A Veil of Truth and Trickery by Analeigh Ford

Chapter Twenty-Five

Further,it seemed, than Caldamir thought.

The walls of the crevasse stretched higher and higher overhead until they stood like towers on either side. The path was narrow, just enough for us to file through one at a time, but in some parts even that was difficult.

One hour passed, and then two, and still no sign of Armene. We hadn’t so much as seen a horse dropping, though the first scout had assured us he took his stallion along with him. The path up ahead was too quiet, but still I didn’t worry until the sky had started to darken overhead.

It would be nightfall before long, true darkness falling soon after, and still there was no sign of our lost prince.

I was wedged between Tallulah and one of the scouts, with Caldamir and Nyx up ahead, and Tethys at the rear with the second scout. Even the horses, happy at first to be eased of their burdens, began to grow uneasy. They went from muttering about claustrophobia and how little it would take for them to bolt and run one of us over into full on wordless grumbling. Their tails twitched and switched at their backs irritably, catching any fae standing too close with strands of stinging hair.

Eventually, just as we were all starting to grow a little too restless, the crevasse started to widen out. At first, I was just glad to be able to reach out my arms to either side and not touch stone, but then it suddenly widened out a lot. The walls took a sharp turn out, revealing a star-shaped center with narrow paths leading out from each point.

From up above, the paths had appeared to form the shape of a cross, but from here, there had to be at least a dozen paths to pick from, each one as cramped and uninviting as the last.

We’d finally come to the crossroads Caldamir had mentioned—and with it, at long last, we finally found the first sign of Armene.

Not a moment too soon. Within minutes, we’d be plunged into darkness.

“Ah, finally,” Caldamir said, standing from where he’d stopped to kneel to look at something in the dirt. He held up a small metal object that glinted in the light. “It’s his. At least he went this way.”

I recognized it too. It was the small silver pin that he used to fasten his gauze head wrap.

All eyes swiveled around the small space, but it was one of the scouts who suggested what we were all thinking.

“Perhaps we stay here for the night?” he asked, glancing nervously around. I noticed that his eyes lingered down one of the paths in particular, but I didn’t see anything when I tried to follow his gaze. “Or at least until your Sand Fae—”

“Prince Armene,” Caldamir said, an edge to his voice. “You’d do well to remember that.”

“At least until he’s come back.”

Once again, Caldamir stood center stage as all of us stared wordlessly, waiting for his reply.

One look at Nyx, and it was clear what he wanted. He’d taken to nervously scratching his arms, his head glancing over his shoulder all too often, making him appear skittish. He’d been like this since we left the forest, since the moment we’d laid eyes on the swath of land that’d been destroyed.

It was like some small part of him had been destroyed, too.

That was why I was surprised when it was he that suddenly straightened up, tugged on his mare’s reins, and started down the path ahead. “No,” he said, pausing just long enough to look up to the darkening sky. “We should keep going. Like Caldamir said, we’ve already wasted too much time.”

“First, let’s make sure we’re headed down the right path,” Caldamir said, hoisting himself up onto his horse. “Then, let’s make sure we have some light. Tallulah, grab the torches.”

Tallulah nodded and went to her horse, starting the arduous task of unloading weapons in order to access the bags’ other contents.

I watched from my mule as Caldamir climbed upon his mare.

“And how do we know which is the right path?” Tethys called from the back. He was holding an empty water skin, his lips cracked with thirst. Prince of the Sea. We’ll, he’d certainly found himself far from the sea now … and he was feeling it. We all were.

“It’s the only path a horse can still ride through from here,” Caldamir said, riding up ahead to check the path that Nyx had started toward a moment earlier. He’d barely ridden ten feet in before Rynn came to a grinding, frustrated halt.

“I could tell you if I was going to fit,” the mare said, foot stamping into the dirt when he tried to urge her forward, anyway.

“Well then, lead the way.”

Caldamir dropped the reins and waited as Rynn backed out of the path and started circling the rest of the paths, pausing at the mouth of each one it turn until, at last, she pushed forward on her own. She went just far enough to nearly disappear, leaving only her twitching tail flickering in the last of the fading light.

“This is it.”

Caldamir didn’t doubt the mare once. He just turned in his saddle and motioned for the rest of us to follow.

“Where are the torches?” he called back to Tallulah just in time for us to turn and look back at her as she paused, suddenly, and a horrified look came over her.

“Armene,” she said, quietly. “They must have been with him.”

Any fear of remaining in the dark lasted only as long as it took one of the scouts to draw Caldamir’s attention instead.

“We have some,” the scout said, rummaging through his bag, only to produce two. One of these he gave to his companion, who settled in at our back. The other he held, lighting it only as he climbed back onto his mare and ushered her forward, pushing past Caldamir to take the lead.

