A Veil of Truth and Trickery by Analeigh Ford

Chapter Nine

I had so many questions.

So many questions—yet each of them vanished the moment I laid eyes on the pool for myself. I thought I felt magic in the way the forest reacted to Nyx, but this pool … it was different.

It had an ancient sort of feel to it, as if the magic in it came from some place inside of itself. The magic of the forest, Nyx’s little display, was nothing more than a party trick compared to what lay before us.

The water of the pool itself was a color so violently blue that if it weren’t for that deep, primal humming I felt once again, I’d have thought the fae dyed it. I’d felt that humming before, heard the roar of it in my ears when Caldamir pulled us from the human world into Avarath.

It was magic—real, tangible magic that was as dangerous as it was enticing.

The forest branches dipped low over the pool, their leaves barely skimming over the surface in some areas close to the shallows. A small break in the trees overhead allowed sunlight to filter down in steep beams to illuminate the water, but their light never quite seemed to reach the edges.

The water there was dark, too dark. It had an inky sort of stain just as unnatural as the blue in its center.

A set of old, twisted stairs had been built leading down from the edge of the water into the center of the pool, where the pattern of the rocks at the bottom hid small silver fish darting in and out of the crevices disappearing into the depths.

“A magic spring,” Armene said, as if reading my mind. He’d still not looked at me. He was fixated on the center of the pool, at the way the light split and painted prisms beneath the surface. “Bathe in it, and you’ll at last be able to step foot in faerie, at least for a time.”

A slight shudder shook his shoulders, and I found myself looking at him more closely. I couldn’t see his face from where I still sat perched atop the mare, but I wish I could. Caldamir had been able to read my face easily, but I was still learning to read theirs. I needed more practice, though it would be easier if the fae who kept insisting on being my keepers were just a little less … well … distracting.

I didn’t know if it was real or if it was just the glamour, but it didn’t matter. It didn’t stop the way my heart practically lurched up out of my chest when Armene suddenly whirled on his heel and marched to the side of the mare, one hand outstretched.

He was no Nyx, but he was breathtaking in his own right.

His eyes had an upward tilt that contrasted with the permanent scowl that seemed to always be playing at his forehead. His cheekbones angled steeply downward toward a pointed chin and perfect, heart-shaped lips.

Lips that parted in offering. “Let me help you in.”

“What?”

He wasn’t looking straight at me, but I was still able to see the slight flicker of indecision on his face. “It’s a pool,” he said, annoyance creeping into his voice. “You have to get into it for the magic to work.”

He was a picture, standing there before me with his hand outstretched in my direction. My body ached to climb down off of Rynn, but seeing him standing there like that, it made me ache in a different way.

A way that made me think better of accepting his offer.

“I’ll get in on my own, thanks,” I said, starting to swing one leg up over the mare.

Armene stopped me, one hand shooting out to rest on my thigh. Though layers of fabric separated us, I still felt my breath hitch at his touch.

“You can’t step foot on the ground until after you’ve bathed in the pool.”

I paused. “So, you weren’t really offering?”

“I was offering.”

“But I didn’t have a choice.”

Armene’s eyes did lift to mine then. “Not if you want to live.”

I wasn’t sure what surprised him more in the moments that followed, the fact that I hesitated at his words, or when I actually reached out a hand and accepted the one he offered me. Armene carried me like I weighed nothing at all, one arm moving to encircle my waist as the other found its way up under my knees.

I, in turn, was surprised he didn’t just throw me over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and be done with it. That’s what I’d always imagined of the fae. In all the stories of them, they were graceful and charming right up until the moment the deal was made. Once they’d tricked you, they turned into the true monsters they were.

But Armene didn’t handle me like a monster. He carried me with care to the slippery, moss-covered steps leading down to the water and then began his descent one step at a time until he stood ankle-deep, the crystal water lapping at the laces of his high-top leather boots.

“You can step in from here,” he said. “Just, whatever you do, don’t touch the dark water.”

“Why not?”

