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“Don’t be sorry. Just don’t give up, okay?”
Ms. Pincette placed a brief, warm hand on my shoulder, before turning on a heel and hiking up the stairs, leaving me alone.
CHAPTER
16
COEN
As the white-haired faerie led us up winding walkways bathed in sunlight, toward a domed palace rising with the distant treetops, all I could think about was Rayna. Because the Uninhabitable Zone was breathtaking—just like her.
Ancient domiciles rose like limestone bluffs along the walkways, curved roofs and open windows facing sunken courtyards before them. The greenery melted into the door-less entrances, and trees tangled together amid open plazas. Birds chirped at each other from the parapets, and water tinkled as little cascades wound down cliffsides and into the ponds below.
Otherwise, the place breathed out a rare stillness, an almost-emptiness.
A peace I’d only felt in Rayna’s mind.
“Not to be rude,” Terrin started as we climbed a graceful set of stairs bordered by overflowing hydrangeas, the pond water down below flickering with fluorescent fish once again. After the other faeries had removed my magical shackles, he’d refilled the ponds with as much water as he’d taken. “But who are you, exactly?”
The white-haired faerie snorted and muttered something that sounded a lot like a curse in his almost-Sorronian language.
“Don’t mistake me for a fool, truade. You appeared out of thin air in our territory. Surely, you already know who we are.”
Terrin and Dazmine glanced at me uncertainly. Now that I wasn’t trying to Mind Manipulate five, fully-matured faeries at once, I could pick the information out of his head like bones out of a fish. But I’d been trying to do this thing where I actually gave people the courtesy of telling me things of their own volition—something Rayna had instilled in me over and over again, whether she knew it or not.
Stay out of my head, she’d once told me with a hurricane brewing in her jade-green eyes, more defiance in them than I would’ve ever expected from someone so shy and cautious. Don’t enter it again without my permission.
The thought of that moment—of that memory where she’d stood before me in the flesh—battered me in the chest. As our path wound through a pavilion cloaked in vines, an ache fissured where my heart beat against my ribs.
God, I really did wish she was here. Wished she could see this place with her own eyes and discover everything alongside me.
But in the meantime, I’d act in a way that would make her proud.
“No, actually,” I told the white-haired faerie. “We don’t know who you are. Can you tell us?”
The male glanced at me, eyebrows tilted. He waited until we’d ascended a crisscrossing staircase leading to the open-faced palace before finally halting at the top with a sigh.
“My name is Kanuk Kalaidesique, and we—” He swept a hand out at the grand palace portico, as if gesturing at an invisible crowd. “—are the last native faeries of this island.”
My blood flooded with frost.
The last native faeries? I’d heard two conflicting stories growing up—one that they’d all gone extinct by the time Dyonisia had arrived at the island and another that she’d wiped them all out—but neither suggested any native faeries had survived. I’d thought Jagaros was the only one left, trapped in a cursed form.
But Kanuk and the other faeries who’d attacked us were proof of more. Were there others here, too? Others who’d been watching our trek from hidden windows?
Beside me, Terrin’s mouth had popped open.
Kanuk himself frowned, his shoulders dropping. “They really don’t tell you about us, do they? We are truly forgotten to the world.” His tone lacked its earlier bite, grief oozing into the words. “The lost empire indeed.”
Dazmine cleared her throat, glaring at Terrin… who promptly snapped his mouth shut again.
“Maybe not for much longer.” She shocked me by placing a hand on Kanuk’s shoulder, and he shocked me by not pulling away. “Tell us what really happened, and I promise we won’t let the world forget you again.”
Kanuk swallowed and jerked his head toward the portico. I didn’t think he’d answer Dazmine as he led us into a vacant atrium flooded with sunlight. After we passed several elegant sofas resting beneath the shadows of indoor palm trees, however, his voice broke the silence.
“When Dyonisia Reeve took siege of this island, she only had five fellow faeries to help her fight, but her antipower was stronger than all of our magics combined.” Kanuk glanced at my brand warily, our footsteps clacking against the polished floor. “Still, we would have fought until every last one of us returned to loam… if it weren’t for the one you’re seeking.”
“Jagaros?” I asked quietly.
