I dreamed of a city in the forest. I tread suspended paths near the tops of the trees, which cradled ramshackle wooden buildings. I looked back to
see Caduan there, walking behind me. He looked different than he does now
—younger. He gave me a small smile, which I returned without thinking.
A blur, and then we were in a crowded room with raucous Fey gathered around tables and benches, clutching mugs of mead. My senses were dull, clouded by many glasses of wine. Caduan’s were too, his words slightly slurred. We were arguing.
Suddenly the window shattered. Suddenly we were falling.
Suddenly there was fire everywhere.
We were on the ground. Caduan did not move. I bent down and bit his wrist, drinking his blood—and life blossomed in me, in him, a thread connecting us and making us both more powerful.
Humans everywhere. Pain in my abdomen. I was pinned to the wall, a spear impaling me.
Caduan’s magic clustered around him as he fought his way to me.
This is a memory, I realized. A long-ago memory.
Everything froze, like time held its breath.
I observed the scene around me, the fire paralyzed mid-stroke, the white-haired human’s wide-eyed face, the smoke hanging motionless in the air. I lingered on Caduan. His face at first seemed calm, focused… but those eyes, and the way they looked at me… maybe back then I didn’t know how to recognize such hidden wrath. But I knew how to see it now.
My chest tightened. I reached out, as if to touch him, and—
The world split in two. Something in the magic beneath me tore apart— tore apart in a way that was deeply wrong. Like a wound ripping through the center of my soul.
The memory was gone. This was no longer the past. This was the present.
I was now three different places at once. My room, in Ela’Dar.
A cell of white stone, panic filling me, death surrounding me. I knew these eyes. These were Maxantarius’s.
A tent of blue cloth, staring up at the sky. Grief ate me alive, but I would not show it. I swallowed it deep. I knew this soul. This was Tisaanah’s.
For a moment and an age, I felt them so vividly, like their hands were interlocked with mine.
And then the roar of this terrible, broken magic took me away.
 |
I STUMBLED ACROSS MY ROOM. The buzzing still filled my ears, my skin covered in goosebumps.
That was not a dream. That was not a memory. Something was happening now. And whatever it was still persisted, beckoning to me.
I went to the door and sagged against it. For a moment I looked at my hand on the knob.
Caduan always told me that I could leave as I pleased, but I never wanted to go anywhere. I hated this room, but at least it was safe, far away from the judging eyes. Even now, a part of me hesitated—longing to stay tucked away here.
And yet… the call was too strong. I opened the door.
|
I DIDN’T KNOW how I knew where to go. I just did.
I walked through the empty halls of the castle, then down, down, down staircase after staircase. I found myself wandering out into the cold night
air, treading barefoot through the forest. I passed the building where Caduan had taken me before, and kept going.
My steps were graceless and uneven for reasons that had nothing to do with my cut-up bare feet. The tear in the magic below left me off-kilter. Whatever it was… it was wrong. Dangerous. And, in equal measure, enticing, pulling me ever forward.
I came to another small, stone building. The door opened easily at my touch. Orange light warmed my face. The floor was rusted, dark metal, with carvings etched into it that spiraled towards its center, illuminated with a faint, throbbing glow. At its center was a large, circular table that continued the same patterns. The light emanated from an orb at its center, so bright that for a moment it overwhelmed my eyes and drowned out the shadows.
The glow faded slightly. My vision adjusted to the darkness, and what I saw within it made me gasp and stumble against the brick.
The room was lined with creatures—creatures made of shadow, standing perfectly still against the walls, faces yawning pits of emptiness. They were silent. One by one, they stepped backwards, simply disappearing into the dusk.
They were… strange beasts. Unnatural. They should not exist. “Aefe?”
The voice made me jolt.
My eyes fell to the opposite wall. I had been so distracted that I hadn’t even noticed him—Caduan, sagging against the table’s edge, as if the stone was the only thing keeping him standing.
“What are you doing here?” he asked. “I—”
Words were gummy in my mouth. The strange buzzing sensation was starting to fade, but only barely. I could not take my eyes from those creatures.
Caduan followed my gaze. “Don’t worry. The shades are harmless to you, and they will be gone soon.”
His voice sounded strange. His lashes fluttered, like he didn’t have the strength to keep his eyes focused on me.
I approached him slowly. “What is wrong with you?” “You shouldn’t be here.”
“What is this? What was— I felt something so strange. Something deep, something—” I didn’t know how to describe it. I looked to the table at the center of the room, and the glow at its center.
Hello, lost child, it seemed to whisper. I shuddered.
An expression I could not decipher flickered across Caduan’s face. He looked around the room as if he was realizing all over again where we were. “You shouldn’t be here,” he said again. “I was working.”
“Working?”
He lifted his gaze to me, and I recoiled from it. “Stop.”
“What?”
Looking at me that way.
He straightened, limbs carefully rearranging.
“I’m done,” he said. “Come. Walk back with me.”
He took two steps closer, but he was wobbling on his feet.
“Something is wrong with you,” I said, sharply. I did not know why it bothered me so much.
“Just tired. I promise.” Then he held out his arm. “Walk with me.”
|
UP CLOSE, even in the night, Caduan’s green eyes seemed so eerily bright— like there was some light inside of him that crept out through his irises. Or perhaps they appeared that way because the darkness around them was now so pronounced.
I remembered little from my former life. But in this moment, I remembered feeling stripped bare beneath a stare just like this one.
