8

I don't allow myself long to rot in bed.

With the first passage around the corner, there are things to be done, even with the bargain locked in. So I quickly run off for the washrooms and lather up as best as I can to wash Daxeel's scent off my body.

Can't risk father smelling him on me.

It's no secret around here who I spend my time with, and that Daxeel is sometimes there, but to wander the halls after how strongly he scented me last night, that's something else entirely.

I scrub myself raw before I'm clean and brave enough to meet father at the infirmary.

My face falls when I see Pandora has joined him.

She reclines against the thick white door, her arms folded.

The way she leans back has her stomach pushed out more than usual, and it's now that I actually see it. For the first time, I see the pregnancy in my sister, while I suffer the consequences.

It's a small bump that pushes out against her brown leathers, but it's large enough that I notice it, and I falter. Firm and round, not a food belly, not true weight—and I think of that moment at the table in our home gardens before I signed as her second; how I assessed her belly then, wondered on her weight gain, and still pressed that quill to the parchment.

Fool, fool, fool.

The realization of it hits me with the violence of a wave crashing against a cliff. I nearly stagger on the spot from the force of it.

Was she pregnant then, when I signed my life away?

Burns of nausea itch at my throat and chest.

I swallow the sensation down and fall back into step.

The clopping of my boots on the hardwood floor alerts them to my presence. Pandora looks up but makes no move to push from the door.

Her expression softens.

Father is the one to move for me.

His stony face reveals nothing. He takes two steps then reaches out his hand for mine. It's not an offering, it's nothing of warmth or comfort—it's a command. Come.

He wants to make sure I attend the healer appointment, that I fulfil the physicals needed for the Sacrament. Thinks I'll turn and run. Not a hint of worry revealed on his schooled expression.

My mind flickers to Taroh—and I suspect now more than ever that father won't help me there. He loves me, but I only exist because he decided on a child with a future he could control, and better for him that I was born female, because I became a valuable daughter to sell to a husband.

Now he sells me to the Sacrament.

Snubbing father's command, I soothe blooming aches with a flattened hand on my breastbone and rub, as if to massage out any of the knots of hurt fastening inside of me.

I don't meet their gazes as I wander in through the open door. My shoulder brushes the toned bicep of Pandora's arm.

I feel the sigh deflate her.

Quiet, they shadow me inside.

Without waiting to be asked, I perch myself on the end of a treatment bed and let the healer come to me.

Then I become a pincushion.

For the full Warmth and Breeze, I'm subjected to all sorts of tests and tortures. My crevices are inspected with black metal instruments, cold against my flesh; strands of my hair are dipped into potions for the healer to tell me I need to drink more water, less honeywine; and the heat of the palmstone that's massaged all over my body does something to my bones, like melts and vibrates and soothes them all at once.

Hours later, and I still feel wobbly on my feet. My bones still hum. My skin is still prickled. But nothing is more uncomfortable than the presence of my family around me.

I don't know who I'm most angry with. I only know I hate them both this phase.

Father, who sells me to the Sacrament and—if I survive—a cruel marriage to Taroh. Pandora, who signed onto the Sacrament without taking care to have her husband eat the seed, protect herself against the one thing that would throw me into war in her place.

It's a battle that I get the all-clear for.

The healer spares another slight lecture about proper hydration and rest, but that's all, and I'm free to head to the scribes now.

Father and Pandora escort me through the garrison to the library, and they shadow me through that appointment, too.

The scribes don't care enough to lecture me. They don't care much for anything. Their only duty to me right now is to detail the expectations I should have for the first passage.

Like every Sacrament before—at least in the scrolls I've read and the stories I've heard in my short life—all contenders are to find their dragon eye. Without it, they can't reach the end of the second passage, they can't reach the mountaintop safely without falling into the split earth.

Not all contenders are to talk to Mother. The litalves, we all know, compete to fight against the dokkalves, just to stop them from nearing Mother's slumber. The bloodshed, the battles, it's all soothing to the nature of our warriors. But it's not the goal.

I wonder if I would survive the passages if I found a hidden spot and bunkered down. But then, what would protect me from the contenders?

