Lies of Murk by Eva Chase
14
Talia
The first several times I’ve encountered Madoc, he came up on me out of nowhere. Now I find myself trying to turn the same trick on him.
I’ve meandered along the passage by the stairs to his telescope room several times before my strategy works out. From far away, I see the station lights catch on his pale hair just before he strides into the darker space of the tunnel. I limp toward him, attempting to keep a casual pace as if I just happened to be walking this way while still approaching fast enough that I’ll catch him before he heads up to his private room.
When I’m a little closer, I pretend to just have noticed him. “Madoc?” I call out, raising my hand to catch his attention.
He pauses and then ambles over to me. His mouth forms an offhand smile that today looks a little stiff to me.
Alarm prickles through me. Did he realize I lied about where I was going after my work in the weapons workshop this morning?
He doesn’t say anything accusing, though, only nods to me. “Talia. Did you need something?”
“I—” I bite my lip as if I’m nervous about what I’m going to ask, which doesn’t require any acting. I’m just nervous for different reasons than I want to let on. “All that talk around the weapon forges earlier made me realize there’s so much I don’t know about the history between your people and the fae of the seasons. I thought some of them were kind, and it’s been hard to get totally invested in attacking them with that idea still in my head.”
Madoc lets out a rough chuckle. “They’re kind when they think it benefits them, not as a matter of character. It’s understandable that you were confused, though. Given how badly the first fae you encountered treated you, even a little kindness must have felt like a lot in contrast.”
“Yes. Well…” I look down at my feet and then back at him. “I feel like I need to see more for it to really sink in—how important this uprising is, how much I need to set aside all the things I believed before. I don’t want to stand with you if I’m giving less than my full commitment. Everyone here in the Refuge seems to be doing all right. Are there other Murk colonies that the other fae have assaulted or something like that, that I could see to drive home just how bad things have gotten for you?”
To let me step beyond the walls of this place and hopefully reach out to Corwin, even if only for a moment? Hell, just getting a glimpse of the outside world might help me convey to Whitt where the Refuge is. And if I can get some of the rat shifters worked up about their hatred of the fae of the seasons, they might give away more about their plans for revenge.
If I could get just one useful thing out of this gambit, I’d be happy.
Madoc contemplates me with a serious expression that sends a pang of guilt through my stomach alongside the tension. Does he believe me? Is it kind of horrible for me to lie to him so blatantly?
It can’t be more horrible than the fate they’re arranging for the fae of the seasons. I can’t imagine any way everyone back in the Mists could deserve the torment the Murk are planning.
“We keep our colonies scattered,” Madoc says after a long moment. “Specifically so that if the other fae track down any one of them, it’s unlikely to lead them to others. And there’s no way we could keep your bond to your soul-twined mate shielded to make that journey. But there is something within the Refuge that I could show you. It won’t be pretty. You have to be prepared for that.”
A twinge of disappointment ripples through me, but I knew that getting out of this place immediately was a long shot. If there are more parts of the Refuge I haven’t stumbled on before, it can’t hurt to see them too.
I’ll take whatever scraps of hope I can get.
“Of course,” I say. “I know firsthand how savage the fae can be.” My hand rises automatically to my scarred shoulder. The long-sleeved shirt I’m wearing covers all the marks, but from the tightening of Madoc’s jaw, he knows what I’m thinking of.
Those scars are no secret, but abruptly I find myself wondering just how long he’s been watching me. The Murk must have set up Aerik and his cadre to come across me and my family while in the grips of the curse—it was part of their plan that some vicious Seelie would discover the power of my blood.
“Were you there?” I blurt out. “The night I was attacked. Did you help with that part of the plan?” Have I just been feeling guilty about deceiving one of the people most directly responsible for the worst moments in my entire life?
But Madoc is shaking his head. I’m more relieved than I probably should be.
“I don’t do much work for Orion above in the human world,” he says, and touches his ears with their slight but obvious point. “He prefers to use the many Murk who could pass for human without a spell for those missions.”
“That makes sense. The—” I cut myself off before I finish mentioning that the fae of the seasons used similar reasoning when sending people to the human world. I don’t think Madoc would appreciate being compared to them, and I still want him to show me what I’ve been missing here.
Is his larger portion of fae blood in comparison to most of the Murk what earned him his spot in Orion’s inner circle? But at least a couple of the other men I’ve seen the Murk king consulting with had ears as rounded as any human’s.
“Come along then,” Madoc says into my silence, looking as if he’d prefer we change the subject too. He motions for me to follow him farther down the tunnel, keeping a slow pace for my benefit, and I fall into step beside him.
