AllFreeNovel
Share Us
20
GREY
“I’m sorry for getting us lost,” Noel mumbled against the bars, disrupting the silence pooling between them over the last half-hour. Drowsiness seeped into his voice and tumbled into Grey’s heart a little too hard, pushing him away from their shared cell wall.
“It’s not your fault.”
“It certainly feels like it,” he said with a sigh. “And now we’re stuck without anything to trade, along with being at the mercy of these people…”
Grey pulled his legs up to his chest. “We just got to hope that word hasn’t spread from the Grand Capital yet.”
A joyless laugh escaped him. “We’re definitely short on time there. If it hasn’t reached this place, it’ll be here soon.”
Misty cold licked his skin, seeping in from the barred windows and sending shivers through his body. “Then we’ll have to be quick once they let us out?—”
“If they let us out,” Noel interjected.
“I don’t think they’ll know before tomorrow,” Grey said with a shake of his head. “Considering how quick they threw us in cells, I can’t imagine they’d take a random messenger in to spout off the news that there are new sacrifices for the Hunt.”
Noel hummed and leaned back, his throat bobbing while his green eyes searched the ceiling. Grey dropped his cheek against his knee as he watched him. For the first time, he tried to imagine him among a flock of macharomancers. Strong-willed, skilled, and pretty, even when he was speckled in dirt. The fact that Grey was even taking his looks into consideration made his stomach flip.
He remembered Uncle Atticus’s little story from several nights ago and its romanticizing of some macharomancer knight coming to the rescue, despite Grey only knowing pain and fear whenever he encountered them. The one thing that made Noel different was that they were both on the chopping block—both doomed to die at the hands of a common enemy. But if they were face-to-face without that threat, would Noel even bother saving him? Would he consider sparing him a glance? Or would he viciously rip him apart like the others?
To imagine Noel as his ally now left an uneasy sensation worming through his gut. Everything he’d ever believed slowly turned on its head in the face of the fair folk—all the times he’d wandered out into the woods as a child went from tasting of sweet adventure to bitter dread.
He’d gone so far to respect the world around him, even though his magic destroyed it in his careless actions. Like the time he scraped his knee stumbling over a log and drained the life from the most gorgeous patch of wildflowers he’d ever seen. The colors bled out while his skin knitted back together. His heart sank heavy in his chest as his mother called out his name, and she clicked her tongue when she found him mourning his kill.
“Grey, sweetheart, what happened?” she asked, crouching down in front of him, her appearance fuzzy in his childhood memories. “Are you hurt?”
But he continued to stare down at the drooping petals while she brushed his hair from his eyes. “It was an accident,” he whispered. “I didn’t mean to…”
Her fingers danced over the blossoms and each one slowly popped back up, its color returning before Grey jerked his head up to take in those soft, kind features on the blurred edge of his thoughts. “No harm done,” she said, the words smooth and sugary like honey.
Whatever died in their place, Grey never found, but a part of him always feared it’d been plucked straight from her own flesh. Not that she’d ever admit it. Not that she ever could now. Not that he’d be able to continue her legacy either.
All while he’d be immortalized as yet another nameless sacrifice, rather than for anything he could create.
Create.
You just want to create, don’t you?
Grey perked up and crawled over to his bag, trying to ignore Noel’s sudden shift on the other side of the bars. “Something wrong?”
He rummaged through his things until he scooped out his journal and charcoal. “The fair folk like pretty things, right? And they love natural creation, so what if I drew them something that captured that essence?”
Noel scooted forward along the bars, sitting across from him as he flipped through the messy pages to find a blank one.
“You really think they’d take that in exchange for your freedom?”
“Maybe,” he breathed, pausing with his charcoal hovering above the parchment. His shoulders fell as he looked up and worried his lip in thought. “They said they’d be my patron, but what would they want me to draw?”
Noel squinted and set his jaw. “Who? That thing stalking you?”
Grey bit down on his tongue. “Yeah.”
His hands wrapped around the bars and his brows furrowed. “I’m not sure that you should listen to anything they say?—”
“We don’t exactly have much else to go off of,” Grey said, a sigh slipping through his teeth as he let his hands take over. “I’m just afraid that a crude drawing might not be enough. If I had paint, that might appease them a little more, but it’s hard to know for sure.”
