Page 13 of Heart of Night
“He’s not wrong.” Royad gestures at the male chewing on a piece of meat, studying the harsh lines of his face visible behind a curtain of black hair.
That earns us the attention of the rest of the Crows. We’ve gotten used to the lack of privacy with twenty-two of us in the cave and all of us equipped with fae senses, but rarely do we pry on each other’s conversations.
I have to admit, I spent too much time, in those first few days after coming back from the dead, on sleeping off the exhaustion overcoming me on occasion and the rest of my time searching the forest for traces of my wife to know much of anything else.
“She’s obviously not in the forest, or we’d already have found her?” I snap, fully aware that those are the few loyal Crows left and that I shouldn’t get on their bad side, or they might abandon me like the rest—the ones who didn’t die in battle. But I don’t have enough air to breathe, knowing that Ayna is in Ephegos’s grasp. Time is running, and I need to act before that traitorous shit kills her.
Forcing my breathing to calm, I turn to Royad, intending to tell him that I’m ready to leave this place and turn over every pebble in Eherea until I find her, but a sharp pain sears my shoulder where the tattoo of a crow mid-flight spreads across my shoulder blade all the way to my biceps, and I release a hiss instead.
The look Royad gives me is a clear indicator he knows something’s up.
When I found the tattoo shortly upon my waking in the clearing, I thought little of it. Many Crows are inked in various ways, and I wondered if it might be a mark I’d been given as a baby and which had been hidden beneath a layer of feathers. But when Royad spied it, he made it clear that this was something different. One wing of the crow would have peeked out from under my feathers where it spreads up toward my neck, and there had been smooth skin before the curse was lifted.
Perhaps that’s what it is, a reminder of Vala’s punishment. But the way pain is lashing through my shoulder right now, I doubt it’s a mere image on my skin serving to never let me forget. Right now, this thing feels alive, like it’s clawing at me with sharp talons.
I exhale with my eyes closed, shutting out the murmurs and crackling of the fire, the shuffling feet of deer and rabbits out in the forest, and the occasional caw of a real crow, until the pain is fading and I can think again.
If losing Ayna won’t kill me, this thing on my shoulder just might.
“You all right?” Royad leans in, pretending to reach for his knife, which he dumped on the floor behind us earlier, and subtly checks on my shoulder.
When I give him a nod, he frowns. “You don’t look all right.”
Gritting my teeth, I breathe through the fading sensation in my shoulder and direct my mind into the shine of the fire in front of me. For a while, all I can do is count my heartbeats, convincing myself that not everything is lost, that I still have time to find my wife.
It’s when I decide that I’ll set out first thing tomorrow that the pain turns into something else, a tug directing me toward the cave wall that has my full attention. I stand, ignoring Royad’s stare as I pad to place my hands on the rough, moss-overgrown stone standing between me and the place the tug is pulling me.
It’s weak, but there is no mistaking whose magic is calling to me from what has to be miles and miles and miles away.
“Drop everything,” I tell what’s left of my people as Royad comes to stand beside me, his hand on my shoulder as if in comfort—or to caution me from clawing my path through the hard stone. “We’re leaving now.”
Eight
Ayna
When I wake, I’m not alone in the room. My head is pounding, and my stomach is roiling in a sensation not so different from when I woke up after Kaira poisoned me, but I sense the presence in the corner of the room, looming and dangerous.
Keeping my eyes shut, I take inventory of my body. The pain has faded from my shoulder and arm where Herinor cut me, and I can no longer feel the bruises where the guards dragged me through the palace to dump me unceremoniously in my assigned bedroom—my luxurious cell is more like it.
“I can hear your heart pick up pace, Ayna,” Ephegos says, accompanied by light footsteps I only hear because he wants me to. I’ve spent enough time in the presence of Crows to know they don’t make a sound if they don’t intend to alert people to their approach. “Open your eyes.”
I do because the only thing more terrifying than facing the male who put me in this new prison is not seeing him coming.
He’s at the side of my bed—the very same bed I crawled to and curled up on top of, crying my eyes out after the guards had left.
There are no tears in my eyes now, only steel determination as I sit up and measure him head to toe like he’s vermin even when his fine black pants and russet jacket suggest otherwise. Even his hair is smoothed back into a perfect ponytail today.
“What’s the occasion?” I let my gaze drift over the brass buttons at the front of his jacket, wondering if they would make a good weapon if I managed to tear them off. If I had a slingshot, they might.
The self-satisfied grin on Ephegos’s face is every bit as warm as the ones he used to give me at the palace in the Seeing Forest and nothing like the monster he actually is. “I took the liberty to heal what was left of your wounds while you were sleeping.” His gaze follows the frayed fabric of my sleeve where Herinor tore it off. “Must have been quite an encounter if it left you that exhausted.”
I don’t know what is worse, that he’s been in this room and laid a hand on me without my noticing or that it seems to give him pleasure that Herinor’s torture knocked me out cold eventually.
All I give him is a bland expression as I swing my legs from the bed and stalk for the bathing room. The fact that I sway the moment I start walking doesn’t escape his attention, and he’s sending a too-warm laugh after me that could have fooled anyone had I not known what sort of cruelty he’s hiding behind that courtier’s facade.
“Yes, Ayna. Go clean up. Today is the day you’ll finally leave this place.”
I freeze on the threshold, using the wood to stabilize myself as I glance back at him over my shoulder. “What do you mean I’ll leave this place? Where are we going?”