6

In the three phases that I’ve been here, Daxeel has stayed true to his word. He isn’t around much at all.

I have seen him only twice. Once in passing at breakfast, the other at dinner. He didn’t so much as look my way either time.

Aleana has kept to her bed, as the healer ordered, and the halls of Hemlock House are thick with shadows, and still with silence.

It feels nothing like being in a home, but more in lodge in the dead of off-season. Much too quiet, and I’m much too alone.

This phase is no different.

Outside, the tree trunks no longer creak in the First Wind that has just passed, the leaves have stopped rustling, and no bootsteps clack and clock on the stone street through the little window wedged up the kitchen wall.

Loneliness comes stronger with the muted air.

It’s a strange way to feel, like I’m so unwanted by the one I love that I search for him in every shadow of the long, dark corridors whenever I go for a wander, or that I look up at anyone who enters the dining hall only to deflate in my chair as in-steps Rune or Dare or Eamon or Melantha—anyone but Daxeel.

He warned me that he wouldn’t be around much.

Still, I lean more towards the belief that he’s simply avoiding me.

I don’t chase him down. I let him evade me.

Dare’s advice sticks with me, all the way down to the kitchens, somewhere between a dungeon and a basement.

The early hour of the Quiet has the kitchens clear of any slaves. They must have retired for their rest. Most in Hemlock have found their beds. The halls of the home are asleep already, since most of the doors I passed on the way down were shaded deep hues of slumbering blue.

I don’t find rest.

I instead search for the late snack I am so used to.

Times like these, I miss Knife, that little beast, because no matter how grotesque he is, no matter how many times he has bitten my ankles with his metal teeth, or how hard I kick when I knock him down some stairs, he has always had my late-night snack prepared and waiting for me in my bedchamber.

Now, I find the snack myself.

I plate up some soft cheese, strips of ham, and caramel almonds.

As I dust sugar over the plate, soft bootfalls echo down the long corridor, a hallway that connects the foyer stairs to the kitchens, and nowhere else.

I don’t look up as the late wanderer approaches. Instead, I am delicate as I place three juicy dates on the plate.

The intruder hesitates in the archway for a moment.

Then a familiar sword of a voice cuts through the dim candlelight of the kitchens, “We have slaves for that.”

The mere sound of Melantha’s voice tenses my shoulders.

My chin stays tucked. I don’t lift my gaze to her.

I tidy the strips of cured ham into a neat row on the plate, making sure they don’t touch the wedges of cheese I have delicately placed on the bread, and then I reinforce the separation of the dates from the savoury snacks with a dividing stick of crystallised sap.

“I am one,” I murmur, hushed by the caution that tenses me against Melantha’s presence.

And still, I can’t help but sass her.

Rune’s words echo in my mind, ‘ you make a habit of this’ , of getting myself into bother, and I find that he might be right.

Soft, stealthy bootsteps resume.

Finally, I glance up.

Melantha’s gaze sears into me as she moves for the scratched table against the wall. She only cuts her stare away when she starts to peel off her gloves, finger by finger.

Heat itches at my face. Cheeks as hot as the embers that gleam in the hearth, I decide I loathe to be caught like a youngling whose hand is stuck in a jar of honey, bee-stings all over, and the gleam of greed in its eyes.

Gluttonous, she likely thinks of me.

She would be right, but still, the shame lingers.

I take my plate and make to draw away from the bench. I have every intention of stealing the snack away to my bedchamber. But I make it back one step when Melantha tuts a disapproving sound that steels me.

Her cheek to me, she reaches out for the woodboard in the middle of the table, where the water-jug stains are at their worst, and she steals a slice of bread from the cut loaf.

I chew on the inside of my cheek for a moment.

There is no doubt that the tut was meant to stop me from leaving the kitchens.

But only Daxeel can command me.

I hesitate on it a moment. My hands clutch the rim of the cold, porcelain plate, ready to set it down at the table and join her as she’s indirectly ordered, but the stiffness of my legs are unmoving, as though they will only cooperate with me if it’s to turn around the bench and walk me out of the kitchens.

