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There was no going back, now.
The only problem was, we were still spent. Though we were back in Arcadia, my Fae magic had only just begun to recharge. I wouldn’t be back to fighting form until at least the morning, and Valerian was in the same boat. Our best bet right now was to walk, to come down the hill, and begin our trek toward… anywhere that wasn’t here.
And anywhere but home.
Windhelm had changed. Neither of us were truly ready to deal with what was waiting for us there, where I could only imagine there were plenty more horrible revelations to be discovered. Because already I knew, deep in my gut, that something terrible had happened at the palace.
How could my parents have allowed the forest to have been cut down like this? My mother is a Moon Child herself. She would never have let her family’s ancestral home be desecrated like this. It didn’t make sense, and thinking about it only made the sickness I was feeling even worse.
“Act naturally,” Valerian said, keeping his voice low, “But know that we are being followed.”
Those words made my blood run cold. “It knows we’re here?”
“It knew the moment we crested the hill. The Souldirge’s sense of smell is unparalleled in Arcadia, and we smell likeEarth.”
“How long will it follow us?”
“It’s hard to say, but if we let it know that we’ve detected it, it will attack. We need to keep walking, pretend we don’t know it’s there, and avoid any dark areas.”
Valerian then grunted, as if he had just thought of something.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Strange that this creature would be hunting in broad moonlight like this. It must be starving.”
“And it could be anywhere…” I said, trailing off.
White, glistening snow blanketed the landscape around us, and while the trees were in fact gone, their stumps were covered in that same, shiny snow and ice that covered the ground. This creature, what I remembered of it, was entirely cased in a white exoskeleton that shone like it was made of glossy ice. It could have been hiding in plain sight, and I wouldn’t have had a single chance at spotting it.
That being said, if it was following us, then it was behind us, and I wasn’t about to turn around and check for it.
“This isn’t the welcome I wanted,” I said.
“You expected something else?” Valerian asked.
“I didn’t expect anything, but I had hoped for something better…” I trailed off. “Being captured by Windhelm’s Swords would’ve been preferrable to this.”
“How would that have been preferrable?”
“Because it would have beennormal. Windhelm’s Swords frequently patrol portal sites. They know when they’re supposed to open, and they station Fae at those portals to try to keep human incursions to a minimum. They should have been waiting for us. The fact that they’re not there just makes this all… worse.”
Valerian took a deep breath, then exhaled. “This is not the place I expected to return to, either. I have always known of this forest’s existence, and I have never known Windhelm to be anything less than a glimmering jewel in the snow… even if that jewel stood for everything that was wrong with the rest of the Winter Kingdom.”
“How could you say that?”
“We’ve been over this, Amara.”
“I know, and I know I’ve lived a life of privilege and luxury, but my parents… they’ve always done their best to foster a system of equality, and justice.”
“And freedom?”
I frowned. “That’s unfair.”
“You ran away from the castle because they wanted you to marry someone you didn’t want to marry. They didn’t give you a choice in the matter. I think it’s fair to say you’ve witnessed some of the oppression many of the Fae who live outside of the castle’s walls feel every single day that goes by in this place. Arcadia isn’t the magical wonderland humans fantasize it to be.”
My frown turned into a scowl. “Is a political discussion really what we should be doing right now?”
“The only thing we should be doing right now is trying to make it to that other hill, and making sure the creature following us doesn’t know we’ve spotted it.”
