With a vicious jab, a golden-haired Fae woman pinned a writhing villager to a tree with her knife through his palm. His other palm she pinned to another tree before I could blink. Around her, five Fae stood laughing in a little ring.
“These white trees are birches,” said one of the Fae. His beautiful fox-hair didn’t disguise the cruel glint in his eye. He wore a bright chartreuse jacket sewn all over with red feathers. “I know a trick with birches. You pick two that are far apart and climb up to the high branches and tie a rope and then you pull the tree down as far as it will go. They bend more than you would guess. Then you pull the other one down, too. And you nail a mortal’s feet to the branches. One to one tree, one to the other. And then you let both trees go.”
Their laughter tinkled across my ears like a gentle breeze as horror froze my belly.
“That won’t work,” the golden-haired Fae said. The young man in front of her – Kenty Earthmover – moaned. My mouth went dry at the sound. It was the sound of someone past consciousness.
“I’ve seen it work,” the fox-haired one said with a wink. He was holding something wrapped in cloth – a scythe, I thought. Had Kenty tried to fight with that? Or had he been caught out here unawares as he worked his fields?
“No, I mean, the nail will just pull out. Their flesh is too fragile. Better to lash him to the tree with leather. That won’t break.”
I felt like I might be sick, but I battled the feeling, drawing my arrow back.
“I wouldn’t,” Werex said, but I ignored him.
My first arrow hit the fox-haired Fae in the open neck of his jacket, the blood of his wound blooming around teeth tattoos and dripping to mingle with the red feathers. I began to nock a second arrow when the golden-haired female spun, her hands shooting up, ripples of something – magic? – dancing through the air.
I imagined her as small, small, small and in my cage.
She disappeared.
I turned to the next Fae, arrow aiming, but I was already too late. He was too close. I wouldn’t be able to avoid him.
My heart was racing so fast I couldn’t think clearly. I let the arrow go toward another Fae – one further away – at the same second that the close Fae crashed into me, knocking me to the forest floor and smashing his fist into my jaw.
I couldn’t stop the cry of pain that shot through me. And then suddenly he moaned, and the pressure was off my chest. I rolled to the side and lurched to my feet. My cage had rolled away. My attacker had rolled with it. Where one of his eyes had been there was only a dark hole and his throat had been run through. Blood still spilled into the moss.
I gagged.
From the tree, Kenty moaned, but I was still looking for the third Fae that I knew should be there.
I found him on the ground, a sword being pulled from his chest.
No – not a sword!
A sewing needle.
Chapter Thirty-Four
“I’m sorry to say that your taste in companions is abhorrent, Nightmare,” Scouvrel said, cleaning his sewing needle on the jacket of the dead man. “You make my skin crawl, you wicked thing.”
“These men – ” I began.
“Fae males and females.”
“These men and women,” I corrected sternly. I was more than my sex. So were they – evil or not. “Aren’t my companions,” I said, stumbling over to Kenty and whispering, “this is going to hurt,” before pulling the blades from his hands.
He fell to the ground, clutching his hands to his chest. I leaned over him but Scouvrel called to me.
“Nightmare, listen to me.”
I looked up. He was standing in a defensive position – low and aggressive as if he was planning to fight me. Which was crazy. Right?
“You should not be here,” he said, eyes wild. “You should be running as fast and as far as you can run.”
“None of us should be here,” I said wryly. “And yet here we are. I need to stop my sister and I need to save my town.”
“Oh, that you could do the impossible, Nightmare,” he said, looking at me almost fondly. “Oh, that you could strike them to the core as you have harrowed me. Oh, that we all could break the chains that bind us into roles we did not choose.”
His shirt was open down to his navel despite the swirling snow and the frigid wind and I could see open gashes across his torso, bleeding into his smooth white shirt. His dark fitted coat hung to his knees and its ebony length was sewn with charcoal feathers, but even they were dark in places, and I knew only their dark color hid the blood wetting them.
