A Veil of Truth and Trickery by Analeigh Ford

Chapter Twenty

I’d grownfamiliar enough with the forests here to know when something was wrong.

And something was definitely wrong.

It was more than the way the brambles grew like a perfect wall up around us on all three sides. It was a feeling. It settled over us like rancid air, a sourness that the stooped branches of the trees overhead.

The moment our hands met, the dazed expression on Nyx’s face turned to me. His eyes stared vacantly into mine for a moment, looking through me instead of at me.

From somewhere behind, on the other side of the brambles, I heard our names being called. They were familiar voices. Caldamir. Armene. Tethys. Even Tallulah called out after us, the crashing sound that followed a sure sign of the underbrush meeting a swift demise at the end of whatever weapon she’d chosen to swing.

The voices might’ve been familiar, but they were also already fading. They were moving away from us, not toward us.

“Come on, Nyx,” I said, wrapping my second hand around his too and starting to tug. The motion finally jerked him out of his daze, his head shaking a few times as he cleared it. As soon as he had, he suddenly sat up to stare hauntingly ahead.

“That’s right,” I said, moving back a step and pulling on him again. “We’re halfway there.”

Nyx shook his head one more time before allowing me to help him back to his feet. Whereas I’d managed to avoid the brambles altogether, Nyx hadn’t been so lucky. I guess his considerable weight had made it harder for his mare to throw him over the bushes, leaving him with two shallow scrapes along the back of his neck.

The discovery of which left him devastated.

I thought at first that the staggered, horrified steps that carried us even deeper into the forest were for the brambles’ sake. I’d seen the way he reacted when he heard about the gnats. Maybe the brambles were sentient too.

It wasn’t until he finally stumbled into a tree, one hand outstretched to support his hunched over body, that I realized what it really was.

“I—I must be hideous.”

“Wait, what?”

He held out a hand to stop me from drawing nearer. From where I stood, the marks on his neck were already beginning to fade. They were barely small pink scratches now.

Nyx covered his face. “I never wanted you to see me like this.”

I stood stock still on the dry forest floor in complete shock. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Nyx finally straightened up only to spin around furiously on his heel to face me. He pointed deliberately at the now almost invisible lines fading away.

“You know, before the glamour left us, you never would’ve had to see that. Or this. Or these.”

His eyes averted shamefully away from me as he pointed at some unseeable defects on his flawless face. “I used to be beautiful.”

The voices calling our names had faded even further. Not only were they still moving away from us, but we’d moved further away from them.

“Nyx, I can honestly say you’re the most beautiful creature I’ve ever laid eyes on,” I said, trying without much success to keep the annoyance out of my voice. “Human or fae.”

His face lit up, that same rosy blush rising up to color his cheeks that I’d caught once before. “You … you really think so?”

“Yes,” I said, genuine for just a moment. Then I heard my own name, the sound so distant it struck a panicked nerve inside me. “Now, can we get going?”

It took some time to find a break in the brambles that we could pass through. By the time we’d stepped through to the other side of the forest, something about the area didn’t look right. The trees here were darker and grew closer together. The earth was littered with thick, undisturbed years of fallen leaves.

Feet rarely trod here, if ever.

We listened hard for the sounds of our names being called this time, paying closer attention to the next few distant reiterations, and my heart immediately sank.

They’d started to come from other parts of the forest. I heard it over my shoulder, then up ahead in the bushes. The closer we came to the source of the sound, the further away it sounded the next time we heard it. It wasn’t until the sound of it started to sound … off … that I finally realized what it was.

I stopped dead in my tracks, Nyx taking several more steps before he realized I’d fallen behind.

“Birds,” I said, swearing and stamping my foot as I turned in a slow circle, eyes scanning the trees overhead. “They’re birds. We’ve been following birds.”

As if on cue, a flock of the winged creatures made a loud squawking sound as they alit from two of the trees overhead. They fluttered in a dark silhouette against the pattern of leaves, a smattering of feathers slowly floating down after them. It was the only sign of them that remained once they’d taken off.

