“Put it in my mouth,” he muttered, voice filled with strain.
“Your mouth. Right.”
I lifted the blade to his lips, watching them part as his teeth bit down on the blade. Then I followed his instructions and slid out from underneath him. It seemed like he was using all his strength to prop himself up, even with the curled vines that had mysteriously sprung up out of the ground underneath us, because the moment I slid out from under his body his arm gave way, and he collapsed to the ground.
I thought I was about to witness his throat being torn out, but instead he rolled the halmasti over, as if he were wrestling a bear, his knife in his teeth, holding the beast’s gnashing jaws at bay.
He must have been holding the giant wolf back solely to avoid crushing me.
I pulled myself back to my feet, looking around blindly for a weapon, wishing again that I had my cousin’s rifle. Not that I knew how to properly fire one, no matter how much my father had tried to teach me. What would I even do with a weapon? The only thing I could effectively stab someone with was a quill.
But still, I saw a sturdy tree branch and lifted it up from the forest floor, attempting to wield it like I’d held a sword all my life.
The giant wolf was still snapping its jaws, its large canines inches from the fae’s face. With my best impression of my cousin Safiyya, I lifted the tree branch and slammed it down on the halmasti’s jaw. It snapped at the bark, but that bought the fae time to snatch his dagger from his mouth and with an underhanded swing, gut the wolf with a vicious stab.
It yelped, the growling replaced by a low whimper.
Then, the beast swung its gaze to me, the violent red eyes blinking and focusing on me furiously before finally fluttering shut.
The fae male stood, soaked in thick black ichor, blood like I’d never seen before dripping from his chest. After everything I’d experienced here already, it was this that caused real fear to rise in my chest.
I’d been shot at, hunted, crossed a magical fae wall, rescued from the River, and thrown into a new world. And it was finally catching up to me.
How did I think I would survive here alone? Not to mention find an ancient treasure and bring down a magical wall that had been erected for a thousand years?
What had I done?
I must have made a sound because fae looked at me, face splattered in black blood, and his eyes as cold and hard as the dead halmasti he’d just killed.
I wanted to burst into tears.
Instead, I turned and ran blindly, threading through the forest and away from the two terrifying creatures I’d found in the dark.
Chapter 15
I’m sorry that all my letters have been nothing short of miserable. There’s still hope here too, if you look. The Red Jasmine Insurgence are assembling, beginning to fight back and organize against Salt. River has continued on as it always does, a curl of life sprouting from death. There’s always a chance we can come back. There’s always hope.
I hope you come back, too.
—Letter from Kiyan to his family, unsent.
Kiyan
I watched her run, her big dark eyes round with fear, her strange clothes wet and clinging to her, hair like a storm. Most humans were usually beat down after centuries of existing as a lifeless shade in service of Salt, but she didn’t seem like that.
I remember the last human I’d properly seen—when I’d been a boy fighting in the pits and running weapons to the rebels from Charvellan city.
The Court of Salt had a few humans they’d brought with them, but they were all at the palace, and at that point I was avoiding any connection to the royal family to prevent someone from recognizing me.
A human boy my age was bound by a bargain to a churail, and the witch kept him on a leash made of threads of wind she’d conjured. His eyes had been vacant and unseeing as he did her bidding. The peris of River were enslaved to the Salt Court, but I preferred having the ability to resist, even if I died for it.
If humans could be so easily enthralled and manipulated, they wouldn’t last long in Peristan.
I looked in the direction the girl ran, feeling the spark of her life in the forest. It was faint, but still there, the beat of her heart quick and afraid. She wouldn’t get far, not on foot and not in the Court of River. I should probably be more worried that she would get herself killed before I managed to find her again.
And I needed to find her, if only to figure out what she knew and how it was possible she had a long dead fae queen’s powerful haath phool on her wrist .
Queen Azari’s bracelet and hand chain had been missing for hundreds of years.
