10

Maybe it's that this is the second last phase before the first passage that not many fae flood the Hall this Breeze. Some might be getting in more practice on the battle blocks, studying the scripture of the passage in the archives and the library, or even getting more rest than usual.

Whatever the reason, all that hot, jovial atmosphere I've gotten used to in the Hall—one filled with laughter and shouts and the slams of bottles on wooden tables—feels somewhat dead. It might be the Breeze, but we're close enough to the First Wind that only having a dozen contenders in here with us reminds me too much of the tavern in my village, the one with old males who have too many stories of tired wars and long-gone battles.

Dull and tired.

Splayed out on the couch, Aleana has her legs sprawled over my lap, and she swirls around the honeywine. She watches the buttery liquid slosh against the clear glass. "Will you come down to Kithe?" she asks, but before I can answer her, she goes on, "You should meet Kalice."

I frown on the name for a beat. "Your neighbour? The human?"

She hums, turning a finger around and around a glossy lock of inky hair. Looks freshly washed, trimmed and smoothed with all the right oils, and so I suspect her phase spent in town was to get her hair treated at the baths with her mother. It's her eyes, those pale shards of glass, that carry the weariness of her sickness in their slightly reddened hue, the dark circles blemishing the skin around them. So unlike the sharp kohl lines of her brother's lively eyes.

Aleana nods. "She's my only friend in Kithe. But she never goes anywhere," she says with a sigh, and at the sound, Rune's gaze cuts to her, lingers for a beat, then he looks away with a twist to his mouth. "She's not dull—she's afraid here."

I tilt my head, the frown still creasing my forehead. "Did she grow up in the human world?"

The pout she gives, mixed with a sharp shake of the head, is her answer. "She's a changeling."

A human babe stolen from the human realm. Maybe even swapped for a sickly fae newborn, probably a kinta.

"You should meet her," Aleana decides, firm.

And I don't quite understand the reason for it all, this sudden desire for me to meet her human neighbour or come to Kithe where I know I'm not welcome, at least not by Daxeel.

I study her elegant lethargy for a few heartbeats, how she draws her distant gaze to the ceiling above, her back melted into the plush cushions of the couch.

I flick my attention to Rune as he shifts in his chair. All sopping wet from the outside he not long ago left to find warmth and drinks here in the Hall, he looks ever uncomfortable. His hardened face is aimed at the short brown table placed between us, but his mind seems faraway.

I look to Eamon who gently turns a page in his romance book. It might be papered in black parchment, the cover hidden from anyone who looks his way, but I know that is a book he has stolen from some human he has recruited into our realm, and this is his fourth read of it, he likes it so much. I recognize it by the scratches down the spine, the ones I left when I tried the book. It wasn't to my taste. Too much pointless action, not enough focus on the characters.

"Eamon," I reach out my hand for him, but he's not within touching distance. Still, he lifts up his gaze from the pages. "Remember Belladonna?"

Eamon frowns on it.

It was Aleana who brought her to mind. All this talk of friends we should meet, and I think it sad Aleana won't ever meet Bell.

But at Eamon's persistent frown, perhaps a bit of annoyance that I interrupted his reading of love and too much war, I add, "I was always with her at the High Court? She had that lovely purple hair."

He tilts his head. "When we found each other?"

"Before," I dismiss it with a shake of the hand and turn back to Aleana. "Anyway, Bell was my only friend when I was a child. A lordsdaughter—"

This strikes him. "Lord Lukah's halfling child," Eamon says with a nod. "Wasn't she banished to the Grott?"

I bite down on my bottom lip. My nod is slow and grim.

Aleana asks, "Why?"

"With child," I answer with a whooshing breath. "The child of a woodland fae. He vanished around the same time she was sent away."

I let the implications hang in the air. It's not an uncommon rumour that the woodland male was killed by the lord, but maybe he just ran off…

Eamon's face is grim. "That'll do it."

The Grott isn't a sentence to be taken lightly. Not all banishments are harsh enough to be sent there. It's a brutal fate. So few who are sent to the Grott return.

