Page 25 of Her Blind Deception (The Dark Reflection #2)

Chapter Twenty-Five

T he only person I informed of my departure was Leela, and even then, I only left her a brief note. I was leaving for a few days, I explained, and I hoped she’d get her loved ones out of the city like I’d told her to. I suggested she go with them. The idea of returning to find her gone sat like a weight in my stomach. I didn’t know what I’d do if she took my advice.

Cotus was waiting at a discreet side entrance with a small, inconspicuous carriage drawn by two horses. He greeted me with a nod and a tense expression. When he opened his mouth to speak, I only shook my head.

‘Not now,’ I said, hefting my trunk into his waiting arms. ‘I’ll explain when we’re on the road.’

I watched the road stretch out behind us, uncoiling like a tendril of smoke as we drew away from the palace. The windows were dark, but I scanned them anyway, straining my eyes trying to imagine I could see the silhouette of someone watching me leave. But there were so many windows, and I couldn’t tell which room any of them belonged to. I was an idiot for looking, anyway. He wouldn’t care enough to watch me go.

When the palace was finally out of sight, I slumped against the bench and stared at my hands. I’d always known that sending Gwinellyn away would only buy me time. I’d relied on the isolation of the Yawn and on the girl’s own timidity, thinking that would be enough. But now that time was up. And what had I done with it? I’d sworn when I bundled her into the cart that I’d find a way to right my wrongs. But every moment since had been a steady slide into more wrongs, more complications.

More death.

And after all of that, I’d failed at what I’d set out to do. I’d wanted to find a way to control Draven. I’d wanted him for a puppet. But we were so tangled together now that if one string was pulled, it would move us both. Could I find a way to dominate him if I had more time? There was something like lightning between us. If I could find a way to use it, I could change everything.

We didn’t stop on our way through the city. I pulled the curtains across the windows and sat in the gloom rather than see the streets of Lee Helse, the Trough, the reminders of where I had come from. It wasn’t the fear of winding up back on the streets that worried me anymore, though. I’d risen too far for that. The stakes were higher now. If I fell from my perch, I’d meet my death.

I managed to sleep for a while, through the darkest hours of the night, bumping along uncomfortably and drifting in and out of wakefulness. But come morning, when the sun had risen high enough in the sky to shine through the curtains, curiosity was enough to finally draw me to the window and out of my dark ruminating. I’d only passed through the gates of Lee Helse a handful of times in my life, so I wanted to see the world I’d been ruling over. The lands beyond the city wall were lush, green, well-tended, rolling on and on in hills of crops interspersed with towns we sometimes passed through and sometimes skirted around. We occasionally stopped to change horses at coaching inns, which readily supplied the beasts with a flash of a royal token, but I rarely disembarked. I didn’t want to linger.

We spent the following night at a small inn run by a landlady who treated me with suspicion, but served a hearty stew that I ate alone in my room. The bed was lumpy, but it was clean enough, and other than the landlady, no one interacted with me. If anyone wondered at the fancy coach, no one was game to bother the person it carried.

As we drew further north, dragging closer to that wavering horizon of mountains, the towns began to change. The smell of smoke was often drifting on the wind, heralding bonfires all along the countryside. We passed near enough to one for me to see the wicker idol at its centre, which was odd. Sacrificial fires were usually set on Aetherdi. Some of the most devout would set them in times of trouble for extra favour, but it wasn’t something common in the city. When I started paying closer attention to the people in some of the towns we passed through, I began to understand. Many were living scarecrows—haggard, straw-limbed and listless, staring at the passing noble carriage with the sort of hollow loathing that had no energy behind it because there was none to spare for hate. Stooped men and women worked grey fields, trying to salvage crops from the sludge of disease. I’d heard there had been another blight in these parts, but I hadn’t expected to see it creeping so far south. Despite myself, bitter sympathy welled up in my throat at the sight of a pair of scraggly, pot-bellied girls by the road, watching on with faces gaunt beyond their time. I knew the hopeless fear of being a child without enough to eat.

After the third town offering more of the same, I closed the curtains.

We made a stop on the evening of the second day, and suddenly those hazy mountains were towering over us. I stared up at them out the window as Cotus checked the horses.

‘That’s them?’ I asked unnecessarily. What else could they possibly be?

‘We’ll reach the foothills before nightfall,’ he replied, shooting me a funny look, which I simply closed my curtains to.

The stories told about the Yawn were the stuff of nightmares. I’d heard enough of them over the years, and not just the usual inflated rumours that were fabricated from tiny grains of truth. Cotus and his ring of snatchers carried plenty of tales from their illegal foraging trips, of strange creatures darting out of sight, of trees that didn’t stay in one place and ground that shifted underfoot, of ghostly lights winking in and out. Of disappearing men. Of gutted bodies. Of severed heads on stakes. And snatchers only foraged around the edges of those mountains. Binders ventured deeper, hunted the creatures that lined the cells of the dungeon in Misarnee Keep, whose blood fuelled the enchantments woven by druthi.

It was still difficult to pick apart truth from exaggeration, mind. Men were fond of stretching the truth to impress the girls at the Nymph. But I knew for a fact many people who ventured into the Yawn never came out again .

The Yawn stretched the entire length of the Northern border, and it was said to be the site of Aether’s fall. I remembered the first time I’d heard the story, in one of those worship congregations my mother had insisted on attending when I was very small, before I began to roam the streets and make my own way. Before she shrivelled up and died.

