Hundredsof thousands, but to say that would reveal too much—it would get too close to a truth I don’t ever want to speak again—and so instead I let the quiet settle over us once more. The bad mood that plagued him when he first arrived seems to have dissipated. I don't expect this peace to last, so instead of pushing my luck and engaging in more conversation with him, I simply sit and open up my magic to the earth once more.
I haven't eaten—the one meal I get each day hasn’t arrived yet—but I feel no hunger. The earth doesn't let me feel hunger, not when it has so much sustenance to freely give back to me.
Tyton speaks again, but his scathing tone is absent. “Why return here? If you knew that the War of the Witches was raging, why come back? Tell me the truth now, witch, and maybe I can get you out of the cell. Not freedom, of course, but if you'd like to see the sunlight again for a few moments, breathe some fresh air, tell me the truth, and I'll see what I can do for you.”
I don't need sunlight or fresh air—he should know that better than the rest of them.
My eyes roll in his direction, disbelief coloring my tone. “Isn't it obvious? You just asked me what the Ureen look like up close. Do you think after spending centuries in the Northern Lands, helping to defeat them, that I’d just ignore my fate and risk another tear in the sky? Death at the hands of your Savage Prince is far preferable to me than another war with the Fates. There isn't much I won't do to stop that from happening.”
He stares at me, his face carefully blank, before he nods slightly. “That's why you're not worried about what's happening, isn't it? You think this is the path of your fate, and there’s no other option for you.”
I splay my hands on the dirty flagstones, pressing my palms flat as I feel the power of the earth flow into me. It’s as though his questions have opened up a wound deep inside of me, and now nothing but the truth, dirty and raw, pours out. “Everything that‘s happening is another step toward my fate. It doesn't matter how poorly the Savage Prince treats me, how long I go without a bath, what little insults the lot of you have for me—we’ll all end up in the same place, regardless. The Savage Prince’s hands are tied—you all know it—but mine are too. The sooner you accept that, the faster we’ll get to where we need to be.”
Tyton exhales before he murmurs, “A marriage between two enemies to unite the land and save our people.”
I’m not so sure they're worth saving, but I know the cost of failure.
Despite his easier temperament, I decide I prefer sitting with Tauron over Tyton. At least the scowling and seething brother doesn’t slit my chest open and expose my bleeding, bruised, and broken heart to the ruthless light of the day.
* * *
I'm woken by the sound of more footsteps and tug in my chest, a quiet murmuring that is too low for my ears to distinguish words filling the empty cavern of the dungeon, and then the scrape of a key sliding into place in the iron door. I’ve become accustomed to sleeping sitting up, not wanting to lie on the filthy floor any more than I have to, and when my eyelids peel back, I find the Savage Prince staring down at me. Distaste rolls off him, seeping from his very pores as his gaze flits over my hunched form.
Tauron and Tyton stand behind him, talking quietly between themselves. I study my Fates-cursed mate closely as I wait for whatever the next round of his temper will bring to me. My breath catches in my chest at the intensity in his eyes, the blue flashing as he looks around the cell as though he’s expecting to find a weapon lying around, or some sign of my nefarious plans.
When his mouth tightens, my own gaze gets caught on the perfect bow of his lips. If I could ignore the indignant fury in his words, I’d say that his voice sings to me in an echo of the song of the forest, a call to the most innate parts of me in a cruel tactic of the Fates to win me over to their whims. Not that they need to, I’ll submit to them regardless, but it feels like a particularly cruel twist of a dagger in my gut to know that he can affect me without even trying.
In the handful of times I’ve seen him since the port, I’ve done my best not to look too closely at him, meeting his eyes without flinching but never lingering on the breathtaking beauty of him. The sound of his voice was bad enough but now that my gaze has strayed from the burning azure depths, I’m stuck basking in all of his glory. How has the shine of the Unseelie high fae dulled for me in every last one of them except him? Why does my reaction to him only grow stronger, even as my fury becomes an untamable beast?
The Fates are cruel to bind me to this male.
He stares back at me, eyes full of resentment, before he reaches up to grab the iron chains from where they hang by the cell door waiting and then he clips the cuffs into place on my wrists. It’s the closest he's ever been to me, so close that he almost touches me, and there's no missing the curl of his lip.
“You stink,” he snarls, and I wait to have some sort of reaction to his words, some shame or embarrassment, and yet I find I'm still numb. I've been hoping that my return would ignite some emotion in me once more, ease away some of the numbness that has taken over my body, and yet I stare back at him with nothing.
I shrug, “If you don't like it, then you should do something about it, because it makes no difference to me.”
He stares for a moment longer, just a heartbeat of stillness between us, then he jerks on the iron chain until I have no choice but to stand with him or risk him ripping my hands clean off. My arms stretch before me as he drags me behind him, and my gaze drops to the blackened skin of my palms, dirtied by the filth of the cell.
I've lost track of how many weeks I've been down here, but I can feel the filth coating my skin. It's not particularly comfortable, and I would like to take a bath and scrub myself raw, but that has nothing to do with the delicate sensibilities of my mate. The life I left behind dances in the back of my mind, an echo of a time where I knew the love of friends and the respect of fellow soldiers, and the true terror of war and displacement.
The last time I was this dirty and went this long without a bath, my brother Pemba and I were scouting, pushing hard to try to make it to the outer villages in the Northern Lands to provide aid and recruit more soldiers after the latest attack of the Ureen. We were chosen, along with a handful of other soldiers, for our healing abilities, and we’d traveled for weeks through the unforgiving mountainous north of the kingdom only to arrive at the most remote reaches of the Sol King’s land to find that the villages no longer existed. Nothing was left behind, not a male, a female or a child, not even the buildings they had once dwelled in.
Everything had been consumed.
It was the first time in the war that I truly felt despair, as though we could not win, and though Pemba had put on a brave face and murmured quietly to me old stories of our parents and our home and all of the wonderful things in our lives that we still clung to like the children we once were, I could not find any hope in my chest.
I’d almost given up that day. Only the thought of what such a thing would do to my brother had kept me going. He had already lost so much, as much as I had, and yet he pasted a smile on his face every day for me. I could be selfish toward myself, but I would never do that to him.
I follow the Savage Prince up the long flight of stone steps, and when we reach the top, I find that it's still dark outside, the huge glass windows that line the hallway show a black night sky. There's light everywhere thanks to the glowing orbs of magic, a remnant of the First Fae and their power that has lasted millenia, and my eyes tear as they adjust, but my vision soon clears and I follow silently as the Savage Prince drags me through the castle. When we exit through one of the castle’s side doors, I realize that this could be my end, that he could be taking me outside to kill me and spread my ashes over the deadened earth, but still, it doesn't matter to me at all.
I follow him as patiently as I follow my fate.
When we reach the barracks, I see rows of high-fae soldiers sitting on horses as they wait to ride out, thirty males in full military regalia but without any house colors, bowing in their saddles as their prince arrives. Only one waits on foot for our arrival.
Roan, the Seelie-blood prince, steps forward from the front line, his horse’s reins in his hands as he greets the Savage Prince. We meet him by Airlie, the heavily pregnant princess. She’s in a nightgown with a fur-lined cloak thrown over the top, casual and discreet about this early morning meet-up.
The moment we stop alongside her she snaps, “You're taking too long. We're supposed to be moving with haste, not dragging things out. Every moment could be Prince Roan's last!”