My earlier thoughts are still spinning through my head, though. “It is true that the Murk have mingled more with humans than the fae of the seasons generally do, isn’t it?” I venture. Most of the rat shifters around here lack pointed ears, for all their tails make it impossible not to know they’re something other than human. And that dilution of their fae heritage is part of the reason they needed to make their own Heart to draw magic from.
“Yes. We don’t choose our leaders based on the supposed purity of their blood here.”
“But Orion looks almost true-blooded,” I can’t help pointing out. I’m surprised there were any Murk with enough fae heritage to produce a child that obviously fae.
I don’t say that bit out loud either, but Madoc must pick up on my line of thinking.
“His parents and grandparents and perhaps more before that wanted to help us rise above the position we’ve been forced into, and purposefully sought out mates who were more… fae-inclined,” he says. “You could almost say he was born for this, to be powerful enough to accomplish everything we needed.”
And because of that lineage, he’s also arrogant enough to think everyone should follow his whims, no matter how horrifying, I guess. I grit my teeth against that observation, remembering how well my criticism went over with Madoc last time.
“What exactly are you going to show me?” I ask instead.
Madoc just shakes his head. “It’ll be easier to explain when I can show you. It isn’t that far.” He pauses and glances down. “Is your foot hurting you?”
I’ve been limping the entire time I’ve been living in the Refuge, so it isn’t as if he could think it’s a new injury. But he sounds honestly concerned—and maybe even a little chagrinned that he hasn’t thought to check before. An unwelcome warmth flickers in my chest.
“No worse than usual,” I say. “The longer I stay on it, the achier it gets, but I never have to walk too far around here.”
“All right. If it becomes a problem, or if you need a replacement for the brace in your boot, let me know. I’m sure we can replicate it.”
I don’t know what to say to him after that. Does my minor discomfort really matter at all to him?
It’s too confusing trying to untangle his motives, so I focus on setting my feet one after the other alongside him.
We walk all the way to the last station in this direction and clamber onto the platform there. Madoc walks up to a set of steel doors that I assumed went nowhere important, since I never saw anyone going in or out of them. He unlocks them with a few murmured words and a series of swift gestures I can’t follow and pushes one wide for me to walk in past him.
On the other side, a linoleum floor leads down a short hall to a single door, this one unlocked.
Madoc rests his hand on the knob. “We’re not sure what the humans who built this place meant to use this area for, but they never finished it. The air doesn’t pass through easily, so it’s not suitable for spending large periods of time in it. We’ve dedicated it to days past instead.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
He opens the door and ushers me in.
Right away, I can see what he meant about the unfinished part. The room is large, nearly half again the size of the station we just left, but the walls are rough concrete mixed with patches of bare bedrock, and the craggy ceiling adds to the cave-like impression. Only the floor has been sanded smooth.
A magical light drifts down from one glowing source in the middle of the ceiling. It catches on a line of metal chairs along the walls, stretching all the way around the room. More chairs form a series of concentric rings moving toward the center of the space, with gaps here and there where a person can step between them.
But the strangest thing is the clots of fog that hang over nearly every chair. They’re like little dark clouds, churning in place a few inches above the seats. They remind me a little of the shifting light inside a Seelie’s soul stone, but they aren’t contained in any other object and they give off no light at all.
We aren’t alone in the room. A Murk woman is sitting on one of the chairs at the far end of the room, the patch of fog there wrapped around her chest. Her jaw is set firmly, but a few tears have trickled down her cheeks.
“What is this place?” I say, my voice dropping to a whisper. The woman gives no sign that she’s noticed our arrival.
“The vault of memories,” Madoc says simply. “A way of keeping a record of the crimes done to us. Any Murk who’s lost something to the fae of the seasons may offer up his memories here so that what was lost is never forgotten.”
A shiver runs over my skin. The air in here is very still but cooler than the rest of the Refuge. “And what happens when you sit in one of the chairs?”
“You’re absorbed into the memory left there until the part offered up ends or someone shakes you out of it.” He gestures to the rings of chairs. “You can see whatever you’d like. Every memory in here shows how little the other fae think of us.”
I can just… step into other people’s memories? Traumatic memories, from the sounds of it. My legs balk. “I don’t want to intrude on something private.”
“We all have access to everything in the vault,” Madoc says. “You’d be honoring the events by witnessing them and recognizing what was done to us.”
“Can you tell me what I’d be seeing ahead of time?” I ask.
He shrugs, an oddly sheepish expression creeping over his face. “If I tell you which to view, encourage or discourage you from any of them, you won’t trust that whatever you see is really representative of what we’ve faced. Pick a few at random, and you’ll get a fair sampling.”
He has a point there. I still find it hard to propel myself forward.
I walk along the line of chairs against the wall, peering at each of the churning dark patches in turn. They all look essentially the same, none bleaker or more violent than another. There’s really no way of telling what each might hold—to my senses, at least. From what Madoc said, there must be some sort of magical trace the Murk can pick up on that gives an idea of the contents.