I pulled my hand away from those thoughts. It was easier not to remember.
I did not think that Caduan would be able to walk, but he did, though he moved slowly and steadied himself against trees with every few steps.
For a long time, we walked in silence. It was a strange game. We both watched each other so closely, and pretended not to.
“You were creating… things,” I said, at last. “For the war.” “Shades. Yes.”
“Because of what Luia said to you today?”
Caduan’s lips thinned. “Because we needed more forces to send to Ara, and I would rather sacrifice shades that feel nothing than Fey.”
“The man we saw today,” I said. “The Aran queen has done that to many others.”
His gaze darkened. “I know.”
“It is not just her. So many of them are like that. They are terrible.” “I know.”
I knew it because I had been one of them. Hundreds of years and I became nothing but pain and want and a gaping hole—a desire for love, for power, for safety, a hunger that never ended. Now the wound they had left inside of me consumed everything.
The words ground through my clenched teeth before I realized I was speaking.
“And yet you left me there.”
He stopped walking and turned to me. The movement was sharp, almost angry, and for a moment I was gleeful to see it—yes, fight me. Give me something bloody. Give me something that hurts.
But when a cloud fell away from the moon, the cold light across his face revealed only sadness.
“I thought you were dead. I thought…” A hard swallow. “Do you remember Niraja?”
Niraja. A beautiful city of flowers and stone. Laughing children. A strange kind of hope. And—
Blood and broken glass on the floor. Dead bodies. A terrible feeling of guilt, of betrayal.
And then, one image that was so clear it left me shaken:
The image of Caduan, clutching his abdomen, falling backwards over the rail.
It was the clearest memory I’d had in a long time. I did not, could not, answer.
We resumed walking. We were nearly at the castle doors.
“The city was destroyed,” he said, quietly. “So many people died there that night. I awoke at the edge of the river. Both of my legs were broken. I would have died too, if… Ishqa had not returned.”
The sound of his name made me stiffen.
“He pulled me from the ruins and took me back to the House of Wayward Winds.” Caduan’s voice was tight as a drawn bowstring. “He told me that we were the only ones to survive. He told me that the humans killed you.”
I wish they had.
Death was like a lost lover. We circled each other. I craved more with every brush of its touch. All I wanted was for it to take me to its bed and never let me leave.
I tried to imagine the world I had lived in, so many years ago. I tried to imagine what it had been like to be Aefe.
“What was I like?” I whispered.
And there was no hesitation as he answered, “You were exceptional.”
We reached the door. He leaned heavily against the stone wall of the castle. “You were like no one I had ever met. Passionate and driven and honest the way so few Fey were, in those days. Because of you, I saw the potential in the new world the Fey could build. But with you gone… everything that I feared would happen came to pass. The House of Wayward Winds and the House of Obsidian went to war, provoked by your father’s foolish actions, and that war nearly led to our extinction.”
My father. I remembered nothing of him but a shadow and a lingering sense of grief, like a reaching hand that was always empty.
“And this is why you brought me back,” I said. “Because I have the power you need to win your wars, now.”
“It isn’t that simple, Aefe.”
“Do not patronize me. I know what it is to be used.”
“You only know what it is to be used, and that makes me angrier than I can ever express.” We reached the door, and he held it open for me. When it closed behind us, the darkness of the empty hallway swallowed us both.
“Ishqa stood beside me for hundreds of years,” Caduan said. “He became a close friend and a trusted advisor. But when he told me the truth of what he had done to you—the truth of what they had done to you…” He heaved himself upright and paused, his back to me. I watched the line of his shoulders rise and fall and thought of what it had been like to feel someone else’s breath running through me.
“Then why would you bring me back, if not to make me your weapon?” I asked.
me.
He was quiet for such a long time that I thought perhaps he hadn’t heard
“Five hundred years is a very long time,” he said, at last. “One hundred
and eighty thousand days, and I thought of you in every one.” My throat grew tight for reasons I did not understand.
“The woman you knew then was not me.”
“She was not. And she was.” Slowly, he straightened, turned, and gave me the weak ghost of a smile.
“Goodnight, Aefe. Thank you for passing the time with me.”
He still looked unwell. He was pale, and the darkness surrounding his eyes seemed even more pronounced than before. A strange feeling stirred in my chest, a feeling that made me want to thrust out my arm to steady him.
He set off down the hall, his hand braced against the stone.
His words echoed: You only know what it is to be used. The gaping wound the humans left within me throbbed.
A part of me loved them. A part of me mourned them. And a part of me hated them, for using me, for abandoning me.
“Wait,” I said.
He stopped short. Perhaps I imagined the surprise in his expression as he turned.
“Yes?”
“I know where she is. Tisaanah. Sometimes I… I dream it. I feel her.” A wrinkle formed between his brows. I imagined judgement in it.
“I don’t know how else to describe it,” I said, somewhat helplessly.
“I understand perfectly what you mean.” He started towards me, and I closed the gap between us. His fingers lifted to my temple. I felt a strange tug, as if he was reaching through me to the threads that connected me to deeper layers of my magic—the layer that I shared with them.
He withdrew his hand. I tried to understand his expression and failed. “Thank you,” he said, after a long silence.
I nodded. A part of me was… glad. Proud of myself.
I watched him. And he was almost at the end of the hall when I said, without fully intending to, “Goodnight.”
Perhaps I imagined the brief pause, as if in surprise. But he did not look back as he disappeared around the corner.