What that place truly is, I only know from fleeting and curt references in scrolls I borrowed from libraries, or the rumours forever circulating the High Court, but it's not enough—not enough to even let myself imagine what that place is. Do they have cabins, houses, castles, or just live in caves like the keenest rumour says?

The Grott is one certain thing. A punishment. The place of exile, for the banished, and difficult to survive.

I hear from the gossipy vines at the court that it's a connecting maze of cave tunnels, forever damp, packed full of wicked, desperate and violent fae; that each has to fight for their own food, water, clothing, or even fire warmth. And that if one isn't in a protected group of allies, then they best just jump from the highest point of the caves, because they will die brutally otherwise.

The Grott is a horror story, the kind that used to wake me up in the night with silent screams and sheets soaked in sweat.

Thatis where Belladonna was sent.

As for what became of her, "All I know is I never got a letter from her, and she hasn't been seen around the Queen's Court since—or any court."

Aleana wears her shock like a tautness pulled over her face. The judgement in her eyes gleams as she whispers, "How awful to do that to one's own daughter."

The scrape of wood on the floorboards interrupts the moment.

Rune stands to push his chair closer to the hearth, then drops back into it. The grey of his t-shirt is dark with the rainfall he's still wet with. He leans close to the fire as he tugs out the ribbon from his long, buttery hair.

"That's the litalves," Rune says with a sigh, and it's a rough sound, like the only water he's had all phase is the rain that soaks him to the bone, even an hour after he sought refuge in the Hall. "They claim to love their children more than our kind ever could, but the moment those children make any sort of mistake," he scoffs, a half-hearted grin perched crooked on his pink mouth, "or decide to live their own lives or fall in love with the wrong one—" His sharp eyes cut to me for a heartbeat, but before I can react, he's thrown his hair like a whip over his back, then snatched up a bottle of tavarak. "—then those litalf parents will destroy their own children."

Keeping his thumb tucked between the pages, Eamon closes over the book. "It's about control, but fuelled by a sense of honour, too. That part is often forgotten in favour of respect, when it truly boils down to image."

"You agree?" I turn my slack face on my brother for all intents and purpose, and I eye him like he sprouted a second head. "You think our litalf parents don't love us?"

Eamon leans his head back on the tall spine of the armchair he sinks into, an armchair so large and cushioned that it could easily swallow up anyone who sits on it, the one Aleana and I sometimes tuck up together on. But we're on the couch, her legs stretched out, her stocking-clad feet rested on my lap.

Sometimes, it really does feel like we're sisters, or we were meant to be. We slipped so easily, so effortlessly into these calm and comfortable moments.

"I think," Eamon starts, "that their love comes with conditions that are less flexible than the conditions of a dokkalf parent."

I frown at the thought of his mother loving him better than his father.

I only know father's love—and as I think on it, I realize how afraid I've been to tell him about Taroh, because I fear the answer.

How much do you love me, father?

A question I'm too afraid to ask.

It gives me the thought for Eamon, too. Is it his father who is less accepting of his same loverness? Does he wish for him to marry a good female and leave behind his bedder ways?

"Huh." It's all I can afford to give to the conversation now that my insides are deflating.

"Maybe it's a mother thing," Aleana wonders aloud. "And fathers are the ones who can't love—"

Rune's cat eyes flash; he swerves them to her. There's a warning in the way he looks at her and, as she frowns over the neck of her honeywine bottle, she falls silent.

My brow knits together as I look between them.

It's Eamon who catches my attention with a slight shake of the head, and a stare so severe that it keeps me silent. ‘Don't pry,' he silently tells me, but if I was planning to, I'm interrupted before I can.

"Master Cup!" The shout snatches the attention of all four of us.

I crane my neck to look over the back of the couch at the source.

Down the wooden table that reaches all the way to the other side of the Hall, a familiar-faced litalf slams a cup down, then throws a stack of parchment beside it.

The faintest pink hue to lovely pale hair, a pearlescent gleam of marble-like skin, and a grin so white that it's near blinding. Ridge.

His fist is still firm around the blackened stem of the chalice as he calls out again to the Hall, "For those who dare."

