Page 3 of Cursed Shadows 4 (The Dark Fae)

Past the abandoned games just off the path, where empty bottles of tavarak are littered about, this steady, silent pace brings us to the mouth of Comlar’s courtyard.

It strikes me like a sword.

I cringe against the rising waves of sound, waves that crash over our tense silence.

The courtyard is packed, full. More spectators than ever have piled their way through the stone ruins, and they squeeze and shove between thick throngs of contenders.

The murmur that hums over the crowd is gravelled, a buzz of barbed accents and husky murmurs. Strategies swapped out here in the open, alliances made and doubled, or even families whispering what could be their goodbyes to their beloved contenders.

Fae splinter off from our arriving group.

My pace is not as determined nor purposeful; it is cautious through the mouth of the courtyard.

Faces I don’t recognise pass me by, shoulders brushing mine, the scent of coffee thick in the air.

At my side, Daxeel maintains a slow, predatory pace, as do the others: Rune ahead of me, Dare to my left, Samick behind me.

Melantha and General Agnar follow.

Eamon should be with them.

Aleana should be here.

And I’m certain that Aleana’s glaring absence is the reason none of us speak as the packed dirt path turns to stone beneath our boots.

It’s grief that silences our throats and stills our tongues. It was only some hours ago that Aleana’s body burned, and we watched the black flame eat her away to nothing.

Just some hours ago…

Almost feels as though I can simply reach through time itself and steal her back to us.

But time cannot be meddled with, things passed cannot be undone, and here lie the consequences.

I face mine.

I move deeper into the courtyard as the horn blares.

I don’t blink, I don’t flinch, I don’t even throw my gaze around to find the iilra and the scribe who blow the final horns, one of gold, the other of ateralum.

I am numb in my daze as the horns quake the uneven stone of Comlar—and chunks of the crowd start to shift. Spectators draw away from their beloveds, from the courtyard, and make for the grandstands that overlook us.

The crowd thins—and as it does, I find I can breathe.

Still, hundreds of fae are packed into the courtyard. So the air doesn’t quite restore the freedom of my lungs.

I drag my dull gaze over them, and I decide that each of them is a foe to me.

Brown leathers, black leathers, some white, some grey, and I suppose those ones are determined to camouflage on the Mountain of Slumber, to hide in the snow.

We are all contenders here, now.

Unity .

That word creeps into my mind. I almost smile something bitter at the reminder of it, when light and dark came together in the hall of Comlar, shared drinks and games and laughter.

Unity.

It was a lie then, a lifetime ago, and will be forever onwards.

The horns blare again.

Like a sea parting around a cliff, two streams of fae split apart. The light moves to the left, where the litalves are seated on the grandstands, and the scribes are dotted around the more powerful iilra. The contenders of Dorcha take their stance on the right.

I watch the divide split the courtyard into different colours: black leathers on one side, and on the other, those of brown like the soil, and white as stark as snow, and greys the shade of stone.

Down the centre, the shimmer of the portal is spilled tar.

I hang back.

Between the edge of the portal and the mouth of Comlar, our group is stagnant for a beat. I watch the last of the crowd part, and it looks nothing short of a stand-off with a thundering spiral of shadows pulsing up into the skies, erected from the tarry portal glossed over the stone.

Those pulses are felt in my chest. Thump, thump, thump. Only, mine are laced with nausea that dizzies me.

Without a word, Melantha touches her spidery hand to Daxeel’s tense shoulder. The look they share draws in my weary gaze.

Then, with a flexed grip that is meant to be a final farewell, Melantha turns for the grandstands.

General Agnar follows not far behind her, but a distance that—if I cared for anyone or anything other than myself right now—I might recognise to be cautious yearning.

I watch them go.

Melantha passes her eldest son, Caius, who cares so little about his family that he departed Hemlock House before us.

I forgot his existence until this moment, seeing him peel away from the dark contenders and approach his mother.

There is no affection to be witnessed. He merely bows a gesture of respect, and in answer, she gives a curt nod.

I lift my gaze to the grandstands. The faces of the dark ones are warped by tears brewing in my eyes, but not yet falling down my cheeks.

I sat there once. I was among them.

For the first passage, I shamed my fellow litalves in my defection, then I sat on the stands for Dorcha.

A slight I didn’t give much thought to beyond pinning a silly, delusional hope on a future with a male who loathes me.

A slight I will pay for in the Sacrament.

My lashes flutter as movement ripples through my vision.