Not before I saw enough of them to marvel at how strikingly similar they looked to the birds known for their own mimicking cries in the human world. I plucked one of the fallen feathers from the ground and turned it over in my hand.

Dense, pinkish-colored bushes were growing here in the forest. I’d not seen them anywhere along the road. I knew I’d remember if I had, as if we needed any more reminders that we were well and truly lost. Nyx would never admit it, I knew, but I also knew the look on his face. He, unlike the other fae princes, was not so good at hiding his emotions.

“Mockingbirds, they call them in Alderia,” I said, turning the feather over once more. “Just … a lot bigger.”

Like everything in Avarath, it was a little more. Similar, but different.

Similar, but more.

Nyx looked a little more serious as he came to stand at my side, his eyes drinking in the same thing mine were. “Some of the courts used to use them as spies,” he said, picking up one of the other feathers. “It’s been a long time since I saw one in my forest.”

When he looked back up, the feather disappearing—tucked away into one of his many pockets—there was a new, resolute look on his face.

“My forest,” he repeated, nodding once. With that, he plunged headfirst into the rose-colored bushes. “This is my forest. We’re going to be fine.”

* * *

We were not fine,it turned out, though it took us several hours of wandering for Nyx to be ready to admit it. I’d discovered this hours earlier, of course. I’d known this since the distant sound of my name being called had long since dissolved into the harsh trill of the birds overhead, the mimicked sound of it repeated over and over until it no longer resembled a name at all.

It was even more haunting that way.

For Nyx, however, it took longer. It took until we finally stumbled upon the last remnants of a drying puddle and Nyx caught sight of his reflection in it for him to fully crumble.

His hands rose up suddenly to the back of his neck, his fingers fumbling with something I couldn’t see until he’d collapsed on the edge of the muddy water to get a better look.

“It’s ruined. It’s all ruined.”

I was exhausted, my patience for Nyx’s … oddities … already worn too thin. He was supposed to be the protector, but here he was, skin turning pale at the sight of a few stained drops of blood on his collar.

Blood that was decidedly red, not blue, as if I needed yet another reminder of the many falsities we’d been fed about the fae in my world.

“First the glamour, and now this?” Nyx was saying. “This simply cannot do.”

He suddenly got back up to his feet, and before I could say anything, he’d started tearing off the pieces of his wardrobe. The laces were made of such delicate silks that they broke at the slightest touch—or maybe I’d just forgotten that however delicate this fae might look, he was far from it.

Whatever was true, one or some combination of both, it was only a matter of seconds before Nyx stood bare chested in front of me, his lungs heaving air furiously in and out of his shuddering form. The remains of his waistcoat and shirt hung limply in his hands when we heard a new sound.

It was soft at first, the gentle cracking of leaves swaying in the breeze. It was the flutter of petals drifting down from a top branch. It was the crinkle of leaves unfurling.

Something moved in the shade under one of the trees along the edge of the puddle. A shapeless mass started to form, roots reaching up from the ground like small seedlings searching for light.

A look came over Nyx, a strange one—some mixture of recognition and terror—as a shape formed in the swirling mass. It grew from the ground with each step, forming first long, shapely legs, then thighs that rose into an hourglass body swinging back and forth with each exaggerated step.

It was a dryad. A sentient tree.

“Oh, Nyx … here I was thinking I’d have to do all the undressing.”

The dryad’s voice purred with a sensuality I didn’t expect to hear coming from a tree. Not that I expected any sound to come from a tree, no matter how human she looked, how velvety soft her birch-tree skin had grown.

It took me a moment, right up until I saw the way she looked over the fae prince, to realize who she was. More importantly, what she’d once been.

Nyx turned to face her head on, chest still heaving—this time, from a new kind of fear.

“Betula,” he said, the sound of her name barely hissing between his lips. “I can explain everything.”

It was the jilted lover. This was the dryad Tethys had tried to warn me about.