A Veil of Truth and Trickery by Analeigh Ford

Chapter Seventeen

There werea thousand reasons why the next few hours my mind fought back sleep.

Against all odds, all warnings, all precedents—I’d been told there was a way back to Alderia after all. A way back to Sol.

It was foolish to think I’d be welcomed into my village with open arms, but I didn’t care. If I survived Avarath long enough to get back, I could survive anything. I would survive anything. I’d never take that blessed normalcy—cursed or not—for granted again.

I did eventually fall into a dream-filled slumber, one that made it all too difficult to wake when the time came.

It was Waylan who finally forced me to rise from my bed, long after Caldamir had started threatening to tie me up and throw me over the back of his mare himself and be done with it. I had half a mind to let him this time, if only out of spite, until the demon’s lizard-like skin appeared in my face.

“He’s serious, you know,” he said, solemnly. “Dangerous precedent to set. And here I was thinking you were a fighter.”

I let out a groan, but reluctantly sat up. My hair had dried wet, turning into another bird’s nest of a mat at the back of my head. The sight of it made Waylan’s hands twitch toward the brush he’d already packed in the bag slung over his shoulder. That was what finally made me leap out of bed and start pulling my dress back on.

I’d managed to avoid it last night, but I wouldn’t put myself through that again. Not now. Not willingly.

I’d barely pulled the top of the bodice down over the sheer part of my chemise before Caldamir burst through the door, color staining his cheeks the same hue as the sky behind him. The sun had barely begun to rise, still sitting low enough not to break through the line of trees that surrounded the court.

Behind him, on the ground, Armene already sat on a massive black stallion with hair that matched his own in both color and coarseness. Tethys was fiddling with the reins of a smaller, dappled mare that had a flighty look about her. Her eyes rolled in her sockets, and with each breath that flared her nostrils, so did a set of gills that cut behind the creature’s jaw.

Caldamir’s mare Rynn was there too, but this time she’d been saddled differently. I knew immediately what the longer leather seat meant.

“What, you don’t trust me to ride on my own?”

“I don’t trust you for anything,” Caldamir said, mirroring a similar sentiment I’d found myself expressing all too recently. “I’ve been honest with you already. That should be more than enough.”

He eyed Waylan for a moment, glanced over the room, and since I apparently wasn’t moving fast enough already, grabbed me by the wrist and starting pulling me out and down the stairs after him. It was all I could do to hold the laces of my gown together to keep it from flying apart.

“Can’t you wait just a minute?”

“No. We should be going before the rest of the court wakes. There’d be more than a few fae who’d rather not see our journey succeed.”

Just like the creature in the pool.

I stumbled back, my hand somehow slipping out of Caldamir’s. He grasped at air in the moment my hand left his, as if he’d forgotten how much smaller I was than he.

“Why not? Don’t all the fae want your precious glamour back?”

He didn’t waste time reaching for me again, but I was too fast for him. I dodged out of his way and back a step toward the house behind me.

“Now is not the time for this,” he said, voice low. The third time he held out his hand palm up, though he was practically twitching to grab me.

“I could scream, you know,” I said, “alert the whole court. Then it’d be a lot harder for us to slip away.”

“If we promise to tell you on the ride, will you just get on the damn horse?”

For one second, I let my eyes lift to roam the sleeping court up above. Soon, I was sure the revelers from the night before would be waking—or maybe not. I wasn’t sure if there was such a thing as fae hangovers, though from the wine and revelry of the night before, it’d certainly be warranted.

I’d seen the hunger in the fae’s eyes before, I’d sensed their power, felt their lust firsthand. I didn’t think I’d like to be on the receiving end of their hatred, whatever the reason. At least Caldamir and the others needed me alive, for now. They wouldn’t kill me right away, and that was something. That was more than something. It was insurance. It gave me a chance, something that staying here any longer couldn’t guarantee.

The creature in the pool had promised to get me out of here if only I stayed alive. I’d been told to defy the princes, but surely, that could wait. For now, I needed their protection.

“Fine.” I reached out my hand to Caldamir.

The moment he took it, he pulled me forward sharply and hoisted me up onto the back of Rynn in one fell swoop. He rose up behind me in the saddle, his body melding into the back of mine. His thighs were huge, spread on either side of my hips, cradling me so that I probably didn’t need to hold on to the front horn for support. With Caldamir at my back, there was no chance of falling. Not unless he did first.

