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We finished the wine. It had to be past midnight by that point.
I ought to have been on my way to bed, I knew; I was supposed to leave the next day, and Halbert likely wouldn’t be happy to let me sleep until noon. But it was so blissfully easy to sit there and talk and talk and talk to a mother who looked like me, who thought like me, who knew the human worldandthe fae world like me …
The building had gone eerily silent by the time our conversation began to ebb, hours past midnight. I was yawning, curled up on the couch with a blanket. Rosalind, her hair sagging from its pins and her voice a fraction slurred by wine or tiredness or both, threw a glance at the window as if she only now realised the sky had gone dark outside.
‘Might be time to go to sleep,’ I mumbled.
‘Yes,’ she admitted, rubbing her eyes with a sigh. ‘Might be.’
So I disentangled myself from the blanket, hugged her a last time and areallylast time, and tiptoed out into the dark corridors, feeling my way up the stairs and around the corners by touch and luck more than anything else. The door I finally pushed open turned out to be my own, thankfully; I slipped in, shut the lock behind me, and stared at the large guest bed for a few bleary-eyed moments. It looked … cold, more than anything. It looked empty.
Outside, on the front side of the building, incoherent shouts were rising from the square every now and then, contrasting sharply with the peaceful silence of the previous night. When I squinted out between the curtains, though, there was little to be seen but the faint flicker of torches around the corner.
The sense of approaching doom didn’t soften.
I told myself not to exaggerate as I brushed my hair and undressed, and then jumped anyway when another chorus of bellowing erupted close by, my heart thumping against my ribs at twice its usual speed. I checked the lock three times. I put a dagger on my nightstand and one below my pillow. I searched the bathroom just to make sure no one was lying in wait for me in the bath, and then somehow I felt evenmoreanxious as I finally crawled beneath the blankets, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling as my pulse continued to race.
Would Rosalind be asleep already?
I doubted it, somehow. She had looked tired but far from drowsy. And if she, too, was hearing the irregular bursts of activity surrounding the White Hall …
Oh, to hell with it.
The decision made itself. I rolled out of bed, groped around for my dress in the darkness, then found my backpack and chucked my daggers back into it – no sense in lying here waiting for dawn to come if I wasn’t going to sleep anyway. At least I had kept most of my belongings in one place. Even in the depth of night, I was reasonably sure I’d managed to pack everything when I finally swung my bag over my shoulder and ventured out into the dark maze of the building again.
Around the corner and another corner. Down the stairs.
A thin line of candlelight was still visible in the chink beneath the door.
I knocked, keeping my voice hushed. ‘Rosalind?’
She opened the door within moments, almost as if she’d been waiting for me to return – not yet asleep, then, although she’d changed into her nightdress. Her eyes were just a little red in the candlelight. Her smile, though quiet and wistful, was no less radiant for it.
‘Of course,’ she said softly before I could even open my mouth. ‘Come in.’
And so I found myself curling up in my mother’s bed minutes later, the daggers left in my bag this time, the bathroom unsearched. She blew out the candles, then joined me. In the dark, her slow breathing was a soothing lullaby to my ears – we had no army, no magic, and yet that quiet, even sound reassured me time and time again that all would be well in the end.
‘Good night,’ I whispered.
Her hand brushed over the crown of my head, as soft as her voice. ‘Good night, baby girl.’
This time, I fell asleep within minutes.
I woke to an explosion of noise.
Bellowing voices, clattering horse hooves … I shot up in the blankets, half-expecting a mob to break through the bedroom door in the same moment, ready to remove the unwanted fae guest from the city by any means necessary. Only after blinking the dreams from my mind did I realise the sound was too distant to be inside: close, yes, but at least outside the walls of the White Hall.
Somehow, that wasn’t much of a reassurance to my pounding heart.
‘Good gracious,’ Rosalind blearily said next to me, rolling over. ‘What is going on?’
‘It’syourcity,’ I said.
She laughed, combing her hair from her face with her fingers as she sat upright; it was unmistakably a tense laugh, though. ‘Not anymore, I’m afraid.’
‘Do you think …’ I swallowed, glancing at the curtains covering the window. Judging by the pale sunlight brushing the heavy fabric, the sun had barely risen. ‘Do you think they’re here for me?’
‘Hope not,’ she said sourly.
