A Veil of Truth and Trickery by Analeigh Ford

Chapter Seven

By the timeI’d exhaled by first breath, I was already becoming keenly aware of just how much more Avarath was.

Though it was nighttime here as well, the darkness wasn’t the same. It was filled with light, not just from the twinkling stars up above that seemed to hang lower in the sky, but from the forest itself. Everything was alive in a way it wasn’t just moments before. The trees—massive and ancient—were dotted with moss and mushrooms that gave off a glowing light of their own. Small insects blinked in and out of existence all around us. The very rivulets of sap that pooled between the grooved bark seemed to glitter darkly.

And where the forest on the other side had fallen into silence, the forest here instead seemed to come alive in Caldamir’s presence. The very grass beneath our feet bowed in some unfelt breeze, their blades moving in a kind of excitement.

In the place of the bridge was a small footpath leading over a bubbling brook. It was no river, but somehow it was even more impressive. The water moved more carefully here, as if some force other than gravity pulled it through the crevices in the ground. It trickled because it chose to, just as the rest of the forest grew for the same reason.

With some greater purpose.

If I was starstruck by Avarath, I couldn’t be blamed. But it also didn’t last long.

Where Caldamir paused to take a deep breath, his lungs filling with air he drank in with the same hunger as downing a fine wine, I found myself choking. The breaths here were heavy, far too dense for my lungs. It weighed down on me, pulling me lower in the saddle as my head grew suddenly light. The edges of my vision swam, my grip on the saddle loosened, and I surely would have fallen to the ground entirely if it weren’t for the sudden rumble from between my legs.

“Deep breaths, girl,” the voice spoke, coming from somewhere beneath me. “Even we horses struggle with the transition sometimes.”

The words nearly startled me out of the saddle again.

“We …”

“Ah yes, good advice, Rynn,” Caldamir said, his eyes opening as he turned to give his mare another affectionate pat. “I forget sometimes how frail humans are.”

Both fae, man and beast, looked up at me through the corners of their eyes. I, meanwhile, just continued to choke—half from the thickness of the air, half from the shock of discovering the horse’s ability to speak. Not that it should surprise me. Nothing here should. Of course it wasn’t an ordinary horse, one look at it should’ve been enough to warn me of that.

I must have looked a fright, because that rumble started up again from beneath me, this time from the unmistakable shake of laughter. The sound was foreign, a kind of wheezing whinny that under any other circumstances I might have found utterly terrifying.

At that moment, however, I was far too preoccupied with trying not to pass out.

I might have, had I not caught the glimmer of mirth mirrored in Caldamir’s eyes. He tried to look away from me, to hide the sly smile that had started to tug at the corner of his lips, but he was too late.

Rage bubbled up in me and forced a breath so deep that I was finally able to feel the rush of air settle into my belly enough to rekindle my fire.

“Shut the fuck up.”

I’ve never seen a man’s face drop so quickly.

I swung one leg over the saddle, and without thinking, dropped from the massive horse down to the mossy footpath below.

I immediately regretted it.

The fall alone was enough to turn an ankle, to say nothing of what came after. The moment my feet hit the ground the whole world tilted around me. I thought that it was the air here that was strange, but I was wrong. Everything about this place was wrong.

The forest around me reeled. The water started to trickle toward me, vines turned their leaves as if to inspect me, and the air thickened, choking me again. Or maybe that was just me, a side effect of the way the world felt wrong.

It felt upside down, or more accurately… like I was upside down in it.

I’d have fallen, collapsed in a useless heap on the forest path if it weren’t for the way Caldamir caught me almost immediately and placed me straight back on his horse. Rynn acquiesced by shifting her weight beneath me while I regained my balance. My head still pounded once I’d finally sat back up, but I no longer felt like I was going to fall straight through the ground to the center of this world.

It was still a moment later, long after I was no longer in danger of tumbling off the mare’s back, that his hands let go of me. They left a heated imprint in their place as he stepped back and cleared his throat.

“Fae realms can be difficult for humans. It could take you some time to adjust.”

“How much time are we talking?” I asked, each word struggling to escape my lungs and make it past my lips.