Rune splits away. His bootsteps are soft as he moves for the right, around the edges of the portal that looks like spilled tar over a window.

Dare is quick to shadow him, Samick at his heels.

Unmoving, I frown at their backs a moment.

A choice rears up in front of me.

Which side to join? The light or the dark?

At my side, Daxeel hesitates.

He turns his chin to frown at me. His mouth twists, and I feel the beat of hesitation, a nag in my heartspace.

He wants to reach out, touch me, take me with him.

His echoed feelings can go shove themselves up his arse.

I stare at him, dead-eyed.

His jaw tightens.

His inked fingers shift at his side. His hand inches closer to mine—as if to touch me, soothe me, steal me away with him to the dark warriors.

I fall back.

All my weight slams onto one boot, a purposeful retreat.

Outrage hardens my gaze, it flushes my cheeks, and I aim every speck of that stirring hatred on him.

From all around the courtyard, the sear of stares burns into me. I’m convinced that every fae close enough to listen is watching us.

Waiting.

Because this moment, right here, right now, determines the fate of the Sacrament.

Will I accept alliance with the dark ones? Fight alongside them? Will I be their willing lamb to the slaughter?

Or will I be yet another enemy to hunt down?

I steel myself against the wretched feeling of being watched in such a private moment, and drop my gaze to the ink glistening on Daxeel’s lifted hand.

I curl my upper lip. “Don’t you fucking touch me,” I spit, and look up from beneath my lashes at him. “ Beast .”

His face shutters. The shadowy hue of his eyes, oceans in the depths of night, flicker.

I recognise the hurt, I feel it in the echo strung between us. But it does nothing to encourage me closer to him.

Here, in the courtyard, with light on one side, dark on the other, I see him for what he is. An enemy.

And I know him for what he is.

My enemy.

The lovely pinkish hue of his lips captures my attention whole. They part, as if to speak, as if to whisper a sweet promise. But he finds no words to give.

For a heartbeat—one so consuming that I feel it pulse through the icy nerves of my body—we just look at each other.

The natural kohl shadows should darken his eyes, but they only brighten their brilliant blues. As strong as ever, the urge to fall into them, to be lost in the worlds they contain, tugs at my heart as though they are mere fiddle strings.

The shift pains me.

Daxeel is not asking me to join him anymore.

This is our farewell.

Silent looks fuelled by nothing more than anguish and poisoned love and perhaps even a touch of regret.

But it is too late for regret.

No matter how strong his urge is to take my hand and drag me with him to the side of the dark ones, we both know he cannot. I am an enlisted contender of Licht, even if I am only an unwilling second.

So without a word spared on my deceiver, my heartbreaker, my monster, I turn my back on him—and I stalk off.

He lets me go.

I stand alone.

The scent of fresh leather is all around me, sharpened by the cutting silver of polished blades and the stink of armour that is too close to freshly painted walls.

The harsh whispers of the already allied litalves, the occasional clang of metal as armours collide in this packed crowd, it bombards me.

Encircled by my folk, I have never felt more isolated.

My back presses against the harsh stone of the crumbled wall, and still, there are so many of us packed in to this narrow edge along the portal that I can hardly draw in a breath that isn’t slick with the scent of others.

My shoulder is knocked once, twice as a stream of litalves squeeze by me; two warriors simply turn around to scan the faces on the grandstand, but trample all over the toes of my boots—

The hiss that comes on instinct, the one I aim at the pair of warriors who don’t even bother to lower a glance at me, is silenced by the whispered atmosphere of the courtyard.

I must be invisible for all the recognition spared on me.

The hiss dies in my throat.

Pressing my back to the wall, I inch along it until my boots knock against the fallen stone, a sprinkle of debris and rubble. In this crammed jar of muscle and leathers, I twist around and hoist myself up the pile of rubble. The wall is mostly ruins here, slanted stacks of broken rocks, and so I can’t climb up to the furthest heights of the wall. I manage to perch myself on a sturdy edge, far up enough to get that feeling of a fresh breath, the same I get when I tug a blanket off my face in the early Quiet after too long of near-suffocation.

The breath that spears me is sharp enough to flood my lungs and, with a tilted chin, I welcome it.

Heads bob at waist-level for me, now.

I search for familiarity.

I sweep my gaze all around the faces of the light contenders. I catch no glimpse of Ronan or Ridge.

Arms hugged around myself, I keep to this little spot on the crumbled wall, at the foot of the grandstand.

