Lies of Murk by Eva Chase
2
Talia
As I emerge from sleep, the first thing I register is the smell. Or smells, really, because there are an awful lot of them colliding and clashing, most of which I’d never expect to find in my nose when I wake up.
Sylas’s castle smells of warmed wood, and Corwin’s carries a faint mineral scent. Both of those mingle together in my bedroom in our new joint castle. Now, I’m assaulted by a mix of bitter metal, acrid smoke, and a thick mildewy odor that has me recoiling before I’m even fully conscious.
My muscles tense, and a twinge runs through my scalp down the back of my head. And inside my head…
Inside my head there’s a horrible blank.
The emptiness echoes from behind my forehead down to my gut. I have no sense of Corwin at all, not even the dulled impression of a barrier between us like when he’s fully raised his walls against our connection. There’ve been times he’s shut me out before, but this is the first time I’ve ever felt completely detached from him since the moment our soul-twined bond sprang into existence like a lightning bolt down the center of my being.
My pulse stutters, and my eyes pop open. I shove myself upward, my thoughts spinning. My mind is still blurred with the unnatural sleep I’m shaking off. Staring at the scene around me, I have trouble processing what I’m seeing.
I’m lying on a thin blanket on a tiled floor in a corner of an immense room, larger than even the ballrooms in the fae castles. It’s split in three, with the tiled floor I’m sprawled on stretching the full length to the distant wall, falling away into some sort of chasm several feet from me, and then rising into another span of tiles on the other side. At either end of the chasm, an opening to a dark tunnel looms. Pipes, wiring, and metal beams crisscross the dim ceiling high above me.
Scattered across the tiled sections stand little shacks made of a hodgepodge of metal sheets, wooden boards, plastic siding, and all sorts of debris from car tires to tattered scarves. Figures are moving between those buildings, ducking in and out of them, and climbing up and down makeshift ladders along the length of the chasm. Some of them appear to be working, hauling sacks or crates of supplies or fixing materials together into objects I can’t identify. Others are simply sprawled in small groups chatting with each other.
Assorted sounds, from rustling to clanking, emanate from all around me. I suspect the smoky smell is drifting from a large, battered steel contraption partway along my side of the room, which whirs and growls with sputterings of sparks. Most of the light streams from flickering panels fixed at seemingly random intervals along the ceiling.
None of the figures are all that close to me. A few of those nearby have glanced my way and then averted their gazes. My voice stays locked in my throat. I’m not sure whether I should call out to them or avoid them.
Where the hell am I? What happened to me? I remember—we had the ceremony for me to take Sylas, Whitt, and August officially as my mates. There was music and food and dancing—an old woman from Donovan’s pack wanted to give me a gift—a fae man appeared out of nowhere and knocked me out with some kind of magic.
My hand jerks to my waist, instinctively reaching for my knife for protection, but of course I wasn’t wearing my usual belt with this lovely dress for the ceremony. In the same instant, the man from my memory steps into my view, so easily he’s probably been watching me from just behind me the entire time. My entire body goes rigid, bracing to defend myself.
I still have the bronze bracelet Sylas gave me, smooth against my wrist. If I have to, I might be able to transform it into some kind of blade in time to fend him off… or at least make attacking me a little harder.
The man peers down at me with an air of mild disdain. In the wavering light, I can’t tell what color his heavy-lidded eyes are, only that they’re dark. Straight, straw-blond hair falls across his pale forehead. It points in a jagged line toward a long nose with a slight bump partway along its length as if it’s been broken before.
There’s nothing directly threatening in his casual stance, but the human-style collared shirt he’s wearing is fitted enough to show the muscular definition in his well-built shoulders and chest. He isn’t quite as brawny as Sylas or August, but there’s no mistaking the strength he could wield if he chooses to. That he’s already chosen to wield, against me.
If the magic he used wasn’t enough confirmation, the ears with lightly pointed tips that poke from between the mussed strands of his hair confirm my original assumption. Despite his clothing and our surroundings, he’s definitely some kind of fae.
“Looking for this?” he asks in the low, faintly hoarse voice that greeted me in the forest before he knocked me out. My gaze falls to his hand. He’s dangling a circlet of gold and silver—
My crown. The crown my mates gave me at the end of the ceremony—to celebrate our union, the peace between the summer and winter realms, and everything I’ve done to help the fae on both sides of the border. I wasn’t looking for it, hadn’t even realized it was missing, but now that I see it in his grasp, my fingers itch to snatch it back.
