Page 99 of Boundless

Rune then leaned down and linked his fingers together to tell me to put my foot in his hands. He was going to help me up there, too. I didn’t think at all, just stepped onto his hands and let him push me up until I reached the edge of the wall. From there, it was easy to pull myself up to my knees at the top and look at the other side—at Maera’s wolf who stood just a few feet away, ears perked up, looking around to make sure we were alone.

We were.

I jumped before I gave myself too long to think, and I landed on one knee on the ground on the other side.

Yes, it definitely smelled like death here. Bile rose up my throat and I had to cover my mouth with my hand to make sure I didn’t throw up. Rune landed right next to me, silent as the night.

Silent asthisplace—which also felt very odd. The sun was setting over the rest of Verenthia. From here, when I looked at the sky, I could tell where the eternal night ended and daylight began, and the sky was burning orange with sunset, so it was still early. People should have been around us, at least somewhere close because there were buildings in front of us. The back of them. Most had their doors closed, and the walls were dirty, and the smell was so awful.

Maera disappeared down the alley between two of the buildings. When Rune and I followed, we found out right away where the smell was coming from.

Whatever part of the kingdom this was, safe to say it was abandoned. The buildings were set in an oval configuration all around us, going on for possibly a mile in each direction, and save for the small fae lights floating here and there, the buildings were dark. Most windows were broken, most doors open, and it must have been a market of some sort, this place, because the smell was coming from the inside, and it was that of food.

Rotted food. Most of the buildings that looked like shops had rotted food in front of their doors like animals had gone in and dragged it out. Fruit, vegetables, dairy and sticky-looking liquids, and even dead animals torn apart possibly a long time ago decorated the cobbled ground, with flies swarming over everything you could see.

Dead.It smelled dead and it looked dead here. Like this little part of the realm was on the verge of disappearing completely already.

Except the lights were still floating around here, and so that meant a fae had called them forth, had fueled them, had left them here. This place wasn’t completely forgotten yet.

Maera’s wolf moved to the right where we could see the tips of trees over the rooftops of the buildings in the distance. When we started following, my hand instinctively slipped into Rune’s waiting one, like they were magnets. The comfort that came from his touch was unmatched.

We said nothing as we went, but whatever this place was, the smell didn’t let up until we were near the last row of abandoned buildings.

And finally, we began to hear noises.

twenty-nine

The skyover most of the Unseelie Court—and the rest of Verenthia—turned dark with night within the first hour of us making our way deeper into the kingdom. The dark seemed to press in on us like a living thing where the small clumps of fae lights had faded, and we did stick to corners and backs of buildings, even though Rune had put his magic all over us to make us look as inconspicuous as possible.

But holy shit, this place was a fucking nightmare.

It might have been a kingdom once, but now it felt like a shell—an empty shell, its streets fractured, its towers broken, at least the ones that were taller than four stories. Even though there were noises here and there, in the moments in between the silence was heavy, pierced only by our footsteps, and the rustle of stray leaves that seemed to be spread out around the streets, even though I had yet to see a single healthy-looking tree here. Houses slumped against each other like drunks, some doors open just because, even the ones with the lights on inside. The magic that I’d felt in the other courts was so much weaker here, faded, brittle, barely hanging on. I wondered if there were any ley lines moving underneath the ground that was so witheredand dry, like husk. I wondered if the people here could try to tap into them because this whole thing felt wrong.

This place used to carry life—it was evident in the many buildings, even though half of them were empty. There wasmajestyto some of them, the way the woods were carved, the way the pillars stood, like they had been proud once. And the dark here wasn’twildand all-consuming like in the Midnight Court, and the light wasn’t as glittering as in the Seelie—here it all looktired.Even the statues, broken and chipped so that you couldn’t even tell what they had been once, looked spent.

Then there were the people.

Rune shouldn’t have bothered to put illusions over us, because nobody looked our way. The Unseelie were beautiful creatures, just like all other kinds of fae, with auburn hair and eyes made of flames, tall, slender bodies and outfits mostly in greens and oranges, warm browns and reds. Outfits that looked just as old as the fae wearing them, and the faedid not age.They were forever preserved in their prime until death—so why didthesefae look so spent?

Was it the magic? The curse?

Both?

And the worst part was that none of it would even matter if we couldn’t find the heir and give them back their throne. None of this—none ofanythingwould matter.

A single question pushed back all the rest as it rose from the deepest, darkest layers of me—if we failed, would I leave Verenthia and go back home, knowing Rune would die if he followed me, and he would die if he didn’t? Knowing Maera would never cross the Aetherway and leave her people. Knowing this entire place would stop existing within a decade, if that.

Or…would I stay?

Such a simple answer that it freaked me out because it felt like it should be far more complicated.

I would stay, each and every time. Knowing that my family would be in Earth. Knowing well that I might never see them again. Knowing death was inevitable, and it would probably come with a lot of suffering, a lot of pain.

I would still stay.

Of course, the thought remained inside me, together with all I didn’t dare to say yet.

The three of us walked ahead, my hand in Rune’s, Maera’s wolf on his other side. We walked for a long time, but it also felt short to me because my mind was so crowded with thoughts of this world I was in and the realization of how much it had changed me. It had changed everything—the way I carried myself, the way I looked at myself, the way I thought of myself and the rest of the world. And I’m not even talking about the changes that happened to my inner voice when I was PMSing or something. No, this was permanent. This was all me.