Here, the body heat is less of a sweaty blaze, the air not as suffocating than if I were to slip down the rubble to the courtyard floor again.

I scan the crowded courtyard.

The iilra flitter through the clusters of muscled warriors with too much ease, spectres shifting through space and time. A dozen of them spread out to form a rectangular border around the tarry portal.

I stare at it a moment. The portal.

In the first passage, I watched that mirror-like surface, as though it were a window, and I saw battles, I saw blood, but I didn’t see the caves.

Now, I see the distant crevices and jarred edges of a frosted mountainside. It’s faint, shrouded in grey mists, but the harder I stare, the better I see the sheer size of this mountain—an impossible climb if one was to land at the bottom of it.

I have the gut-wrenching suspicion that it will be different this time, that the portal will reveal all to these spectators. They will see everything we see.

It feels true to even think it: On the Mountain of Slumber, there is no hiding.

That doesn’t work for me.

At least in the first passage, there were caves that the warped window of space and time couldn’t penetrate, couldn’t see. Now, the sickly sensation coiling through me tells me that it will be different on the mountain.

There are parts of myself, horrible and ugly parts, that might be revealed if I’m not careful.

I can lie.

No one in my family knows that.

Only Daxeel and Eamon are aware of this rare talent.

I can lie —

If I’m not careful on the mountain, my father might learn that awful truth about me by watching me in the tarry windows.

Father will watch.

I know it as a fact that is as heavy as lead in my gut.

He’ll be here now. Up there, on the grandstand, trying to lure in my gaze if he’s spotted me already.

I can’t fight the niggle to look at him anymore.

My eyes burn, my jaw clenches, tight.

I angle my chin to scan the faces of the spectators.

That’s all I do as the iilra start the low thrum of their chants; a whisper that hums all over the courtyard, blending in seamlessly with the thundering spiral of darkness that feeds the skies above.

I don’t watch the iilra.

I stare up at the grandstand. My gaze flickers over face after face, in search of my family. Then, out the corner of my eye, movement flaps. A hand waves at me. A warm brown hand, slender, fluttering back and forth, back and forth.

Pandora.

My heart slingshots into my throat.

I twist around, my gloved hands sliding over the stone rubble for a solid grip—and I just blink up at her, not so far above me, almost as though I could reach out and touch her fingertips.

Our gazes lock.

Pandora loosens a breath, a relief that unribbons through her. She slumps and a small, cautious smile tugs at her mouth.

I just blink for a moment.

Something is quick to thrash in me. My heart twists, my insides writhe, and I’m torn. A part of me aches to rush up the stands and throw my arms around her. The other wants to take a bite right out of her.

It’s her fault I am down here.

But then—

Is it?

No, it’s Daxeel’s fault.

He orchestrated it all.

This moment was moulded by him in his hands, all the while they touched me, entered me, caressed me, and shaped my fate.

My shoulders sag.

The look I give Pandora is grim.

I can’t see her belly from the courtyard, not with fae in the row down waving their hands and shouting out to their loved ones.

But the weight of it is in her face.

Once oval, now round and full, her face is enough to tell me that she’s at the end of the gestation. Time in the Midlands has warped the speed of it all, and I don’t doubt she’s just about ready to fall to her knees with the agony of labour.

A grimace steals my face.

Just the thought of birth is enough to steel my bones.

A grisly fate, maybe even more than my own of a bloody Sacrament in which I am certain I will die.

In the distance between us, Pandora mistakes my grimace for something kinder. And she mirrors it back to me in a timid smile. Her movements are slow, and so I follow them as she presses her thumb to her mouth—then flicks her hand my way.

She throws me a kiss.

For a beat, I stare at her with as much focus as I can summon, as though a small part of my mind has taken over and I’m now determined to sketch every detail of her face into my heart, to keep the ghost of her with me.

Before I can memorise her completely, she turns her cheek to me. Her mouth moves, but I hear no words.

She speaks her silence to the one beside her.

The one I didn’t look at.

Until now.

Father’s eyes are sad.

He watches me. Mute and numb.

He does something I have never seen him do before. He lets a tear fall down his cheek. It’s slow over the arch of his sharp cheekbone, then veers towards the corner of his mouth. There, it lingers.

He doesn’t wipe it away. He wears it for me to see.

Then he lifts a buttery flower in his hand.

A daffodil.

A narcissus.

I shut my eyes on red and dry eyes, eyes that itch and burn, like a dehydrated throat.

