3

the night I chose the dark

TEN YEARS EARLIER

The torn bark of the oak tree scratches at my spine.

“They have invaded our field too long. Will this ghastly Eclipse end already? If it is not over now, then it is not soon enough.”

I slump against the tree.

Arms folded over my middle, I hug stacks of parchment and folded star maps to my chest.

“Look at them, their arrogance .” I can practically hear Lilith’s lip curl over her teeth. “Hiding in the shade but crushing our grass.”

Idly, my thumb toys with the curled edge of parchment.

Lilith sucks in a sharp breath before her hushed tone hitches into a squeak of outrage. “Did you see that? He kicked it. He intentionally killed that darling flower.”

I listen as Lilith hisses under her breath from the next tree over, but my attention is on the ones she is in a twist about: the dark ones. Dokkalves young enough to attend our lessons in the night—those who aren’t yet full warriors or in their chosen careers.

In these efforts of friendship between our kinds, for the treaty, the dark ones infiltrate our field.

And not everyone is pleased about it.

I am less slighted by their presence.

I watch them.

Some prowl in the shade beneath the oak trees across the glade. Their boots are silent on the blades of grass they crush under their weight, their leathers melted into the wispy dark of night, but not a full darkness, not like the one they belong to. Our night is speckled with bright stars and a gleaming moon so close to our lands that, when I was a youngling, I believed Pandora when she teased that if I jumped high enough I could one day touch the surface.

I tried that more often than I’d like to admit. Jumped on the tips of hills, the peaks of towers, stretched my arms up too high from the tips of trees.

Suppose that’s how I came to love heights as I do. Suppose that’s how I came to be the climber I am.

I don’t see the dark ones doing such silly things. I don’t see him believing such silly things.

Daxeel .

I’ve seen him around since he broke Taroh’s nose in the statue gardens of the High Court. But since he walked me to my home village, I haven’t spoken to him. Not a word shared beyond our fleeting looks.

But I have learned more about this dark male.

Daxeel of the House of Taraan.

Eamon’s cousin. One of the three who live in Kithe, a lawless and blended town in the Midlands. A cousin Eamon so strongly urged me away from, warned me of the dark fae’s nature.

But is this male’s nature so rotten?

He saved me from Taroh. He walked me home. And he has only looked my way since, held my gaze for some moments, but graced me with the space still between us.

It’s a new experience for me, to be afforded this power, the authority in my hands. I’m the one who decides when we speak, when we hold each other’s stares, for how long, and I give no invitation for him to approach me… and so he doesn’t.

Even now, as I lean against the coarse trunk of the oak tree, the gleam of the moonlight flickering through the thinning leaves above me, and my lilac skirt rises from the friction, just above the line of my stocking, and his gaze burns into the meat of my thigh from across the glade—

Even now, he doesn’t make a move to approach me.

I think it something unusual. Sweet, perhaps. Or is it a foreign sort of kindness that he affords me this… this… respect ?

A respect my father doesn’t offer me when he shoves me into the arms of Taroh, a respect Taroh doesn’t give when he forces himself onto me because I am his future property.

Eamon warned me of the dark nature prowling within these males, including his cousin. But I have seen nothing to frighten me away from him.

I only feel drawn in. Invited.

“Look at that,” the pure venom of Lilith’s hiss stiffens me, a snake’s hiss before it strikes. “I didn’t know she practices whoring.”

I turn a narrowed look on her.

My mouth puckers at the sight of them, some light ones huddled under these sparsely leafed oak trees that the dark fae didn’t want to take shelter under, because of their poor shade from the moonlight.

Isha dangles from the thick branch of the tree, his boots not far above the reddish hair of Griselda, a fellow halfling.

She’s tucked to the edge of a mushroom plot, picking her favourites.

The woodland-light fae hybrid who kneels at her side watches her every move—and just as I wonder if he carries a flame for her, he snatches out, fast. His hand draws back from her wild, reddish hair, and pinched in his fingers is a small pixie.

He bites the head clean off.

I drift my attention to Lilith.

She fingers a ribbon at her cocked hip, but her eyes are daggers aimed across the glade.

It’s Fyn who hangs on her every word. He stands behind her, arms looped around her middle, and his chin rests on her shoulder.

His agreement only comes in the occasional hum.

It’s enough to encourage her in all her poison.

I trace her gaze across the field to the black, glossy boulder.

There, in the cusp of shade and moonlight, Aisla flirts with a dark male. Sat on the boulder, her knees are tucked to her chest, and she aims her silly smile at the dark one who circles her, slow and predatory.

Skin like marble, in tone and strength, he wears his inky leathers with a stark contrast that reminds me of the moon against the blanket of a night sky.

There is something uneasy about this male. More than the golden gleam of his eyes, one I don’t trust and that sucks my insides deeper into me, as though my organs ache to retreat from him, its his smile that tenses me. It’s a smile that spreads over white teeth, sharper canines at the rear of his mouth, rosy lips that look somewhat stained with litalf blood…

And I know, deep in my gut, it's a smile made for biting hearts.

He runs his hand through his thick mess of tousled, black hair, then leans in closer to the litalf he’s lured across the lesson’s glade. He whispers words I suspect are sweet nothings into her ear, and I do not trust him one bit.

Dare, his name is.

A friend of Daxeel, a soul-brother, like Eamon is to me.

For the Fae Eclipse, he doesn’t stay at the barracks, he stays with Eamon and his family, and I wonder if it’s crammed in his home now, or if they all fit in it comfortably since it’s such a large manor.

