Page 20

SAMICK

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Hand flat against the air, Samick watches the gentle winds weave between his fingers. The Breeze carries a faint chill in it; it finds a kinship in the ice that frosts over his knuckles.

Pinched between two fingers is a dewy black roll of grimroot. The thick, dark smoke billows from the roof of Hemlock House into the blackness of the skies.

Samick watches the battle, the heat of the grimroot’s ember against the cold bite of the air and the frost creeping along his hand.

Loosening a smoky breath, he brings the grimroot to his pink lips and pauses. His icy green eyes lift to the darkness that blankets Kithe.

A darkness foreign to him. Too dense, too thick.

It feels unnatural.

His eyes strain to adjust—as they often do in the thick darkness. But when his sight does adjust, and he watches the folk skitter around the streets below, he can make out the changes in Kithe.

Two townkeepers carry their ladders from lamppost to lamppost, climbing to the lanterns atop, changing out the flames for reds and blues and greens and yellows from the ordinary whites.

Another pair of keepers are setting up weaved ropes of ribbons and tinsel to wind along the borders of the roads, creating a path for the parade to follow. Tables are being erected at the front of every lane, tables that will house paints and dusts and parchments and inkpots for writing letters to the dead.

Samick watches the preparation of the streets for the Sabbat. Two phases away, now.

How quickly it is all forgotten, the blood that ran through the crumbled stronghold atop the hill, the lives lost, bodies spat out from the portal, the town alight with screams of grief.

Fae are hollow folk.

Some more than others.

Samick lets the wonder slip through his mind, a question that doesn’t quite touch him, but whispers as it passes, fleeting; Is he most hollow ?

Because—as he draws in a smoky breath from the grimroot, green eyes glide to the ruins of Comlar, those anguished screams fresh in his mind, the loss of Aleana staining the halls of Hemlock, and the brutality of an invasion on his doorstep—he finds that he feels nothing more than a faint echo of ice.

Just that.

Ice. Cold. The bite of winter surviving in him.

It isn’t a new, uncomfortable sensation.

It feels like home.

The air shifts behind him. Subtle.

Unmoving, a statue at the edge of the roof, Samick listens. Hears the faintest creak of the door from the staircase, the soft flattening of leather on the roof, weaved with a constant pain that sits hollow in a heart.

Rune’s scent is the giveaway.

It grows stronger with his approach until he stands at Samick’s side—and merely holds out his hand.

Without a word, Samick exhales another billowing cloud of black smoke into the darkness, then offers the grimroot.

“Dare wrote. Did Melantha tell you?” Rune asks, then his chest swells with a deep inhale of smoke, a hunger for numbness.

He will never have that numbness he seeks, the one he yearns for, the quest that drives him into brutality and violence just to silence the pain for a moment.

But the pain of losing evate is eternal—and cannot be muffled, no matter how much grimroot is in the realms.

Samick shakes his head, the frosty hue of his hair disturbed. His voice is distant ice, “Where is he?”

For phases he has been waiting for Dare’s return to Hemlock. His little quest over a meaningless kinta has cost Samick time in Aiteal. Together, they are meant to depart Kithe and, while Dare spends time with his family there, Samick means to work on his unfinished home.

At this rate, it won’t be finished for another year.

“Dare was held in Licht for questioning,” Rune says. At the flash in Samick’s eyes, he adds, “He is well. But he was of short time, so he left directly for Aiteal. He messengered a letter ahead to tell you.”

“He did not say his farewells.”

Rune loosens a ribbon of smoke. “He said them in the letter.”

Samick is quiet for a moment before, “I’ll leave shortly.”

Gleaming yellow gaze cut aside to Samick. “You could stay, for the Sabbat at least. Go to the village after that.”

“I could. But why would I?”

Rune’s smile is tight. “You’re not that short on time. The house will still need work done the phase after the Sabbat.”

“I have nothing to say to the dead.”

That response, spoken with sheets of ice, shuts down the discussion.

Rune thins his lips before he turns his attention back to the grimroot. “Did you speak your farewells?”

The human realm will be an easy takeover. Yet the threat of war, violence, battle, it risks lives even if they are fae. It takes one human to learn the differences in their anatomies, and that a well-aimed knife to the neck of a fae is more effective than a poorly placed explosion that merely might make a dent.

There is no certainty in war.

