A Veil of Truth and Trickery by Analeigh Ford

Chapter Twenty-One

And jiltedshe most certainly was.

There wasn’t one drop of kindness in the glare she fixed Nyx with. Though her lips curled up, colored that same rose color of the bushes that had first started us down her carefully laid trap, there was no mirth there.

It was a smug, cruel smile.

“I’m surprised you dare venture into my forest, after how you’ve treated me.”

Nyx’s shoulders rose and fell, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat as he struggled for an answer. “I didn’t mean for things to end badly.”

“End?”

All false sweetness drained from the tree-woman’s voice. Roots burst up out of the ground, ready to grab and carry her over to where Nyx stood between us. He braced himself as she came to a halt just inches before him, her long reed-like hair billowing out around her in an angry cloud.

“If only you’d ended things, I might have been able to forgive you.” Nyx flinched at her words, but I saw the way he averted his gaze. “But no. Instead, you left me here to wait. I waited for two years for you, Onyx.”

“You didn’t have to wait that long.”

“You know I did,” she hissed back. She drew herself up, more roots growing into her so that her body swelled and grew until she was taller even than Nyx. She jutted out her chin in defiance as her arms opened wide, fully exposing the naked curves of her body. Though she was made up of the forest itself, I still found it difficult not to blush as I looked on.

This dryad was, in essence, as real as any human.

“I wasted my youth on you,” she moaned. “I’m no longer the green sapling I was when we met.”

Nyx had started to back away, head tilted back to look up at her. “No, Betula, you’re not. But I’m not the same boy, either.”

“Yet you still wear the token I gave you,” the dryad said. One of her hands reached out to briefly touch the root that dangled around Nyx’s neck. The mournful look on her face turned to hatred in a flash, and she tore the chain from him with a loud snap. “You still deserve to pay for what you did.”

The dryad started to move in a slow half circle around him—that was when she spotted me.

“Don’t mind me,” I said, holding up my hands and backing away. “I won’t get in the way of a lover’s quarrel.”

“Delph,” Nyx said, the plea in his voice low and desperate. I don’t know what he expected me to do, though. She was a literal tree, taller than either of us, and from the sound of it … her anger at him sounded pretty justified.

“See,” Betula said, when she’d circled around to stand directly behind Nyx. “Even your new woman sees it.”

As justified as her anger might be, what she did next was not.

Her hands wrapped around Nyx’s chest, forming to the shape of his body as she slithered over his bare skin. She pulled him up to her surprisingly soft form, pressing her face up to the back of his ear. Her teeth, naked roots, shone in the dim light as she bared them.

“Let me remind you of what you’re missing. Let me remind you of all you’ve lost. Let me make you feel small, like you made me feel.”

Her hands wrapped tighter as new roots burst from the ground. They snaked up Nyx’s legs, trapping him further. But that wasn’t what worried me. It was when the roots moved further upward, forming long fingers that started to undo the ties of Nyx’s pants, that uncertainty flooded through me.

“That’s enough, Betula,” I said, though my voice was so small, I didn’t think she heard me. Her finger-like roots only moved with increase fervor, her intent growing ever clearer as her eyes rolled wildly in their sockets.

She might not have heard me, but Nyx had. It was as if he was drawn out of a trance himself, something brought on by the fear of having a woman-turned-monster-tree wrapping around his body.

Nyx’s muscles strained against Betula, but the dryad only continued to grow around him. She looked less and less human by the minute as new roots grew out of the ground around her. By the time Nyx’s pants had finally fluttered to the ground, exposing his naked body to her wandering roots, she was well over twice his size.

But she was still a tree, after all.

There were many things Nyx and the other fae deserved. Sometimes, I thought they deserved death.

But they didn’t deserve this.

I didn’t think twice before grabbing the flint Armene had given me out of my pocket. The moment the black stone flashed, I saw the sinews of Betula’s skin ripple. The moment the two stones drew together, I saw her start to turn.

All it took was a few more strikes of the flint, one spark, one tiny orange flicker, and Betula was suddenly drawing back. Nyx fell to his knees, completely naked, gasping and choking for air. Meanwhile, Betula’s eyes widened at the flint in my hand, a new kind of hatred flashing across those wooden features.

“You said you wouldn’t stand in my way,” she snarled, root teeth gnashing together with each word. Her anger had twisted her entire body, made her forget to make it appealing.

“That was before you tried to rape my poor friend here.”

Nyx looked up from where he remained sprawled on all fours, his face aghast. “Is that what you were really going to do?”

The innocence of him in that moment—it broke my heart. Even when he was in the midst of it, how did Nyx not see? Surely, he wasn’t so naïve.

“Betula … tell me that wasn’t what you were going to do.”

