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I didn’t much care about why The Raven was determined to uncover some secret or find out why he thought I was an imposter. All I cared about was in my grasp, and all I had to do was wait and bide my time. Silver would be an issue if I didn’t handle him carefully.
Pink bloomed in his cheeks. “And I’d do it again if someone took your place, miss. I’d beat them within an inch of their lives.”
“What does it matter if someone takes my place, Silver? I’m just a daoire.”
He snorted, and it developed into a derisive laugh. “You don’t know what happens when someone takes your face, do you?”
I tilted my head. I wasn’t familiar with it, having only met the one skin changer, Brittle Spear. “No.”
His gaze flew down the intersections and tangles of hallways that surrounded us as if he was about to impart some heinous knowledge that was beyond forbidden. “It’s not like what happened to you and the other humans, Cricket. To take someone’s face is to take their entire essence. Sure, they can’t mimic memories or knowledge if they just craft an illusion, but to fully crawl into someone else’s skin you have to kill the original person. So, if someone had taken your place, that would mean they had murdered you in cold blood.”
Ice ran through my veins as I thought back to the young face that Brittle Spear had found me with in the throne room and the implications of the Bandrui’s twin.
“What about if they are using magic to appear as someone else?”
Had I fucked a dead man’s mien? Had I cum all over the cock of a man Brittle Spear had murdered to fuck me?
He shook his head. “No, illusion magic is something else entirely. Only the most skilled of the Abhartach can do that, and there’s always a tell. Sometimes hard to find it, but there’s always a tell. If the Captain had thought someone was using illusion magic to appear as you, it would have been a simple thing to break the illusion. For him to ask for the Righ-cuicidh’s chambers that meant he thought someone had taken you fully.”
I nodded and began moving through the hallway, leaving the courtyard behind. Silver kept up, not commenting on the fact that I knew where I was going. “I forgive you, Silver. I meant what I said, though. If you ever hit me again, I’ll tear you apart.”
“I don’t doubt that you will, Cricket.” I cast my glance sidelong at him. “You’re different from the other humans. I don’t know how or why, but you are. Not even the old ones are like you. There’s . . . I don’t know. There’s something about you that makes you . . . almost Fae.”
Oh, sweet Silver, if you only knew. I was different because, unlike the other humans, I wasn’t human at all. I was Fae. A Fae raised by humans and born on the back of the heinous war that the man I could not stop thinking about perpetrated. I wished I could tell Silver all of this. I wished I could tell anyone all of this.
I felt alone and sequestered by the secrets I had to keep from everyone around me. Not even my rules were comfort in a time when everything around me and about me was dangerous to one person or another that I wanted so badly in my life.
Silver led me back to the warrens and left me be, alone in the dark tunnels of the human quarters as I stewed.
Violet, Green Man, and Emerald found me there hours later, sitting on my cot staring at the single candle where I had first found the star bead.
“Tomorrow,” I whispered to the lonely little candle as they huddled around me, Goose standing sentry at the entrance to my alcove.
Emerald flashed a myriad of celebratory images. Fireworks. Streamers. People dancing. People cheering.
“Keep it down, Emerald,” Violet hissed.
“Be ready. Near sundown. I’ll send Goose like we planned for.”
The three nodded, all of them near to vibrating with excitement. I couldn’t share in their joy, though. I kept thinking of all the things that I would be leaving behind. Not just the potential for more with The Raven, but my mother’s body. The library I never got to explore. The rest of the humans that I couldn’t free.
The others wandered away naturally when they saw I was in no mood to be chatty, none of them questioning the solemnity that came over me as they reveled in their own impending freedom. I only hoped that their celebration did not rouse the suspicions of the others.
I lay down on my cot, stared up into the black ceiling of the warrens, and went over the plan, running each step through my head. It was not a complicated plan. There were no great trials or risky steps. It was a simple, clean, efficient plan that held very few options for things to go wrong.
The only true complication in the way was The Raven. I doubted that given the shifting of his opinion on whether I was a skin changer, that he would alter his plans to escort me to his betrothed. I would need to deal with that.
Goose found his way up onto the small cot and lay his head on my shoulder where we both fell asleep.
I dreamed of golden suns dawning over horizons of glittering cosmos swimming between the sun and stars.
Chapter 45
It was the last day of my enslavement. The last day I had to wake in the dark smoky caves that housed the humans of the palace. It was the last day I would look over to see my dress draped over the half wall. The last day I would sit up in my little cot and count down from ten as I listened to the bells that woke all the daora ringing in my ears. It was the last time I would breathe in the morning farts of what seemed like hundreds of humans jammed into such a small space.
Goose was blinking weary eyes up at me from his place at the entrance to my alcove, where he curled up in a ball every night so that he could watch the stairwell and me while I slept. His lens-flare eyes found mine in the dark, and we seemed to silently communicate our trepidation and excitement for the day. We both knew that nothing would be the same after this. Nothing would be comfortable.
I didn’t know much about roughing it out in the human wilderness, let alone the Fae wildlands. But anything had to be better than the withering away torn between giving in to my need for The Raven and my need to self-destruct under the yoke of my captivity.