All the tears I had in me have been shed already. I’m certain there is not so much as a single drop left to give, maybe not ever.

I am empty.

I feel that as I turn my back on my family.

Turn my back on the flower, my sister, my father’s tear. Their goodbye to me—because they know, like I do.

The chances of my survival…

I bow my head with early defeat.

Not a moment after, the blast of the battle horns pummels the courtyard. Scribes and iilra raise the horns towards the skies. The iilra who chant drop to their knees, whispering and whispering and whispering.

My teeth bare against it all.

My shoulders tuck.

A cringe as deep as my bones—against the assault of the blaring horns, and the whispers, the whispers, the whispers .

A violent shudder rattles me.

I see the same tremor ripple through some parts of the crowd. I’m not the only one feeling it—a strange sensation, too delicate to describe, but not terribly unlike a claw of invisible matter reaching through bridges and wormholes and portals, spidery fingers too long and too bony, all to graze down my spine.

More trembles ripple through the crowd. Even the spectators hiss and snarl. Instinct of the unnatural steels many of us—but most contenders stand tall and firm.

A hush spreads through the courtyard.

Spectators sink into their seats.

Contenders, in a rustle of movement, turn to face the tar windows glossed over the stone ground, and I notice that the portal this time is much larger than the last.

I watch, motionless.

I am little more than a statue planted in the gardens of the High Court, moved here to the ruined walls of Comlar.

And I hate that it happens.

The horns are still blaring when the bass comes—the heavy bootsteps of warriors. A wave of motion.

All around me, bootsteps thud closer to the portal. More and more and more, until I can finally inhale the freshest breath I’ve had since leaving Hemlock House, and there are only five contenders within arm’s reach of me.

No one races into the portal, no one shouts with bloodlust or glee or fear, then charges. I watch as the contenders march as though headed to a funeral, their own.

I swallow, thick, before I make my move and slide down the rubble. My boots are soft on the stone floor, and my sight of the portal is stolen. Now, I stare at the backs of light warriors between me and the windows.

The urge to turn and run has my shoulders curved.

But my boots are planted, firm.

If I could have fled, if I could have run into the dark, then of course I would no longer be in the Midlands. But Daxeel gave me to Mother, and she owns me now.

In a way, she always has.

I don’t fight it, because I can’t fight it.

Reluctance weighs me down, but I step forward all the same. The soles of my boots are the loudest of all remaining light contenders. They scuff and drag over the stone ground.

Each agonising step I take towards the portal brings me closer to a wretched aching sensation—it spreads through me; it threatens to consume me whole and bring me to my knees.

For too long a moment, I think it is my own fear. Like ice spilled inside of my chest, then spreading over to frost everything in its path.

Then I sense it.

I sense him .

The urge to lift my gaze and look across the portal, across the courtyard, is strong. Too strong.

I fist my hands at my sides as though it helps me fight the temptation. It must help, because I don’t look up—I don’t meet Daxeel’s stare.

And I don’t have to look to know he watches me.

I can imagine it perfectly, as clearly as a painting in front of me. The gleam of his eyes through the thick darkness, the coiling shadows curving over his shoulders, licking at his heels, and a frown on his mouth.

I am too close to the edge of the portal now to let myself break. If I look at him, I will.

So I lock my gaze onto the portal instead, just as a contender from the light side steps onto it, then drops into tarry nothingness.

I still for a heartbeat—then I double over.

My hands slap onto my knees as an ill sensation barrels through me. The retch comes first, loud and grated, then the flow of sick falls out from between my parted lips.

It splashes on the stone between my boots.

Murky brown.

Coffee and water.

Distantly, I feel a bud of gratitude for myself, that I didn’t eat the breakfast that Tris delivered to my bedchamber.

Laughter erupts from across the portal.

Dark warriors find humour in me. The mockery of their laughs, the chuckles, the murmurs, it makes me want to turn around and run—and never come back.

My own kind don’t tease me. I hear no laughs from this side of the portal, not from the contenders or the spectators.

Before I can linger too long on the sick at my boots, or the sudden swell of something ugly in my chest from Daxeel, I wipe the back of my gloved hand over my mouth, then stagger those final two steps.

I ignore the aching swell of pity that courses so strongly through Daxeel that it lashes at me through the bond.

I ignore the laughs that fade to chuckles.

I ignore the stares of the fae on me.

And, with a sharp inhale, a breath that pins to my throat, a face flushed red hot, I lift my boot from the stone—then step onto the tarry window.

I fall.