The scribes don't even bother telling me anything about the second passage. Surely they know as well as all others do—I won't survive the first.

But I stole a bargain. I paid the price, willingly, for escape.

So I only tune in and out of what I already know of the first passage. All contenders go through this, the rundown. Just as all contenders give the blood sacrifice.

That time has come for me.

With the Sacrament so close now, I must give my blood. So it's my place as Pandora's second to come up to the chalice on the desk.

On the other side of the solid stone desk, I look into the shadowy hoods of an iilra and a scribe. Their faces are hidden from me, their hands wrapped in bandage-like gloves, as they each reach for the chalice.

The scribe presses her bandaged fingers to the pearlescent side of the chalice. "Narcissa Elmfield."

The iilra touches the grainy black side. "Daughter of Brok Elmfield."

For a fleeting moment, it's strange to me that the iilra stand here to open the Sacrament with the scribes. Shouldn't it be the Four Sisters who stand with the iilra? But then, there is no magick needed here beyond the enchanted chalice, this is ceremonial, even if it feels like I'm signing my name again, only this time with pieces of my soul and drops of my blood.

Together, the scribe and iilra speak, "Second to Pandora Elmfield."

The shadowy hoods nod in perfect synchronicity, an unspoken order.

I lift both my hands and reach out.

Palms turned upwards, I hover them above the empty ink-and-ruby-stained chalice—blood from earlier contenders, dark and light fae, black and red blood.

Behind me, a sharp intake of breath comes from Pandora. I set my jaw and fix my stare on the two daggers that the iilra and scribe raise.

Father swallows. It's loud and choked enough that I hear it, though he's some paces behind me.

Maybe he does care, I let myself wonder. And he's only composed to help me find my own strength.

The voices of the two opposite me wind together in a gravelly, disinterested hum, "You offer your blood to the Gods beneath the Mountain of Slumber, but it is theirs to spill should they please."

I wince as the blades press against the meat of my palms. At first, my skin fights the indent, but soon blood beads—then spills freely.

"You promise your soul to Mother, but it was hers since its creation."

I watch as the daggers are placed on the desk before they each take my hands, then tilt them. Crimson blood pours into the chalice.

"You bid your bones and flesh to the Sacrament, but they have always belonged to the earth."

Those words roll over me like waves.

Sound echoes in my ear, near-deafened by a sudden ringing noise. I stagger on the spot.

"Narcissa Elmfield," their distant-sounding voices snare around me, winding through the gaps between the pulses of my heartbeat in my head, "welcome to the Sacrament."

One final pulse slams through me.

I smack into the edge of the table, a bite of pain at my hipbones.

Dazed eyes fight against the white glare of glowjars and I blink, squeezing my lids shut on the blinding gleams.

My breath ribbons out of me, shaky and unravelled. Then firm hands find my shoulders, taking them in a steadying grip.

My lashes flutter open.

Already, the scribe and iilra have left me at the table. The chalice is gone, and all I see is a glimpse of their tattered cloaks disappearing through curtains before I recognize the scent closest to me: Apples, honey and earth.

Pandora holds me steady by the shoulders.

My face contorts into a scowl.

Turning my vicious look on her, I jerk my shoulders hard enough to pull out of her hold. My narrowed stare is a set of vicious swords spearing into her. But I only waste it on her saddened eyes for a mere moment before I stumble around her, then start for the door.

I don't make it.

Father's command hits me like a punch to the back, "You will leave when you are dismissed, child."

Face twisted, my hands fist at my sides. But I don't take another step, not even as I catch a glimpse of the familiar male out in the corridor.

Eamon reclines against the far wall, waits for me—and his soft jawline tightens. It tightens for the light male that brushes by me.

Ridge, a litalf from home, sweeps out through the doors with such a soft breeze that I know he's intentionally keeping his exit gentle for my benefit. A small kindness in a garrison of cruelty.

Eamon's gaze cuts to the pale, pink-haired male for a beat, a moment long enough to pinch his cheeks with a blush, but then that moment shatters—

It's gone when Ridge takes a turn around the door and disappears with silent bootsteps.

Eamon cuts his stare back to me. His eyes are embers in a fire pit the very second that father moves for me.