Caldamir didn’t like it, none of us did, but the only other choice we had was to wait, alone here in the darkness, and that was a choice none of us seemed eager to make.

Especially when it turned out that we weren’t alone.

It was Tethys who noticed first. He’d tilted his head up to the darkness once it’d finished falling completely, trying to spot the stars up above in the tiny crack of sky. His face screwed up, as if something was wrong.

“What is it?” I asked, glancing up after him.

I saw him trying to work something out, then the moment it dawned on him what that thing was.

“They’re not stars,” he said, quietly. His voice barely dared to rise above a whisper, even when Caldamir looked back, confused, and he had to repeat himself. He pointed up toward the tiny pinpricks of light up above and swallowed. “They’re fiends. It’s our torchlight reflecting off their eyes.”

Hundreds of eyes peered down at us from up above. Tiny, white pinpricks of light.

They were scattered like stars all along the walls, indiscernible from the real things twinkling between them.

The only one who seemed unfazed was Caldamir.

“That’s right. Just fiends,” he said, nodding once toward the scout at the head of our party. “Now, unless you’d all like to stick around here and find out what kind, we best be going.”

Caldamir’s tone did nothing to stop the way my heart was beating at the top of my throat. It pounded in my ears and sent my stomach lurching with every crunch of dirt and stone under my mule’s hooves, thinking it was the sound of some creature climbing down from the darkness instead.

We continued onward, remaining on horseback this time, though in a markedly new kind of silence. I tried not to look upward, but I couldn’t help myself. Even with the flickering light of the torches ahead and behind, I often found myself in the crux of darkness. Two narrow turns was all it took to leave me floundering for a moment, alone with my mule, between two faint flickers of light and nothing but fiends hanging in between.

I thought I caught a flicker of one once, a great bat-looking thing at least half the size of me, before I was pulled back down to the path by an unexpected voice at my side.

It was Caldamir.

He and Tallulah had switched places, so he now rode directly ahead of me.

“It’s better to ignore them,” he said, gesturing up toward the sea of monsters over us, but without actually taking his eyes off the flicker of the torch up ahead. “There were plenty of fiends in the forest, you just didn’t see them there. There’s really no need to be afraid.”

“It’s not them I’m afraid of,” I said, though that wasn’t entirely true.

“Bullshit,” Caldamir countered, stunning me.

I stopped in my tracks, or would have, if my mule ever once obeyed what I told him to do. “What?”

“Of course, you’re afraid of them. I’m afraid of them. Fear is natural.”

I bared my teeth, even though I knew he wouldn’t see it here in the darkness. He was insufferable, Caldamir.

“There’s an innumerable number of fae creatures watching me from overhead,” I said through my gritted teeth. “But they’re not determined to see me killed, specifically. They might want me dead, but it’s more in a general sense. They want everyone dead.”

“You think I really like this?” There was a change in Caldamir’s tone. Frustration. Anger, even. “You think this is what I really want?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Then why would I try to kiss you? You do remember that, don’t you? From the other night?”

Of course, I remembered. I could still feel the heat of him on my skin. Feel the press of him against me. But I also remembered the hatred that had boiled up out of me. The hatred that had stayed, simmering on the surface of my mind, ever since.

“Lucky you didn’t,” I growled, a guttural sound from the back of my throat. It wasn’t anything like the feral growls of the fae, but it was close enough. “If you had, I would’ve bitten off your tongue.”

“It only would’ve grown back.”

“And I would have relished every moment of silence while it did,” I said in response.

“I think you’re confusing me for Tethys.”

“And I think,” I said, nodding toward the light that had disappeared around another bend in the path, “that I’m not confusing you at all. I think you just want to be the hero. You don’t want to admit that maybe, just maybe, you’re the villain.”

“Is that really what you think of me?”

He turned back to look at me, but it was too dark for me to make out his face.

I didn’t have to wait until we’d rounded the corner, until I could make sure that he saw the hate I felt plain on my own face when I answered.

But I did, anyway.

“Yes,” I said, setting my jaw once we were once again in the flickering torch light. “That’s exactly what I think of you.”

Caldamir stared in silence for a moment before turning wordlessly away. He didn’t have to spur his mare on, Rynn did it herself, overtaking and joining Tallulah and the scout in their cluster up ahead.

The path had begun to grow wider, but I felt no less claustrophobic, not when there was now an ever-pressing ceiling of creatures moving in from overhead.

Caldamir rode on with his shoulders pulled back a little too tight. I watched on, eyes glued in an angry glare at his retreating back until I couldn’t see him anymore.

I couldn’t see anything.

It took me a moment, a moment too long, to realize it wasn’t just because he’d turned the next corner.

No.

There was no flicker of shadows on the walls up ahead. Only blackness.

The torches had been extinguished. Both of them.

And I knew why, even before the hands of the scout wrapped around me and pulled me screaming up into the darkness … just as the fiends descended.