Page 68 of Boundless

I breathed deeply, heard every drop of water rushing down the mountain, and my mind cleared a little bit instantly, following the sound.

And as I watched the stars for a moment longer, the night didn’t feel all that dark anymore.

twenty

Nilah Dune

It had beena while since the last time I was in Cloakwood, the fomorian territory of Verenthia. Nothing about it had changed in any way. Still the same buildings made of stone or wood or concrete, and the same creatures as well. All kinds of them I hadn’t seen once in the fae courts or Mysthaven—Twinborn, people with two heads on their shoulders, and noxins who could taste truth on their tongues, and imps, whom I knew firsthand to never piss off anymore, and lizard-tongues, who had some kind of a lizard wrapped around their bodies at all times like a goddamn accessory.

Yes, nothing about anything had changed, yet to me it all felt like a different world.

BecauseIhad changed. I was far from the girl I had been the first time I came through Cloakwood with Rune, and the difference was so painfully obvious now that it scared me to realize it. It terrified me.

I no longer felt like an outsider.

Panic rose inside me so quickly black dots exploded in my vision as I walked alongside Maera down a crowded street. It was morning still, and the people were going about their business, and it was easy to see each and every person passing us by—and yet I felt like I belonged.

Not a stranger here in this land, like I did that first time. Like I should have now.

Not a stranger in a fae realm full of magic—and definitely nothome,either—but somewhere in between.Closeto home, if you will. Not in a different world, but somewhere where I could…belong.

The only thing that kept me from losing my shit was the fact that Maera was with me, and I didn’t want to freak her out—because then she’d have questions, and how in the fuck could I possibly answer anything right now?

I didn’t feel like a stranger in fucking Cloakwood, and everything I looked at had becomenormal.Nothing surprised me and I didn’t feelthreatenedin any way like I had before. Nothing scared me and I was perfectly confident that I could handle anything these people might throw at me if they did. Like I was one of them. Like I really,reallybelonged.

No, I could never say this out loud. Not to Maera, and not to myself.

The other stranger thing was that the people around us didn’t look at me any differently, either. Before, I could have sworn that they all knew who I was and where I came from as I walked beside Rune. Possibly just my imagination because nobody even looked at me twice now as we went. I still had my sneakers and my jeans on from home, and Maera had given me a white shirt of hers to wear because the sleeve of mine had torn completely. She’d also given me a cloak to put over my shoulders, and it had one of those large hoodies in typical Verenthian fashion, but I never put mine on. It had been too hot in The Vale, andit was too hot here in Cloakwood, too. But it did have a pocket I could put the queen’s small mirror in. I had it with me still, though I doubted it was going to help me again going forward. Still broken and it still showed me my reflection—but that’s it. It was just…a token. Something that made me feel a bit more grounded. Familiar.

My hair didn’t seem to interest too many people. I kept it down, covering my ears, and nobody looked at me for longer than a second. I was willing to bet anything that they thought I was an Ice fae.

The fact didn’t bother me.

They all knew what Maera was, too. And the two men and two women who walked behind us. Werewolves she’d insisted we take with, even though Thornevale needed all the werewolves it could spare at the moment. After what I witnessed with my own eyes happening with that gate, I was restless just to think that the ley lines anywhere in The Vale couldattackthe way the one in Thornevale had.

Fucking hell, the power. The speed. It terrified me, and I saw that spiral lightning strike-type of energy coming for me every time I closed my eyes still.

Maera had sent word so that all werewolf packs across The Vale knew to keep guards near their gates at all times now, but I was still terrified of what might happen if energy like thatslippedinto the world, and there were no werewolves to stop it. Contain it.

I hadn’t seenhowthey’d done it, just that they had. They’d calmed down that gate, had gotten rid of whatever kind of energy had shot out of it within minutes. The ground had stopped shaking and the howling had faded, too.

When I asked Maera about it, she had the same answer for me the fifth time as well: “We are the guardians. We can handle the gates.”

Except I knew her just well enough to realize she didn’t say those words wholeheartedly. But for now, I was choosing to think it was just my imagination, that I was seeing things, just like I had thought thateveryonewas out to get me the first time I came through Cloakwood.

Besides, if the very guardians of the gates couldn’t handle them, who could?

Each of us carried leather bags around our shoulder with bread, meat, fruit and water for the road. We only stopped to eat in forests, though, never when there were others around us, and never before the werewolves that had come with us spread out on all sides and made sure any given area was safe.

We were. We were perfectly safe in Cloakwood.

Then came Mysthaven.

I always had a bad feeling when crossing into it, no matter where I came from, and no matter who I was with. Being surrounded by sorcerers had been a literal nightmare for me, knowing what I knew about them. How they used live beings as sources of magic.

That’s how I’d found Maera in the first place, caged in, without food or water, so weak she could barely keep her head up.

Now she did, though. I looked at her through the corner of my eye when we were just in front of the wide pathway that marked the Cloakwood border, before the trees began on the other side, half hiding a wooden sign that could have been centuries old judging by the condition of its edges and its surface, yet the engraving in the middle still remained:Mysthaven.The letters were most likely cut out with a knife, and whoever had done it had probably been in a hurry, but it was enough to tell people where they were going, even if they didn’t know it.