I feel him come up to my back, just a step closer, but a step that shudders command through my stiff shoulders.

I don't turn around, not even as his next words come with a strained voice, as though he's almost desperate. "I tried all that I could. I tried to save you from this fate."

Eamon gives me strength with his hard gaze. He aims it at me through the doorway, but it's for my father, and I know that. Even Pandora, his old friend, gets the cold shoulder from Eamon in the corridors of the garrison.

They can't see that he's out there, not from the angle they lurk at behind me. But I know, and it's enough to fuel the fire in me, like he's standing beside me, holding my hand through this moment I've avoided.

I speak through gritted teeth, "It's not that you didn't save me from this. But that you didn't try to prevent it." I answer my father, but I address Pandora too. I look over my shoulder at her and my face pulls tight, strainedlike my heart. "Did you know what you were doing with my life, my future when you stopped taking the potion—or when Ronan decided to forget the seed before he visited you?"

Pandora's dark brown hair is folded back into a plaited ponytail, one so tight that it pulls on the skin of her face. Her chin lifts, a slight reaction, but one that adds to the stern look she gives me.

My body turns towards them, and I take a single step closer to my stone-faced sister. "Did you both laugh at my fate, that I would die doing what you would survive? Your weakling of a sister, right? That's what you think of me, what you've always thought of me. Nari gets what she deserves, finally."

Pandora moves for me.

I take a hard step back and lean my weight onto that one boot. My sneer falters her.

"Ronan is taking the seed," Pandora's tone comes out like a sheet of glass, and I find nothing to be sorry about it. "How this happened, Nari… I can't explain because I do not know. It might have been a bad batch of the seed. At the bases, we can't always know what's effective—"

I lift my chin, as though defiant, as though tears don't slip from my watery eyes and run down my blotchy cheeks. "How many others became pregnant from that base and the bad seed?"

Her throat bobs—and that hard swallow is answer enough.

"None?" I arch a brow. "Just you? How fucking convenient."

Father's harsh scoff silences me.

Even Pandora drops her gaze to the floor between us.

"Our predicament is unwanted." Father keeps his stance, he doesn't move for me, doesn't offer his hand in comfort like he would have done when I was a child. His eyes have darkened into pits of mud. "However," he adds, and the chill of his voice bolts my muscles to my bones, "it does not excuse the troubling reports I have heard."

My mind is flung to Daxeel.

I blink on the image of him standing over me, then the flash of him between my legs.

I steel myself against the memories.

I hold father's stare.

Father fights the snarl that tugs at his upper lip. "You promised you would stay away from him."

Hands still fisted at my sides, blood pools at my palms, some trails threading through my fingers. Fleetingly, I think I might need a salve for these cuts from the iilra and scribe.

But I force myself to stand in this moment, to weave around the truths and lies I'll need to quell father's wrath.

My promise to him isn't what he thought it was. My wording was careful.

‘I can promise to turn my back on him if he speaks to me.'

"Did I?" Droplets of blood hit the floorboards. I only look at father. "I promised I would walk away if he spoke to me. He hasn't."

A lie, a lie, a lie.

One I wouldn't have dared chance with Eamon out in the hall, but he knows—he figured out my deceit and loves me still.

Father knows nothing about it, and so he takes my words as truth.

His mouth flattens into a hard line.

I can't tell if he looks defeated or infuriated.

He wouldn't know anything about Daxeel and me. He only suspects, and that's just not enough.

Beyond our spat in the hall, when I called him a bedder, Daxeel only spares his words on me when we're tucked away into a private moment, all because he can't chance any of his own kind seeing him with me like that, forgiving me for my horrors against him.

My voice is thick as I add, "I can't help that he's friends with my friends. Trust me when I tell you this, father, Daxeel's hate for me runs as deep as you wanted it to when you forced me to break his heart."

Those tears have trickled into my chest where they've gathered into an ache that reminds me of a cold.

Father just watches me, considers me with a distance that only stirs that ache deeper than it needs to be.

