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Small, upward strokes turned into the outlines of stems, leaves, petals—a reimagining of the small patch of flowers he’d killed and his mother breathed life back into. He could picture the colors each one should be, but he didn’t have the heart to shade them in.
Grey sat up straight again and scowled down at his sketch before his shoulders fell.
“What?” Noel asked, that confused concern accompanied by his hand falling from the bars and landing on Grey’s side of the cells.
“I don’t think it’s going to work without color…”
“Let me see.” Noel held his other hand out, and Grey’s grip on the journal tightened.
This—his journaled art—was such a fragile, intimate thing he’d always kept close to his chest after Uncle Atticus gave him his first sketchpad to ease the time he’d been tended to in the confines of his small room. It wasn’t much bigger than the cot they set up for him, but Aunt Ingrid insisted he stay there so they could keep a close eye on him until he adjusted to his new home. His new life. His new reality with a new family.
This was his personal form of therapy that was never pried from him without permission. His fingertips ran the slope of the pages to the cover, like sand in an hourglass. Before he knew it, the leather was pressed into Noel’s grasp.
The upturn of his lips and glimmer in his bright green eyes as they danced across the page made him squirm. Seeking approval from Noel should be the last thing he wanted, but he craved that small reminder he wasn’t completely useless—that he had his own talents and strengths.
“I think you might be onto something,” Noel said, offering it back to him. He ripped open his own bag for the map and spread it out on the floor. “I think I know a place that makes paints—by the delta.” He jabbed his finger to a spot marked near one of the offshoots of the river. “Here.”
Grey crawled over, his cheek grazing the bars while his eye focused on that pinpoint. He swallowed. “Isn’t that lithomancer territory?”
“Yes, but we’ll be in and out before that bastard catches wind of us. For all we know, Cavan could’ve flew out his damn van window and got impaled on a tree back there.” Noel waved past the building’s walls. “We get you some art supplies, we corral ourselves in an inn for a couple days, and then we see what we can come up with.”
A small, scared squeak of a laugh pulled from Grey’s lungs. “And what if I can’t get it just right? What if they don’t take it? Where do we even bring something like that to trade?”
Noel’s excitement dimmed as his grin twisted into a grimace. “Um… Well…” He smoothed out the map a little more, like the creases in the paper were obscuring all the answers he needed. “I think it’s the best idea we have to go off of, and what you made in a short period of time is incredible by itself, but I do recall seeing spots on the walls of the ruins where portraits and stuff had to be before they were stolen and scrapped. So maybe we return something like that to a shrine? Or ruins?” He shrugged.
Grey rubbed his hands together, smearing the remnants of charcoal staining his fingertips. “Then maybe a landscape isn’t the best choice? Maybe one of the fair folk instead?”
“And have you actually ever seen one in person?”
He opened his mouth, paused, and bit down on his tongue. “No. Fine, I’ll do a landscape.”
Noel began folding up the map. “Then it looks like we’ll be on our way the second they let us out of here.”
21
NOEL
Noel nearly ripped the map in two as a shriek tore through the silence in the early hours of the morning. The glow of dawn hadn’t even crested the horizon before he and Grey scrambled up from the floor of their cells to glimpse the commotion from the bars of their windows. A man shambled through the streets with a dark stain spreading under a palm pressed to his shirt.
“Help!” he wheezed. “There’s something wrong with my wife?—”
A guard jumped off the porch of one of the shops and another started out of the dark recesses on the other side, pulling their mask down over their face. The second the first guard was within reach, the injured man snapped up to attention and lunged. Grey jolted and ducked down while Noel’s grip tightened on the bars, his hackles rising as more guards poured out of their hiding places along the walls.
Orders barked out as they converged on the feral individual, and Noel felt a tug on his sleeve. He turned to Grey, finding him pointing at a spot just beyond the wall. “Fair folk,” he whispered, barely a rasp.
His blood ran boiling hot as his head whipped back around to the lanky silhouette with piercing, glowing pink irises. The creature paced back and forth with its entourage of unhinged faerie monstrosities panting for flesh.
“Fuck,” Noel mumbled, just in time for the alarms to start blaring. “Is that them?”
Grey winced and crouched, his breaths coming out harder and faster. “I- I don’t know?—”
He bit down on his tongue and bolted back to his bag. The contents spilled along the floor from coins to trinkets to rations until his fingertips skimmed the rough surface of a nailfile. It pressed into his palm with yips and howls growing ever closer. “Shit, shit, shit—” Noel shoved himself up and jammed the file into the lock.
Grey gasped the moment the lock clicked free, and Noel shoved the door open to work on Grey’s. It took everything in him to ignore his shaking as Grey started scooping everything back into Noel’s bag and tensing at every guttural noise from outside.
“They’re not going to take us, Grey,” he hissed. “Just stay calm.”
“What about the gate? What if?—”