The shadows at the edges of the water seemed larger here, up close. As inviting as the clear water in the middle was, the light playing across the surface so that it made patterns along the bottom down below, the outer darkness made me pause.

It was more than a shadow, it was an inky blackness as dark as the night sky—but without any of its tiny, twinkling lights.

“Just do as you’re told, please. I’m not superstitious … but some rules are better left followed.”

I leaned forward slightly, my neck craning over until I caught a glimmer of my own reflection in the surface of the water. I looked … rough … to say the least. My hair was matted to a forehead that glistened with grime and sweat, and the dark circles of my eyes had started to make me look like I was racoon-marked instead of fae-marked.

I didn’t look like a girl who’d been riding through the forest for one night. I looked like I’d been lost in the forest for days.

Weeks, even.

The life was literally draining out of me here.

So there really wasn’t much of a choice.

I finally drew back from my own sorry reflection to prod Armene in the center of his surprisingly hard chest. “Are you going to watch too, or am I allowed some privacy?”

Armene cleared his throat.

“Oh, of course.”

He set me down with more of his surprising care, my feet splashing into the water that easily reached up to my calves. Armene’s eyes averted from mine as I hitched up the bottom of my skirts to keep from soaking them, but he was already trudging back up the stairs toward the horse before I could see if a blush had risen to match his sudden shyness.

Looking away from the pool was a mistake. I shouldn’t have, not when Avarath still seemed unsteady beneath my feet.

Armene had barely disappeared over the top of the steps before I lost my footing.

There was one frightful moment where I thought I was going to pitch over the railing and straight into the dark black water lining the edges, but I somehow managed to pitch forward instead.

Ice erupted along every surface of my body.

I’d thought the water was cold at the shallower edges of the pool, but in the center when I surfaced, it was cold enough to make me gasp and splutter for air.

But for the first time since I’d arrived in faerie, I found it.

Air. Real, breathable, air.

There was no struggle to fill my lungs. From the moment my skin hit the water, that exhausted, tingling, wrong sensation abated. I felt a thousand times lighter, even as the heavy skirts tied around my waist threatened to weigh me down to the bottom.

More than a threat. They actually were.

Just as quickly as my breaths turned elated, they soured and became desperate. My hands reached out to try to keep my head above water, but it didn’t work. They just got more entangled in the fabric, pulling me down deeper.

Through the rippling surface of the water, I could still make out Armene’s form. He stood by the mare, his back turned to me like a stiff, unwavering soldier.

Surely he’d heard my gasping before, the splashing of my hands upon the surface.

So, he had to have ignored me.

Maybe this was it, the reason he’d brought me here. This was never a pool meant to save me. It was meant to end me.

But I’d not give up so easily, not just like that.

I tried to fumble with the ties of my bodice, but my hands were slick and the string slipped between them. The water in the middle of the pool was deeper than I expected, but the pool wasn’t so wide. I knew even if I sank to the bottom, I could probably wade my way out to the edges.

If it weren’t for that inky blackness waiting for me.

One more choking tug at the back of my throat and I didn’t care.

Damn the inky blackness.

For all I knew, Armene’s warning was just an empty threat. For all I knew, he wanted me to keep from the dark water because it might actually help me. It would be typical of a fae.

I started edging toward the dark, one sodden, tangled footstep at a time, and I knew in my heart that those threats weren’t empty. Not when, with each inch I approached, tiny fingers of blackness started reaching out toward me.

Ready to pull me in.

Delphine.

The sound of my name echoed in my ears, surprisingly clear here beneath the surface of the water.

Delphine.

My name echoed out to me with a hauntingly deep note. It made a tingle race up my spine—and stay there. The water warmed as I drew closer to the dark edge, enticing me further. As if my burning lungs and watering eyes needed any more enticing. I could feel the slippery rocks beneath my feet and see the surface of the water drawing nearer with each step that inched me closer to the edge.

No matter how dark that edge was.

“Delphine!”

The third time I heard my name, however, it was different. It was broken, garbled, shouted from above the surface of the water instead of beneath. A second after it rang out, an ear-splitting crash erupted all around me as something massive lunged into the pool right beside me.