But I have more important considerations first.
“Who are you?” I say, jerking my attention back to the fae man’s face. “Where are we? Why did you bring me here?”
The man flicks the crown in a slow rotation around his fingers. He ignores all but my last question. “My king felt it was time you met him. I’ll bring you to him now.”
His king? I don’t understand any of this. I open my mouth to press for more answers—but a twitching motion by the man’s leg catches my eyes, and my voice dies.
A long, slender shape, sinuous and covered with a thin sheen of pale beige fur, grazes his calf and then tucks back behind him. I gape for a second before comprehension dawns on me. Even then, my gaze darts toward the other, more distant figures throughout the room to double check.
Between the distance, the erratic light, and my initial daze, that one detail didn’t fully sink into my mind when I scanned the space before. Now that I’m looking for it, my gut twists at how obvious it is. A woman climbing out of the chasm there has a similar but dark shape slanting along her leg to twine around her ankle. A man on the other side has a gray one looped around the leg of the table he’s poised at.
Not ropes or cables or any separate tool. With each glimpse, my understanding solidifies.
They all have tails. Long, tapered, lightly furred tails. I’ve never seen fae with tails before, but if this is their home, why shouldn’t this kind flaunt them like the wolf shifters can let out their fangs and claws, like the ravens can unfurl their wings? A fresh wave of panic washes over me.
I’ve been taken by the Murk. The rat-shifting fae despised by both the Seelie and the Unseelie; the fae best known for playing vicious pranks and taking malicious satisfaction out of hurting both humans and other fae.
I cringe back against the wall instinctively. When I focus on the man in front of me again, there’s something hard in his face that wasn’t there before. He motions to me with his empty hand. “Let’s go. There’s no point in delaying it.”
My hands press against the cool tiles. “I don’t want to go anywhere except home.”
“Well, too bad for you that’s not in the cards. You can walk, or I can carry you. Either way, we’re going now.”
His voice stays low, but I can tell from the edge that creeps into it that he means it. He’s more than half a foot taller than me, and he’s got fae strength and magic on his side. There’s no way I’m beating him in a struggle, bronze bangle or not. I weigh my options for a few seconds and decide I’d rather go on my own two feet than have him lay one hand on me, if I’m going to end up going either way.
I push myself upright. The silky fabric of the dress my friend Harper made me for the ceremony swishes around me. It’s marked with dirt and grease stains now, but I still feel a little elegant in it.
I’m Lady Talia, mate to four of the most powerful fae alive, and I will meet my fate with dignity—and as much defiance as I can manage.
The fae man ushers me to a set of narrow stairs built against the side of the chasm by the nearest tunnel. I walk slowly, catching my balance on my initially wobbly legs. The ache of my recent wound—dealt by one of this man’s Murk kin—wakes up in my thigh, and I’d limp anyway because of my warped foot, but I keep my pace as steady as possible.
It isn’t much of a drop, no more than five or six feet down. As I pick my way down the steps, I take in the metal bars and slats that run along the concrete floor of the chasm. Recognition clicks in my mind, taking the setting immediately from alien to familiar.
“This is a subway station,” I say, the revelation slipping out of me before I can catch it.
“Not anymore,” my kidnapper says. “The humans abandoned it, and we reclaimed it.”
I guess I should be glad that my situation can’t be made even worse by a speeding subway train rumbling down those tracks. It’s hard to feel very optimistic as I limp along beside the fae man into the dank, shadowy tunnel.
Small, furry bodies scuttle past us in the darkness, and I can’t tell whether they’re Murk in rat form or regular rats. Maybe a mix of both. More haphazard structures jut from the walls here and there, little more than vague shapes to my eyes. My escort strides along with an impatient air, navigating the darkness without hesitation.
The mildew smell gets thicker as we walk deeper into the tunnel. Twice, a small light flares in the distance against the thicker blackness. As my eyes adjust, I notice a dull orange glow seeping across the tracks up ahead. It brightens as we near it. A quiver ripples through the air, prickling over my skin with an unsettling erraticness. I can’t help rubbing my bare arms.