“I see you share my habit of a bite before bed,” she drawls, lifeless, and lifts her hand to gesture to the wooden chair across the table—a signal to sit. “I do not like that we have this mutual practice.”

The stone floor is cold against the soles of my feet.

I welcome the sharp, chilly nips as though it’s a pain I deserve, or at least one that offers enough of a distraction from the writhing of my stomach.

I force my legs to move—and they grudgingly take me to the table.

I slink into the chair opposite her.

Still, she doesn’t look at me.

Melantha pours out two mugs of poppy tea, the steam wispy enough that I know it’s cooled in the pot that’s been left on the table for however long.

The slaves must do this before each Quiet, prepare some foods and teas to leave out for Melantha.

Stiff on the chair, my toes flex, then curl, flex, then curl, under the shield of the table. I do loathe small talk. And with Melantha, I have not the faintest clue how to start it.

‘Where is your husband?’

‘Do you like it here in Kithe?’

‘Are you afraid that all your children are going to die by the end of the month?’

My mouth flattens on my weak ideas. I keep to silence.

Melantha butters her bread slice. Just that act alone reminds me all over again of that effortless bludgeoning energy of hers, like she herself is a mallet.

I start to pick at my nails.

The unease in my gut, like snakes have taken up residence and formed a pit, means my snack goes untouched.

“Agnar will come for the final passage,” she says, and it’s all too casually conversational for my comfort. “It is doubtful he will reside in Hemlock, but he might visit this home once or twice.”

I eye her closely, the way she smears a black paste over the buttered bread, a bitter paste that stinks of those kars and their thick smog in the human lands.

My mouth turns down at the idea of General Agnar in this house.

General Agnar is her husband and Daxeel’s father, this I already know, but the lull goes on a moment too long, and I think she expects me to play this game of chat with her.

“Your husband?” I prompt.

She lifts her inky eyes to me. “Agnar is not to be spoken to. He is not to be acknowledged,” she tells me, and there is a warning in her tone, like a blade’s edge before she adds, “and not to be sassed. That will only accomplish bloodshed.”

My bloodshed.

In answer, I nod.

There is no snark to my expression, no moody pout to my lips.

She doesn’t command me for the sake of it, she warns me.

I note the difference.

Inkpots for eyes, she holds my stare.

I swallow under the assault of her gaze, then look down at my untouched plate.

My mouth wets at the sight of those cured ham strips, the healthy hue of glazed rose.

“I never wanted them.”

I gulp down the gathered drool in my mouth. A frown starts to knit on my brow. Then I lift my stare to Melantha’s unwavering one.

“My children,” she adds. “Perhaps that is the reason they are all doomed.”

Blankly, I just stare at her.

“Fated for ruin,” she muses, and I don’t at all get the sense that she’s more speaking to herself than me. Each word she delivers in this moment has intent, purpose. But what, I don’t know.

She clasps her teacup. “Mother mocks me with children I did not want, forced upon me, and who in time stole my love. Now, she wants to take them from me.”

Mute, I watch as she sips her tea, as casually as though we are merely discussing the phase just passed.

Forced upon me.

I don’t need more than a moment to understand what she’s telling me about the sort of male General Agnar is.

“I didn’t want to love them.” She sets down the cup, then pours a refill.

No steam comes from this serve.

We have sat here too long, the tea gone too cold.

“I tried not to.” The whisper of a smile flitters over her lips like a brushstroke. “I maintained indifference for Caius well enough. He is so like his father. But my Aleana, my Daxeel… One became my heart, the other became my soul.”

I scratch the edge of my chair.

No words gather in me to answer with.

What does one say to that, to any of it?

Melantha seeks no answer from me. Not yet.

She just stirs into her tea a heap of mulched stems. The small spoon clangs on the edges of the cup. “I knew when I birthed them, each one of them, what it meant. Agnar would destine them for the Sacrament. That is one of the reasons I fought my love for them.”

