The sky is lyingto me.
It’s still purple. Dark enough that the shadows pool between the castle’s towers like something living. Still technically night.
Despite the fact that Faerie is endless twilight. It’s just shades of pink, purple, and deep magenta.
But even so, the horizon has that quality. That pale smear along the eastern edge that means we have twenty minutes before dawn decides to show up and ruin everything.
I count the distance between the hidden passage exit and the tree line.
Too far.
Fifty meters of open ground. Maybe sixty. The courtyard cobblestones give way to a garden that’s more gravel than cover, and beyond that, a stretch of flat earth that Moros’s sentries cross on a rotation. I’ve been watching them for four minutes.
Four minutes is not enough data.
And the tree line taunts me with how close and yet how far away. Not to mention the brightening twilight.
“Ash.” Kestra’s voice at my shoulder. Barely a breath.
“I see it.”
“The rotation?—”
“I know.”
Six seconds between the eastern sentry’s turn and the moment his back faces us. Six seconds to move four people across open ground without a sound, without a light.
I glance back at Finnian.
He’s standing against the passage wall, arms wrapped around himself. Not cold. I watched him walk through Amarantha’s rooms without flinching at the temperature. This is something else. But I can’t ask him right now what happened, or what he’s thinking. No matter how much I desperately want to know.
“Can you run?” I ask instead.
“I can run.” He answers before I finish asking. No pause, no warmth, no the-thing-Finnian-does where he makes even a simple question feel like a conversation. Just the words. Clean and efficient.
And nothing like the Finnian I know or his warm, soothing voice.
It’s the voice you use when you’ve decided the person asking doesn’t get to know how you really are.
It’s also not what I asked. He’s deflecting so he doesn’t have to lie to me. And I get it. I do. I’m fluent indon’t ask me how I ambecause I wrote that language.
But hearing it come out of his mouth instead of mine makes me feel he doesn’t want to tell me. Instead of the logical reason, of now is just not the damn time for it.
I turn back to the sentry count.
I pull air through my nose. Slow. Pause. Exhale even slower. The thorns beneath my skin pulse once in protest, each one coming alive and stretching because let’s face it, I haven’t used them. And now is the first time in a month I’m close to the roots beneath my feet.
“We move on my mark. Single file. Kestra, you’re behind me. Finnian, center. Tiana, rear.”
“If the eastern sentry turns before we clear the garde,” Kestra starts.
“Then we move faster.”
She doesn’t argue. But I can tell she wants to.
I watch the eastern sentry complete his turn. I mark the time in my head, six seconds. Six seconds, fifty meters, four people, and a sky that’s getting pinker by the minute.
Easy.
