Page 5
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I stand in the alley for a while, parchment crinkled in my fist, staring at the door.
The splintered spears of wood, stripped and peeled away; the murky slime that coats the brass knob.
I flinch.
A splash of water hits me right on the nose.
My chin lifts as I turn my gaze upwards. I half expect to see someone leaning out of a window above, about to toss water out into the alley, and those first few drops that spill from a bucket are striking me.
But I see nothing more than the thick darkness.
Another droplet hits me. This one on the cheek.
My face twists.
And not a moment after, a sudden downpour falls from the black skies.
I throw myself at the door.
It swings open with an awful groan, and my boots stagger onto hard steps.
I stumble, grabbing at the walls to right myself. And, as I look up at the steps, I realise I am in the realm’s narrowest stairwell.
I start up the stairs.
My legs move slow, lethargic, and the muscle of my thighs are screaming louder and louder with each climb.
I push through it, until I reach the third level—the second number on the parchment.
The first number is .
So I walk the narrow hallway to the fifth, final door.
For a beat, I stand there, looking at it. The unpolished brass number bolted to the wood, the smell of soup wafting up all around me, the distant pummel of rainfall outside.
I loosen a swelling breath before I lift my hand, then curl my scraped, torn fingers into a fist.
If I had anywhere else to go, anywhere, I would turn around—and leave.
I loathe this. To stand at a stranger’s door, looking for a bed to rest on.
I have had a sheltered life, I know this. Even if the greater plan waiting for me, created by my father, was not so pleasant, I was kept out of that knowledge for much of my life.
Lack of home is not a concept I understood very well. There is so little of that in Licht, especially in the Queen’s Court.
Now, I am of no home.
And I am the beggar.
I knock, soft, but a total of six knocks of my knuckles on wood.
Then I still.
I wait.
I listen.
Beyond the door, there is an inconvenienced grunt followed by a slamming and thudding.
The thudding is undoubtedly heavy bootsteps coming to the door. But the slamming sounds something like a pair of canes, hobbled between each step.
Then it stops.
The door rattles once, a chain clinks, then it’s yanked open. The groan shudders through the frame and sets my shoulders on edge.
I slide a small step back.
The door doesn’t open all the way. Just a wedge of light from the dwelling inside reaches over the old, rotted floorboards and brushes the toes of my boots.
My throat bobs.
The light is faint in the musky corridor. Of three lanterns bolted to the wall, only two are illuminated with fireflies buzzing, smacking into the glass over and over. The other is dead, as are the fireflies in it.
Takes my eyes a moment to adjust to the flood of light wedging out of the dwelling, through the door, orange like firelight.
Obstructing the light is a large, broad hunched figure peering out at me. He has a head of yellow hair, thrown up into a loose bun that sags to the left.
There’s a weathered look to this dark male. Dokkalf. His size gives him away, his width and bulk, but also the cutting point of his ears, the tips of sharp teeth I can faintly make out, and the instinctual sensation that shudders through me.
Even after all this time of being around dark fae, of befriending them, of bedding one, that natural echo whispers through my bones like a morning chill.
Run, run, run.
Danger, danger, danger.
He parts his twisted mouth.
“Hel—” The lameness of my greeting is enough to flush my cheeks. I pause to clear my throat. “Hello.”
My pitifulness does nothing to ease the sneer warping this male’s face, and I don’t need him to tell me he isn’t pleased that I have darkened his doorstep, his face says it all.
“I am Narcissa Elmfield.” I extend my hand, the parchment pinched between my fingertips. “I was sent.” My mind stumbles into what Dare said, the name he used for the healer, and I rush to add it, “Niamh sent me.”
The male’s furrowed brow is thick over his eyes. He stares into my damn soul for too long before he drops his attention to the scrap paper.
He snatches it.
A wooden crutch is propped under his armpit. It creaks with the lean of his weight and lures my attention.
The trouser leg is stitched less than an inch from his crotch, but the other covers the length of his leg.