My lips tuck into my mouth and I bite down on them. I look at my plate.

For the first time since I sat at this table with her, I join her.

I take a wedge of cheese, then flatten it onto a ham piece. I roll the ham around to make a sandwich, then lift it to my mouth.

If I wasn’t sitting across from Melantha, but rather was enjoying this snack alone in my bedchamber, I wouldn’t be so polite in my nibbles. This entire chunk would be crammed into my mouth, whole.

Melantha sets down the spoon on the saucer. “I was to represent the Sgail bloodline in the Sacrament in my youth. So long ago now.” There is a hush to her tone now as distance flickers over the dark pits she wears for eyes. “Two hundred years and I have never stopped yearning for my place as a contender. But my time in the Sacrament never came.”

I swallow, hard. A heartbeat thumps in my chest. Another passes. Then a third before I chance my question, “What stopped you?”

Her smile is bitter. It’s stained with blood long washed away, but pain that can never be erased. “I was in love.”

Creases etch into my face, a mask of blatant confusion. In love with Agnar, I almost ask, but she answers my unspoken curiosities—

“Bracken,” she whispers the name that jolts my bones. “Together, Bracken and I were to win the Sacrament, and emerge with our hands joined. We planned to be the face of dokkalf victory.”

“Bracken,” I echo, a look of horror slacking my face. Second to General Caspan. The beast whose threat shudders my bones and chills my insides.

Then, as though fingers snap in my mind, I remember how often he looked over his shoulder at Melantha on the stands at the first passage; I remember the disdainful glares he threw Aleana’s way, all the contempt he carries for Daxeel—both children of the female he had, children who are not his own.

“Before the first passage could even begin…” She shakes her head. Fine strands of inky hair fall from her stern braid. “It was only the first ceremony when evate found me. I was looked upon by a general, a warlord with a reputation that frightened even me. Like other warlords, he came to assess the contenders. Once he found me and experienced evate, I was thrown in the dungeons beneath the streets of Kithe for the entire length of the Sacrament.”

I finish my tea, as smooth as lukewarm water pouring down my throat, but with a kick of the poppies that will ease me to sleep soon.

And I hang on her every word.

“Morticia had to take my place,” she sighs, and a weariness pinches her nose. “She was my second.”

Like me, Morticia signed as a second.

The pattern of it flutters my lashes with a faint flicker of surprise.

I never knew that about Morticia, that she competed in the Sacrament at all, let alone as a second to her sister.

Finally, Melantha starts on the bread slices she earlier painted black with the fume-ish smelling spread. Her sharp teeth sink into the cooked dough so easily that it almost seems to melt.

“Morticia was never like me,” she tells me after a firm swallow. “She fought in the Sacrament to survive, not to win.”

She’s like you .

That’s what she’s really telling me.

“It was at Comlar she met her litalf husband. They fell in love,” she adds with a look I can read only as distaste and arrogance. The racism of her judgement oozes from her like pus from a festering wound—and it aims right at me. “He saved her life in the first passage. At the end of the second, she ran off to be with him in Licht. I was released from the dungeons to find that the litalves had won the Sacrament, and I became a prisoner again. In marriage. In motherhood. In evate.”

“You couldn’t compete the next century?”

Her eyes narrow on me. “One can only sign their name once.”

I know this, so I deflate on the chair with a hint of shame that I even asked at all.

“Why are you telling me this?” I ask, hushed, and stare down at my plate. We both know she doesn’t feel any need to bond with me, to confide her past horrors in my pain.

With Melantha, there is agenda.

“When Agnar approached me in the throes of evate, I rejected him. I claimed my heart to belong to another. We were not alone when I shamed him.” Her eyes gleam. “The shame of slights are carried by all fae. But to dark males slighted by their evates …” She exhales a breath wrapped in tension, and I have this awful sense that maybe, maybe she worries for me. “That slight cannot be controlled by their wants and desires. It burns the soul, chars a piece of it—then that mark festers, it rots, and it consumes the bond.”