The farewells of soul family is a custom upheld by the dark warriors.

Dare’s letter is a meagre goodbye. It is arrogant.

Samick spoke his already. So his answer is a nod.

Rune says, “I will give mine at the Sabbat.”

That constant pain in Rune that snakes through the air, silent to fae not of ice, it ebbs with something fresh, something new.

Samick lets the sensation creep around him for a moment before he decides, “You are nervous.”

Rune throws him a dark look. “How do you do that,” he mumbles the question without inflection, mumbles it in a huff, then flicks the ash over the side of the roof. “I am nervous about Daxeel.”

Samick turns a blank look on him.

“He is weakened by loss. I wonder if I should have chosen another path… another general to follow.”

“General Caspan has been your choice since the barracks,” Samick says with a slight shake of the head. “As Raske has been mine. Dare will be in Daxeel’s unit—he will watch out for him.”

“Loss does things to the mind,” Rune argues, soft, and looks down at the scuffed, damp stone of the roof. “If Nari… If she gives him the chance he yearns for—before we depart, I might feel more assured.”

Samick’s jaw tenses; a fistful of knives.

“Yes, we all know how you feel about her.” Rune tosses him a withering look. His shoulders slump with a weighted sigh. “It’s… I sense that something terrible is coming.”

Samick lifts his gaze to the outline of Kithe.

Yes. He feels that, too.

Something wrong in the darkness. That same wrongness he marinated in, silent, alone, before Rune came to disturb him.

There is a niggle in the Cursed Shadows, a thicker blackness than what was before. It is serrated, it is dense, it is godly—as though a part of Mother resides in it, weaving new fates, a tapestry of fresh schemes.

The arrogance of the dark fae astounds Samick.

Though he allies himself with Dorcha, fuels his bloodlust through their means of conquest, he does not bend his soul for their ways of thought like Alasdare does.

Samick sees through the lens of all, not one.

And one thing he cannot settle in his mind is Mother—and her children.

The humans are her children as much as the fae are. Strange that she accommodated their end in such a way. Who’s to say she wouldn’t do the same to the fae? Her children, the dark fae, the light fae, seelie and unseelie, human, beast, the witches, the ferals. All life.

Is Mother a mother who loves her children?

“Dare should sense it, too.” Rune’s jaw rolls. “So why would he run off and waste his time on a kinta?”

“Perhaps that is the very reason why,” Samick considers. “Dare chases fate in ways we do not understand. Fate’s hands are on his shoulders, guiding him. We cannot question that. He is a puppet of fate, not a weaver.”

“And you?” Rune snaps, that sour mood settled. “Does fate demand you leave us before you must, to do what—build a home that is never done?”

The look that Samick slides to him is dark.

His home in the village is something of a running joke with his brothers; a tail that has no end.

The home is a dream he tries to mould in the awake. He takes great care to build it with his own hands, stone by stone. Each time he is released from duty, he travels there, and he works. And he accepts no help. Not even from Dare.

But each time he finishes something, this time the windows overlooking the wild gardens yet to be planted, he knows it is wrong. He must try again.

And again.

And again.

For years.

A gruelling process to perfection; a dream taken to a sketch then into hands.

Is it fate?

Or is it that he has no home beyond Hemlock, not the way that his brothers do?

Rune has his blood sibling, his brother, and his parents in the Blood Court; Daxeel has his home in the Royal Court, his mother with him; Dare with his parents in Aiteal.

Samick had that home. Just one door over.

Not anymore.

Rune offers the grimroot, pinched between his fingertips.

Samick shakes his head, then takes a small step back from the roof.

Rune touches the root to his mouth. “You are leaving now?”

“I will make a stop on the way.”

Rune arches a brow. “Where?”

“The brothel.”

Rune’s smile glides around the grimroot; a contrast to the sudden pulse of a stirred ache.

Samick feels the nip of pain biting at the cold air around him; the lie in the smile. A lie he is all too familiar with since Rune found his evate in a brothel, ran from her, then lost her to the Wastelands.

The practiced nonchalance that Rune wears as he tugs the grimroot from his lips, it is a mask that Samick can see through as clearly as a glass window.

“In that case,” Rune says, then finishes his implications with a shrug before he takes a step forward. "Shall we?”

Samick turns his back on the glittering lights of Kithe, Rune trailing behind.