I swallowed.
I was never sure if I should be terrified of Scouvrel or see him as a friend, if I should pity him, or disdain him. But he took these wounds for me. A sour taste filled my mouth at the sight of them, my eyes pricking sharply with unshed tears.
He was the worse for wear, his cheeks hollow and his dark locks tangled. The Balance had not been kind to him. That was my fault.
“I chose my role, unlike my marriage,” I protested, though there wasn’t much bite to my words. I turned back to Kenty, but he ignored me, a pained look filling his face as he rose, wavering to his feet and scampered off into the woods as fast as a winter hare. I watched him go. “No one chose for me. I’m no victim of circumstance or fate.”
“You chose to be a sacrifice?” Scouvrel asked. He sounded so strange, like he was fighting some thought he didn’t want to have. “To be your sister’s chosen lamb for slaughter?”
“I chose to be a hunter,” I said grimly, scooping up the cage from the ground.
And while my back was turned, I felt a shove. My face smashed into the tree and stars danced across my vision.
I blinked.
Twice.
I was in the cage.
The floor was slicked with blood and the only whole Fae still in it was Werex. I didn’t want to think about what else was on the floor.
I gasped, scrambling to my feet and slipping on the bloody floor. My ankle twisted painfully.
Werex was fast. He slammed into me and I barely managed to dodge enough not to be crushed against the bars. The scent of burning flesh filled my nose as I rolled away.
Everything seemed to be happening at once.
My breath burned in my lungs as I panted, trying to suck in enough air to think.
My heart throbbed, beating faster, pushing me to action.
My hands tingled with the need to move.
My hands. There was something in one of them. I spared a lightning-fast glance at them. The bow.
Werex shot a small dart from something at his wrist. It struck my thick leather boot, embedding enough to bury shallowly in the leather.
Werex was charging again, axe slicing through the air. He was bigger than me. Faster than me. He had years of experience. I had no chance.
But I had to try.
My breath was coming too fast.
I dove for the ground, sliding over the slick, bloody surface, under his body, and then across to the other side of the bars. I hit them – hard – but used the momentum to twist so that I was lying on my back, bow arm up.
I yanked an arrow from my quiver, nocked it and loosed without aiming, hoping it would magically pierce his heart.
Werex bellowed, spinning to face me again, axe raised.
The arrow sliced through the air, spinning, curving unnaturally, and buried itself in his open, screaming mouth, angling upward. I gasped as he fell to the ground.
My heart hammered so loud that I couldn’t hear anything else.
There was so much blood. I was used to blood, but not like this. Not with two yellow cat’s eyes staring at me as if they might blink at a moment’s notice.
I swallowed, my breath rasping out in gasps of agony.
Was this real? Had I just killed the Lord of Twilight?
Collecting my arrows with shaking hands, I paused to check my fallen foe. Yes. It was too real. The way he stared at me seemed to accuse me. I closed my eyes, but I still saw the stare.
The world spun around me, narrowing to this one moment, this thing I’d done. This fight that had almost killed me.
And then the realization hammered down on me. I was trapped. Again. Without any hope of stopping my sister.
I ran to the bars in a rage, stuck my head out and roared as long and hard as I could – right into the face of my captor.
He smirked at me.
“What have you done?” I asked, still shaking so hard that words were difficult to form.
“Exactly what I was ordered to do,” Scouvrel said with a cynical twist to his mouth. “If you didn’t want the Balance ordering me around, then you shouldn’t have sold me to him.”
“But you threw me in a cage with the Lord of Twilight and he wanted me dead! I could have died. I almost did. And you just sat and watched.”
“And see what a fine job you did of saving yourself? Perhaps all you needed was a little desperation and terror. I’ve heard that they can lend a person a fabulous level of concentration.” He seemed utterly unconcerned.
“But I’m your wife!” I protested.