The cup in his grip is no ordinary one. The gilt surface is stained black in some spots, like it's been poisoned, and it's enchanted. Some kind of spirit magick, but those cups can be found at most major markets around the lands.

Master Cup is a common drinking game, no matter which land one is from. I hear it's most popular at the bases.

And so I'm not surprised as light and dark fae alike draw away from the shadows of the Hall and approach him.

Ridge grins all sharp teeth and dark promises as the contenders reach for quills and parchment.

They each must write their names on a torn piece of paper, then—once they drop it into the cup—they can't leave the game before the cup spits out their name with a task.

None of us move to join the growing group at the table. And their game begins as it always does—light and fun. Never stays that way, of course. I've not seen a single game of Master Cup end without bloodshed.

But it goes on for a while with cheers and laughs and hisses and growls. No blood spilled yet. And, as more and more fae wander into the Hall, most finding themselves at the table and joining the game, it keeps a merry atmosphere about it.

I don't know Ridge too well. But I know light fae, and I'm not entirely convinced he started that game as a ‘last hurrah' show of unity before the first passage begins. He's up to something, and whatever that is, Eamon can keep watching from his armchair, but I decide I want nothing to do with it.

I'm about to turn my back on the table, the game, the entrance of the Hall, when I spot more fae drifting in through the open doors.

It's the scribes and iilra that steal my attention for a pause. The white-robed scribes carry stacks of parchment, some quills, wear ink stains on their bandaged hands, and have their hoods drawn over their identities. Some light warriors shadow them closely, but not for protection against the lively shouts of the Hall. Those fae I recognize from around the Queen's Court, and I know them to be generals and admirals.

So I guess the same for the dark fae who wander the Hall with the black-robed iilra.

I don't turn my back on them now. Faint curiosity has me shifting around to tuck myself into the corner between the couch's spine and arm. At this angle, I better see my group, and the fae in the Hall.

Eamon has returned to his book, but his gaze lifts every so often to watch the game over at the table. I suspect he isn't truly watching the game, but rather the strikingly beautiful Ridge.

Aleana hums a disjointed melody into the bottleneck she cradles, her lashes low over sleepy eyes.

But my attention lingers on the doorway.

"Recruitment," Rune answers my silent question, one I must have had written all over my frowning face.

Then I understand he misreads by focus, thinks I wonder about the fae with the scribes and iilra, not that I watch the door and wait for Daxeel to come.

"All the best warlords will be here to watch the passage," Rune tells me. "Looks like they have already started scouting for favourites."

"Do you have a favourite?" I ask and realize this might be the first time I've had an actual conversation with Rune.

The drier his hair gets, the yellower it looks. But it's still damp, and he threads his fingers through it, as if to prevent any knots from forming. "I'll serve under General Caspan."

Rune jerks his chin across the way, and I trace the gesture to the three fae gathered by the shadows of the entrance. But there's nothing hidden or discreet about them. I see only a menacing, deadly presence as I study them.

The black ateralum diadem is what gives the dark-haired dokkalf away as General Caspan. Fixed properly atop his thick head of hair, that chalky metal material somehow glints like silver beneath the constant gleam of the glowjars.

His leather vest should creak as he folds his arms over his chest, but of course it doesn't, because it's crafted from dragon leather, and that is as silent as the grave. An advantage the dokkalves have over our kind in battle, leathers.

I watch as his pinkish lips move over murmured words that I can't hear from this distance, but words he speaks to his companions.

The iilra scribbles down some notes on parchment at whatever he's saying to her.

"General Caspan," Rune echoes, then reaches for another bottle, and this one is black sludge, too thick and potent for my tastes: Viskee. "The only general in existence to knock Prince Rain on his ass."

Eamon scoffs and closes over the book before he sets it aside, but I blanch.

Can't help that my eyes widen into saucers at the blatant disrespect of our Prince of War. But then, it's like I hear the words. All of them. Knocked him on his ass…

I don't dare look at the general again.

