That was too much truth of another type, too. I was a hazard in the field if I couldn’t shift, just as I had been that very first day when I met Fieran. Bismyth had fought around me as I bled from the wyrm bite.
“Dair did feel he was missing out.” Fear’s forearm, on the back of my chair, brushed my shoulder as he shifted toward me. “He told me, ‘I need someone newer than I am on the team. Someone who will let me rescue them for a change instead of you rescuing me!’”
Dair protested, laughing, and the room laughed with him. “Well, if I had known we would get Cara, I might have said that! But it’s unfair. I’ve only been claimed since the last Trial!”
Fear had shifted things so seamlessly, making it seem as if it were typical for new shifters to be fragile. There was nothing about me that was uniquely weak. My cheeks felt pink, and I did not dare look at him.
And I did not look at Dair, either, who had suggested that they had needed me. No matter how much it was just silly banter. When had I ever been wanted like that before? Not inall of Stonehaven, and yet here, with the most incredible group I’d ever met, they claimed me as one of their own. I could not endure it.
When I started to push back from the table, too many gazes swiveled my way.
The Nightwalkers swept in.
They did not knock. They entered, dark-cloaked and unhurried. Their attention was on Fear, as attention always was. Everything else that happened was just the queen angling her pieces toward him. He was the one she wanted to destroy.
I was on my feet before I realized I had moved. My shoulder in front of Fear, my hand on my dagger. As if I would fight them to protect him.
He had moved in the same instant, one arm rising to put me behind him, his other hand going to his shoulder. A golden glow limned him in light as his sword-and-sheath glowed into existence across his back.
The same instinct, mirrored between the two of us. Shadowbane and Lightbringer through us, surely.
I wasn’t entirely sure I believed it.
Fear’s hand found the small of my back, settling on it with his usual control, and the usual charm touched his lips. “Good morning. If you would knock properly, we could greet you properly.”
“Clan Bismyth.” The lead Nightwalker carried the flat courtesy of someone delivering a message, not initiating a negotiation. “Her Majesty requests the presence of the clan leader and his wife.”
The hand at my back was steady. “Delightful. We would be happy to meet with my mother.”
The ground felt as if it rocked beneath my feet, though this must have been inevitable. This was my fault, too. He had rescued Tay and Lidi and Mam, and the queen would know, andnow she would take us. Could she torture us? Not by her own hand or by her order. What were its limits? Would she torture Bismyth?
“Cara.” Fear’s voice was soft, and my gaze snapped up to his. His gaze moved over my face in the quick way of someone checking on a weapon, or a shield, or…I was neither. I was a weakness.
Something shifted in his jaw. He offered me his arm. Formal and old-fashioned and as if I were a royal and not the messy mortal girl to which he was bound. In another moment, I might have mocked him. Instead, I looped my arm over his forearm. He was so steady and warm; at least my legs wouldn’t fail me when I could lean on him.
He looked over his shoulder as the two of us moved toward the door. “No one follows.”
“We’ll be here,” Asrael said. “Waiting.”
There was a promise in it. Two promises, really.
One for us, and one for the Nightwalkers.
Fear
The Nightwalkers set a pace that didn’t invite conversation.
I fell into step beside Cara, close enough that our arms brushed on the narrow turns, the corridor swallowing the sound of our footsteps into its old stone. I watched the backs of our escorts and said, very quietly, without looking at her: “She’ll know you tried to stab me.”
Her breath hitched slightly. She had heard and was deciding what to do with that.
“Don’t deny it. We’re still standing together; that’s the only thing that needs to be true in that room.”
She nodded, but it was the nod that meant she had heard me, not the nod that meant she would play my game. I sawthatnod rarely.
“Can you do that?”
She said nothing for three steps. “Yes.”