I do not eat more of my snack. The ham has warmed in the air of the kitchens, the cheese has started to sweat on the plate.

But I am hooked by the awful terribles she tells me.

“Evate is a curse.” She pushes aside her plate. Her jaw rolls before she plants her elbows on the table, brings her hands together in a clasp, then levels her stare with mine. “It stole me from the Sacrament—but to you, perhaps it saved me. Ask yourself, at what cost?”

I bite down on the inside of my cheek before I ask, “Are you warning me of your son and his cruel nature?”

“I am warning you of evate; of ownership and possession and primal rage that you think you understand, but you do not.” Her eyes flash, pits of tar caught in lightning storms. “I warn you that whatever move you think you are making, Daxeel sees it before you make it. He herds you, and you think your steps are of your own accord. He corners you, and you think you stand there willingly. That you drag my Aleana into this,” she spits the words with a curl of her lip and her voice drops to something gravelly, “is where my threat lies.”

Before she can elaborate on her sickly daughter, my intentions with her, I grunt a huffy sound and push away the empty teacup. “With respect, Melantha, my friendship with Aleana has little to do with Daxeel.”

“Little, but not nothing,” Melantha snarls, and her bones go rigid beneath her skin, like she’s about ready to pounce on me.

That is a fight I will lose, fast.

I fight the urge to roll my eyes, to sass. “I say little because I met her through our shared connections—” I’m silenced.

Melantha slams her hand down on the bench.

I flinch.

A hiss gurgles up her throat. “In your desperate attempts to meet any other fate but mine, if you so much as look at my daughter the wrong way, I will gut you.”

I snatch the plate from the bench, but I can’t find the strength to look at the dark female who watches me with eyes that reflect fiery embers.

“If Daxeel never existed, I would still love Aleana,” I say and scramble out of the chair. “I would want her as a sister. Like me she is overlooked and underestimated, and her ambitions are for happiness and nothing more. I respect that—I relate to that.” Finally, I lift my chin to stare down those searing eyes. “I’m sorry you think so poorly of me. You’re right to say I have talents of seduction, and that I yearn for the protection Daxeel can offer me—but I feel I’ve proven my worth and more now.” I watch her eyes dim, her brow furrow. “Have I not proven that I truly love him?”

She only considers me.

A hefty sigh deflates my chest and I start around the corner of the table for the archway. My voice is a murmur, “Not that any of it matters. I lost him a long time ago and…”

Shaking my head, I find her gaze again, unreadable. “Daxeel has lost whatever he once felt for me. I am not so sure anymore I can win it back. What you say—what you feel—about this evate business… you are right. It is poisoned, and I poisoned mine by my own hand. Daxeel might never forgive me, and so maybe we will always be ruined and I’m chasing ghosts.”

I swallow back the swell of thickness that suddenly appears in my throat, that decides to burn my eyes. “So please, Melantha, please let me at least keep my friendship with Aleana before she soon finds her peace.”

Melantha blinks—and she looks stricken as though I have just slapped her with a rotten slab of ham.

I don’t want her to see me cry. I turn my cheek. “I know she doesn’t have long,” I confess. “I love her better than I love my own sister. Aleana deserves more than she has gotten out of life. I will be her friend until her last breath—and beyond it.”

Melantha releases a long, steady breath as she sinks back into her chair. She studies me with a pensive silence, and it still isn’t friendly.

I doubt it ever will be friendly.

The best I can hope for with Melantha is civility.

So I bow my head and—plate firm in my steely grip—I stalk out of the kitchens. I only loosen the trembling breath that swarms in my chest when I’m in the foyer, a safer distance from the deadly beast lurking in the bowels of Hemlock.

For a few phases, I am either lounging around with Aleana in the gardens at the rear of the house, or hidden in the aisles of the library reading all that I can find about Kithe, the Mountain of Slumber, the Sacrament and evate.

And still, the hours are slow to pass.

The phases here are eternities.