"He was only a warrior then," Rune adds with a slack, impressed look aimed my way. "Guess that got him a fast promotion, because he's one of the youngest warlords in our history. He leads a strong unit."

"How do you know you'll be recruited by him?" It's not an insult, it's curiosity, and he reads it as such.

Rune seems to take no offence. "I received a direct offer from him before I arrived at Comlar." He grins and it's disarming.

All of this is disarming, me sat here with dark fae all around me, and I'm talking to them, casually, normally, like we're all friends.

Samick's glacier voice, cold and smooth like ice, comes from behind me, "The other is Bracken."

I arch my neck to watch him approach from behind the couch.

Samick makes for the side-table beside Eamon's armchair. Before he sits, he tugs out some throwing stars, a cloth, then perches himself on the table's edge. The fireflies suddenly drop to the bottom of their jar to play dead.

"Bracken is Caspan's second," Samick adds as he starts to wipe his charcoal-like stars clean of blood, and since he wears spidery chainlink armour over his shoulders, I'm guessing he was getting some fights in on the battle blocks.

"For now," Rune mutters and his eyes have turned into something deadly, all traces of yellow in his irises gone, darkened into burnt-autumn leaves.

I follow his gaze over to Caspan—and the one beside him, the one with cheekbones so sharp I'm sure they could cut through my fucking bones.

I study him.

Golden blond hair, braided intricately down his back; a slender frame (slender for dark fae), but tall and looming all the same. There's nothing obviously intimidating about Bracken, this second to the general. It's the way he looks at Daxeel that has chills trickling down my spine.

Daxeel stands with Caspan now, and I think he must have come in with Samick but stopped on his way over to us. The general speaks to him like an old friend, a familiarity in just their body language, in how Caspan smacks his hand down on Dax's shoulder.

So I think it strange that Bracken has his gaze narrowed on Daxeel with such unveiled venom. I think of that narrowed gaze, and I'm reminded of a snake's warning before the strike comes.

Yet Daxeel doesn't spare Bracken so much as a glance.

At first, I wonder if he can't overstep—but then I realize, with the slight tilted down chin that Bracken keeps, it's him who avoids overstepping with Daxeel.

Sometimes I forget his lineage, his house, his ancient blood, his father a warlord, his mother a viscountess. I forget that Daxeel has something I've never had once in my life. Status.

And whatever that means to them, it stops Bracken from spitting out the poisonous words he so clearly aches to aim at my dark male.

Rune draws in my attention with a muttered, "There's always a way to knock someone off their pedestal and take their place."

Aleana smirks something unkind at him, a mocking smile. "Someone should tell the general to watch his back then."

Rune sneers at her, and it's the first time I've seen any look of the sort aimed at her. She seems entirely unfazed, her sleepy smile still painted over her pale lips.

"General Caspan has no reason to mistrust me." Rune's shoulders are stiffer now, heckled by the insult. "Difference is, I respect him where I do not respect Bracken."

With a grunt, I reach out for my second bottle of honeywine and praise myself mentally for taking it slow this phase. "Is he unworthy of your respect?"

Rune nods, eyes on the sudden ignition of blue flames in the hearth. It keeps a blue hue for a heartbeat, two heartbeats, then swells back into its angry oranges and blood reds.

It's Samick who answers, while he works the cloth in between the nooks and crannies of his throwing stars, all without cutting his ungloved hands, "Bracken is emotional. Too much so. He makes battle personal, loses his head. His thirst for bloodshed is deranged, unevolved, and unrefined. Is he so different from the wastelanders?"

Rune hums in agreement. "A leader like that can't be respected—or trusted."

I turn my chin and look over at the group by the door.

Daxeel catches my gaze—and hooks it. He holds it steady as he starts for our claimed corner of the Hall, a steel to his eyes.

I flicker my gaze around him to the general and his second.

Bracken has his daggered eyes on Daxeel's back… then slides them to me.

I swallow under the assault of his fierce gaze.

A breath shudders out of me as he smiles. It's a smile that pebbles my skin and stiffens my shoulders.

Bracken's beauty is striking but striking like a sword. And I feel every bit of that sword's sharp edge grazing over me.