The darkness reached out to me one last time, those fingers almost grazing mine the moment before arms encircled my waist and pulled me, coughing and spluttering, up onto the stairs in a tangle of sodden skirts. Above me, looking down into my surely pale and bloated face, was one unlike any I’d seen before—on this side of the veil, or the next.

He was more muscular than any of the other fae I’d met, or maybe he was just the first one I’d seen bare chested. His skin was so dark it nearly rivaled the inky blackness that had moments before been trying to lure me into their warm shallows, but it was his eyes that were really the most striking. They were a bright and luminous gold, the pupils slitted down the center into two, mirrored half-moons.

Gold piercings glittered in his ears and brows, long braided plaits falling down across that muscular chest as he leaned closer to my face to look at me.

Right before I promptly vomited a lungful of water right into his open mouth.

“I usually like to get to know someone before I let them do that to me,” he said, his one free hand reaching up to wipe the bottom half of his face. “Though I suppose we all have to start somewhere … and the story of how Tethys, Prince of the Sea, saved you from drowning before you vomited on him is going to make a good one.”

His eyes travelled over me, a still-quivering mess in his arms, and a mischievous smile pulled at the corner of his lips. “You’re not at all what I expected.”

Armene appeared right above us, eyes wide and face flushed with fury as he and Tethys pulled me the rest of the way up and away from the black water to the grass at the top of the steps.

“I told you not to go near the edges!”

“Well,” I spat after several hearty, spluttering coughs, “I chose that over dying.”

“That was the wrong choice,” he hissed back, one hand reaching up to tug at a loose strand of hair that had fallen out of his bun and into his face. “Do you have any idea what would’ve happened to you if you did?”

“No,” I said, struggling to force the words from my searing throat. “Because you didn’t tell me.”

“Madness,” Tethys answered, before Armene had a chance. That gold in his eyes glittered brighter than the gold in his ears for a moment. “All who touch the darkness go mad. As much as the water in the center of the pool is blessed, it’s balanced out by a curse.”

“Damned Starlight Fae,” Armene muttered, pulling at his hair again. He’d started to pace, head shaking as he tried to work out what had just happened. “How often do humans have to breathe, anyway?”

Both Tethys and I stared at Armene in disbelief for a moment.

“A whole fucking lot more than you, apparently,” I snarled at him, before pitching forward to hurl another stomach of water out onto the leaves and grass.

When I looked back up, both Armene and Tethys were watching me carefully.

“What is it?”

“How do you feel?” Armene asked, hesitantly.

I looked down at my hands on the ground, and despite myself, I felt a small rush. “Aside from nearly drowning, I feel fine,” I said. A little woozy, a little unsteady, and still unsure of whether or not I should have just let myself drown.

But those things I didn’t share with them.

Some things were best kept as secrets. Especially when that was the only thing left that I owned. That was the only thing left that was mine.

Armene straightened up, obviously relieved. He tilted his head up and Tethys followed him as they measured the angle of the sun in the sky.

“Still plenty of time to dry off. We should get her back before anyone comes asking questions.”

Both fae turned to look through the surrounding woods, their shoulders rigid, as if expecting to see those same faces I looked for earlier. But there was no one. No one I could see, anyway.

I couldn’t wrap my head around what just happened here at the pool.

It was more than the whispered words from the shadows, whispers that still echoed if I listened closely enough when staring into a shadowy corner between the trees. It was the way the two fae had acted.

Armene and Tethys, both.

They’d been … protective of me. The human.

I didn’t know why.

I was insignificant to them. Of all the things we got wrong about the fae, that was one thing we’d gotten right. I was nothing more than livestock to them, a strange, lesser-than mirror image of what they were. I’d be long dead before they’d even realized I was really here.

But still, Armene had nearly pulled his hair out from the roots when he realized what’d nearly happened. And Tethys, I’d seen how close he swam to the edge of the darkness. I’d seen it reach for him too.

He took a risk, for me.

There was only one explanation.

They needed me for something. But for what … I supposed I’d just have to wait to find out.