A single tear gathered at the corner of Nyx’s eye, spilling over to stain the flushed cheek beneath it, and even Betula melted. Her form shrunk down until she’d returned to the small, shapely woman that had first approached us. Her roots retracted into the earth, leaving the ground a mass of scarred earth in their wake.

That was when Nyx struck.

Naïve or not, he knew what he needed to do.

He held out his hand behind him, reaching toward me as he shouted for me to throw him the flint. Behind him, Betula started to grow again as she realized it was her turn to be tricked. Her roots leapt from the ground, reaching for him with more ferocity than before. This time, she was going in for the kill.

But when Nyx turned back, she was too late. Just a moment too late.

The next sparks that showered from the flint alit on the soft birch of her skin, smoldering and smoking enough to give Nyx time to scramble back. He struck the flint again, this time sending the sparks into her roots. The heat of it made them curl and whither back, and Betula stumbled.

It was enough for Nyx to turn on his heel and run—but not before reaching out to take my hand and drag me with him.

For a moment there, I’d half expected Nyx to burn down the entire forest to get away. I’d seen the dry leaves, the kindling waiting to go up in flames. But I’d also seen the way it pained Nyx to save himself, that each spark made him flinch back as if he wasn’t burning his attacker, he was burning himself.

For a while, our wild escape made it difficult to tell what was making the most noise—us, or our pursuer. For she did pursue us. She followed us like a banshee, her roots digging into the soil and bursting out to try to trip us with every step. Leaves lashed out to whip at the backs of our arms and legs. Blossoms that same wretched rose color swirled through the breeze trying to blind us.

But still, eventually, the sound around us dulled. The crashing and thudding fell away until the only remaining sounds were those of our own panting breaths.

Only then did I realize how my lungs burned, how my calves stung, how my eyes felt as if they’d been lacerated with a thousand tiny cuts.

Only then did we allow ourselves to collapse onto the forest floor, our bodies intertwined as Nyx reached for something to cover his nakedness. That something ended up being me.

“Nyx …”

“Stop,” he said between gasping breaths, holding up one hand. “Let me make sure she’s truly gone.”

Nyx spread his arms wide to either side and plunged his hands into the soil, his eyes rolling back in his head, lids fluttering some place between open and shut. A vein popped in his throat, near the back of his jaw where it pounded with each of his heartbeats, growing larger and larger until I feared for a moment that it might burst. I started reaching for Nyx, ready to make him stop—when he dragged his hands back out of the dirt and collapsed back a second time.

This time, his body was covered in a thin sheen of sweat.

What could be seen of it beneath where I straddled him, anyway.

“Is she gone then?” I asked, hardly daring to breathe.

His gaze lowered from the treetops to come rest on mine. He nodded, once.

“Even better, though,” he said, taking another gasping breath. “We’re not as lost as we thought.”

I felt myself melt into him. We lay together in silence for a moment, the adrenaline fading with each rise and fall of our breaths.

“You could’ve used that before, you know,” I said, peering up at him from where my head had found a resting place on his chest. “That’s a handy little trick that.”

“I wasn’t sure it would work,” Nyx admitted. He turned his head in a circle, his eyes scanning the forest as I’d so often seen him do. “The magic gets harder the further away from the court you are. And these days, even there it’s hard to pull the tiniest spark.”

But he’d pulled a spark, as he called it, and we were saved.

More than saved.

That spark had alighted in each of us something more, or maybe it was the adrenaline, maybe it was the rush—but this time, it was me I found closing the gap between us. There was no honey on Nyx’s tongue to bait me in, but I didn’t need bait.

“Delph …” The sound of my name on his lips like a sigh was the only honey I needed.

Nyx lay on the dried ground, lips parted and hair splayed around him like a halo. The faint sheen of sweat still lingered on his skin, highlighting every perfect curve of his body, every angle of his face. His eyes had gone soft and hooded, as I hovered in the inches above him, one hand lifted up to gently cup the side of my face.

His hands were softer than I imagined, with a sort of hidden strength that made a fire alight in my lower belly. I knew he could crush me with that single hand if he wanted to. I was no more than a toy to him, a lesser being, and yet …

And yet it was I who hovered above him, one subtlest shift away from our naked bodies pressing together beneath the halo of my skirts. That’s all it would take for us to share the heat that had begun to pool between my legs, to satisfy the ache in my body that had grown there ever since I laid eyes on him.

It wouldn’t be the first time since arriving in Avarath that I’d let a fae take me. The memory of that first time brought back the same furious yearning that had led me to lay with Tethys that night. Not all the fae made me feel this way, flushed with insufferable, unquenchable heat.

Only the ones who were determined to kill me made me feel that.

As Nyx did now.

The Woodland prince’s chest rose beneath me and stayed there for a moment as he took me in. It was a long moment before he let out that breath in one long sigh. That hand cupping my face dug into the hair behind my ear, his long fingers intertwining between the strands.