“A while.”

The mare shot Caldamir a look then, but I couldn’t read it. All I knew was that there was something more that the fae wasn’t telling me.

“Fine then,” I grumbled, reaching forward to grasp the horn of the saddle to steady myself again. “Keep your secrets. Just… just tell me one thing.”

“And what is that?”

“Am I ever going to leave Avarath?”

I knew the answer before it came. I didn’t need to be able to read the intricacies of a talking horse to know what it meant when she wouldn’t look me in the eye.

Caldamir took the mare’s reins in his hands and gave her the gentle tug signaling the return to our journey. “No, Delphine,” he said, feet trudging forward once again. “No human ever leaves Avarath alive.”

* * *

I’d supposed as much.None of the old stories—however fickle they’d started to turn out to be—made mention of any humans returning from the land of the fae once they’d been spirited away.

I should’ve been focused on that, been caught up in mourning the fact that my old life was well and truly dead. But, instead, I was fixated on something else.

Delphine.

It was the first time I’d heard the sound of my own name on his lips, and just the thought of it brought a small shiver to my spine… and I hated him for it. No man, human or fae, should have that kind of power over me. The power to simply utter my name and make my mouth go dry.

It had to be some kind of spell, some glamour, that did it. That didn’t make me hate it any less, nor did it change the fact that I longed more than anything to hear him use it again. Next time, I swore I’d see the shape his lips made when he said it.

Right before I hit him squarely in that sharp-as-anything jaw.

Not that it’d actually do anything.

I didn’t know much about Avarath, about fae, about anything here, really… but that I knew. I knew that compared to the fae, I was barely more than one of the gnats that buzzed around us in the forest.

I also knew that curse be damned—if I wasn’t going to leave this place alive, then the very least I could do is make sure I didn’t die here in peace. I’d make Caldamir and all the rest of the fae here rue the day they’d made the deal that brought me to this place.

If Avarath itself didn’t kill me first.

We travelled through the night until I wasn’t able to sit upright in the saddle anymore. Still, it was the third time I nearly slipped off Rynn’s back before he we stopped—and then only at the horse’s insistence.

“Surely, we can rest for a bit.”

“She won’t make it through the night in this forest. We’ll just have to tie her to the saddle so she won’t fall off,” Caldamir said in response.

“Like hell you will,” I barked out, my voice croaking from the sleepless night. I pointed my finger at his hands already reaching toward thick twine in the shadows of his bag. “If you dare put a rope on me, I’ll … I’ll hang myself with it.”

He cocked his head to the side, lips parted in surprise.

I straightened up despite my aching muscles and nodded once, hoping my face looked more resolved than I actually felt. “Yes, that’s exactly what I’ll do. Lot of good that would do you and your little deal wouldn’t it. You need me to make it to this forest court of yours alive, yes?”

Caldamir’s jaw worked, his hand rubbing the twine so tight between his fingers that it started to unravel. But after a moment, he just nodded.

“Fine then. But don’t blame me when you fall off her and don’t wake back up.”

I swallowed hard. “You could keep us both awake by telling me the details of the deal that brought me here,” I said. “I think I deserve to know that, at least.”

Caldamir eyed me suspiciously. “So, you can try to find a way out of it? It’s a bit late for that.”

“Oh,” I said, leaning forward to press one hand to the mare’s neck. “I think it’s never too late for that.” Rynn made a small sound of pleasure as I picked a gnat from between her shoulder blades.

“Leave them be,” Caldamir said, flicking the twine still clamped between his fingers to wave my hand away. “They’re some of the last magical creatures left. Can’t afford to kill them anymore.”

“Some of the last ones left?”

“Actually …” His eyes took on a glazed look for a moment. He ignored my question and suddenly started swatting the mare all over. When his hand reappeared between us, it was splattered with more of the small insects. Blood and broken insect parts splattered the palm he held out to me.

“What am I supposed to do with that?”

Rather than answer me directly, he instead demonstrated. He pressed one nostril shut with one finger and dipped the other to his palm and snorted up the remains of the gnats. A heady noise issued from the back of his throat as he stood back up to his full height.

