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“I won’t live a thousand years.”

That was a lie, I didn’t know how long I could expect to live now that I was settling into the knowledge that I was, in fact, a Fae and not a normal, boring human. I didn’t even know how long a human in this hell hole would survive. Violet was at least two hundred fifty years old, and she was still spry.

“You beautiful little liar.” He curled a bitter smile and dragged the gloved back of his hand down my cheek again. “You are filthy, Sóna Mac Raith. May I take you to the baths? Get you clean and dress that wound?”

“Is there a reason it’s not closing on its own?” I didn’t move. I didn’t want to accept his kindness.

He watched me for a long time. I could see the gears turning in his head as if he had noticed something and was putting pieces together slowly. “The spider. What did it look like?”

“Huge. It would easily fill this room. Maybe thirty feet total? Blue. Black spikes. Red roses for eyes. But the petals had eyes on them. And it was cold. Really cold.”

He sat back on his heels and watched me. “You really did die.”

The sentence was a soft whisper, as if he hadn’t even meant for me to hear him.

“Told you I did.”

Was that a shiver that ran down his spine?

He collected himself and took a deep breath. “That was a mourning spider, Sóna. Not the deadliest of them all, but that sounds like it was a broodmother. Somewhere, down in the depths, you’d find an egg sack. They eat Fae and magic. Spit up the soup that’s left over into the egg sacks to incubate their young. The temperature they are at when they are nursing their young dictates what comes out of the eggs. Cold breeds soldiers. Hot breeds more mothers. If she was hunting, that means she has brood somewhere, now that she’s dead they will die off soon as well. How she survived down in the darkness without a source of magic to feed her let alone feed her well enough to mate and lay eggs, I don’t know.”

“So, how many Fae does it take to feed one of those things? I’m thinking of going back down there and raising one of them as a pet. Need to know how much Fluffy will eat.”

“Depends. Your average Fae? Six to ten a year. A royal? Two or three for the whole brood. If she happened to get her hands on an ascended? One could feed thousands of broods if she kept it alive and restrained long enough.”

My mother had been down there in the dark with that creature for easily two hundred years. How many times had she been fed off of? How many times had that foul thing bit into her delicate flesh and drawn the magic from her? How many broods had she raised on the strength of my mother? The thought alone made me sick.

I let my eyes squeeze shut against the image of those massive fangs sinking into her throat and chest. She couldn’t die by that alone. Magic wouldn’t let her die from a spider. It required iron to do the job. Iron and someone who was dead. It had required my hand to do it.

“Can I take you to the bath?” He was already moving off the bed before I could answer him.

I wanted to wallow in my filth a little longer, but something told me that he wouldn’t be letting me, even if I said no, so I merely nodded.

His arms slid under my blanket and lifted me and my warm cocoon up to cradle against the firm rest of his chest. He scooped up a small satchel and tucked it into his belt. “Not the communal baths. This might be my room, but it is not my only one.”

His chest expanded on a deep breath, and a shaft of weak sunlight pierced the darkness around us in a column from ceiling to floor. He stepped forward into it, and I felt like the world dropped out and all that was left was the warmth of a summer day and the blinding sunlight.

When we stepped clear of it, we were in another place, another room. This one was somewhere within the palace proper, as the two massive windows that let light in overlooked a forest of trees that expanded out beyond the horizon. It was an opulent room, garish compared to the austere well-crafted elegance of the one in the prison. This one was decked out in greens and golds, with a shattered crest over the enormous bed. Even cracked and broken, I could clearly make out the sigil. A black mountain with a golden sun breeching behind it and, atop that, a falcon.

It hung in a place of pride over the head of the bed as if to remind him always of his family’s disgrace.

He set me down gently in a velvet wingback chair and tucked the blanket around me. “I will draw my lady’s bath and then leave her to it. Something tells me that you wouldn’t want me hanging around. You need time and space. And I’ll let you have it. But I will be right here, reading. If you need me for anything, you need but call.”

He kept to his word. The bath was steaming hot and scented with floating flowers and oils when I stepped into it. There was no door that separated us, but he had adjusted the curtain shield and the massive copper tub so that I was in relative seclusion. If I peeked around it, I could easily see him, and as he promised, he was sitting in the very chair he had sat me on, his handsome face tipped down into the pages of a large leather-bound book. I couldn’t read the language it was in, but he was engrossed, and that allowed me time to think.

I pored over the details of everything I had learned. From Daróg’s true name to the bits and pieces of what happened during the war. Why I was brought to the human realm and what I truly was. Who I truly was.

There were pieces missing, pieces I would desperately need to fill in if I wanted to get out of here, but there was one thing that was certain. No matter what happened, I would be bringing this place and all its denizens to their knees. I would not just raise the House of Magic. I would not just find a way to balance magic. I would find a way to destroy every one of them, and that piece of crystal I had pulled from my mother’s grave would be the weapon I used to watch the life bleed out of Daróg.

“May I come in, little bug?”

I peeked around the curtain, and he had set his book down and was watching the curtained tub. He hadn’t moved, merely waited for me to respond.

“Yes.”

Only when I gave him permission did he unfold his huge frame from the chair and make his slow journey to my side, where he kneeled next to the tub. “I wanted to take a good look at the wound now that it’s clean. Once that’s done, I’ll leave you be if you’d like. I suspect after being in the tunnels for a few days, you could use the fresh air.”

“Is this where he thinks you spend most of your time?” I asked as he took a rag from the folded pile and soaked it. I turned into him, unembarrassed by my nudity. He’d seen it all already, anyway.