I said I wanted to see what the Murk have actually been put through by the other fae—and I can’t see how I’m going to get anything else of use out of this place. There could still be information in one of these memories that’ll get me closer to escape.
Madoc has hung back by the door as if to ensure there’s no chance of me thinking he’s influencing my decision. When I look back at him, his mouth has formed a crooked line, as if he’s not totally happy I’m here.
It was his idea. But then, these are his people’s deepest wounds.
Has he left a memory here?
I set aside that question and force myself to pick a chair at random, halfway along the room. Bracing myself, I sink into the chair.
As I settle into the seat, a chilly tingling sensation wraps around my torso and flows up to my head with my next exhaled breath. The world around me tilts, and I close my eyes instinctively.
And then I’m there.
A fire is blazing all across a small wooden cabin. The smell of smoke fills my nose. A man lies dead in front of the building, his torso slashed through from shoulder to waist so deeply the edges of his ribs glint against the bloody flesh.
As I watch from the perspective of whoever this memory belongs to, a woman runs toward me, shooing at me to run ahead of her. I shake my head, but the panic etched on her face convinces me. My view swings around as I turn. I glance back a moment later just in time to see a wolf lunge out of the shadows to tackle the woman to the ground. It plunges its claws into her chest with a savage grin.
I jolt awake to find myself clutching the sides of the chair, my breath coming short. For a second, the smoky smell lingers in my lungs. The still air cools the sweat that’s broken out on my forehead.
Madoc watches me silently from near the door. The woman who was here before has left.
That memory doesn’t tell me much, though. Who knows why the Seelie attacked those Murk? Maybe they’d already hurt the summer fae. It’s easy to look like the victim when you’re controlling what anyone sees of the story.
I push myself off of the chair, wavering as I catch my balance, and stride deeper into the room to one of the chairs closer to the center. Dragging in a breath, I sit down.
The chill wraps around me, I close my eyes—
And now I’m swinging high above an icy plain. There’s a pain in my behind from an appendage I don’t have in real life. The wind ruffles my fur, and I realize the memory is of a Murk in rat form.
A rat clutched by a raven. The black wings flap overhead, and the talons clutching my tail give me a shake so hard my bones rattle. Then the bird dives downward, plummeting toward the ground. It tosses me just as it lands, a few of those bones snapping as I hit the ice.
The raven shifts into an Unseelie woman. She jabs something I can’t see into the base of my tail to stop me from running, though I’m too dizzy to be likely to anyway.
“Show yourself,” she snaps. “I have questions.”
Pain hazes my mind as I leave behind my animal form—other than my tail, which enlarges but remains pinned.
“What do you want?” I stammer. “I wasn’t hurting anyone. I was only foraging—those woods belong to no domain, I’m sure of it—my mate is close to having our child; she needs—”
“Enough lies,” the woman snaps, even though I can tell the Murk whose memory I’m in meant every word he said. Nothing but fear and anguish runs through his frame—and a pinch of hunger in his belly. “You don’t belong in the winter realm at all. What tricks were you up to?”
“I swear, I only came through to the fringelands because I thought something grown in the land of the Heart might fill her more,” the man says. “I don’t want anything except to gather a few morsels of food and leave.”
“We’ll just have to pick you apart until we discover the truth, then.”
The Unseelie woman turns as if expecting someone else, and a flare of panicked certainty shoots through my chest—I won’t make it through this alive. My mate will never know what’s happened to me. She’ll be all alone.
In that moment of desperation, I spit out a string of syllables. Pain sears through my bottom—but I’m free. I leap away from the tail I’ve severed from my body, shifting into rat form at the same time, and dash into the shelter of the nearby woods even though every step is agony.
When I come out of that memory, I’m shaking. Madoc has come closer, standing over me as if he was considering snapping me out of it early. He peers into my eyes. “Have you seen enough?”
I swallow thickly. The man whose memory I just inhabited didn’t deserve that treatment. But after all the Murk have done—so much the fae of the seasons haven’t deserved either—I’m not going to say they deserve to be slaughtered over a few overly vicious sentries.
“I’ll look at another,” I say, annoyed that my voice wobbles.
Madoc frowns, but he doesn’t stop me. He hangs back as I weave through the chairs again. But when I stop and swivel to sit down on the next one I’ve chosen, he clears his throat urgently. “Maybe not that one. That’s… That’s a particularly wrenching one.”
I hold his gaze. “Shouldn’t you want me to see it, then?”
He opens his mouth and then closes it again with a sickly smile. “You’re right. I should. Just—be prepared. If you react too strongly, I’ll pull you out.”