His other hand moved to my shoulder and began tracing down the curve of my side, pausing for a moment to press into my waist before it slid down again to rest on my hip. His fingers played along the ridge of my pelvis, feeling the shapes there without daring to move further down.

Never before had the cotton gown felt so thin. It was all that remained between us, two thin layers that did little to conceal Nyx’s growing excitement—or my own, I was sure.

Both our breaths had grown ragged again, Nyx’s even more than mine.

He reached for me hungrily, his hips bucking forward a bit to press harder into me. It took every bit of my remaining energy to stop him.

“Nyx, are you sure this is what you mean to do?”

He blinked up at me in that angelic, naïve way of his, and promptly broke the spell that had fallen over us with the next words that slipped from his perfect lips.

“Is it because of Tethys?”

I sat up, hands pressed between Nyx’s chest and mine.

“What? No. It’s because of the dryad … you …” I stumbled over my words, my concern over Nyx’s state of mind suddenly overshadowed by what he’d just said. “What do you mean by that?”

“You and Tethys, you mated.”

I glared down at him in growing horror. “We … we what?”

“Do humans not call it that?” A look of confusion crossed his face as he said it. “It means that—”

“I know what it means,” I hissed through clenched teeth.

“Oh, I see what this is about,” Nyx said, propping himself up on his elbows. “You’re embarrassed.”

“How can I be embarrassed by something I didn’t do?”

“Please, we could all smell it on you.”

My cheeks had never burned so hot. I remembered the last conversation I had with Tethys. There was no point in denying it now. Not if all the fae already knew what had passed between me and the Prince of the Sea.

“Does that make you jealous?”

“Should it?” he asked, genuinely. His hand stayed steadily on me, eyes meeting mine with a soberness not usually found in him, even on the best of days. “Have you decided you want to only be with Tethys? I’ve heard humans are strictly monogamous.”

“Not that it matters, given the fact I’ll be dead soon, but no.”

Nyx somehow completely missed the point of what I said.

“Well then, I’ve no reason to be jealous.” His brow furrowed up for a moment, his eyes lifting from mine to stare up at the treetops waving above our heads. “Though I think I’m starting to understand what you were saying before. I should have listened to Tethys. I never should have worn that damned necklace.”

“I … I don’t think what Betula did had anything to do with you wearing that trinket.”

“Either way,” Nyx said, “if it’s all the same to you, maybe it’s best if we don’t mate tonight, after all.”

And here I was, thinking my cheeks couldn’t burn even hotter.

There was no point in correcting him.

I let out a sigh, rolling over off of him and tilting my head back to let the cool night air rush in. The last of the adrenaline rush faded, and with it, the fearsome desire that had overtaken me.

I didn’t remember pulling Nyx’s head onto my lap, but somehow in the moments that followed, I came to cradle the prince there between my crossed legs. One hand had started to absentmindedly stroke the hairs at the side of his face, twirling each one into individual curls that came to lay along his ruddy temples.

He was by far the fairest of the fae princes, and yet nothing compared to the illustrations of fae that the humans of my world had long since committed to memory. Armene and Tethys looked like different creatures altogether. That left only Caldamir, and he, compared to Nyx, wasn’t much better off. Caldamir looked like he’d never learned to laugh, where Nyx here looked like he’d never stopped. Strange to think both these creatures were princes, each one tasked with leading a people.

I’d never been given responsibility over so much as one. That would have required someone to trust me, even for an instant—and that was never going to happen, not back in Alderia.

As if reading my thoughts, the Mountain Fae was the next thing on Nyx’s tongue.

“If it wasn’t for Caldamir, none of us would be doing this, you know.”

My fingers still moved in their little circles, taking another stray hair and winding it, winding it, winding it and then watching as it fell to join the other, perfect curls.

“I sometimes forget there was a time before he came and got me,” I said, quietly. “Avarath will do that to you, I guess.”

“No, no, not that,” Nyx said, brow furrowing. His forehead still glistened with sweat. He was clearly exhausted. He’d taken on that far-off look from earlier, each blink of his eyes making it harder and harder for him to focus up at me. “We weren’t expecting this to be so hard.”

I froze a little, looking back down at the fae between my thighs. He was drifting close to slumber, his words slurring dangerously near to the truth.

“What about Caldamir and this being hard?” I asked, already feeling a pit start to form in the middle of my stomach.

“He’s the one who keeps insisting on going through with this. He’s the only one. If it were up to the rest of us, now that we’ve gotten to know you, we’d find another way.”

I was frozen in place for real then, as Nyx turned listlessly over on his side. He pulled my skirts to cover his bottom half again as he settled into a satisfied, dreamless sleep with promises to reunite with the rest of our party in the morning.

But I wasn’t going to get any sleep.

Not after what he’d just told me.