Page 11

DAXEEL

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Daxeel finds himself here often but always in the Quiet, whether the beginning, the middle or the end, he finds himself wandering to the lane across the street, where he stands a while.

The time of a phase can be sniffed out in the air of Cheapside: The stone beneath his boots is damp and not yet rinsed; the water in the fountains has grown a film of algae and bird filth; the blind hour between the last fragrance of the bakery and the first baked dough of the new phase means that the air is devoid of the fresh scent; the sugary stink of the sweetshop takes over, and it's enough to crinkle Daxeel’s nose in the shadows.

At the mouth of the lane that leads to the rear of a butchers, he stands. Just stands, in the thickest pockets of darkness.

Worse than the sugar, the stench of low-grade meat ruins the air around him, burns his nostrils and twists his mouth with a touch of disgust.

If he let his mind be stolen by the nostalgia of the stink, he would be deep in memories of the barracks, where mediocre cuts of meat meant a good phase, a time he would have been pleased to smell such fatty, farmed flesh when everyone knows the best cuts are wild caught.

But those memories, times of the barracks, they don’t touch him. Instead, his thoughts are swarmed with other memories.

Of her.

Only her.

The shadows melt him into darkness, where he once belonged; now, there is an edge of separation, as though the Cursed Shadows are licking at him, trying to lure him back into their fold, merge together once more. It shrouds him in the dark, and yet the blue of his eyes are faint lights she might see if she bothers to look out the window.

She doesn’t.

Nari has her back to it, the window, the street… her watcher.

Her hands are lifted to her head, her fingers firm on her temples, and she massages them as if to soothe away a headache or the stress of her chosen life.

A life that doesn’t include him.

Daxeel’s mouth tugs with a frown.

Nari turns her cheek.

Daxeel studies the profile of her features. His eyes graze the curve of her nose, then the pout of her puckered lips before brushing over the arch of her soft neck. His gaze is a caress, one that aches his chest with that thumping hollow feeling he’s grown too used to, one he thought— hoped –would vanish with the bond.

Nari drops her hands to her sides. The tension in her shoulders loosens before a small grin tugs at her perfect mouth.

His insides constrict.

What soothes her?

What eases her stresses, her pains, her fears of the choices she’s made? Is it Eamon? Does he offer words of comfort, or does he simply tease her?

Daxeel’s throat swells.

Nari walks out of view. She’s gone from the faint firelight that flickers through the window.

Daxeel lingers a while longer until the firelight is extinguished, and the dwelling goes dark. It’s only then that he fists his hands around the urge to go to Nari but instead, forces his way through the streets of Kithe to Hemlock House.

The door swings open for him the moment his boot flattens on the bottom porch step.

He is quick to pass the foyer, hands still fisted at his sides. His steps sweep like shadows, brisk and quiet, through the hallways.

He passes Samick and Rune in the dining hall, the latter tossing tavarak-soaked pixies into the other’s mouth. With how drunk they are, most of the tosses miss.

Daxeel doesn’t make himself known.

He heads for Aleana’s bedchamber.

It is unchanged.

The bedsheets are washed and pressed and pulled over the mattress. Smells fresher, less like fever and death.

He sinks into the armchair in the corner of the room, angled to face the bed. For a while, he just sits there in the dark, in the silence of the upper floors of Hemlock House.

His mind is empty.

In the fourteen phases since the Sacrament closed, a week since he properly woke, he has visited Aleana’s chamber a handful of times.

Each time, he has found emptiness.

At first, it came with a pang in the chest. A sorrow too deep, too stirred, that he worried it would call her soul back to this realm.

Now, he seeks out the emptiness.

There is a sort of peace to be found in the quiet of it. A numbness that spreads through him and mutes the pain—the ebbing regret he can’t let himself feel.

So he sits in the silent suffocation, the pressure of nothingness, and stares at the fluffed pillows.

The faintest, near-undetectable shift in the air rouses Daxeel from his trance. He blinks against the dark once, twice, before he senses the swell of leather and blood and fresh coffee.

He doesn’t need to look at the ajar door to know who stands there.

“Trust you to find me when I do not want to be found,” Daxeel mutters the words with an edge of bitterness, because it would only be Dare who would choose to interrupt a moment so private.

The faintest sound of leather shifting comes as Dare leans against the wooden doorframe. He says nothing.

Together, they marinate in it, the horrid silence of Aleana’s absence from this world.