He smirked. “And a fine terrifying wife you are, soaked in the blood of the ruler of a Court. You’ll have to teach me that little trick of yours with the arrow. I liked the irony of shooting him in his open mouth.”
I shut my mouth with a click, staring at him for long moments.
“I could have died, and you don’t care,” I said flatly.
“You do yourself too little credit,” he said coldly. “You were never going to die.”
The cold wind blasted over us and I turned my back to it as tiny pellets of ice scored across my skin. Scouvrel seemed unaffected.
“Aren’t you cold?” I demanded.
“I embrace the cold. It has all the charm of my wife’s icy affections.”
He’d betrayed me. I’d turned my back on him because I trusted him, and he’d betrayed that.
“I thought I could trust you,” I said, my voice shaking.
He paused, staring at me. “I thought I was clear, Nightmare. I should not be trusted.”
“I thought we were married,” I said, still desperate to be proven wrong. Was this a trick? Was he really on my side despite how it looked? “I thought we were allies. I thought we were friends!”
“We are all those things.” His glamor was painfully beautiful as he looked at me with such haunted eyes. “This, Nightmare, is how I treat my friends.”
“I hate you,” I said. “I hate you forever.”
He smiled wickedly. “Good. You should hate me. You should despise me down to your very bones and triumph in my humiliation.”
“Why would you say that?”
“Because I am bound to the truth and can speak no other.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
There was no way to get rid of Werex’s body unless I was going to be a monster like him. I refused to dismember him and throw his pieces through the bars. I was no monster.
But it was a miserable thing to have to stand on the far edge of the cage from him and to see what I’d done. He’d been alive. He’d been a thinking, feeling, living thing. And then I’d stolen all of that from him.
I tried not to think about how I was covered in his blood. I didn’t want to panic.
Scouvrel lifted my cage so he could look at me as he slid through the clusters of Fae and the golems setting up camp around the village. Screams and laughter filled the air. I didn’t dare look out of the cage. I couldn’t bear to see my friends being tortured for the amusement of the Faewald.
I couldn’t stop my teeth from chattering, though. Hopefully, Scouvrel wouldn’t notice. Hopefully, he wouldn’t realize why.
I focused on his narrowed eyes as he looked across the gathered Fae, trying not to notice how many of them there were. I’d never seen a thousand people in one place before. I didn’t like seeing so many now. It made me feel more vulnerable than I’d ever felt before, as if their sheer numbers surging into our world was some kind of violation.
“We have only minutes before I find my master and deliver you over to him,” Scouvrel said in a low tone as he ducked around a group of Fae who were tying up captured soldiers to a large wheel they’d made of fresh-cut trees. I didn’t want to know what the wheel was for. My imagination as already feeding me too many horrible ideas. This was what I’d been fighting against. And I’d lost. “If possible, I would like to gift you some information – as payment for the kiss I took earlier.”
“What a bargain,” I said dryly.
“I’d say so,” he said with a smirk, as if he wasn’t even noticing that a woman right beside us – Maebry Spinner, I thought – was shrieking like she was being killed as the Fae shoved her from one to another, demanding that she dance with them. “But we have no time for fond reminiscence of past crimes. You should know that the Balance plans to make you Fae – to make you immortal.”
I shivered. I could feel his breath like a warm breeze gust over me as he leaned in very close. “Are you afraid, Nightmare? You should be. Be very afraid.”
To my surprise, his expression was haunted as he spoke, shadowed with his own fears and etched deeply with lines of worry. He looked as if something inside was tearing him apart. I almost reached out to comfort him. Even the Fae deserved some compassion, didn’t they? But no. Not Scouvrel. Not my betrayer.
“How do you become Fae?” I asked. “Do you have to ... kill someone?”
I glanced at Werex’s dead body. I had already killed someone. Several someones. Guilt flopped in my belly like a fresh-caught fish.
“You become Fae by drowning in a river of blood.” His expression was hard.
“You have to kill that many people?” I felt my eyes widening.