As we come up on the glowing area, the dissonant hum of energy intensifies. The wall falls away to reveal a deep alcove about the size of the grand meeting room in the Bastion of the Heart back in the summer realm. Tailed fae stand in a line leading up to a large dais at the far end, which holds a tall throne.
The throne appears to have been constructed out of the rubble of the destroyed section of wall, packed together with clay. The woman at the front of the line is speaking to the man sitting in that high seat. A glowing mass behind him is what’s emitting the orange light, which catches off his pale, spiky hair. Three other figures lounge on the dais around him with a vaguely menacing air.
At the sight of my kidnapper, the man waves the woman and the rest of the line away. “Return in an hour,” he barks in a tone that manages to sound both terse and flippant.
As the other fae scatter, my escort leads me toward the throne.
Closer, I can see that any color in this man’s hair is only reflected from the quaking light behind him, which twitches in time with the erratic energy now trickling right through my flesh. The narrow spikes along his scalp are pure white. But that can’t be a reflection of his age, because the face they frame is smooth and sharp-edged without a hint of wrinkles. His yellow eyes track our every step. A white-furred tail swings casually over the arm of the throne.
Like my kidnapper, this man is dressed in human clothes: tight dark jeans and a satiny shirt with a blue-and-maroon pattern, the collar gaping open to show off the wiry muscles and dappling of scars on his lean chest. He’s barefoot, his narrow toes tipped with claws like the ones that slashed open my thigh. They gleam on his fingertips too. When we stop in front of him, one more feature captures my attention.
His ears. At first I mistook them for more tufts of his spiky hair. They’re pointed as sharply as Whitt’s, and Whitt is nearly true-blooded.
From what the other fae have told me about how much the Murk have mingled with humans to bear their children, I didn’t think any of the rat shifters had that much fae blood left in them. But then, there are obviously a lot of things the Seelie and Unseelie don’t know about their greatest enemies.
The Murk who must be the king my kidnapper mentioned and the… guards? poised around him on the dais watch us silently. My kidnapper dips into a rough bow and nudges me half a step ahead of him. “I brought her to you as soon as she woke up.”
“Thank you, Madoc,” the king says in the same tone as before, careless and yet brusque. I hold myself stiffly still as he looks me over from head to toes and back again. “Well, they have draped you in a lot of pretty wrapping, haven’t they? I hear that you’ve even won over not just the man your soul was bound to but three others besides—and to the point of them declaring you their mate. You’ve outdone my expectations. Excellent work.”
I blink at him, my stomach balling tighter. “I don’t understand. What are you talking about? Why did you have me brought here?”
He shrugs, a cool glint lighting in his yellow eyes. “Everything important about you came from me. You’ve served the purpose you were intended for. And now you’ll serve me by being here while those idiotic fae of the seasons scramble around in desperation.” He grins, revealing a row of crooked teeth.
His words repeat in my head. Everything important about you came from me. A thicker chill coils around me. “I’ve never even met you.”
He cackles with apparent glee and stretches out in his throne, tossing one leg over the arm next to his swaying tail. “Oh, little girl, you met me before you met almost anyone. You didn’t really think you gained the power to cure curses and win an arch-lord’s soul all by yourself, did you?”
My lips part, but no sound comes out. I close my mouth, swallow, and finally stammer, “But how—how could you—?”
“I stole you when you weren’t even a day old,” the king says, his gaze wandering away from me as if the story barely matters to him. “Swapped you out for one of our own infants cloaked in an illusion. Your dimwitted parents never noticed. Then when I’d worked my magic, I swapped you back. You already held the kernel for the rest to sprout. I planted it in your grandmother, urged it on in your mother—these things take time to fully bloom, you know. We’ve been playing a long game here.”
A rush of nausea flips my stomach. Nuldar the sage said something about that, didn’t he? That my grandmother had met a fae who planted the seed… We assumed he meant that my grandfather had fae blood in him, that it’d caused my powers somehow. But it wasn’t that—it was this spiteful villain working some kind of magic on my family?
Even as the pieces click together, every cell in my body balks at accepting what he says as truth. I grope for some kind of argument. “But—we went to a pool that shows the past—I asked about when I was born, and when I first met the fae—it showed—”
“Only darkness, right?” The king’s gaze focuses on me again, his lips curving into a nasty smirk. “Oh, I know the tricks the fae of the seasons have up their sleeves, and I matched them with my own. I stole you in total darkness, and in total darkness you remained until you were returned home. Nothing for them to unravel with their visions and magic ponds.”
