Page 38 of Let Slip the Dogs of War

“Lark hasn’t come out of that room since he went in there. Maybe you should go take a nap on the bed?”

That wakes me up a little more and I blink blearily before I rub at my eyes. “No, I—I’m awake. Sorry. That all sounds good. You’ll be safe in there?”

“Pretty sure,” Grant says, giving me a reassuring smile. He pats me on the shoulder. “Seriously, rest. We’ve got a ball to attend tonight, remember?”

I grimace, and he smiles again before he slips out the door, then closes it quietly behind him. I rest my elbows on my knees and put my head in my hands. It still hurts, but less than before. Lark’s still in that room? He needs to rest, too. As far as I know, most fae don’t need as much sleep as humans, but it’s been a long day, and he just got all his magic back. It might be selfish of me, too, but I want to be sure he’s well-rested before we find Ophelia tonight. If we’re all alert, we might think of a way out of this for him.

I get up with a sigh and walk over to the door, where I knock quietly. “Lark?” I call out. He doesn’t answer. Maybe he’s not in there at all. Maybe he’s gone to some other room somewhere else.

I push down the handle and the door swings gently open.

Lark is in here. He’s standing in the centre of the room, still and silent, and the look of utter despair on his face breaks my heart.

It’s a greenhouse, I think, or at least was once a semblance of one. The walls are hewn stone, like the rest of the castle, but the ceiling is made of glass, and the sun—no, suns—beat down upon it.

And there were plants here. Hundreds of them, except now they’re all withered where they haven’t rotted away, and Lark is standing in the centre of their quiet, unvisited tomb.

“Lark?” I murmur.

He blinks, as though coming back to himself, and it’s only then that I notice his glamour is gone. His eyes are black from corner to corner, features stretched and sharp in a way they aren’t when he’s pretending to be human.

“Dante?” He looks at me then, for a second, before he turns his face away. “Apologies. I did not mean—”

“This was all yours?” I interrupt. I don’t want him to push me away again. I don’t—

I don’t know what I want.

“Yes,” he says.

I feel a faint pulse of his magic, and I’m not sure if he’s reaching for his power or for something else entirely. I run my finger over the edge of a stone pot, its surface rough to the touch.

“What happened?”

“I—” He swallows. “Nothing.”

“What do you mean?”

His next words are sharper. “I mean, nothing. No one came to take care of them. And I thought—I knew that. I believed that I knew that.”

“You hoped they might, anyway?”

Lark looks away. He bends his face down, and his hair hides his expression from view. I round the bench in the centre of the room and he doesn’t look up even when I stand before him.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper.

“For this? This is not—”

“For all of it. We’ve trapped you here.” Trapped him like all the plants in this room, maybe. I still want to be angry with him. No, I still am angry with him, but not for this. And it’s harder to hold onto that anger as I get more pieces of who he truly is.

“I could have said no.”

“You wouldn’t.”

He presses his lips together. I reach out tentatively, and when I touch his hand, he doesn’t pull away.

“We should rest,” I murmur. “Grant says some fae are coming by later to help us with our clothes.”

“Very well.”