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If I continue at this pace, I’ll collapse, and they’ll find me and drag me right back. But if I slow, they’ll find me anyway. Even with Royad’s cryptic words that Crows weren’t like other fairies, they are still fairies. Bird-shifting, bride-stealing, tribute-demanding fairies who are out for my blood.
Above, a shadow moves beyond the green layers of leaves. I tell myself that it’s a songbird even when I don’t believe it for a frantic heartbeat.
I duck under a low pine just as the shadow dives through the treetops, landing on a thick branch a few trees ahead. The bark digs into my skin as I press my back against the tree trunk, holding my breath and willing myself to keep still even when my shoulder is a pain-pulsing mess.
From behind me, a hiss calls the attention of the shadow, which hops forward out of the leaves, revealing a large, male form with feathered arms and claws for hands. I don’t see his face, and I don’t need to. The way he hisses and caws tell me all I’ll see are feathers and a beak and soulless eyes. If he spots me down here, I’m dead, and I’m not even thinking about the second Crow behind the tree where I’m hiding.
“Come out, little bride,” the one in the treetops hisses, the sound sending shivers of panic down my back while my throat slowly closes up. The feeling is familiar, similar to drowning, minus the pain. It’s the fear driving me to stop moving entirely, including breathing, for if they find me, I’m dead. “I haven’t tasted human flesh in a while.”
I-can’t-I-can’t-I-can’t close my eyes, no matter how much I want to make them disappear with a blink, the way I made my cell at Fort Perenis disappear during those long months in the damp darkness. If I shut my eyes for a heartbeat, I might be disemboweled before I even realize they are upon me. Then, perhaps that’s the more merciful way to go. I don’t want to think about the myriads of other cruel ways of killing me they might come up with.
They know I’m here, might even have let me escape, only to chase me through the forest. I wouldn’t put it past them to want to make a hunt of it.
The Crow on the branch swings his legs over the wood and slides down. The last few feet, he beats his wings to buffer the fall and lands on his boots. My hiding place suddenly doesn’t feel so well concealed anymore. Even if he can’t see me, he might smell me. I strain my ears for a sign of the second Crow.
There, a swish to my right.
My entire body protesting from my absolute stillness, I inhale a painful breath and inch to the left around the trunk. Searing pain rakes down my arm as my injured shoulder brushes the bark, and I barely balance myself on my toes where I squat under the branches. If they can see me, they haven’t given a sign, haven’t lunged for me or dragged me out with their magic.
Run,my inner voice commands.Run fast.
The Crow whose legs and claws I can see through the underbrush is blocking the path I’d been following away from the palace and the other one…
I need to get out of here, need to make a run for it.
I’m about to tell myself that running will only get me caught faster when something sharp digs into my good shoulder, ripping me to my feet and out of my hiding place. A scream tears from my lungs, hoarse and breathless, but a scream anyway.
“Shut your mouth.” A second claw falls around my face, covering my mouth so hard I taste blood. “We don’t feel like sharing our meal.”
Panic is no longer strong enough a word to describe what happens when he sniffs my hair, pulling me against his feathered chest. His beak clicks right by my ear, nicking the sensitive skin at the top of it, and I start thrashing in his grasp. Forget the pain in my shoulder—it no longer matters. Forget my crippled hand. I claw at the Crow’s winglike arm with all that I have, the hissing, cawing laughter of both of them becoming a tapestry of nightmares to my futile efforts to free myself.
“King Myron has made a mistake letting you out of his sight, little bride.”
Guardians help me, I can’t-breathe-can’t-breathe-can’t-breathe as I struggle and kick aimlessly.
The Crow holding me caws violently to the other, and I don’t need to understand the exact words to know the meaning.
I’m dinner. They’re ready to slice me open and feed on my organs.
I’ve known fear, have fretted for my life before. But never like this. Never have I seen death on my doorstep with a vicious grin on his face like that.
If I don’t manage to break free, there won’t be enough left of me for Royad or Myron to find once they realize I’m gone—if they even bother to go looking. I’ll be another set of bones withering away in the moss and ferns of this Seeing Forest.
The thought hits me like a rock in the head, and I go still in my captor’s grasp, wheels spinning in my mind as I try to remember the Ayna who fought alongside pirates, who put their captain on his back in training, who knew how to smile and to laugh. The Ayna who had something to live for.
She’s deep down there, somewhere, but as I reach for her, only the bitter, teeth-baring woman who withered in prison for almost a year stares back at me. It doesn’t matter. I’ll take her help as much as any other’s.
I spent months observing how the fairy guards’ superior senses and instincts made flight literally impossible for me, am bearing the scars on my back, on my arms, and my hands. Yet I also spent months learning to compartmentalize pain and work around it. And that’s what I do.
With a scream, I distract the fairy holding me as I throw my head back into his jaw and kick my heel up between his legs. Claws rip over my cheek and mouth as he lets go, cawing a curse and hissing in pain as he reaches for his crotch. And then I’m running.
I don’t look back for what the other Crow is doing. If he’s following me or watching his hunting partner writhe in pain. I just bolt, cutting through the lush greenery like a blade. My shoulder is a branding iron, but I pant through the agony, clutching my hand to my chest to keep it from jostling too much while my bad hand shoves aside branches and holds onto tree trunks so I don’t slip as I take sharp turns.
I no longer know if I’m running from or to the palace, don’t know if I’m being followed or if my followers are already almost upon me. All I know is that, if I stop, I’m dead for real this time. So, I pump my legs, no matter how much they burn, the promise of air and freedom dangling like a spider’s silk-thin thread before me. Of a moment of rest if I make it to the edge of the forest where the Crow Fairies cannot reach.
It’s all I need to push myself harder, faster, my heart beating like butterfly wings in honey. I don’t slow, don’t give up because, if I do, it will be the end of me.
A bone-shattering roar rips the air, making me stumble over a root as I lose focus for a breath, and I’m down. My knees hit the moss between the roots—a small mercy I realize—as above me, shadows are closing in, blocking out the sun beyond the canopy of branches. My head is not as lucky.