A hand comes down on my stiff shoulder.

With a jolt of icy fright, I jerk against the sudden touch, pushing myself up the spine of the couch.

"Calm, vicious one," Daxeel's growled words soothe the rush of panic instantly. The panic I only felt because I was trapped under Bracken's stare.

Evil isn't a word I throw around, but it's the one that comes to mind.

And Daxeel must have noticed Bracken's stare on me, and so he's come up to the side of the couch, put his hand on my shoulder, and claimed me right in front of the second.

I don't want to look at him again, so I shift around to face the fireplace, and catch Rune's small smile.

It's a smile that says, told you so, and I think of Samick's words—

‘He makes battle personal.'

I wonder if what he meant to say was that he makes any grievance or dislike personal—and no one is off limits.

But then Daxeel's hand is suddenly gone from my shoulder, and the abandonment should sadden me, but he wouldn't have let me go if Bracken was still in the Hall.

Besides, Daxeel doesn't abandon me just yet. He stands by the arm of the couch, within reach, and uses a dry rag to wipe blood from his leathers.

From behind me, jeers rise up from the table, and it takes me a moment to fully come back to the Hall.

Master Cup must have delivered quite a dare, but I don't look over my shoulder as Ridge's voice reads out the task from the cup's spitted parchment—

"Prit!" I don't recognize the name. "Kiss a halfling!"

Instantly, I cut my panicked gaze to Eamon.

He watches me already with a twist to his mouth, only a slight crease between his eyebrows. His concern is there, but it's mild enough that I wonder if I might convince him that I'm doing the right thing by playing the long game with Daxeel.

Then—whatever is happening behind me—stirs a growl deep in Daxeel's chest. I feel it rumble at my shoulder.

"If you want to lose your fucking jaw," his words are a throaty, savage warning he aims at who I guess to be Prit.

Suppose I'm the closest halfling to the table.

Rune scoffs into the bottle he drinks from.

And Prit apparently decides against the challenge of Daxeel.

I look up at him, at my dark one; the hard line of his clenched jaw, at the caramel tone of his skin made darker by the dim light of the Hall. His leathers are somewhat different today. Like the general, he wears a black vest that moulds to the defined lines of his muscular chest, and the leather makes me think of an inky stream running over boulders and stone.

Part of me itches to reach out, dance my fingertips down his chest, feel every curve of muscle tense at my touch. I ache to graze my palm along his solid honeyed arms, over the weapons belts strapped around his biceps.

But I think he wouldn't welcome my touch, not right now, here, in front of everyone.

My mouth flattens and I turn my cheek to Daxeel.

Eamon's gaze snares mine.

We share a moment, silent worries, and thoughts in our eyes.

Do you see, Eamon?

Do you see how far I've gotten with him already, how much closer I am to my final goal with the one I love?

I've come such a long way from the earlier days here when he would only spare me a glance but keep his distance, and any words he might have spoken to me were insults of my insignificance.

It's all getting so raw now. But before I can build any flesh around our love, then reform the steel armour it once had, I have more work to do.

I bring the honeywine to my lips, and just as I take a swig, a rocky snore comes from my left.

Aleana is passed out on the other side of the couch, her mouth parted around gravelly breaths. The hem of her floaty black dress is ruffled, but the plum purple of her corset rises and falls with her steady breaths, and I think it a wonder she can breathe.

My mouth quirks at the corner. I'm not a snorer myself, but it would be a lie to say I haven't woken in some drool before.

Eamon's sigh isn't annoyed but exhausted as he pushes up from the armchair, then tucks his book into the waistband of his trousers. "I'll get her home."

First, he comes straight to me. The instinctual smile steals my lips as he plants his goodbye kiss on my temple.

"Behave," he tells me as he makes for Aleana, but it's a half-hearted command, one he knows I won't obey, and one he's just too tired to care much about.

He scoops Aleana's small frame off the couch like she weighs little more than a feather. Then he's gone—and I'm suddenly aware that I'm alone with Daxeel and his friends. Neither Samick or Rune are actually my friends, and that has never felt more obvious to me than it does in this moment.

