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Dare is lounged on top of the toppled carriage, as lazily as one might find him on a chaise in front of a lovely simmering fireplace. Arm draped over his raised knee, he watches the slow dissolve of the crowd around Braxis.

I make no move to dismount.

I stay up here, nuzzled into Eamon, for a few reasons.

It is still too thick with fae on the ground, and I have already been swept away a couple of times by the lot; and I avoid too much down there, my family, Ronan, Daxeel.

No, I am better off staying up here, on the toppled carriage, for a while longer.

Then, I will climb down and wander Kithe until I find Hanner Fordd.

The thought prickles through me.

I reach into my trouser pocket, slim and packed thin against my thigh, and lure out the torn piece of parchment.

Drawing back from Eamon’s hold, I offer it to him. “Where is this?”

Dare—using the tip of a knife to scrape dirt out from under his fingernails—lifts his chin to peek at the scribblings.

Eamon takes a lingering look. “Who wrote this?”

“A healer.”

“Why?”

I hesitate.

My mouth parts around an answer I don’t have. Then, I shrug and steal the parchment back.

Truly, I don’t know why she wrote this address for me, why she sends me to her husband, her home. I only know she meant to help.

“A place to stay,” I guess.

Eamon’s mouth twists with a frown.

Out the corner of my eye, Dare stills. The knife tip is tucked between his flesh and fingernail, but it doesn’t move.

Eamon parts his lips as if to speak, but shuts them, then again before he slumps with a sigh. “I do not know why I assumed you would return to Hemlock.”

A quiet drifts over us, as though the realisation of our new realities has finally taken the moment to settle. The adrenaline surge and the panic, it’s muted now—and so the truth can creep in.

I am without a home.

Daxeel and I are done.

Aleana is not at Hemlock House. She is gone.

It will never be the way it was before.

Eamon is replotting his thoughts, deciding our next move together.

Dare slowly starts to push up from his lounging posture.

I cut a glance at him.

He forces a tight smile in return, but it’s grimaced by the wound slashed down his face. “I can take you there.”

I blink at him once before my slothful mind catches up. He will escort me to the address on the paper.

I nod, firm.

“Us,” Eamon says, soft, a worry-frown digging deep into his honeyed features. “You can take us .”

“I wasn’t offered for us both,” I tell him. “I think perhaps I should go alone—” Eamon’s chin lifts with an edge of tension. “—and you return to Hemlock until next phase. All my belongings are there. You will need to gather them for me, gather whatever has resale value, and we should meet next phase.”

It isn’t a lie, what I say. The healer didn’t open the offer to anyone else, didn’t tell me to bring along a friend to her door.

But maybe I avoid a moment with Eamon.

Maybe that flicker of worry in my chest drives me to avoid him. I can’t, I can’t be around him when he learns of Ridge’s fate at my hands.

I can’t see the pain on his face, pain that I caused.

And if he chooses not to meet me next phase, then I will know how alone I am.

Eamon thinks on it.

The tension in him is stiff.

Dare waits, pushed up into a slouched-sitting position, and his gaze swerving between Eamon and me.

I loosen a breath and look out at the sea of bobbing heads. Too many fae still wandering the streets of Kithe.

They don’t all have a place to go.

So many of the warriors, most of them, and their families have been staying at the garrison. That’s gone now. All that’s left is a stream of rubble and broken stone powering through the spiral.

The uncertainty is found in every other face. The faces of those who haven’t a place to stay but the fallen stronghold. I wonder if evacuation tents are being set up around the town or in the woods, and that is why the full medical tents haven’t been pitched.

“If it must be,” Eamon finally says, and his voice is clipped. He is displeased. “Where shall we meet next phase?”

“The tea shop down from the scripture hall—at the start of next Quiet.”

“Next Quiet?” he echoes, sharp. “That is a whole phase away.”

“I need rest. A lot of it.”

Eamon’s sharp features soften. His throat bobs before, dropping his gaze in shame, he nods. His cheeks flush.

I almost reach out for his hand, tell him not to feel the shame of forgetting my circumstances, to reassure him. But I find I am eager to slip away now.

I lean for his face.

He meets me halfway.

I brush a ghost of a kiss over his high cheekbone. And that is my comfort, my farewell before I slip off the side of the carriage.

My boots smack down on the rough stone road.