I am a fae who sneaks out to field parties, runs off to explore the human lands, dances nights away at the High Court—but here, I am imprisoned.

So many parts of my life, of myself, have been stripped away.

I itch to go beyond Hemlock for a wander. Maybe stalk the streets of Kithe or sneak up to Comlar and join the dancers for a little while.

But Daxeel gave his command not to leave, and so I can’t.

Even just the thought of stepping out the front door has my muscles bolting to my bones, like they wouldn’t move if I begged them, like they fight the temptation rising through me.

Eamon should be my saviour of tedium. But I find he’s not in the house as much as I would like him to be. Maybe I regret a little that I guided him and Ridge together. Perhaps I should have waited until the Sacrament was done with, so I at least had Eamon’s undivided attention for this month.

Instead, this Breeze he’s off with Ridge to the Gloaming.

Maybe I would have been invited if Daxeel hadn’t commanded my confinement to Hemlock.

Fleetingly, I think of Melantha, of her confinement in a dungeon for the full two months of the Sacrament, then her imprisonment in marriage and evate. But I fast shove the thoughts from my mind as I wander out into the gardens tucked away at the back of the home.

Aleana is where she said she would be, and at the exact time we agreed to meet. But I don’t smile at the sight of her.

Rather, disappointment tugs my mouth down into a frown.

On the black swing bench, she’s sprawled out—and so deep in sleep that she’s borderline comatose.

The blue silk of her dress is bunched around her bruised knees, her sandals abandoned on the faint gleam of the muted stone beneath her, and she has her arm twisted at an odd angle to rest over her eyes.

The cooling breeze rustles her fine dark hair around her ears.

She sleeps through the tickle, the hum of her delicate snores entwining with the faint rustle of the wisteria that drapes all over the gardens like a roof of violet blooms.

A pause comes, and I stand on the steps at the backdoor.

I study her, the sickliness she suffers without all her tonics and potions, the true appearance beneath the balms and the lotions.

The depth of her ailment is clearer than it’s ever been before.

Her skin is so ashen, so bruised, that it twists my mouth.

Looks like a street artist wandered in, painted her grey, took a sponge to black dye, then blotted it all over her limbs.

A wretched twisting sensation rinses in my chest.

I start for the bench she’s sprawled out on.

The disappointment of her deep sleep turns my mouth down at the corners, yet I keep my steps soft as I approach, careful not to stir her.

I wear no sandals or boots, so the cool bite of the stone nips at the soles of my feet. The chill of the Breeze cascades over my pebbled flesh, but a sharp layer of frost prickles me as I pass the hefty trunk of the wisteria and, as I look around it, beyond the swing seat and blackfish pond, I spot the bulky silhouette of a male.

My face tightens.

Caius leans against the wrought metal fence.

The black arrowheads must dig into his back, but I’m certain he’s bulked with steel muscle and so doesn’t feel even a pinch.

I force a stiff smile in greeting. The corners of my mouth tuck into my cheeks with it, and I hate how it unnatural it feels on my face, like I’ve been wearing a mask at a ball all night, suffocating my skin and I itch to claw it off.

Caius only looks at me a moment before turning that gaze on Aleana.

He pushes from the black metal fence, and the faint shimmer of the wisteria blooms flicker over his cropped hair.

“You’ll watch her,” he says.

I’m not entirely sure that it’s a request, not an order.

What I am sure of is that he runs me over with a look dripping with enough disdain to wrinkle his crooked nose before he storms out of the gardens—and I mean storms , his boots kicking up fallen leaves and swirls of dust with his thumping steps.

I watch him go until he’s vanished through the parted glass doors, panelled with blackwood.

It’s only when he is gone from sight that I let a trapped breath whoosh out of me.

I don’t immediately move for the swing seat.

For a long pause, I stand rigid, narrowed eyes fixed on the darkness that Caius disappeared into, and my lips twitch into a fleeting, snarky smirk.

Melantha’s words come to mind, the ease in which she declared Caius her least favourite child.

I understand it.