Their customs tell them not to grieve, for the pain calls out to the souls of the dead and snares them back into this world—a suffering for resting souls.

Still, they grieve.

It cannot be helped. The suppression of sorrow is just that, suppression .

Daxeel wonders why he cannot feel her soul come to him in the pain. He wonders if her soul is restless as it waits for her other half, the evate in this life who never found her, or if that male died already and their souls have joined to become one, and their slumber is so deep in the beyond that not even a brother’s grief can rouse her from her eternal rest.

Daxeel wonders so much—too much.

He lets his eyes shut on the final thoughts he allows himself, then pushes from the armchair.

Dare’s gilded gaze is hard as metal, misted in his one good eye. The other is stroked with a barbed scar, turning that eye a blue paler than crystals in the light.

Silent, Dare watches Daxeel approach, until he has drawn too close. Then he tugs back into the dim corridor as Daxeel gently shuts the bedchamber door—and as the door clicks, the peace is gone, and the ache is quick to return to his chest. An ache threaded through a hollow pit where Nari once lived.

A bitter twist to his mouth betrays his thoughts. He has spent much of his life attempting to eradicate pain from his soul, and all that he’s accomplished is its enhancement.

Dare reads him too well. “Mother has one twisted sense of humour.”

Daxeel slumps against the closed door. “You didn’t meet me at the dungeon last phase, or the one before.” His gaze lowers to the rug on the floorboards. “Where were you?”

“Around.” Dare flattens his hand on the banister of the staircase, leaning his weight on it. “In Licht.”

It takes some seconds for the words to settle in his mind. But when they do, a frown knits between his eyebrows, drawing them together, and he lifts his doubtful look to the hybrid watching him.

“For phases, you have been in the light lands?”

There are other questions that flitter through his mind, mostly why Dare would choose to visit the light, since he avoids it like a plague, ignores all light blood in his body, and turns a cheek to his litalf ancestry.

Dare doesn’t visit the light lands.

So it must be, “An assignment?”

“A personal one,” Dare says, and the bitterness darkens his gilded gaze into a mesh of burnt embers and ash in one eye. “I’ve been hunting the kinta—well, trying to.”

Daxeel recognises the flare of failure that tenses Dare’s muscles beneath the black leathers, the clench of his sharp jaw.

“You didn’t find her.”

“She’s not in the village of her mother. And she is not in her dwelling in the human realm.”

The human realm…

It will be plagued with darkness and sickness now. It’s been just two weeks since the Cursed Shadows finally tethered to the skies from Daxeel’s sacrifice. But those two weeks is eight weeks in the human world, or two months, and that’s plenty of time to destroy much of the land and the humans before the invasion.

“I tracked her scent to a street of the human town,” he says dully, but to anyone who knows Dare, that dull, uncaring tone is edged. “I lost her scent, as though she simply—” he snaps his fingers “—ceased.”

Still slumped against the door, Daxeel considers it a moment. A frown tugs at him, tired, always tired. “Did she know the dark was coming?”

Dare is as quiet as he is still, a pause drenched in thought. Then he decides, “Eamon must have warned her, and she has gone into hiding. I will find her.”

The determination written all over his face, in the fine lines of unease around his pinched mouth, the creases littering his under-eyes, it’s sheathed with unspoken doubt.

Daxeel has seen Dare in every capacity. Enamoured, enraged, violent, peaceful, disturbed. He has not yet seen him so edged with doubt, not when it comes to his own capabilities.

In true Dare fashion, that exposed vulnerability must be vaulted shut before either of them can address it—and he diverts, fast. “I accepted your father’s offer.”

The distraction works.

Daxeel pushes from the door. “You did?”

Dare aims a lopsided grin at him. “I will join his unit for the invasion.”

Daxeel nods once, unspoken gratitude.

Dare needn’t join any unit. His profession keeps him in Dorcha if he chooses; his birth and home in the Midlands means he can declare neutrality. But Daxeel knows Dare joins Agnar’s unit to be by his side in the invasion.

It wasn’t such a simple choice.

General Caspan did not offer Dare a place in his unit, because the general seeks out warriors who have lost their evates to death. He seeks out those who have no other priority beyond war.

Rune will go alone in that unit.

Samick chose to serve under General Raske, one of only two female generals of Dorcha. Back in the barracks, Raske was a formidable instructor and an ice fae, like Samick. Then, when she was seen by her evate, she cut his head off with a sword.