Why was I still surprised about any of this? I knew they were evil. I knew they loved horror and pain. So why did any of this surprise me?
At least I’d gotten the children out. That was the one good thing that I’d done.
“Oh, don’t be so figurative, my Nightmare.” Scouvrel’s tone was almost affectionate. “I mean a real river of blood, of course. You will be literally drowned in it. Isn’t that nice?” He bit those words off with a fury that belied his tight smile and made my stomach lurch. “You’ll suck in the horrid death of someone else into your lungs until their desecration becomes a part of you and then you’ll die. And we’ll bring you back as a twisted nightmare like us. We call it ‘The Glory’ but only because ‘The Horror’ and ‘The Repulsiveness’ were already taken.”
I gaped. “You’ve thought of things so horrible that they were already named ‘The Horror’ before you thought of that?”
“I keep telling you to run,” he whispered, his eyes widening as if in pity. “I keep telling you to fear. You’re a terribly foolish nightmare to keep coming back and haunting me despite it all. Do you think I take pleasure in your desecration?”
“Yes?”
He turned his burning eyes to me. “I had other plans for you, Nightmare. I still do.”
“Then tell me what they are,” I said through clenched teeth. “You’ve been bargaining and fighting to have me – to own me, to marry me – why? What is this bigger plan that dwarfs all the rest?”
“I wish I could tell you,” he said, his eyes meeting mine. “Did you find your sister’s apartments? Did you find what she wants?”
“She wants me dead so that she can rule the Court of Mortals.”
“Yes. And what do you want?”
“I want a way to stop her from taking my people’s homes and lives,” I said.
He gave me a long dry look. “If you discovered what she wants, then you know that there is only one way to get that. You have to win her just like she is trying to win you.”
“Scouvrel?” I asked, interrupting him.
He tilted his head to the side, listening.
“They stole you as a child and made you Fae. Does
that mean that you also drowned in a river of blood?”
His glamor flickered for a moment, exposing his true nature. Feral eyes met mine and a hard expression filled his emaciated face. I gasped.
He shook his head violently, his face rippling through with masked fury and something that looked almost like fear.
His hand shook so hard that I had to focus on keeping my balance as the cage rocked side to side. My gaze was snatched away from his face and I realized we were walking into town – over a pile of corpses. The soldiers who had marched here with Sir Eckelmeyer.
My heart was in my throat.
“Don’t try to distract me,” he said between his teeth, his glamor returning. “The important part is that mortals may only be made immortal during the Feast of Ravens – when blood flows in rivers. This is their chance for The Glory. And you stole all the children they would have turned. Children collected over years of painstaking effort. The Balance thinks the only way to restore order is to drown you instead.”
“And what do you think?” I asked a little breathlessly.
I was scanning for people I knew in the tumbled heaps along the streets. There was old Mayor Alebren, a kitchen knife in his hand. His head was a full pace away from his body.
My lips felt numb at the sight. I refused to look too long at the other fallen. I didn’t want to see. I’d failed them all.
There was an angry roar from down the street – a mortal voice. A voice I knew.
“Leave them alone!” Olen. That was Olen.
As if all his small betrayals had never even happened, I felt my heart lurch to him. I wanted to defend him. I wanted to save him, too.
Scouvrel watched me with hooded eyes.
“Your strange capacity for forgiveness leaves me feeling hollow, Nightmare. What tortures mortals suffer on behalf of those who hurt them. What woes you will take on for one who did not earn the privilege. There’s magic in that. A strange and wonderful mystery.”
“Your point?” I asked through clenched teeth.
“That’s what I want from you. It’s what I’ve been fighting for from the moment you first put me in a cage,” he whispered, holding the cage up so I could hear his words, see his eyes open wider, his lips tremble slightly as he confessed everything to me. “Absolution. Forgiveness. To be unwoven, untangled, undone.”
Fae Nightmare Page 16
