk, and as we passed the second monument that sat beside the road, I looked back to watch the castle. There was no movement among the towers that rose, gleaming and white, beneath the moonlit sky.
Celeste never looked back.
Once we passed the third statue I spurred the mount to a quicker pace, first at a slow trot and increasing to a full gallop. I wanted to be miles away before my family had a chance to come after me. They would know where I was headed, but I didn’t plan to let them catch me before I got there. There was only one Gate from the Boundlands into Faery—the rest having been systematically destroyed in the many millennia since the Great Migration—an effort to keep outsiders from coming in and to have fewer points of entry to defend during a war. Now they only warred among themselves.
The original plan had been for Celeste to ride out of the Dawn Court in an irin-drawn carriage with a full accompaniment of my family and the general’s soldiers for protection. It would have taken several days of travel to reach the Gate in such a slow-moving caravan. Even without the carriage, if my family were accompanied by irin at their top speeds, it would take two or more days if they made for the Gate. But since I had Celeste—if they didn’t simply follow me—they wouldn’t need the Gate anymore at all and would have a much shorter trip into the wilds to open a portal. And then there was the factor of whether they would rush to leave or stay to finish the arrangement with the Dawn Court. Perhaps they would stay in an effort to appease the Queen after the impropriety of my departure.
I kept to the main road until I reached the first city and opted for a side road to keep from slowing down. Hours passed as I carried her, acutely aware of her soft, slight frame pressed against me, with nothing but the moons to guide us and the tall spires of trees to witness our passage. The occasional nighttime traveler braved the darkness and howling winds with a lantern hanging from their cart, but for the most part the roads were empty. I moved to the side for the few travelers we passed so as not to frighten them with the clatter of unseen hooves, cut wide around all the villages, and avoided the cities entirely.
Only someone on the brink of sheer exhaustion would have been able to fall asleep on the back of a sprinting horse, but Celeste did—curled up in my lap, her body limp in unconsciousness, her head resting against me. I kept my arms securely locked around her and was careful to keep her balanced across my legs to protect her from being jostled too much. I made sure to keep her cloak pulled down, to protect her face from getting chilled, and was grateful for its protection of her delicate looking wings against the buffeting winds.
We were outside of a county called Eryvale when I first spotted the glowing yellow eyes of ghouls lurking in the forest. They turned to watch us pass from their distant hiding places, but we were there and gone before they could do anything else. I quickly shifted Celeste’s weight and summoned my scythe to have it ready, knowing that, where there were a few, there would be many. The high fae did a good job of keeping the numbers of these parasitic apparitions down in areas with denser fae populations, but they proliferated when left unchallenged by those with the old magic. From what I’d been told, ghouls and other specters had been all but wiped out within the Boundlands when the high fae had lived there, but now that they were gone, even the heavily populated areas sometimes had problems with things like fades and banshees wandering in. Every realm has its own fitful colonies of the vicious specters, but for some reason the high fae had always been the most vulnerable to their predation. Luckily for the high fae, the old magic they carried was the most effective way to repel them. At least, for a mortal.
Not even a league later I encountered a seething mass of specters right upon the dirt road. The apparitions were eagerly lying in wait for a lone traveler or two in this quiet region of the world, hoping for an easy meal. Someone who might not recognize they were there until it was too late. Since even the fae couldn’t physically see them, they weren’t expecting me to be ready for them as they reached out their long, spindly arms in an effort to drag me from my mount. A wide arc of my scythe lopped off two heads, their spectral forms vanishing before their heads even hit the ground. I looped my weapon around overhead and brought it down on a trio directly in front of us, slicing them in half before their dissipating spirits were trampled beneath my wraith. I swung again and again, spinning my scythe in deadly circles, heedless of the trees I rode through. My weapons could pass through them as easily as I could.
Though I hated to slow down, I turned off to chase down a few specters at the back of the group. I morphed my scythe into a spiked mace on a chain long enough to tag the remaining few from a distance and made sure they dropped before continuing on my way. My friend Jordan’s ability to create a rolling wall of fire would have come in handy here.
It wasn’t my job to purge the world of its scourge of these spiritual vermin, but at least I could leave it a little safer for the fae who lived here. I turned my mount back to the main road and considered the “angelic” fae asleep in my arms. I was grateful that she hadn’t been awake to be frightened by the attack, but how deeply was it normal for one to sleep? She was still breathing normally, but her unconscious state began to make me a little more anxious.
