Page 60 of Boundless

Maera pulled me one last time, hard. Doors fell closed right in front of my face, the sound of them echoing in my head.

I was so screwed.

eighteen

Maera wassure that they left, even though I’d made her sit with me in an open field from which we could see the Chamber building. It was just there, possibly not even fifty feet away, and it was dark, but the torches in the front still burned with that orange fire. Impossible to miss in the darkness, when even the moon seemed intent on hiding behind clouds tonight.

I hadn’t seen the Council members leave. I’d been looking at that building almost all the damn time, not able to gather enough courage to run back, but not fully convinced to walk away, either. Not just yet.

But Maera, who’d stayed with me and looked so much more panicked than I’d ever seen her before, insisted that they’d already left. When I asked,from where?she just said,from the back.

How could Inottake her word for it?

“If you don’t stop walking in circles, I’m going to throw up soon.” And I meant it. She moved so fast, almost like her feet were gliding on the grass, it made my head spin.

Maera stopped. Sighed. Sat cross-legged just to my left.

She looked back as if to make sure that the wolves and the people who’d seen us to the Chamber hadn’t come back—and they hadn’t. We were all alone with the night. And the occasional howl in the distance every few minutes, which was strangely calming.

“I’m sorry, Nilah. This is just…so much more than I imagined.” Coming from her, it was a big deal. Since I’d met her, she’d always been so composed.

“It is. It’s so much more than should even be possible, and I can’t even laugh about it because I’m pretty sure I’ll cry halfway through. I mean, the Ice Queen whose soul I have inside me is pretty much a baby-killing monster, but then she…had a change of heart? Regretted having made the deal with that devil? And then she leftmeto pick up the slack—me!”

“Yeah, the fae are fucked up like that,” she said, and this time I did laugh. Just the way she said it, like it came from her very soul, and I felt it in mine.

“You can say that again,” I said, and by some miracle, didn’t cry. “His sons. He killedhis ownsons.”

“Pretty sure there’s worse stories out there if we want to look,” Maera said.

“No thanks. I think I’m good.” If I never heard another fae story, I was perfectly fine.

My God, those tales I’d read in the Seelie Court, then in the Ice Queen’s bedroom—they were all based on real things. All those terrible tales I thought were just horror stories, and now I realized they weren’t.

“It’s only normal to be afraid,” said Maera. “I am, too.”

“It’s not just about the fear.” And I wouldn’t say it out loud to her, but it wasme.It was how filthy and dirty I suddenly felt.

The soul of a queen—what a fucking nightmare. It was inside me, and I couldn’t get it out.

“Where are they?” I whispered to Maera, despite my better judgment. “The gates. Can I see them?”

Maera looked at me for a second. “I don’t see why not.”

A moment later, we walked in silence across the field to get to the other side of Thornevale.

We walked for half an hour,if not more. We were alone—no wolf or man or woman followed us. Maera seemed calm, not once looking over her shoulder.

We were in a forest somewhere, and I thought we still had a ways to go because all she said when I asked when we’d get there was ‘just a little more.”

But very soon we began to notice the blueish light coming from beyond what I thought were trees or buildings. They weren’t. The closer we got, the better I saw.

They were rectangular pieces of smooth grey stones standing twenty feet tall each, engraved with symbols I didn’t understand, and they’d formed some kind of a maze between them.

An open field. The structures stood alone surrounded by forests, like enlarged tombstones scattered onto the grass. Maera walked slowly, her every step precise, and took us beyond the first two. There were more of them, so much more, and the deeper we went, the more those symbols engraved on the surfaces pulsated with that same blue light that was burning somewhere beyond.

Then we saw the center. The ley line here stood upright, moved toward the sky and also back down toward the ground, just as tall as the pieces of stone. Wider, and so much different than the one in that train tunnel. This one sort ofdisplayedan image in the middle of it, a dark sky dotted with stars, like it was a mirror into the very sky that was above us now. A reflection.

Fuck, I couldn’t breathe. The intensity of the magic that radiated from that ever-moving light nearly suffocated me. It pressed against my skin like it had hands, even though we were some twenty feet away from it still. It stood on a stone platform raised a couple feet off the ground and the light of it spread onto the pathways made of the same stones that led to the first circle of tombs.