There’s a person … awomanhuddled on the ground by the bars, her weathered fingers wrapped around the rusted shafts of metal as though she slipped away clinging to the hope of a freedom that never came.
My knees buckle, and Cainon’s grip around me tightens.
The shrunken remains remind me of the mice I used to throw across my Safety Line to Shay …
“Wh-what is this place?” I whisper, voice cracking. Only the small, curious part of me wants to know. Every other bit is screaming to turn and dash down those stairs. To run faster than I ever have and never look back.
“An old, abandoned Unseelie burrow. Raided by Irilak.”
The words pour my lungs full of mortar.
Unseelie.
I remember the illustration inTe Bruk o’ Avalanste—the way that male looked out at me from the page through eyes that made me feel small and fragile.
Hunted.
Thosemonstersalmost tore our world to shreds. There’s not a single part of me that wants to see what they were capable of doing to these captives.
“I need to go.”
I shouldn’t have come.
Cainon’s lips brush my ear, blasting my skin with a burst of goosebumps. “No. Not until you’ve seen it all.” I’m pushed forward, his firm grip on my chin lashing my head sideways, forcing me to look at the cell on my left.
There’s a child on the bed, perhaps a boy, curled up, held together by moth-eaten clothes and dehydrated skin that’s sucked close to his frail remains. And his hands … they’re covering his face like a shield.
If I can’t see you, you can’t see me.
A sharp sound carves up my throat. He’s small.
Too small.
“This is the black smudge in our history books that most struggle to look at,” Cainon drawls. “Mostly the ones who have something to hide.”
He releases his hold on me, and I thud to the ground, knees cracking against the stone as he rounds on the bars.
I can’t breathe. Can’t move or think or blink, moored in place by an anchor lanced through my heart.
“The world was once driven by more than just the desire to govern more land. It was a ruthless, brutal age of greed and bloodlust, where those with power ruled and those without were the corpses the High Masters and Mistresses built their thrones upon.”
Cainon drops into my line of sight, snapping my view of the child.
I flinch, looking up into his emphatic stare with a mouthful of words and a severed tongue.
“The Unseelie fed off the life force of others, Orlaith. Men. Women.Children,”he bites out, dashing his hand toward the cell. “It bolstered them. Gave some of them yield over the elements. Filled others with unparalleled strength.”
“Stop—”
“Until The Great Purge that set most things in order, theironemortal weakness was a Vruk talon through the heart,” he says, brow pinched as he watches a tear slip down my cheek. “Not even the Irilak would touch them.”
Is that why the Irilak don’t eat me?
Am I part Unseelie?
“For thousands of years,” he continues, “they were unstoppable—plagued with an unquenchable thirst to tear the world to bloody shreds in their bid to be the best.”
He collects my tears with the pad of his thumb, slipping it between his lips, and I wonder if I taste scorched.