I rode harder as I came across larger and larger groups of rogue wraiths, and eventually had to start picking and choosing the times when I struck out at the groups of wandering ghouls or banshees and when to leave them be. If they were close enough to the path to be within easy striking distance, I took them out at the knees, but I didn’t go chasing any more down. I could spend days I didn’t have here trying to wipe them out and still barely make a dent. The remaining Gate was purposefully situated within the most desolate badlands, and the further we got from civilization the more groups I came across.
I considered creating a pack of shadow hounds to keep pace with me as another line of defense, but that would cause me even more magical drain.
The wraith I rode was a spectacular conjuration. I didn’t have to worry about it flagging or colicking or breaking its legs while I drove it for hours at top speeds through these darkened countryside roads littered with dips and valleys. The issue that arose was that my mount was essentiallyme. It was created and sustained by my magic, and combined with the use of my power for the binding ritual, I’d never usedthis much magic sustained over this amount of time before. The faster we rode, the more energy was pulled from me. Every conjuration had a price it required to be paid.
I rode through the entire night, killing any wraiths that came within reach. As the sky began to lighten, I finally decided to make use of the lessening darkness before it was gone. My path had taken me through the outer reaches of both the Kingdom of Falling Stars and the much smaller Midnight Kingdom, and I was now on the farthest-reaching borders of the aptly named Empire of Open Skies. I stopped briefly in an open field with no ghouls in sight and shook my muscles out, unused to spending so many hours in the saddle.
I gathered magic from the decreasing darkness and created a pack of shadow hounds—stockily built, heavily muscled dogs that easily resembled the slavering hellhounds of mythos. The seven large hounds spread out in a circle around my mount to keep watch for me while I focused my attention on my companion. The fae soldiers we’d traveled with on the way in had taken the opportunity to stretch their muscles each time they rested their mounts, and that had been a much shorter journey than what we’d just completed. Shouldn’t she need a break after so many hours in one position?
“Celeste?” I pushed her hood back gently and peered at her face. There was no movement of her eyelids. Just the soft, slow breathing of someone deeply at rest. I tried reaching inside her cloak to find her fingers, squeezing them briefly to try to rouse her, but received no response. Even turning her body so that she rested on my other leg made no difference to her sleeping state. She just rested her head against my other shoulder and drew up into my lap again. I tugged her hood back up over her hair and horns, tucked her head under my chin, and held her close as I set off again into the beginning of a new day. Mortals usually slept through the night, so perhaps this was normal?
Other than that once, I took no breaks, unwilling to sacrifice any time we could be moving. The shadow hounds bounding along beside me successfully cleared three more groups of ghouls, but as the sun rose higher, I released them back into the ether. I truly needed to reserve my energy now and not fight the tide of dwindling darkness. I still had hours to ride and was beginning to feel the drain. As the day wore on though, I became increasingly concerned when Celeste never awoke. Her slumber before the wedding had been magically induced as a kind of stasis to keep her illness from progressing, but they’d removed that from her for the ceremony. What if something was deeply wrong with her that my magic couldn’t fix? I worried for the tenth time that maybe I had made the wrong choice in taking her away.
My grandmother’s words were both a source of comfort and anxiety.“She will not be immortal immediately, and though this disease will not continue for terribly much longer beyond the ritual itself, she will still be able to be killed for several years. Your only duty during that time is to protect her.”The disease couldn’t last for too long now that my magic was inside her, but she could still perish. I looked down at Celeste and mentally willed my magic to spread farther, to work faster. I could do no such thing of course, but childishly, I tried anyway.
The sun had passed its zenith and I’d destroyed dozens more apparitions by the time the wall came into view over the horizon. I stopped at the tattered edge of a long-petrified forest and looked out over the badlands—a rocky, craggy landscape that was entirely devoid of vegetation as far as the eye could see. A hard packed road wound its way past low, strange rock formations toward an ancient fort known as the Fist of Heaven, which had housed a garrison of soldiers for millennia. It existed without a kingdom—a city-state all its own, supplied by tariffs from every nation within Faery. Its only purpose was to guard the Gate.