Some moments pass before Pandora steals her moment back. "Let me train you, Nari," and that pleading hitch returns to her voice. "You go into this fate too willingly. If you let me teach you—"

"Then what?" I snap, face burning hot. "I might stand a chance? How? Will some lessons of how to hold a knife teach me to fight those other contenders—" my voice rises into a shout "—those fucking warriors? What can you teach me that means I can stand against a dark one when they decide to hunt me down," and I growl out my next words with a snarl turned on father, "because of what I did to Daxeel?"

The truth of it strikes father's complexion ashy.

A slight like that from one like me against one like Daxeel…

All the dark males will be after me in that first passage, and we all know it. I shamed him, his status, and his kind. Of course they don't know about our evate bond—and I truly believe that's the core reason Daxeel hinted at a bargain. His animalistic need to save me.

My snarl turns on Pandora, "I'll die within the minute."

Pandora's face twists, but not with pain or hurt or shame, like it should. It twists with a snarl of her own and she's fast to move for me, until she's towering over me, her sharp finger jabbing into my shoulder.

I wince with a stumble.

"How can anyone feel sorry for you," she hisses at me, "when you do that plenty for yourself? No one else seems to be allowed to pity you, let alone help you—all you want to do is wallow. You are a stubborn child, Nari, a brat."

My eyes turn wild as I suck in a deep, sharp breath, as if to soothe the surge of rage that tickles my chest. "Feel sorry for myself?" I shriek and push up on my toes to meet her towering height.

But before I can scream another word, she shouts down at me—

"You're not the only one paying for this, Nari! I've lost everything. My career, my future, my sister—"

The screech that rips through me is the shriek of a banshee. My face turns purple as I scream into her face. And that's all I do. Lean up on my toes, bloodied hands fisted, and I just scream.

Pandora pales and steps back.

Father moves for me, as if to snatch me by the arm, as if to punish me, but I am so beyond the point of behaving, the acceptance of his punishments.

I just scream until my throat can't do it anymore and I'm left panting, heaving like a wild beast.

I care nothing at all about Eamon who's come up to the doorway, close enough to my back now that I can smell his cologne, or even the scribes, iilra and some contenders watch us.

I care only about the words that growl savagely from my bared teeth, "You lost career offers you might have gotten in the Sacrament. Is that what you lost? I'm to die—die! And you think of your career?"

Eyes still wild, I pause to draw in a deep breath through flaring nostrils, and I'm sure I look absolutely mad.

I lift my hand, letting the blood spill to my boots, and I point at her.

"I hope your child is ugly," I curse her, and she blanches. Then I swerve my finger at father who looks torn between a backhand and a cuddle, "and I hope you do better at protecting that child than you've ever done for me."

I only get to see father's eyes shut on the pain of my words before Eamon's slender hand snatches my wrist—and he's stealing me out into the corridor.

Neither father nor Pandora follow us.

Not as I stagger to keep up with Eamon's brisk, long strides. Not as the tears flow so freely that I'm blind without Eamon leading me.

No one comes after me, and I know now more than ever that Eamon is my family, my only true family, and he's the only family I'll ever recognize again.

I make that decision as he drags me through the garrison, the courtyard, around the battle blocks, and takes me blubbering at his side all the way to the edge of the Gilded Glade.

There, he pulls my back against his spine, and his arms come around me.

I scream into the air.

Eamon holds me.

Gilded the glade is. A fitting name.

Before I came to the darkness in the Midlands, I never expected the beauty of the dark to meet the splendour of the light. I always thought it cold and harsh and unforgiving.

But now, in the light of golden skinned fruits that hang too low from the branches ahead, and the specks of gold glitter dusted all over the grass and dirt, I realize just how deep Pandora's words struck me.

Wallowing in my own self-pity.

It's true. Not just because she believed what she said, but because it is exactly what I've been doing. Even if it's justified, I have only seen my own dark, not the light, not anyone else's shading.

"I'm a wretched friend," I sigh the words out with that ragged, post-sob voice of mine. "Since I found out about Taroh, this has all been about me."

"You are selfish," Eamon says but it's not an insult or a complaint, he just speaks it, and still he holds me.

"Talk to me about you…" Sounds like my voice was dragged over a grater. "Not to distract me from myself. I want to know. Is it hard for you here? Do you loathe it? Love it? Do you have many males in your bed? What new books do you read that you haven't told me about?"