My home might collapse with that many folk in it.

Still, it might be a nice way to live. The song of laughter and chatter in the corridors, a full dining room with clinking glasses and friendly smiles. My home is quiet. Awfully quiet.

Lilith’s sugar-slicked drawl creeps into my thoughts. It snares my attention whole.

“Is Aisla not bedding Prince Affay? Suppose to be a prince does not mean to be a satisfactory lover.”

I hate this female. It shows in the roll of my eyes before I exhale my exhaustion of her.

First time I met Lilith, years ago in lessons, we sat together. Our friendship made it to the first break just after dusk, and she looked me dead in the eye, then said ‘you are too poor and too halved to be this ugly.’

I know she meant my heart.

I was quiet the rest of that lesson. Then I went home and cried. I thought of all the ways I would get her back. Cut her hair in lessons when she drifted off to sleep, or pour honey in her bag in bee season, or just push her into the bog some distance out into the woods.

But I never got the chance. The next lesson came, she was surrounded by more folk, and I sat alone.

It’s been that way ever since.

Even now, the space around her is peppered with litalves, changelings, halfbreeds, all hanging on her every word.

And I stand alone at the next tree over.

He is alone, too.

Daxeel.

Not alone in the way that I am.

I don’t fool myself in finding isolation misery in him.

His peers like him, respect him. But he separated himself, as he always does when the dark fae invade our lessons just after dusk, and he fell onto his back under the thick leaves of a bushy tree, near where the wild daffodils grow.

He keeps to the border of moonlight, just out of the white wash of light, but close enough that he could reach out and touch the gleam with his honey-toned hand.

I wonder if he does that for me.

An invitation to join him.

He might think he is less intimidating if he is alone. But I’m not so sure I agree. Each and every one of them frightens me to my bones, alone or together, it makes little difference.

The way I see it is, if I stumbled onto a lone dokkalf in the woods, I would run just as fast as though it were a group of them.

Thoughts of fleeing are severed when the ugly clang of metal rattles the glade.

The lecturer rings the triangle.

Gasps and snarls rise up like a barbed cloud over the tensing litalves.

The lecturer lifts the little metal triangle, a cruel glint in his whitish eyes, then he hits it again, once, twice, and by the third time it’s feeling too much like a bell.

My upper lip curls over my teeth.

Over my shoulder, a litalf hisses with the same reaction, Isha clammers out of the tree.

The hybrid lecturer smirks something small, then tosses aside the thrumming triangle.

Lessons are to begin.

A rustle shudders through the edge of the glade; the light ones moving for their groups and their favoured spots to lounge and sprawl out in the night air.

Normally, I sit here. Sometimes alone, sometimes with Griselda. But always here, under the oak tree with the least number of branches and the murkiest, crispiest leaves, always just barely clinging to life. I choose this one because I like the caress of the moonlight on my skin, but I also like the trunk of the tree to lean my spine on.

But this lesson, this night, I push away from the familiar bark that scrapes against my back, because somehow—the call of his cobalt eyes that gleam from natural dark hues—feels warmer than to stick with my kin.

I stride across the glade.

My boots flatten on the lush, dewy grass.

Stares latch onto me from all over and my heartbeat tangles with my bootfalls.

Thump, thump, thump.

Each step draws in another stare, until I’m nearing the thick row of trees on the other side, and every single fae is watching me cross the unofficial border between light and dark.

My chin is lifted, my face impassive, and I feel the defiance in my gaze—the gaze that’s locked onto cerulean eyes, like merfolk caught on hooks.

I breach the barrier.

I walk the field into enemy territory. I hold my shoulders firm and confident, my steps don’t falter, and I give nothing away as I march for the dark one who lounges under the shade of the oak tree, near the wild daffodils.

I’m sure they all hear it: the rapid pounding of my heart, the uneasy twist of my insides, the breath pinned to my chest.

I don’t let them see how afraid I am as I approach Daxeel.

He just watches me.

The natural smudges of darkness somehow brighten the deep hues of his eyes. I feel his gaze ripple over me.

My chin tenses just a little, a crack in my mask of courage. But I push on and reach the edge of the shade.

His eyes lift as I come up to his boots.

Still, he only watches me, silent.

I say nothing as I drop to my knees beside him, then spread out my star map over the grass. His stare burns into me, searing my already hot cheek, as does every other stare in this glade. But I sniff back the nerves bundling inside of me, lay out my parchments and inked quills, then I sprawl out on my front.

I rest my chin on the heel of my palm and pretend to read the star map. Really, I’m hiding the heat of my face from all this attention—and I loathe every second of it.

Movement ripples at my side.

I go rigid all over, toes curled in the confines of my leather boots.

Beside me, Daxeel lowers himself to lie flat on his back. A slight gesture, one that assures me, soothes me. He won’t challenge my proximity, he’s at ease with me.

I am welcome.

It’s a feeling that has my brows furrowed. The puzzled look is fixed on the star map, chin pressed into the heel of my palm.

I throw him a side-glance.

Daxeel just flicks his gaze to me for a heartbeat, just a split moment in time. But in that moment, a small smile ghosts over his lips—then it’s gone.

I don’t speak to him.

He doesn’t speak to me.

I am sprawled out on my front. He lounges on his back.

I keep to the moonlight. He sticks to the shade.

Yet we spend the lesson side-by-side, in silence.

The first of many times we spent lessons together.