It doesn’t surprise Daxeel that Samick chose to follow her into battle.

But Daxeel chose loyalty to his house. General Agnar’s unit is the only option for him.

Dare took his time deciding between Raske and Agnar. If Caspan’s unit was open to him, Daxeel doesn’t doubt he would have gone with Rune.

Now, Daxeel won’t serve without a soul brother—and that is a weight lifted from him. Breathing comes a touch easier now. But the other two will be out there in enemy territory—and he won’t know if death has come for either of them, not until the units are returned to Dorcha, and that is a half-year from their departure.

Half of a year away from the fae realm. Longer, in the human realm. Time will move differently there; it will echo across a chasm that never seems to end. That time will be filled with, first, the Great Walk. All units will march into the human realm on the same phase… and walk.

The Great Walk will end at the farthest reach of the human lands. The farthest isle on the farthest ocean.

Then it starts.

The units turn around—and follow their designated path, already mapped by the cartographers: The Great Return.

Each unit has their own route, sometimes crossed over, sometimes entwined, sometimes entirely alone. But each route will be covered in the Great Return, and that ensures that every single settlement, town and city and village and farm, will be destroyed.

It is after the Great Walk that the destruction begins.

Eternal flames will burn everything to the ground—and any human still alive will die at the hands of the dokkalves.

Along the way, kuris are to be rounded up and carted back to Dorcha, then forced into the slave trade. The stronger the kuri, the more valuable they are.

Samick’s Great Return journeys the same landmass that Daxeel’s does: North America. But Rune’s Great Return takes him across the landmass of Europe.

There is relief in Daxeel, in his sagged shoulders, that Dare will be with him on the Great Return.

If only he could have convinced Rune to follow Agnar or Raske instead of Caspan. But even then, others are left behind.

Kithe will remain for that half-year.

Eamon will remain here. Nari, too.

And with all four of them gone, who is to keep Eamon and Nari safe?

The uncertainty of it all, it eats at him. Tires him.

A part of Daxeel wonders—if the slights never became of him and Nari, if they were never poisoned and she asked that he put down his sword and stay in the Midlands, stay out of war, if he would do it.

Now, he wishes that did come to be. That they loved purely, sweetly, and she asked him to set up a little tavern with her in the heart of Kithe…

He would choose that.

He would choose her.

“You should return to bed,” Dare says, a quiet murmur. His dual gaze sweeps over him, gilded and pale blue. The scar runs from his eyebrow, down to his jawline, and it twists as he slants his mouth.

“I am fine.”

“No, you are not.” Dare’s look is firm. “The separation of that darkness from your soul… It has taken from you.”

Daxeel rolls his jaw. “I will rest later.”

“Or now,” Dare suggests with a one-shouldered shrug.

The look Daxeel throws at him is withering. He diverts: “Have you talked to Eamon about the kinta?”

Dare arches a scarred brow. “Am I welcome to?”

Daxeel frowns on it a moment before the understanding clicks. To visit Eamon means to visit Nari. Dare must be avoiding anything to do with Nari. Perhaps even bringing her scent back into Hemlock House is something he avoids.

“That depends,” Daxeel says, “on how severe your need for revenge on that kinta is.”

Dare flashes a grin. It is false and tired. “Quite severe.”

“Then I suggest speed.”

There are some weeks before the Sabbat comes to flood the streets of Kithe. But Dare is never in Kithe for the Sabbat. He returns to his village down south, and Samick goes with him to tend to his forever-work-in-progress dwelling.

On the Sabbat phase, the summons come.

Rune will leave then.

Daxeel will leave a week later.

Samick and Dare will depart for the Royal Court directly from the village and meet their units.

Of time, Dare is short.

But before he can spend much of that time on the hunt for the kinta, Daxeel says, “We have unfinished business to tend to.”

Dare’s eye gleams. “I could eat.”

Daxeel gives a sharp nod, then—with a sigh—adds, “I must collect the faerie hound first… from Kalice.”

Dare’s brows hike. “Pardon me, but what the fuck?”

Daxeel’s face tightens, grim. “I purchased a pup from her. Don’t tell Samick.”

He won’t.

But his eyes are wide enough to exude all the silent judgements thrashing around in him. Those eyes follow Daxeel as he starts down the stairs.

But Dare says nothing.