No chance of slipping away either.

“And Waylan—”

“Stop worrying about the demon,” Armene said, pulling up beside us. “He’ll meet us whenever we stop. They have their own way of traveling.”

True to his word, Waylan was already gone. Though not before, I discovered, he’d somehow placed the brush in my lap without me noticing. I’d never felt so threatened by something so mundane in my life. By the time our three horses had passed through the gate and out onto the narrow path winding around the court, my hair didn’t have so much as a snarl—I’d made sure of it.

If I was somehow going to make it out of this whole thing alive, it wasn’t just the fae I was going to have to watch out for. Though, from the way the princes rode out of the court with heads bowed and necks swiveling to look over their shoulders at every snapping twig, the fae might be a bigger threat than I thought.

These were Nyx’s people, the same fae that had welcomed us into their court only yesterday. I supposed things had changed since then. For me to stay alive, it wasn’t Caldamir, Armene, and Tethys that presented the most immediate threat.

So, with that in mind, I stayed silent. I ducked my head when they did, held my breath when I heard them holding theirs, sat in stillness when all around me stopped moving.

We rode in this tense silence until the court had long since dropped away behind us and the little brook had grown into a broad stream. The water flowed in steady rivulets between thick, slippery stones. Sometimes the horses ventured into it, letting their hooves grind into the stones and the water splash up onto their knees.

We stopped eventually, the princes dismounting one at a time to splash their faces with water and refill the flasks at their hips. Gnats buzzed heavily in the air, but I noticed no one reaching for them—not even to bat them out of the way.

I guess Nyx had gotten to Caldamir in the end.

The horses bickered amongst themselves, mostly in their own language of sighs and sniffs, punctuated occasionally by the most disturbing kind of human laugh. It only sounded human against the background of their whinnies. On its own, it was the kind of sound that might illicit nightmares instead of a swat on the head by the back of Caldamir’s hand.

“Wait too long, and this happens every time,” he said, shaking his head to match his mares as he slid her bridle back into place after a particularly long rest. She’d given him the runaround for the last ten minutes, avoiding being re-saddled until the very last minute. The bridle she now reluctantly took from him wasn’t an ordinary bridle with a bit, it was more of a simple leather contraption meant to give a gentle tug in the right direction. Explained how she was able to speak so clearly—when she chose to.

The last thing Caldamir did before we started up again was kick one of the wayward rocks turned over by the horses back into its place at the edge of the stream.

“Never can be too careful,” Caldamir said, finally swinging one leg back up onto the mare and up behind me. I’d grown so used to the feel of him already that I melted back into the shape of his hard stomach before I realized what I was doing. By then, it was already too late.

I shifted uncomfortably in the saddle, all too aware of the press of the fae’s body up against mine. I’d assumed at first that Caldamir’s beauty was due to his kind’s glamour, that it was another tool in his arsenal to lie and deceive. It felt all too real now to be any kind of magic.

As soon as Caldamir had stopped squirming, each movement giving me too vividly a picture of what lay beneath his fine silks, I was more than ready for a distraction.

“So, now you’ll explain, right? Tell me why we had to sneak out of there like common criminals.”

“Nope.”

Caldamir’s tone was so matter of fact, I thought for a moment that I’d heard him wrong. Right up until I felt his arm tighten a bit around me and he leaned in to speak into my ear, the tingle of it making a kind of electricity alight at the base of my skull. “I’m not telling you anything.”

I jerked away. “I knew I shouldn’t have trusted you. You tricked me!”

“I don’t trust you. You don’t trust me. Now we’re even.”

The horse swayed beneath us in a way that I swore was something akin to a belly laugh. Rynn tried to cover her snort with a whinny, but I knew better and dug one of my heels into her side in retaliation.

She let out another snort, eye rolling back just to narrow itself at me.

I ignored her.

“I’d hardly call it that,” I said to Caldamir. “It’s not the same.”

“But oh, it is. Let this be a lesson, Delphine of Alderia. Never agree to anything with a fae unless there’s a deal.”

I kept my face forward and my voice even. “Right, and never make a deal with a fae.”

“Ah see, you’re learning.”

The slightest smile pulled at the corner of my mouth.

If only he knew.