Is he putting on a show because he doesn’t want me to see what this memory contains for some other reason? I sit in the chair, even more determined than before, and shut my eyes.
This time, I fall into a dimly lit tunnel that stinks of sewage. Because it’s a sewer, I realize as I take in my surroundings. It’s hard to focus on any details because my heart is pounding so hard. I’m standing braced in front of a doorway on a ledge that runs alongside the channel of sludge.
Several fae are approaching. I can’t tell whether they’re Seelie or Unseelie at first, but then a few bare their teeth to show wolfish fangs. “We’ll take her for questioning,” the one in the lead says. “Destroy the rest.”
“No, please!” I cry, throwing my arms wide as if I can stop them with my body. “They’re only—”
One of the fae punches me in the throat so hard my voice turns into a croak. Another yanks my arms behind me and snaps a magical binding around me as he carries me with his colleagues into the room I was trying to defend.
It’s… It’s full of children. Young fae ranging from toddlers to kids who don’t look older than five or six in human years. They all freeze and stare at the sight of the intruders.
The few adult Murk who’re standing among the children rush forward, letting loose their own rat claws, but the wolf shifters slice through their throats and bash their heads in a matter of seconds. Then they turn on the kids, some of whom are staring in stunned horror, others starting to wail or shriek.
The summer fae warriors barge through the room, catching every Murk child in their path with their fangs or claws. Blood splatters the little faces. Bodies slump like toppled, dismembered dolls across the blankets spread on the floor. And one of the Seelie—one of them laughs.
“This many fewer to grow up and become thorns in our side,” another mutters, grabbing a toddler who was scrambling away from him with a whimper and slashing the poor little body right down the middle.
A scream of protest finally bursts from my damaged throat. The man holding me wallops me across the head—and I whip back into the vault of memories.
I double over in the chair, vomit burning up my throat before I have a chance to even try to rein in my nausea. Madoc springs forward, grasping my shoulder, pulling my hair back from the spray that spills from my mouth. I gag and sputter, those horrible images flashing through my mind on repeat. I can’t shut them out, eyes open or closed.
“I’m sorry,” Madoc says raggedly. “I shouldn’t have let you anyway.”
I stay hunched over for several seconds longer until I’m sure my stomach is done heaving. Then I bring my hands to my face. “That—who were all those kids? What were the Seelie doing there?”
Madoc eases back. “We have… what you’d call orphanages. For the Murk who aren’t yet old enough to fend for themselves, who’ve been left parentless for a variety of reasons.” His mouth twists. “I spent some time in one of those, though thankfully not that one, obviously. As far as what the Seelie meant to do, you saw it. One of them must have noticed the Murk living there when they were in the human world for some other reason, and they took the opportunity to exterminate as many of us as they could.”
I don’t want to believe it. Does Sylas know that kind of thing goes on? Do any of my mates? No matter how many spiteful pranks the Murk have played, no matter how many deaths they’ve caused, to rip apart tiny children who’d never done anything…
My stomach lurches again, and I wait until I’ve gotten it under control before I speak again. “I can see why you hate them so much.”
Madoc sighs and helps me out of the chair. My legs tremble. He keeps his hand on my elbow to steady me and murmurs a few quick phrases. The dinner I threw up crumbles into dust that wisps away.
My cheeks flush with embarrassment that he not only saw me in that state but cleaned up after me too. He isn’t acting disdainful of my reaction, though, the way I can so easily imagine fae like Celia or Laoni behaving.
He looks me over as if confirming I really am okay and then says, “It isn’t so much about hate. I do hate the fae of the seasons for the things they’ve done—don’t get me wrong. But I don’t stand with Orion to punish them. I stand with him to make sure Murk like the ones you saw never have to be punished again.”
He hesitates, and then adds, “The woman whose memory you were just in came to the orphanage where I was living next. She managed to get away from the Seelie who captured her, but she lost one of her arms in the process. She never told us what happened to the children she’d looked after before us, though. I didn’t know until I came here and sensed her presence in that memory.”
I shiver. “I don’t regret seeing it. I needed to know. But it was horrible.”
“It was. And for her, and the other children like me, and every other Murk who’s had to live in constant fear of the fae of the seasons stumbling on us at the wrong moment and deciding to rain their vicious judgment down on us all, I want us to have a real home. I want us to be able to walk around freely without that shadow hanging over us. Hell, I want us to be able to partake in the Heart of the Mist’s magic again, if it’ll have us, even if that’s a pipe dream. We’re fae… We shouldn’t have to live as if we’re only rats.”
He averts his gaze as if he’s ashamed of how much emotion he’s shown. His frustration rang through his voice.
I want to tell him I understand, that I respect him more for the compassion and resolve he’s just shown. But how can I when seeing that resolve through would mean destroy everything in the worlds that I’ve come to care about?
