Page 98 of Boundless

Maera nodded. “They had power because they had the numbers. It will be the same with the Unseelies. All they have to do is get rid of the heir, either banish or kill them—it doesn’t matter. Nobody will question it.” There was a heaviness to her voice just now, and a dark look flashed in her eyes, like the memories of her past had caught up with her in the present. I could only imagine how she felt, having been left to die in a sorcerer’s cage by her own people.

It occurred to me how incredibly strongshe was because she never once hated them for it. Now that I thought about it, I’d been to Thornevale, and I’d seen her with her people—if anything, she respected them just as much as they did her. She didn’t resent them or hold grudges when she could have for what they did. Nobody would blame her. I sure as hell wouldn’t.

Funny enough, what Raja said once at her dinner table made sense to me now—you’re good when youcanbe bad but choose to be good anyway. Everything was always a choice, and Maera had made hers.

“Nobody’s left in the Unseelie Court to rebel anymore. They’ve killed off a lot of their own population, all those who opposed the original usurpers, the ones who killed the royals, as well as those who opposed the others who came after. We knew this long ago when I was still in the Seelie Court.” Rune’s eyes were focused ahead, but he was lost in his own thoughts. “I asked Lyall once what he thought of it. He smiled and told me not to worry. Said he would take care of it once he was king.” A smile of his own stretched his lips, and it wasn’t pleasant. “Now I know howhe planned to do it.”

As he spoke, I could actually see Lyall smiling the way he did when he thought he knew all the secrets and held all the cards.Ugh.

“Wherewill we start our search, though? Do we know exactly where the moonstone place is? And how big is the Unseelie Court exactly?”

“Almost as big as the Midnight Court. Slightly bigger than the Seelie,” Rune said. “And the settlement is inside the palace walls, according to Raja. She’s sent me a visual of the moonstone fountain. I think with her guidance, I can find it.”

I had no doubt about that. The way they communicated wasn’t foreign to me—I’d actually been able to communicate with Rune the same way before Maera scratched me—or at least hear his voice in my head. If Raja would guide him, and she knew where the moon’s eye was, we’d find it.

“It will not be enough to simply bring the heir to the throne,” Maera said.

“We must also kill the ones in charge,” said Rune, and there went my stomach again, spiraling out of control. “If they’re the ones who’ve made the morvekai, they will die with them.”

“And…if we can’t?” Because I had seen those creatures with my own eyes. They were enough to scare me shitless without even considering having to fight against people who were powerful enough to actuallymakethem in the first place.

“We die trying, I guess.” Maera shrugged. “At least that way we don’t see the end coming.”

“We’ll be okay,” Rune said, leaning back on the seat as he put his arm around my shoulders and pulled me to him. “We’re not going anywhere. This realm isn’t going anywhere, either.”

I clung to those words like they were my lifeline for a while.

And then I noticed how Maera was looking at me. At our joined hands. At the way Rune held me close.

Once again, something flashed in her yellow eyes, something that made a bad feeling spread in my gut like wildfire.

I never asked what she was thinking out loud, though. I didn’t think I wanted to know, anyway. I already knew way toomuch about everything else, and I had no clue what to do with half that information.

Luckily, less than ten minutes later, the carriage stopped.

The wallthat marked the border between Unseelie and Midnight on whichever part we were wasn’t broken. The carriage had left us in the middle of a woods to continue on foot, and the soldiers had then retreated. The one that Rune sent for Hessa took one of the horses tied to the carriage for himself, mounted it, and disappeared between the trees. The other two moved back slowly, and the way those two soldiers were looking at Rune, I was pretty sure that they weren’t planning to leave for real—they would stick around and wait, maybe even try to cross the border after us. Raja had surely given them their orders, and from what I’d seen so far, Rune had no problem with her calling the shots.

For now, we were alone, the three of us, and one of the moments in which we walked among the trees felt so surreal, like I was in a dream. Like none of this—not even Verenthia—was real at all.

It was, though. The bird that Rune made for us burned brightly against the night. This part of the Unseelie territory was in permanent darkness, and I couldn’t see if it was dark everywhere else in Verenthia from the canopy. The magic in the air, the black,deadbark of the trees, the stink in the air like there were animal carcasses spread about in the distance—yes, it was all real. And the farther we went, the more pronounced the feel of magic became.

It felt wrong. I couldn’t really put my finger on it, why it was so different from the Midnight Court, but it was. Weak. Dark.Filthy.

Then there was the wall.

It wasn’t as high as it had been where the Unseelie territory met Mysthaven, possibly on the other side of this forest. Here it was lower. If I rose on my tiptoes, I could see beyond it, could see the rooftops of the buildings next to the wall inside the court. It all looked so ordinary—pointy rooftops and deep maroon shingles. What I thought was fire was burning somewhere on the other side, but then the lights rose over the top of the wall. They were fae lights, except these were smaller, a group of five or six small spheres floating about together, releasing orange light. Deep orange—not golden like the Seelies. Easy to tell they weren’t the same thing.

Most importantly, there were no morvekai that we could see.

“Are there—” I started to ask, but a hand on my shoulder stopped me.

My heart jumped, the fear ringing all the alarms in my head, but it was just Maera holding a finger to her lips to tell me to be quiet. Rune stepped forward from my other side, thick shadows slipping out of his hands and moving forward, climbing up the wall, moving over the top and to the other side.

Then he looked at Maera and nodded.

Before I knew it, Maera had stepped back, and she threw her jacket on the ground, then pulled her top off. She was naked underneath, and she was still pushing down her pants when fur began to sprout from her pale skin. The shock going through me made sure I didn’t even blink, that I caught every single detail: every sound and every visual of how her jaws seemed to break and rearrange, then her skull and arms and legs and back; how her hair fell off and disappeared into nothing before it even touched the dry, cracked soil; how her ears grew and hernose turned black and she fell forward on all fours, like she wasslipping intoher wolf skin, within seconds.

Maera’s wolf looked at me for just a second, her eyes the same glistening yellow. Then she went right where Rune’s shadows had climbed the wall,ranon the side of it at an incredible speed, and jumped over the top, disappearing from my view.