"Or," he offers before I can ramble on any more, "why not ask how it is for me to be the babysitter of two stubborn, young females who can't seem to keep out of trouble?"

"Or," I add in a whisper with a bitter smile, "do you love me less now that you have her?"

He grins against my temple, then laughs something curt. "I enjoy my time with her. I adore Aleana, but this phase she spends with her mother in Kithe. I can't say I wasn't relieved to come to you alone."

My grim smile softens.

Our time, shared alone. It's special to me, as it is to him.

Sometimes, we sit together in silence. We snack on the latest fruit imports, or wander markets, explore the seaside, sit in fields and read our separate books. Other times, we sneak off to the human lands we explore.

Always, since we met, we have our moments, our time.

This phase, it's exactly what I need.

"The timing was fortunate," he adds softly, as soft as his rough voice can be, "for Aleana to stay home. I'm all yours, selfish Nari."

I don't want the conversation to be steered back to me, I want to know more about the friend I've been neglecting too long.

"Maybe you only came up here to see Ridge," I comment, and I feel his smile tug against my temple at the mention of the pink-haired litalf.

"How do you know him?" he asks.

"He was an apprentice to the village guard." I tuck my knees up to my chest. "I was a child in the year or so he was around. I met him when I slipped on the mud and went tumbling down the hill after a rainstorm."

"Hm?" A tired prompt.

"Ridge came out into the rain," I tell him. "He helped pick up my things. Then he walked me home. That's all I know of Ridge."

That, and that he has the softest shade of pink hair, so pale it's almost blonde in the moonlight, and that his nose—while sharp and arched—is a little crooked, like it's been broken a few times and not properly tended to by a healer, but likely a house servant. I know his complexion is like the marble of the High Court, like the sun is trapped within it, and the marble can do nothing less than glow. He has that glow about him, a dewiness to his skin, a prettiness so perfect for drawing in prey.

And now, he's a contender.

But Eamon thinks of a different identifier—

"So he is kind," Eamon decides.

I frown at the tree ahead. Not because ‘kind' for a fae means something else entirely to what a human might think kindness is, but because of how Eamon says it… like he actually cares about Ridge being kind.

I thought he only wanted to bed him.

"You like him," I whisper, the realization striking me.

Never before has Eamon actually liked anyone, not enough at least for him to consider more than a fling. But that smile is still pressed against my temple, and I know he is guilty of my accusation.

He doesn't deny it.

"Have you done sex together?" I ask.

"No," he says then sighs, and his arms come away from me. He leans back on his elbows, his hold dissipating.

I recline until my spine flattens on his chest, and I'm lounging against him like a pile of stacked cushions.

At this angle, I can still see the tree, but I need lower my gaze—almost looking down my body—to watch it rustle in the stagnant breeze, the kind of wind that gathers around but doesn't quite move, a sort of tense air I've only ever felt in the darkness.

"I didn't know him at home," he tells me. "Saw him sometimes at the court, but never talked. Now, he flirts with his eyes, often, but not anything more than that."

I think on it a moment. I think of when Ridge lifted me up from the mud I was slicked in, head to toe, and the black apple he had in his grip as he did it…

"He liked black apples. Every time I saw him, he had one… those filthy ones that come from the Wastelands, and they taste like ink and all things sour?"

White skin, black flesh, these apples make the potent drink viskee, the sort of drink that would have a halfling like me scaling castle walls, hallucinating that armoured goblins were chasing me. Fullbloods only for viskee, and even then, it's a dark fruit, so better left to the dokkalves.

Still, Ridge always had a black apple in hand.

Eamon hums. He knows the ones I mean.

"They probably sell viskee in some taverns down in Kithe," I add with a smile, and I sense he smiles too. "In case that information helps you at all."

But neither of us speak more on it.

In silence, we rest.

I don't feel the violence of the First Wind protected by all the trees around me.

I don't relax. I feel more like an extinguished candleflame, or that my body has been muted in existence for a while. My tears dry up, my face slackens, and for a long while, I just watch forest critters skitter around the glade.

I don't think anything of the Sacrament just around the corner, only three phases from me now.

I don't do anything but exist—barely.