The pain thrums through me, instant. But it comes without the dizziness that plagued me down to the town centre, it pulsates in my head, thrum, thrum, thrum , but doesn’t throw me off balance.

I close my eyes and let the spell pass.

As I blink back to my surroundings, Dare is a blur of black and gold at my side, he’s taking me by the wrist.

The pace he takes is unhurried, and I suspect that is for my comfort, but he keeps me close.

He leads me through the throngs of folk, winding us around lampposts, weaving us through the standing carriages and ducking us under the steamy huffs of the kelpies.

His grip on my wrist doesn’t loosen.

The scent of leathers and blood and metal is thick in the air. It’s a suffocating cloud that surrounds us all the way through the crowd, even after Dare turns us down the slender, bending street that’s too narrow for any carriage to squeeze through. Plenty of fae have spilled into the street, though; there is still a shortage of fresh air.

I stick close to Dare’s shoulder, his grip on my wrist, as he weaves us around fae after fae.

“You are too proud to ask, or you are too selfish to consider it,” Dare starts, then pauses to peer down a street lined with bloated homes, at least six levels tall, “so I will tell you.”

His fingers flex on my wrist bone before he drags me alongside him, down the street with the bloated homes.

The fae crowd is thinner here, but there are still enough folk scattered around that my bad shoulder is knocked once, twice, and by the third time violent urges are crawling up inside of me.

“Tell me what?” I ask, but I know the answer.

Above, an elder male leans out of a curtained window, watching all the folk move below.

“Daxeel is fine,” he tells me. “Wounded, but is recovering.”

My teeth clench so hard that the bones in my gums ache. All I manage is a hmph in answer.

Undeterred, Dare goes on, “Rune and I got him out of Comlar in the collapse.” He scoffs, bitter. “The iilra—those who survived—left him behind. We thought he was dead,” he adds with a side-glance my way. “He wasn’t.”

My nod is stiff. But the gloss burning my eyes betrays me.

I do not want to hear any of this.

And yet, I want to hear everything.

I ache to know every detail of Daxeel’s health, of his escape from Comlar, of his condition. I also yearn to tear myself away from this path and never hear the name of my once love ever again.

Dare is unlucky to be caught in my conflict.

The sneer I aim at him isn’t kind. “Oh, and how is he now? Better?”

“Daxeel is being treated at Hemlock,” Dare says, but then he looks at me, he sees the sneer, and his words falter. He realises the sarcasm in my question. His tongue darts over his ointment-smeared lips before he sighs the words, “Samick was sent to find you in the collapse. We didn’t know then if you’d made it out or not.”

We didn’t know if you had left Daxeel behind.

That’s what he really means.

A grunt catches in my chest.

Our bootsteps, out of sync by a mere moment, thud on flattened cobblestone.

“He isn’t at Hemlock,” I say after a beat. “Daxeel was in town earlier.” Not even an hour ago.

Dare slides a frown my way. “He has been unconscious since the iilra stripped him of the magick.”

I shake my head. “He was right behind me.”

And I walked away.

Dare’s mouth pinches. “It couldn’t have been him.”

My tongue runs along the gloss of my teeth. The distant thought passes me, that I am dire need of charcoal and a brush to scratch the film off my teeth, to scrub my tongue clean; I need a stone and sand in my hands to attack every bit of my flesh I can reach; a bath to fill with scalding water to immerse myself in.

I need to wash away the Sacrament, Daxeel, blood and death, the loss, the shadows… everything , until I am clean again.

Dare turns us off the street into a lane lined with overflowing bins. My nose crinkles under the assault of the acidic stench, a rotten stink that surely comes from old wines and overripe fruits.

His fingers finally slip from my wrist.

There are no fae crowds down here.

“So you sent Samick to find me?” I say and watch a voder skitter behind the bins. “And here I wondered if he had a heart underneath all that ice.”

Dare smiles small, but it’s quick to morph into a grimace. His eye flickers, a quiver of his lashes.

It hurts him, the gash that’s balmed down his face.

“He has a heart,” Dare’s voice is soft. “But it is awfully selective.”

His unmarred cheek turns into my line of sight as he pauses at the mouth of another lane, a narrow alley whose dewy, stone walls are littered with uneven, crooked doorways. A cheap, hollow end of Kithe where visitors don’t roam.

