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Ah, so that was where she kept them. Her usual braid was so thick he doubted anyone had ever noticed.
He really hoped she didn’t ask him how those had come loose the next morning.
He sighed, pulled the blanket up to her shoulders, and clasped her face. “Jules, repeat after me: you had a most excellent evening of dancing and revelry,” he told her. “You danced, you ate, and you drank far too much. But you got back to bed by yourself. We never spoke.”
Later, Hawthorn would wonder at the magnificent unfairness that he could only ever speak a lie if he was spilling it into a mortal’s ear, and how Jules made a poor receptacle for the only lies he had ever uttered.
Julianaploddedonwardthroughthe thick, heavy snow. Several times, she thought about turning back, or at least finding shelter, making a fire, speaking to Hawthorn, weighing her options. But she didn’t want to admit this wasn’t the best of ideas, and at the end of the day, she still had no way of getting through the gates to Acanthia.
Thiswasthe best way. She could do it. She had to.
Distracted, her foot slipped on a patch of ice and she tumbled down a slope, hitting a dense, flattened part of snow on something that looked almost like a road.
Juliana surveyed her surroundings. She had landed on a footprint almost as large as she was tall.
A giant had come past here.
She examined the rest of the trail. By the looks of things, it hadn’t come alone. Dozens, maybe hundreds of other tracks ran alongside it. Narrow, thin lines, claws and paws… a dark myriad of patterns and footprints.
Her father would have been able to name all of them, to give a precise number.
All Juliana could guess was that it was alot.
Don’t follow,warned a voice inside.Stick to the path.
The trail led deeper than she’d planned to go. She ought to stick west, moving towards Acanthia. She shouldn’t allow herself to be sidetracked—
But she was also acutely aware of Ladrien’s plans to invade the mortal realm, and she had to—had to—find out if this had anything to do with that. If she saved Faerie but doomed the rest of the world in the process, she wasn’t sure she could live with that.
Just find out what you’re dealing with,she told herself.Don’t do anything stupid. That’s Hawthorn’s area.
But even as she thought it, she knew that wasn’t true. Hawthorn was cunning and calculated, at least when it came to things like this. He never rushed into a fight. He thought about everything he said and did.
She really should have waited to talk to him.
Too late now.
She crept forwards, footsteps sinking deeper and deeper into the snow. If anyone caught her trail now, she’d never lose them.
A thick, dense wall of thorns appeared ahead of her, obsidian-black and shining against the snow. It parted where the tracks lead. Juliana inched forward, remembering the thorns Ladrien had summoned, expecting these to be like the vines at home, alive and whispering.
But they were silent. If these were conjured by Ladrien, there was no life to them. Perhaps that was the difference between Seelie magic and Unseelie—one life, one death.
A short while later, smoke appeared in the distance, followed by a faint red glow. Rocks emerged, the snow sloped away. A quarry opened up ahead of her.
Juliana took a moment to gather her breath, forgoing the path down into the centre, and instead climbed up to a ledge to peer over the side.
Her stomach leapt from her body.
Inside the pit were hundreds of Unseelie. Giants and goblins, all kitted out in armour; sluaghs shrieking overhead; viscous red-caps, painted in blood; fanged, grey-skinned nixies with hair like pondweed; barghests all collared and harnessed, with dozens of other brutish beasts she couldn’t name or see clearly enough to hazard a guess at their origins.
A force like this could flatten a mortal town. Devour it, liquify it, drain the souls to feed their ranks and carry on to the next.
And the next, and the—
She shouldn’t have come. What could she even do? There was no way she could take on an army and no one she could turn to. She just had to reach Acanthia as soon as she could and try and convince Maytree to lend aid—
A shadow fell across her. Instinctively, her hand flew to her dagger, whipping round in an instant and toppling her opponent to the floor, blade against his chin.