I turn and duck under a particularly heavy drape of limp branches that hang like rope, violet flowers whispering all around. As I straighten my back and swat away the tickle of petals on my nose, the grunting of a beast thumps through the peaceful air.

I frown through the thicker shadows of dark beyond the metal fence.

Another grunt, not unlike that chesty thumping noise faerie hounds will sometimes make. It lures me a step closer.

I slip through the thicker wisteria drapes, and the moment they fall over my shoulders to caress my back, my sight adjusts to the faint light in the garden over.

Kalice’s garden.

Without a gleaming tree, the dark is dimmer there, thicker and with a weight to it, but I blink once, twice, and the faint emerald glow of the pond illuminates the garden enough—

Enough that I see the natural, ugly whitish coat of a faerie hound, the sort of pale fur that has a pinkish hue to it, the sort that at first glance, might look like it isn’t there at all.

The faerie hound prowls around the pond, the emerald gleam of its fierce stare speared into the golden fish. The upper lip curls to reveal the wink of black metal-like teeth.

The fish taunts the beast.

It dips underwater, deep, then soars up through the surface, flips in the air, and lands with a splash—all before the faerie hound can get its metallic, needle-like teeth into it.

I let a smile whisper over my lips.

My hands find their grip on the arrowheads of the fence, and, for a time, I watch the hound. I watch it snap its death jaws at the pond, but never quite catching the mischievous golden fish; I watch it paw at the mossy water, as though to lure the snack in closer, but it winces at the bite of the cold.

“They love fish,” a dull voice comes from the dark.

I look up as the cloaked female comes down the stone steps from the house over. Shadows are thicker in that garden, so it’s near impossible for my litalf vision to make out more than the grey hue of her cloak, the hood pulled over her head.

“But they are afraid of water,” she says, and though her voice is muted, as though she couldn’t care less about anything she’s telling me. A determined set to her jaw is revealed as she pulls the hood back.

Loose mousy hair spills over pale shoulders.

Kalice spares me no glance before she wanders over to the wild hound. It bows at the rim of the water, its chin rested on the moss-smeared stones, and its rear lifted in the air. It’s the stance I’ve seen many hounds take before rushing into play, but it’s such a casual thing to see on a beast like a faerie hound, and it stuns me quiet for a moment.

All I know of them, I read.

Father never let me keep one, but to have one is a thread in my woven assortment of dreams.

“I have to muzzle her just to bathe her.” Kalice sits on the tree stump beside the pond. She reaches out her bare hand, long and slender, for the spine of her pet. She strokes, and it ignites those chesty thumps again.

I listen for a moment, thump, thump, thump , before I ask, “What are those sounds she’s making?”

“Grunts.” She shrugs, disinterested. “Just another way they communicate. She is telling me to get the fish for her.”

Her face is as expressionless as it often is, as though nothing interests her, not me, not the hound she strokes, not the goldfish who spurts out of the water then smacks the hound’s snout with its tail.

I make a face, eyebrows raised and lips pouted.

That is one courageous, stupid fish.

Kalice reaches for the neck of her cloak. She loosens a sigh as she tugs the strings, and it falls open to reveal a plain white chemise.

She doesn’t speak.

Neither do I.

I have little to say, and all I can think to ask to reignite some form of conversation to fill this tranquil silence between us is inappropriate.

Aleana said she is a changeling, a human babe stolen from her realm, and brought here to be raised by fae.

I want to know more about that.

But to ask of someone’s changeling story is improper in my lands, so I swallow down my curiosities.

Instead, I ask, “Do you always live in Kithe?”

Some folk have other homes in other lands, further out in the Midlands, or a home in Licht, or—like Daxeel’s family—a primary home in Dorcha.

The faerie hound whines softly at the surface of the stagnant pond. The fish hasn’t emerged in a while now. Seems it’s grown bored with teasing the beast.

