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“We don’t have time for this. Ren will go through the gate. You will follow after him. Your oath to me will leave you no choice.” Ren went still. His eyes locked on to Kingfisher. The warrior must have felt the burning intensity of the general’s gaze, but Fisher didn’t so much as glance in his friend’s direction. “Tell me I misheard that,” Ren said. “Tell me you didn’t bind this girl to you with an oath.”
“I’m only half insane. And yes, your friend is bound to me. Did she tell you that she’s the only reason you’re still alive yet?”
Carrion gave me a saccharine smile. “And there was me thinking you weren’t infatuated with me anymore.
Kingfisher stilled, his fingertips curling tighter around Nimerelle’s hilt. His eyes darted from Carrion to me and back again; then he looked off toward the other side of the room, seemingly at nothing. Slowly, he set the apple back down in the bowl. “I need you to come with me, human,” he said.
“Out of everyone, you should understand why I want to go back the most. You’re desperate to do everything you can to help your friends here. I have friends and family who need help, too. They’re too tired to fight Madra on their own. They’ve given up. If I don’t go home, who’ll help them?”
“That’s right. But I wasn’t just covered in your blood, was I? I was wearing another of your… perfumes.”
He still smells of you even now.”
“There’s every way,” Fisher rumbled, his eyes darkening. “I’d know the smell of you anywhere. On anyone. I’d know it blind and in the dark. Across a fucking sea. I’d be able to scent you—” BOOM!
“We are nothing alike,” he said quietly. “You nearly died from a scratch that would have been a mild irritation to me. You are soft. You are fragile. You are vulnerable. You are a newborn fawn, stumbling around in the dark, surrounded by predators with very sharp teeth. I am the thing that exists on the other side of the dark. I’m the thing that puts the fear of the gods into the monsters who would eat you bones and all.”
I turned back into the forge and dropped my heat-proof gloves onto the bench. “You really should stop making excuses for him. It doesn’t help him, me, or anyone else. He’s just a bastard.” Ren smiled weakly. “He’s also my best friend. I have to believe that he’s still in there somewhere. The person I once knew. Not this cold, shutdown version of himself.”
“You’re more than needed. You’re required. We’re done with this, Brother. If you bear me any love or respect at all, you’ll come to the meeting.”
“Doing some research?” I couldn’t imagine that he was the type to settle down with a work of fiction. Fisher surveyed the collection of tomes that covered every available surface and grunted. “You could say that.” “Something important?” “Very important to me,” he clipped out. From the hard edge in his voice, he wasn’t going to say anything further on the matter.
“Amazing, isn’t it? People prefer to acquiesce to a request rather than being forced to follow a command. Who’d have known.”
“Have you paused to consider that I might want to stay alive? That I’d do whatever it was you wanted me to do if you just explained why it was important to my well-being?”
A rush of something hot and not entirely unpleasant burned right behind my breastbone. It wasn’t just how he looked. There was something else there, too. Something that made my body come alive. His scent, and the way I knew that he’d entered a room before I saw him, and the melancholy tug at the root of my soul whenever he wasn’t in a room, and—
I kicked Carrion’s boots, grunting at him to move, when I reached the fire. The suggestive way he grinned at me made me think he could smell what I’d been up to as well, but that wasn’t possible. Our human noses weren’t that sensitive.
“I’m sorry, I truly am. I didn’t want to leave any of you back at Gillethrye. I wish I could tell you why I had to go, but I can’t. All I can say is that I had no other choice.”
“She’s mine,” Fisher said.
“I can’t wait to hear what kind of sounds you make when I thrust into you for the first time,” he purred. “I’m going to make you pant for me, Little Osha. And when we’re done, I’ll close my eyes and replay the sound of you moaning in my head every time I stroke myself to completion.”
In the darkness, Fisher slowly lowered his head, his lips parted, hair mussed, and the dazed look of surprise on his face sent a rush of adrenaline powering through me.
“Witch,” he accused. “You do have magic.”
“Don’t worry. It’ll fade. Probably,”
“I can’t have children, Fisher. I was cleansed when I was fourteen.” I expected to see relief on his face. But instead, his face drained of color. “What the fuck did you just say to me?” I stopped laughing. “I was cleansed. When I was fourteen. They do it to about seventy percent of the girls in my ward.” He came and stood very close to me, his head bowed over mine, nostrils flaring. “What do you mean… cleansed?” “I mean… they sterilize us,”
“What? I figured you’d think that was good news.”
