Orthat. I was well aware that he could end me in the blink of an eye if he wished. It was not death I feared. I braced myself as I took the chalice. The taste of metal gathered harshly on my tongue, but there was no sickly sweetness of rotten things. Just a slight tang of salt, like inhaling the mist of a sunlit tide.
“Thank you,” Adrik murmured and settled, to my utmost alarm, into the armchair. “I have a few questions for you.”
He must have noticed that I retreated. That I cowered in the corner of the bed like a wounded animal. His gaze turned sharp with interest. A hunter, realizing that he was in the presence of prey.
“I do not wish to pry,” he began. It was a lie. He wished to tear my secrets from my flesh— “These are dark times. Wildemire is glad to shelter you, but we must protect ourselves from the warring blood-tribes. We must know that you pose no threat to this town.”
I ignored the sting of guilt. I’d witnessed the waste the blood-wars had laid to the southern forests only from afar. The image of trees weeping crimson tears still haunted me. For a decade, the battles had waxed and waned and crept ever closer to the wasteland.
I forced myself to look at Adrik as I answered—not into his eyes, for I feared I’d get tangled again, but at the shadows under his sharp cheekbones.
“I was born and raised in Eldevale, but my mother’s family hails from the Ravenwoods.”
A simple, well-rehearsed answer.
I knew the mining town of Eldevale well enough to pretend I’d lived there. I had, after all, spent nine lonely summers looking from my mountain shelter down at its red-tiled roofs, at the ice-blue lake at its heart. My connection to the Ravenwoods was no secret. I bore the features of my ancestors: black curls, cool olive skin, freckled cheeks, and thin, copper-brown eyes. In truth, I had been born and raised in the Ravenwoods’ wildest, darkest corner. Ten autumns ago, I’d travelled west to Kresting and then north to Eldevale.
No, I hadfled.
Adrik studied me with too-watchful eyes. “A wicked place, the Ravenwoods.”
“A wicked place, indeed.”
“Have you been?”
“No.” I curled my hands into the sheets to conceal a tremor. "I have heard the stories and I never wish to go.”
“Ah,” Adrik said with slight amusement. “I too have a penchant for allowing stories to guide me.” He waited a moment, as if he expected I’d volunteer another tidbit to our conversation. When I made no such effort, he said, with a quick glance at my hands, “You are a miner?”
I might have felt offended by his insinuation, had my hands not worn a thick coat of callouses from a winter’s work on the fishdocks, from nine summers of scavenging Mount Windrest for food, and had not most of Eldevale’s populace indeed labored in its famous moonstone mines.
“I’m a bookseller with a fondness for the wild.”
Another carefully considered answer. I was well-read for an unschooled girl from the Ravenwoods. My mother had seen to it that we spent any coin she could find in my father’s pockets, after he’d returned from the brewer, on books. I’d often sought refuge from the twisted world outside within stories. On MountWindrest, once I’d bargained with the faeries for mushrooms and berries and the traps had yielded a hare for supper, I'd use the final scraps of daylight to draw and read. I had an odd knack for finding abandoned books in hollow trunks and on beds of moss—or perhapstheyhad a habit of findingme.
“I wonder,” Adrik said, and I knew by the caution in his voice that he doubted me already, “what a bookseller from Eldevale hoped to find in the wasteland.”
“I was travelling to Eldevale from Kresting. I visited my great-aunt for the solstice.”
"There are other, less perilous roads to Eldevale."
“I was in a haste.”
“Ah yes, because your lover awaits.” Again that sliver of wariness, that mocking undertone. I’d lost him amid the lies, and I feared I possessed neither enough eloquence nor charm to ease his doubts. “Tell me about them.”
Heat curled through my veins and sprawled to my cheeks. I was not quick, not sharp enough to think of a tale. I’d not had a lover in my life who lasted longer than a night and I did not know how to lie of such unknown things as warm arms beckoning me home.
“You claimed you did not wish to pry.”
“An unwise claim, indeed,” he said with displeasure. “I should have waited to make such promises until I knew you better. Alas, you are unwilling to speak unless I pry—so pry I must.”
“I’ve answered all you asked of me.” Too shrill, that traitorous voice of mine. Too afraid. “Why must you know about my lover?”
Adrik's face darkened. “Because few lovers are worth the perils of the wasteland. I believe you were there for another reason. I believe you are hiding something.” With eyes sharp as a butcher’s knife he studied me—as if he wished to gut me and read my secrets in my entrails. He was, after all, half of a wicked faerie.
“Were you not there too?” In my terror, I had forgotten to be clever and quiet. I should have known he’d not take well to being prodded in return.
He smiled viciously. “I washunting.” A shiver crept over me. I said nothing while I pinched, as covertly as I could, the knotted scar. Deep within me, in a rotten hollow, stirred the darkness. “I wonder—” Though he remained much too near, his voice came from across the chamber; muted and dull. “Were you hunting or were you running?”