The brightness had returned to his eyes, if with a slightly maniacal gleam this time. He held his eyes a little too wide and seemed to keep forgetting to blink regularly.

“No way,” I said, shimmying in my seat as if trying to prove I was no longer in danger of slipping from the saddle. “I’m not snorting faerie bugs.”

“They’re harmless,” Caldamir said with a shake of his head. “In small doses.”

I screwed up my nose again. “Not happening.”

Caldamir nodded for a moment, then looked down at the string in his hands and started slowly, methodically, unraveling it again.

My heartbeat quickened as I imagined his hands binding mine. I could practically already feel the rope cutting into the flesh of my thighs, my stomach, my waist as he wound it around me. Around and around until I wouldn’t be able to move, until I was even more at his mercy than I already was.

The thought should have terrified me, but what terrified me more was the heat that bloomed within me. I was no stranger to the feeling that tightened the muscles between my thighs, but I was also not enough of an idiot to imagine indulging in it.

It was one thing to lose myself in Leofwin, a servant boy who threatened little more than temporary heartbreak—another entirely to imagine getting entangled with a high fae far more likely to break me.

So, rather than face these thoughts, these feelings, I reached up and caught the first gnat I could get my hands on and pressed it between my lips.

I’d never tasted something so bitter. It took every ounce of self-control not to spit it back up and dry heave out the rest of my stomach’s contents. Even Caldamir wrinkled his nose up at the sight, his eyebrows raising in slight surprise when I finally forced myself to swallow.

“That’s one way to do it, I suppose,” Caldamir said, shrugging once. He gave me an unreadable once-over before conspicuously replacing the twine and giving Rynn a soft tap that told her to start plodding forward again.

Eating the bug, as vile as it was, had two benefits. I did get a small rush through the front of my brain, something that awakened me enough to hold myself straight once again in the saddle. Better still, was that the overwhelming urge to vomit had replaced any of that inexplicable heat that had, just for a moment, made my mind and body wander toward the ultimate betrayal.

The kind that would have been my own undoing.

These fae were my enemies.

I had to remember that … and it was a lot easier to do when I could blame Caldamir for the ensuing hours of nausea.

Just when I thought I wouldn’t be able to stay astride the mare for a moment longer, dawn arrived. With it came a glimmer through the forest. Something shimmered from between the trees, something tall and sturdy, but still alive. It wasn’t until the path turned a corner that I was able to see what it was.

A great wall had been erected in the midst of the forest, built from the very trees that surrounded it. They’d grown together, interlocked and interwoven into a long, winding mesh of branches and roots that stretched out of sight in either direction. The wall thinned as it grew up into the treetops, but where the trunks left gaps, huge swaths of otherworldly vines grew down in their place. It left only the tiniest glimpses of what lay on the other side.

This was a far cry from the wall built around the village back at home. It made our sorry excuse for a defense against the fae look laughable in comparison. We’d built a mere pile of sticks to keep out the most powerful force our world had ever seen.

Here, that same force had gone into much more trouble to protect themselves.

But what the fae wanted to keep out … I didn’t want to imagine.

The branches of the walls began to churn as we drew near, their interwoven branches and roots rippling like the surface of a great pool of water until a doorway opened before us. Light spilled through the gap, casting us in a golden shimmer as sunlight finally broke through the tops of the trees beyond.

The silhouette of a fae appeared in the gap, and in that instant, something inside me froze. The fae descended from the open door, and for one moment, I wasn’t sure I hadn’t fallen into some kind of magic-induced slumber … because the creature standing before me looked like something straight out of a dream.

He was smaller than Caldamir, but that wasn’t saying much. His slender body was powerful in its own right, more lithe and narrow—but no less dangerous. His hair, long and rosy hued, cascaded over his shoulders in the softest waves. Full lips parted in an effortlessly sultry smile to reveal perfect, pearly teeth.

On his head was a crown, not that he needed one.

If this man, this fae, wasn’t born a prince … the whole world would have long since bent the knee. He was the most beautiful thing I’d ever laid eyes on.

And from the way he looked at us, he knew it, too.

“Welcome, travelers, to my Woodland Court.”