Clenching his jaw, he spun around, his eyes searching the horizon for gods only knows what. Had he heard something? Some promise of danger that my inferior human hearing hadn’t detected? “Fisher. Hey! What’s wrong?” When he faced me again, his eyes were almost fully black, his pupils blown wide open.
“Did you know, the Yvelian Fae are the youngest of the Fae houses? By a thousand years. There was a dispute between these two brothers, and they splintered off to make their own court.”
“How the fuck are you just so okay with all of this?” I demanded. “Ever since you got here, you’ve just accepted it all. You didn’t know the Fae existed. Suddenly, there are massive fighters with pointed ears and sharp teeth everywhere, and you’re just like, okay, yeah, sure, of course there are Fae. Of course there are other realms. Of course there’s magic, and vampires, and all kinds of horrifying, terrible things out there that want to kill me. This all makes perfect sense!”
Gracia took the superfluous punctuation to mean that the situation, should these Gilarian Fae creatures ever show their faces, would be very dire indeed.
Well, that was unexpected. Where the hell had a book about the Fae come from? Madra had burned any literature that even mentioned the Fae or magic a long time ago. It was a curious thing—to find out that Carrion had, in a way, been brought up to believe that this would happen to him at some point.
“Forgive me for making the day a little more interesting for you. It’s good for you to improve at finding the quicksilver. You never know when you might need to detect small amounts over great distances.”
“Because she is moonlight. The mist that shrouds the mountains. The bite of electricity in the air before a storm. The smoke that rolls across a battlefield before the killing starts. You have no idea what she is. What she could be. You should call her Majesty.”
“Amazing. So you’re saying that I was in camp for less than five minutes and I destroyed an ancient weapon that has profound cultural importance for all of Fae kind,” I said, recapping.
Every one of us. We have a choice. Bleed on the stone and make our vow. To always be truthful. To always be bound by our word, no matter what it costs us.”
“So you see, no matter how much we might want to sometimes, we’re physically incapable of breaking our word or telling a lie.”
“It’s a sex thing. If a male drinks from someone, it’ll make his dick harder than it’s ever been in his life. It makes you euphoric. Both of you. While you’re fucking.”
He made me his brother. By blood. He gave me a part of his soul.”
But Fisher’s father had almost died once, and his friend had used it to save him.
I won’t permit a single breath into my body beyond the last one Kingfisher takes. By my own hand, I’ll make sure the piece of soul he loaned to me finds its way back to him. And if the fates consider it just, and I’ve done enough to earn a place at his side, I’ll go quietly and happily with my brother into whatever lies beyond.”
“You’re wearing my shirt,”
“No. We’re staying somewhere else tonight. There’s something I want to show you.”
A hundred and ten years. I left them for a hundred and ten years. Ren and the others did everything they could to stem the tide. It’s not their fault. I was supposed to be here to protect them. I failed them. So I don’t deserve to be called Lord of Cahlish. I am lord of nothing.”
“You made it very clear that you could hate me and still want to fuck me. And I’m not the type of person who keeps throwing herself at the things that hurt her.
Edina of the Seven Towers. Lady of Cahlish.
If you have any respect for me, if you care about me even the tiniest, most minuscule amount, you will never, ever compel me again. Do you understand?”
I wasn’t surprised when the ink beneath his skin drew closer to the places where our skin met. I watched it climb my fingers, forming shapes, and then runes and delicate designs as they inched upward. There was every chance they’d still be there in the morning, but I couldn’t bring myself to care right now.
Every warrior in Irrín will smell me on you, Fisher’s voice rumbled in my mind. I’m going to make you hoarse from screaming my fucking name. I’m going to mark you in every way imaginable, so that everyone knows you’re fucking mine.
He mindlessly slammed himself into me, grunting, and then he ripped his mouth away from my skin and roared like he was dying. No. Not like he was dying. Like he was being reborn.
and, sidenote, Fisher and I were now randomly capable of speaking into each other’s minds.
Stacks of small runes ran up each one of my fingers. Delicate script wound around my wrists and up my forearms. I had no idea what the fuck any of it said. And the backs of my hands?
The lines were bolder. They twisted around one another, forming a variety of knots that I had trouble even picking apart with my eyes. It wasn’t just one rune. It was many, interlocking, woven one on top of the other, on top of the other. One of the runes wasn’t even black, but a dark, iridescent blue-green color that flashed metallically when it caught the light.