An amputee.
My mouth thins before I look up and find his yellow eyes boring into me. Yellow, like Rune’s, and the slash of black down their centres. Cat eyes.
If Dare hadn’t told me of their relation, I would figure it out on my own. The same eyes, plucked from one head and shoved into another; the same hair, long and yellow, not pale, not blond, not golden, but canary yellow.
The difference in Rune and Forranach is size.
Male fae have a natural lean towards muscle mass. It grows easier, larger, stronger than, say, in a human. That is doubly true for male dokkalves with all that natural testosterone fuelling them.
Even still, this male surprises me.
Every part of him is bulked. Above the collar of his sweater, his neck is thick with muscle, and he’s so wide that, if he opened the door all the way, he would swallow up the entire threshold.
His head tilts to the side as he scans the parchment.
He lifts his unkind gaze to me. “Why?” His voice is little more than a grunt, thick with a garbled accent.
Rune’s accent, like most other dark ones I have met, is barbed. It isn’t nearly as smooth as the litalf tongues. But this male speaks in thickness, in grated, throaty sounds that feel otherworldly.
Niamh’s was totally different, an accent and broken tongue that I have never heard before.
“Why?” I echo his question in an uncertain whisper. “Why did she send me?”
Again, he grunts.
“I don’t know.” My shoulder lifts with a lame shrug of my good shoulder. “I… I have nowhere to go. She might have sent me because I am familiar with Rune.”
Friends, maybe.
Sometimes it feels like that.
Most often with Dare. But that will change now, I suspect. And so why won’t it change with Rune?
The male shakes his head, a curt no .
No, that isn’t the right answer.
She didn’t send me on account of Rune or that I am displaced from home.
My shoulders sag.
I’m not sure how much hope I had pinned on this little piece of parchment, but I am certain of the hollow feeling carving into my gut now that the hope fades.
“I should not have disturbed you,” I say and, sliding a boot back, I incline my head. “Good phase.”
I make to turn my back and leave, to head out into the rain that batters the streets and wander around for shelter of some kind, but the male stops me with a single word:
“ Halfbreed .”
My face wrinkles with a frown. “I am half.”
“The halfbreed from the Sacrament.”
I nod, faint.
There were many halfbreeds in the Sacrament, but I don’t chance the sass with this older male. I doubt his patience extends very far.
He looks me up and down. “You are alive.”
Again, my answer is a faint nod.
I guess he didn’t keep up with the Sacrament to the end. He knows enough to understand my name, connect it to Rune, and the second passage, but I bet he was in bed asleep for the finale that tore down Comlar.
Considering the stink of tavarak drifting off him, I throw a wild guess that he got all his information on the Sacrament from tavern talk.
Forranach considers me. “You must have tricks,” he decides, that thick black furrow of his brow shadowing down his face. “The light females are always full of tricks.”
“Halfbreed, so I am only half-full of tricks,” I say, and my words should be accompanied by a smile, but the fatigue of the phase—the months —has me sagging on the spot.
His hand fists around the paper before he knocks himself on the chest. “Forranach.”
I know because Dare told me his name.
Still, I bring my hand to my own chest. “Nari.”
He shoves his weight into the door and the crutch drags along with him. “Come.”
The breath that shudders through me is nothing short of relief. I rush into step and follow him inside.
Table of Contents
- Page 1
- Page 2
- Page 3
- Page 4
- Page 5 (Reading here)
- Page 6
- Page 7
- Page 8
- Page 9
- Page 10
- Page 11
- Page 12
- Page 13
- Page 14
- Page 15
- Page 16
- Page 17
- Page 18
- Page 19
- Page 20
- Page 21
- Page 22
- Page 23
- Page 24
- Page 25
- Page 26
- Page 27
- Page 28
- Page 29
- Page 30
- Page 31
- Page 32
- Page 33
- Page 34
- Page 35
- Page 36
- Page 37
- Page 38
- Page 39