I follow him down the alley. “He hates me.”

Dare is unflinching. “For what you did to Daxeel. You have to understand, Nari,” he says and steps over a toppled wicker basket, empty and stained with mould. “Rune and I met Daxeel at the barracks. We can see what is best for him from a distance. We have the outside perspective. Samick can’t see the way we do.”

My answer is a frown as I side-step a leathered ball, peeling and frayed at the seams. Younglings have left it out.

“Samick and Daxeel grew up together.” He stops at the end of the alley, where a tall and wet wall looms up as high as three stories. He turns to look down at me. “When you harmed Daxeel,” he says, “Samick felt it as though it happened to him.”

My lips suck inwards.

I look anywhere but at Dare’s single golden eye, or the other eye, ridged and ruined, slick with brownish ointment.

“Samick has always felt on the outside. Even among the dark fae, he is different. He is of ice.”

I make a face at the wall. “What does that mean ?”

“It means he is not dark fae, not really, not in blood.”

I lift my crumpled look to him, an unspoken question.

He is quiet for a moment before, “Samick is from ísabroch. It’s an isle off the mainland. The Ice Court. There, the fae are…” He sighs and aims an apologetic look at me, “different.”

My nod is slow.

The only consistent way I have heard Samick described by anyone who dares speak of it at all. Different .

“Is it another race of fae?” I ask, and my mind flickers between woodland fae, dark fae, light fae—and one we have not yet learned of in Licht, a breed hidden on an isle, shrouded in darkness, far beyond our reach and knowledge.

“It is. Once, before the isle of became a court of Dorcha, the fae there were called the ones of ice . That is what Samick is. He was born there, in the mountains of ice and mist, where the sun never sets, but is always hidden behind the clouds, and the winter never leaves… A place like the Mountain of Slumber.”

Harsh.

A harsh life in a harsh environment.

“Why did he leave?” I ask, though I too would flee such a place.

“His parents are gone.” Dare shoots me a side glance. “Before you pry any further, no—I do not know what happened to them. All I know is that Samick was displaced as a youngling and was taken in by a dark fae couple. He was raised in the home next to Hemlock House.”

“The home… in Kithe?” The frown I fix on him is dubious, slow. “Next to Hemlock House?”

Dare’s mouth tightens.

He watches me, his eye flickering over my face, as I put it together.

“The home Kalice is in?”

His nod is not just slow, it is grave. “Samick’s differences make even his peers uneasy. At the barracks, most avoided him. But he has heart—and Kalice is an example of that heart, and why he has it covered in ice, as you say.”

“I…” My mouth parts, then shuts, parts, then shuts, until I shake my head. “I don’t understand.”

“Kalice and her brother,” Dare starts, his one-eyed stare levelled with my stupid one, “stumbled through a bridge between the realms—and the wrong fae were on the other side. She was only six years old.” He gestures with a wave of his hand to his body, his armour . “I doubt you have seen her without a cloak or a shawl covering her, since she wears the scars of missing flesh and bites all over her body.”

I pale and lean my weight onto one boot, a leaning retreat—as though it will take me away from that horrible thought.

Unease has my gaze shifting to the wall that closes the alley, where smears of dirt are caked into the grooves, and to the opening where the lane cuts past, and the only sound comes from the rodents that dig through the waste.

“We were fresh out of the barracks, and we all got home visits,” Dare tells me. “Samick was travelling to Aiteal to visit me when he heard their screams. He slaughtered the fae to save them.”

The corners of my mouth are turned down. “I always thought… He and Kalice, I…”

“I know what you assumed,” Dare says. “We all did. And we chose to let you assume wrong.”

“Why?”

“We do not speak of it.”

“Why not? Why do they not speak if he saved her? Where is the boy, the brother? Why is she and her family in his home?”

“That is his family.” Dare holds my gaze. “Kalice stole it from him.”

I flinch.

“Samick abandoned his journey to my home village and took the two human children to his adoptive parents in Kithe. Those parents were all Samick ever knew, raised him from a youngling to a warrior. They took Kalice in, kept her, and Samick saw her as a sister of sorts. Saw the boy, Kason, as a brother. That lasted fifty years or so,” Dare sighs and, folding his arms, reclines against the dewy wall. His cheek turns to me as he looks down the alley. “Kalice never warmed to him. Kason did better.”