Kalice reclines against the curve of the tree trunk, one so clearly carved and sanded to mimic a chair, and I fleetingly wonder if she did that herself, to better enjoy the comfort of watching her fish, her faerie hound, or those pink and yellow birds tweeting in the aviary that’s tucked at the rear of her gardens.

She shakes her head, mousy strands of hair falling into her freckle-dusted face. “We only come to Kithe for the festival of the gods.”

The Sabbat.

I draw away from the fence and wander to the swing seat. I plop down with an impolite grunt, but the human doesn’t so much as blink at me for it. Her eyes linger over the faerie hound who’s now digging at a patch of dirt that looks disturbed, as though a gnome has recently burrowed its way down there, then covered up its new den.

I lean my temple on the post. The seat rocks gently. “Do you live in Licht?”

Her voice is firm, disinterested, “Isle Barra.”

My mind flashes with maps I’ve browsed over the years of my life, maps of Licht, of Dorcha, of the Midlands, of the Wastelands, then all the little isles dotted around the seas and coasts. But the Isle Barra isn’t one I recall. Must be small.

But then, she adds, “It’s a bridge isle.”

My brow hikes.

Lips part around untethered words.

The bridge isles are lands with the most connections between the realms. The most bridges. So many that it’s almost impossible to not fall between the worlds.

I have so many questions. Kalice is wildly more interesting to me now.

But I don’t get the chance to ask anything at all.

Kalice stiffens and her gaze swerves my way, a tad wider and wilder than before.

Slowly, I look over my shoulder—and I see exactly who startled her.

My own muscles jolt in surprise at the sight of Samick, standing there on the stone trail that interrupts the wild garden, his hands in the pockets of his slacks, and his pale hair dishevelled, as though he’s just woken.

Gleaming, his gaze is homed on Kalice, and the sight of his eyes strikes an image through me, of winter frost dusted over green blades of grass. It’s enough to shudder my spine.

A blankness steals Kalice’s face as she stares over the head of her faerie hound to the newcomer.

I frown between them.

Samick dips his head at her. It’s more than I’ve ever received from him in a way of greeting, but it does nothing to soothe the tension in her stiff shoulders.

I’m a sudden statue, watching them, flicking my gaze back and forth, from the stillness of Samick in the gleam of firefly strings crisscrossed above, whose face is stone; and then to Kalice, who stays crouched beside the softly snarling faerie hound and keeps her stiff gaze on the dark male.

“She’s been asleep a while now,” I say, drawing in Samick’s gaze.

He blinks as though just realizing that I am here, that I exist, and then traces my gesture to Aleana still passed out on the bench opposite me.

If Samick understands that I’m helping him right now, swatting away the awkward tension between him and the human changeling, he doesn’t acknowledge it.

“I can’t carry her inside,” I add, yet I haven’t so much as tried to rouse her from her rest.

On the other side of the fence, Kalice pushes up to stand and cuts her gaze to the rear entrance of her home.

I can’t see beyond the trees stuffed into the gardens, but I hear the creak of the door and the thick meaning of the silence.

Kalice leaves. The hound bounds after her.

Without a word or a wave, she rushes up the path—then comes the faint click of a door shutting. I’m not without a father, and so I can guess that it was he who came out and silently summoned her back inside.

I kick my heels into the ground for a wider sway of the swing seat. “Why don’t you talk to her?”

Samick swerves his daggered stare to me.

My toes curl against the air.

Unmoving, his voice is forming ice, “Why would I speak to her?”

“To get to know her?” My voice hikes with the doubt. I shrug, stiff. “Isn’t that what you want?”

His upper lip twitches, daring to curl over his viciously sharp teeth. His muscles slink beneath his hard skin as he takes a step closer to me, pressing his weight onto that one boot.

I cringe back.

He reaches out his hand and grips the post, his eyes turning to pure frost. “Some fae might speak too much.”

My cheeks heat.

He looks down his fine nose at me. “And yet, learn nothing.”

My words falter as his jaw tightens, a rage brewing in him like I’ve never before felt. It bites and nips at me in the air alone, a blizzard brewing all around.

