Chapter 17

Chapter17

The way out is as Morgana said: a rose-carved door, a garden, a narrow path through the woods. Thunder echoes through the trees as I hurry down the path as fast as I can; a low, angry storm is churning in from the sea. Lightning dances in the cloud bellies above me, and there’s no rain yet, although I know it’s just a matter of time before it reaches me.

My feet are bare, and I’m still in my chiffon dress, and I’m sure my tits are frozen off by the time I see the loch glinting through the trunks of the trees. I turn to look back at the castle, lit blue and gold against the night, and my heart twists like an apple being yanked from a branch.

I love you, I think. No matter what you planned to do. I love you.

And then I turn and start half jogging along the shore of the loch, relieved when I see the tomb’s hulking shape. It’s ringed with torches, just like it was in the mortal realm on the first night of Samhain, but there’s no one there that I can see, no Maynard or Idalia waiting to kidnap me again, no Felipe ready to drag me back to the castle.

Elphame will just have to suffer. Unravel.

You have no duty to Faerie or its woes. Flee and live, and let Faerie pay for its own sins for once.

My steps slow.

I’m so close. I’m bedraggled and heartbroken and terrified, but I’m so close, and all I have to do is walk through the tomb, and I’m not walking through, I’m not coming any closer. I’m just standing in front of the cairn’s open mouth like a statue, wishing it didn’t matter to me that Morgana and her kingdom might suffer if the tithe isn’t paid.

Morgana was going to kill you. She watched you for a year, adored you, craved you, knowing all the while she’d pay the tithe with your blood.

But I still can’t make myself walk through the door.

Before I can decide what to do, a shadow moves in the tomb. I take a hurried step backward as the shadow resolves itself into the slender, muscular form of Morven Nightglass.

“I was hoping I’d be in time to see you off,” he says. His posture is studied, casual, but he looks more rumpled than I’ve ever seen him, his platinum hair mussed and his shirt open all the way to the breastbone. He almost looks like he came straight from someone’s bed, but when he steps closer and I see how hard he’s breathing, how he still has a short cape clutched in one hand like he tore it off, I wonder if he’s like this because he ran here.

To grab me and haul me back to the castle? Or worse, to the tithing place?

Panic claws up my throat, and my worry for Morgana and the fate of Faerie wavers under a cloud of cold fear.

“Are you here to stop me from leaving?” I ask, more to buy myself some time than anything else.

“Why would I, when it serves my purposes so well?” he says, again with a convincingly indifferent air. But there’s no way he tore down here just to wave me off.

“Those purposes being what? Me being gone?” I ask, discreetly casting my gaze around the shore of the loch. I think we really are alone down here, and I think I might be able to get enough of a head start that I have a chance to make it somewhere…but where? Past him and into the tomb, where safety and home beckon? Or back up to the castle to try to help Morgana?

“How small you think,” Morven says. “What of the crown my sister wears that I want so very much? What of a throne that could be empty at a moment’s notice?”

I stop looking around; he has my full attention now. “The throne isn’t going to be empty,” I say. “Morgana will remain the queen, no matter what happens tonight.”

His eyebrows lifted. “Is that so, little mortal? Even if she sacrifices herself for the tithe?”

In the hellish blur of the last few hours, it never even occurred to me that she might…no. No way.

“You’re wrong,” I say. Firmly. “Acanthia said it had to be someone beloved of the crown.”

Morven looks at me like I’m stupid. “A Faerie crown is not a mortal crown, a metaphor for its wearer. It’s an extension of the fae realm and the magic that binds it. And what’s more beloved to Faerie than a Faerie ruler, Janneth? Than one whose blood and bones are tied with the land? Who can shift the mist and move the hills? Morgana’s death would be powerful magic—the kind of magic our world was built on.”

And then he sighs. “And unfortunately, my sister is far less ruthless than she should be when it comes to these things. Our court has Unseelie roots, and she would be better served by embracing them, by doing what Queen Acanthia would do and sacrificing you despite her obsession. But Morgana is too noble for all that. She believes a queen shouldn’t ask anything of someone she is unwilling to do herself.”

“Even death,” I say faintly.

He nods.

“But you’re wrong,” I say again, a little desperately this time. “She would have said—if she was planning to pay the tithe with herself—no. She wouldn’t do that.”

She wouldn’t send me away knowing she was going to take my place instead. She wouldn’t have touched me, freed me, stared at me with those deep, inky eyes while I walked away and left her to die…

“This can’t happen,” I whisper. “It can’t.”

“She could, perhaps, offer the usual closing sacrifice rather than a tithe, using the same magic that’s used to lower the veil in the first place. On non-tithe years, this is sufficient, and maybe it will close the veil enough to buy everyone some time.”

“Yes,” I say, grabbing on to this idea. “And if it works, maybe the tithe never needs to be paid again!”

“Or,” Morven says, and he almost sounds gentle now, “it does not work. The veils stays open, and people like Queen Acanthia will once again be able to steal away mortal children, and the Court of Salt will be able to sink ships and eat their drowned sailors. Gods and demigods will roam the earth, demanding worship and glory. Witches will have no limits on their magic. It will be as it was in the past, in the times of tales, with monsters, mayhem, death. And that is only the beginning, because if the tithe is not paid to renew the land and the land begins to fail, the Salt fae and vainglorious demigods will be the least of anyone’s problems.”

I stare at him. “What?” Mortal children…demigods roaming the earth… “Acanthia didn’t say anything about…”

“About the mortal world? No, I don’t think she would, given that she’d like nothing more than for the veil to stay open so she can pillage it as she pleases. But yes—the tithe, the veil—all the magic that links and unlinks our worlds will be undone. And it won’t just be fae who can creep among the mortals at will but demons and monsters too. Some will be good, if curious. Some will not.”

I push my hands against my closed eyes, trying to breathe, trying to think. The stakes have just gone from helping Morgana to saving my entire world. I feel very fundamentally not cut out for this.

“And Morgana knows all this,” Morven continues. “And so her choices were these: to kill her mortal lover, kill herself, or refuse to pay the tithe altogether. She could not stomach the first, and the last would potentially leave the blood of billions on her hands. I know you’ve not known my sister long, but between these choices, which do you think she would choose?”

I’m still numb, my mind as frozen as my body. I look at him. “Swear to me this isn’t a trick. That this isn’t a way to lure me back to the castle or the tithing place to kill me.”

His eyes are as black as the storm above us when he meets my gaze. “I swear to you, Janneth Carter, that I speak the truth. My sister will try to pay the tithe with herself tonight; I believe you are the only one who can convince her otherwise. I cannot promise your safety if you go to the tithing place to stop her, but I can promise it is not my intention, aim, or hope that you will come to harm there yourself.”

I mentally sift through his words as best as I can. I think he is telling the truth. I think it might also not matter even if he isn’t. Because I can’t risk Morgana dying.

I can’t.

“Are you admitting you’re doing this to help your sister?” I ask, taking a step forward. Closer, I can see the beginning of his glassed chest, the pink, red, and russet parts of him peeking from the open collar of his shirt.

He gives me a sour look. “Yes. But if you tell anyone else that I wanted to help her, I will do everything in my power to make you look like a fool.”

“Fine,” I say. When he offers me his cape to drape over my shoulders, I take it and knot it tight at the neck. “Take me to her.”

Come what may.