Nuldar’s creaking voice comes back to me. She started in darkness. Then she came into the light.
No. This can’t be possible. A tremor courses through me, leaving me shaking despite my best efforts to hold myself steady. “But why…”
“I’d have thought that’d be obvious. You have a lot of experience with the viciousness of those fae, don’t you? Keeping you half-starved in a cage? Mangling your body? Attacking you at every turn? And you their supposed savior.” He shakes his head in mock disbelief. “They’ve spent millennia trying to crush us Murk, shunning us, savaging us, killing us as often as they can. It was time they got not just a taste but a whole banquet of their own medicine. And you delivered it for me.”
One of the fae beside the throne speaks up, his voice cruel in its amusement. “We’ll see them all on their knees soon, Orion!”
Orion. Some distant part of my mind files that away as the king’s name. The rest is still reeling, but he doesn’t wait for me to reply.
“It’s all worked out perfectly,” he says. “I laid the curse while I placed the seed of the temporary cure in your family line all those decades ago. Drive the wolves wild, freeze the ravens feather by feather—what could be more fitting?”
My jaw goes slack. It shouldn’t surprise me after everything he’s already said, but still—the enormity— “You placed the curse on both of the realms?” The curse that’s been afflicting the Seelie and Unseelie for… for decades, like he said.
The curse that’s been steadily growing more horrible until I showed up with just the right components to cure it. How else could he have managed that if he wasn’t responsible for the curse itself? But I still don’t understand how.
Orion’s lips pull into a mocking sneer. “They never suspected, did they? So sure of themselves and so dismissive of us. Now they’ve seen our power, and before much longer they’ll know who orchestrated their downfall.” He chuckles to himself. “The worse the curse got, the more frantic they all got. And then you appeared as if out of nowhere, a beacon of hope. With a little encouragement, we had them all seeing you as their blessed savior, the one figure standing between them and despair. And now I’ve yanked you away from them.”
He has. Away from all of them, more completely than I’d ever imagined was possible.
My voice comes out thin. “My—my soul-twined bond. I can’t feel—”
Orion snorts. “Oh, we couldn’t have you drawing your supposed beloved here, could we? Since my magic created the spark for that connection, I can shield it well enough. He won’t reach you while you’re within my home.”
He isn’t saying the bond is gone completely. Maybe there are some limits to what his powers can accomplish.
But that doesn’t help me while I’m stuck here.
I swallow thickly. “And what happens next?”
“Oh, I’ll let them stew in their misery and panic for a little while, and then we’ll sweep in and claim all the Mists for ourselves. I’m sure you’ll continue to be a useful tool throughout that mission. And you’ll get to watch all those who mistreated you laid low.”
Orion speaks as if I should be happy. I wrap my arms around myself, finally getting enough control to stop shaking, but nausea is still clamped around my gut. My thoughts whirl, shying away from accepting anything he’s said as the truth.
I thought—I thought the Heart had blessed me, to push back the curse, to bring the realms together.
The Murk are known for mischief, for playing tricks on people. Maybe he’s just trying to make me believe all this so he can manipulate me somehow, or simply for his own amusement. I don’t have to accept his story at face value.
None of it really makes sense, after all. The Murk are supposed to be the weakest of all the fae by a huge margin, living so far from the Heart, constantly breaking its laws. How could they have managed to orchestrate a curse so massive it affects every one of those he calls the “fae of the seasons,” controlling their behavior, even killing them?
“I don’t believe you,” I say, raising my chin. “You couldn’t do even half of that when you can barely draw on the Heart’s power at all.”
Orion laughs again, but for the first time true hostility darkens his expression even as his eyes gleam brighter. “Oh, I don’t have any need for the Heart of the Mists, little girl. I made my own.” He swings his arm toward the stuttering mass of orange light that fills the space at the back of the platform.
I stare at it and then at him again. “You what?”
His lips peel back over his uneven teeth. “I made my own Heart. A Heart for the Murk, to fuel our powers by our own rules. With every bit of confusion and agony we provoke, it grows stronger, fiercer. Just in the past few hours I can feel it beating even more furiously. And that’s all thanks to you.”