Still, the words stumble out of me in a whisper, “Is she your evate?”

The regret is instant.

Too late, I bite down on my cheeks as if to trap words I’ve already spoken.

Samick lifts his pale, slender hand. He drags his finger down my cheek. The touch is an instant cold burn.

I hiss and cringe back into the post.

But Samick looms over me, still.

“If it were evate, would she still be alive?” he asks darkly, then shoves away from the post.

No words gather in my throat in answer.

Samick isn’t confessing secrets to me.

Samick is warning me.

He makes no secret of it in the way he considers me, his disdain for my questions, for being trapped in this conversation with me. Maybe he even despises the audacity I have apparently have for striking up a conversation.

He moves for Aleana.

My hand cups my tickling cheek, the frosty nip lingering.

Mute, I watch as he scoops up Aleana.

I doubt Samick came out here to check on her. He doesn’t seem to bother with her much at all. It’s like he goes through life with layers of ice and frost between him and the world. So as he takes her into his arms with little delicacy, I’m certain he only came out to see Kalice.

Samick spares me no final glances as he takes Aleana inside.

I watch him go.

And I think myself awful stupid.

I decide I’ll never know Samick.

And he cares little about ever knowing me.

I think if he ever saves my life, it will be for Daxeel. Not for me.

And even then, I don’t bet on it.

The rest of the Breeze passes in silence.

I rock with the sway of the seat, and no one comes out into the gardens. Time ticks onwards into the First Wind, dust and leaves on the ground rustling, disturbed.

But I rock, back and forth, back and forth.

And I have nothing to do but think.

My head is leaned back against the post, and I stare up at the slivers of darkness I can make out through the gaps in the wisteria.

The Cursed Shadows.

An ill-suited name.

They are not true shadows, not cursed either, so I don’t quite know where the term originated. What it really is, is more .

More darkness.

That’s why it feels so thick in the air now, like I’m going to suffocate in it the longer that the spiral pushes up into the skies at Comlar. That constant fuelling of the darkness, it just adds more and more, until what? Until finally the glowjars are dimmed entirely, until the flames in the lanterns on the streets are snuffed out? Until no matter the light, there is only darkness?

I don’t know why the dokkalves would want the Cursed Shadows, want to blind their own world. Sure, they can see in the dark as clearly as I can in the light, but it’s impractical enough that I suspect this is about war.

Daxeel channels the Cursed Shadows now, but if he gets to Mother’s ear and survives it all, it will pass into the iilra. It makes sense for that to be their way, because the iilra can stretch a power over an entire sisterhood across Dorcha, but Daxeel is just one male. He dies, so do the shadows. But the iilra? There are always more out there.

There are always more to come.

A battlefield that suffers the border between light and dark? Bring iilra. They can sweep the lands in excess darkness, steal away the sunlight, and the victory will be for the dokkalves, the light ones will be blinded.

Still, it doesn’t sit with me the way it should.

I’m missing something.

It should make seamless sense, but it doesn’t.

Daxeel, like all other dark males, is a warrior at his core. Trained and accomplished. It is their culture, their law to be raised as fighters, then to serve a decade in war. But his career choice of an extractor, of a torturer, is not meant for battlefields. So will he change his career? Will he decide on a warrior role, just to keep battlefield advantage for his people?

No. No, there is more to it than I am seeing.

The aftermath of the Sacrament is uncertain, and my half-witted theories aren’t quite fitting together. But I have the awful feeling that everyone is in on a joke, except me—

And I am the punchline.

I check in on Aleana again that phase, maybe just to kill time, maybe to observe her failing health. When I find her, she sits at a vanity table and uses a damp cloth to wipe away black bloodstains from her mouth.

Her bare legs are what hook my attention. Smeared in stains of black, like smudged ink, it looks as though her sickness is eating her from the inside out.

I say nothing about it, and instead we enjoy dinner together in her bedchamber before she retires for the Quiet.

Alone, I return to my bedchamber.

I don’t see Daxeel.