I arch a brow. For a beat, I let that sink in, then sputter the question with a polishing of contempt, “She never warmed to the fae who saved her?”

“Spared, as she puts it.” His chin grazes his shoulder. “Anytime Kalice looks at Samick, she sees the brutality he spared her from. Their sibling relationship became little more than bickering, whenever he was home. He started to spend more and more time at Hemlock, though his home was only the next door over. Kalice collected faerie hounds,” Dare adds. “As I imagine, they make her feel safe. But those faerie hounds are hunters. And Samick was tired of them routinely digging through his belongings, ruining his work.”

His work.

My mind flickers with sketched throwing stars and carved weapons. He’s a black metal smith, by nature, by passion, by heart.

It is his true language, and the voice is his second.

Dancing is a hobby of mine, a love that I hold dear. But then there are those like Samick whose passion is ingrained into their very essence. They cannot be without it.

“Samick and Kalice bickered often, until one day he lost his patience. He is, after all, what he is.” Dare’s face is grim as he turns to look at me. “He froze a hound’s heart. Kalice attacked him, Kason got in the middle, tried to break it up… But Kason was touched by the ice bite.”

I know nothing of the ice fae. But I do know of the ice bite. And it stuns me silent for a moment.

Ice bite is rare, rare enough that I can only summon two or three mentions of it in scripture over all the years I spent poring over the scrolls.

The touch of ice takes a certain concoction of circumstances to produce it. The body must be hot from the inside, the flesh prickled, and the cold so sudden and frozen that it sheets an entire layer of outer flesh, but does not reach the lower layers. The bright side of it, if there is one, is that limbs aren’t lost to it, as they are with frostbite. But the downside is that an entire body can be sheeted with the ice, the frost, and frozen stiff—while the inside is still alive, heart still beating, eyes still seeing, ears still hearing… until being frozen stiff, unmoveable, kills the one who suffers… kills them in minutes.

I read of no cure or treatment.

But I did read of the ice bite as a Fae Trait in the dark ones—and now, I suspect we knew a little of the ice fae’s existence, but not fully understanding through the secrecy of Dorcha that those with the ability of ice bite are a fae species in their own right.

It is too much.

Too much for my tangled, fatigued mind to absorb.

“Kason died, of course,” Dare tells me, as though I am not drowning in this information. “Samick has not been welcomed back into his home since. His parents turn their cheeks to him on the street. Kalice keeps her hounds close and her distance great.”

“But why did he do that?”

Dare scoffs, harsh. “Samick did not chose to harm her or Kason. She attacked him at the wrong moment, when his hands were frost, and he is what he is at the end of it all. To Samick, it is as natural as breathing, as bleeding from a cut. You cannot ask why a beast eats to survive, why some pant as they run. It just is.”

Silence trickles down on us.

Not even the voders can be heard through the pulsing moment that steals the alley.

Then, I swallow, thick, and it’s audible.

I have no words.

And Dare is almost finished with his. I know that when he pushes from the wall and lets his arms uncross from his chest.

“It is not lust you sense in Samick for Kalice. It is rage. He acted from his heart… and it led to his own demise.”

He sees her as a human he never should have saved; as a sister he resents the existence of; as the very reason his adoptive parents do not look at him.

“He regrets saving her,” I murmur and cast a sorrowed glance at the space between our boots.

“Yes,” is all Dare says before he gestures to the door behind me. “There.”

The shift takes a moment in my mind.

I blink, a flutter of the lashes, before I turn my chin to my shoulder.

The door behind me is as rotted as all the others. The frame is almost entirely eroded. Whatever shade was once painted onto the wood is now gone, just bubbled and sun-bleached.

I fish out the parchment from my pocket and turn it over in my hands. “This is it?”

Dare takes a step around me. “You know where this is?”

I turn to trace his movements, his gradual backsteps away from me. I shake my head. “No.”

“Rune has a sibling.” Another backstep. “His brother is a once renowned warrior. Forranach. And this is his home.”

“What?” The word escapes me in a breathy rush. “This is the home of Rune’s brother?”

Dare nods his head to the parchment in my fist. “I suspect Niamh is the one who offered you sanctuary. Careful, now, heartbreaker. Forranach isn’t known for his loveable nature.”

He turns his back on me—and stalks down the alley.

He leaves me at the old, rotted door.