My face is blank as I turn to look at each of them.

Rune watches the game over the back of the couch with mild interest, but not enough to leave the warmth of the fireplace and join. He is dry, finally.

Samick has cleaned all his stars, patched them away in their holsters and straps, and has taken to smoking grimroot. He sinks into the armchair Eamon occupied. The fireflies still play dead.

And neither of them look at me like I'm not supposed to be here.

Finally, I look up at Daxeel.

He doesn't move away from me.

Instead, I watch as he shifts onto the edge of the couch, stretching out his arm to rest his hand on the couch's spine at the nape of my neck. His stance is almost relaxed, but I know he only sticks close to me to protect me from the game.

No, not protect, shield me—for his own benefit. This isn't powered by love, it's the need to claim his possession, it is evate.

I reach out for the table and, snatching an already open bottle of tavarak, whose stench itches my nostrils, I fall back with a grunt.

I lift the bottle to Daxeel. "Here."

He looks down at me with dark pits of ice for eyes, shadowed by long thick lashes.

Daxeel could be considered pretty if it wasn't for the ruggedness about him, the darkness of the kohl shadows around his eyes, the forever-commanding stare he keeps, the menacing tattoo licking up his neck and inking his hand. Rather, he is a walking threat.

There is no thanks that comes from him as he reaches out to take the bottle from my offered hand. He firms his fist around the neck just as Ridge's voice shouts out, "Luna! Punch your equal!"

And that's the Master Cup's latest task.

This Luna, if doesn't complete the dare, she will break out in hives. Not the sort of the flesh, but hives that spread into mouths and spill down throats and inflame organs.

My earlier suspicion that Ridge has strategic reasons for starting that game in a phase of lower spirits… If he was aiming to eliminate some of his competition with hives…

Or fights.

My eyes widen the moment I hear the crunch of bone. And I mean crunch. Like a cheekbone has been crushed beneath the weight of a fallen boulder.

Rage floods the Hall with the surge of roars and outraged, fierce war-cries. The sheer animalism in these battle sounds bolts me in place, a call of hums drawn out from calloused throats.

I'm a sudden statue, tense and cringed, on the couch. Like if I don't move at all, those warrior sounds, cries and shouts only ever meant for the battlefield, won't be aimed at me.

But I squeal a shout of my own as the air is knocked out of me. I'm falling, falling to the floor, the weight of solid marble pushing at my side. It takes me a blink and a heartbeat before I realize Daxeel has tackled me off the couch—and onto the floorboards where I land with a grunt.

Just in time, too. On my back, my wide eyes are aimed up at the ceiling, over Daxeel's shoulder, and all I see is a spatter of crimson blood.

I wince at the sight of it, even as I lay under Daxeel's hard body that he keeps over me like a shield of ateralum.

The frantic shouts of rage twist in the Hall's air, contort into a symphony of crunching, beating, thudding.

Fights have broken out. More than one. And I don't need to look to know it's between the dark and the light.

How our unity holds up in the face of the Sacrament.

Curved over me, Daxeel's eyes gleam like never before. Or like I've never before seen them.

Hunger, thirst, yearning—it's all there beneath the shadows of panic he has for me, for my safety in this Hall. A part of him wants—needs—to abandon me on the floor and join the fight. He smells the blood, hears it call to him, and he is a mere slave to it.

But shadows start to darken the gleam until the deep blues of his eyes are mostly onyx. And that's all I see before I'm flung again, this time over his shoulder.

Daxeel moves fast.

He's out of that Hall in seconds.

At the entrance, I push my hands against his back for leverage and look into the Hall—at the brutality of them all. Knives coming down on cheeks, a jaw ripped clean off a dark male's face, a light one's leg bent and snapped at the most unnatural angle.

In the chaos, I notice that Samick and Rune stay behind to fight. They work together, Rune kicking a light fae square in the chest, then Samick coming up behind the victim—and punching a blade right through his skull so it comes out his parted mouth.

Then the scene is stolen from me.

Daxeel sweeps me away from the threat.