The sanctum had been the grandest place I’d ever entered then, a stark contrast to the single room we rented from a shoe maker that always smelled of mould. The priest had always told the creation myths with a fierce sobriety and fanatical gleam that had both scared me and made me think he enjoyed frightening people a little too much.

When Aether blessed Madeia’s flesh with life, all was good and new. All was eternal, ageless, and humanity lived in perpetual youth and joy. There was no disease, no hunger in this time of plenty, as all existed then and ever in a single, perfect moment. But then came Taveum. He did not see the beauty in the perfection of the world Aether and Madeia had created. He found the static tiresome and longed for the chaos of beginnings and endings, of decay and corrosion, of progress and decline. And so with a single turn of his hourglass, he set the sands of time in motion and that perfect moment was shattered. Minutes began to pass, then days, then years. The world began to change, to age, and death caught its first victim.

When Aether discovered what Taveum had done to his creation, his fury shook the earth, and the two gods waged a battle that set the sky aflame, until Taveum landed a blow that knocked Aether from the sky and sent him plummeting to that world of his creation. He was so mighty, and his fall so wild, that when he hit the ground it split, creating a fissure from which all manner of wicked and foul things spilled from the realm beneath ours, the Shadow Realm. The site of Aether’s fall is still a yawning wound in the world, and the creatures spawned from the collision continue to collect around that wound, like infection, like rot.

So we must bless the binders, good people. We must revere them for doing the dangerous work of cleaning the wound.

As we began to rumble along the road again, I peered through the curtains up at those mountains, their peaks disappearing above the press of clouds, and a shiver went down my spine. So much mystery, so many stories. Did I really believe a god had fallen here? Did I believe whatever lived here had been spawned of that fall, the wicked beasts of another realm? I thought of the creature I’d seen in Dovegni’s dungeon, of her beautiful, fragile wings, her glistening eyes. Fall spawn or no, I suspected not all that was said about the Yawn and the creatures within was true. Though I was about to find out one way or another.

I opened the window and stuck my head into the misty air. Cotus was flicking at the horse’s flanks, and even with just a glimpse of his profile I could tell his expression was grim.

‘How much further?’ I called to him.

‘We should make a camp. We don’t want to be out after dark,’ he said, glancing back at me.

‘No. We’re not spending another night on the road. I want to make your cabin tonight. This whole journey has already drawn out long enough.’ I ducked back inside and closed the window to prevent an argument. He had grown increasingly vocal in disagreeing with me throughout the journey, as though the more distance we put between us and the palace, the easier it was to forget that I was a queen. I didn’t know what would happen if we went so far that I became just Rhi again. Perhaps he would see the situation I’d burdened him with clearly enough to realise I’d played him like a fiddle from the start.

And what if all I found at the cabin was the corpse of a sixteen-year-old girl? The thought made me shudder and I quickly pushed it away. Nonsense. Even if there hadn’t been any sign of her when Cotus last checked, it didn’t mean she was dead. There had been all those forsaken reports of a girl traipsing around the place that had got me into trouble. Surely Gwinellyn was still alive and well. Dovegni’s blood stones had shown me as much.

As we drew into the foothills proper, the trees began to gather more tightly around the road. Their rustling sounded like whispers, though I dismissed the fancy as soon as it entered my mind. The hair on my arms and the back of my neck prickled constantly with the sense that there was something lurking just out of sight, watching me.

The horses slowed to a walk as the terrain worsened. More to shake off the eerie thoughts than anything, I stuck my head out of the window again.

‘Do the trees really move at will here?’ I asked, my tone just a note off teasing. It seemed one of the more far-fetched stories and I was almost positive it was a lie.

‘I’ve never seen it around the fringes. But I can’t speak for deeper in,’ he replied soberly. ‘I had a drink with a binder once who swore to it.’

The fact that he would even mention something a binder had sworn to, as though they were any kind of trustworthy, rankled. Honestly, it was sometimes like he had forgotten what had happened to me. Perhaps he thought that the memories had vanished along with the scars.

Cotus’s cabin was about as ramshackle as they come; lopsided and loose-shingled, the whole thing looked like it was a gust of wind away from collapse. The surrounding woods stretched fingers of moss all over it, like it wanted to bury it. A thick, uncomfortable feeling sunk through my gut as I stared at it, hardly believing this was the place I’d condemned Gwinellyn to live.

‘Do you want me to unload your trunk?’ Cotus asked.

‘Let’s look inside first,’ I mumbled, as though I truly believed the girl would be sitting cross-legged on the floor, patiently waiting for me. Then the trunks wouldn’t have to leave the coach. I took a deep breath, hardened my spine and strolled towards the door, not pausing to wait for Cotus before I twisted the handle. Inside was actually not as terrible as I thought it might be. There was a cot made up with thick blankets, some cupboards and a stone bench, a crude fireplace with fuel still stacked in it, ready to burn. There were even a few plants in jars on the windowsill, though if they weren’t dead yet they soon would be, stringy and brown as they were. No girl, though.

‘This is… cosy,’ I said as Cotus joined me.

He began poking around in the few cupboards. ‘The supplies still haven’t been eaten.’ He ran a hand through his hair and puffed out his cheeks as he blew out a breath. ‘She hasn’t been back here for a while.’

‘Of course not,’ I grumbled. That would be too easy. Rubbing my brow, I closed my eyes. I thought back to the vision I’d had of her—the cliff with the impossible staircase, the boy with the pointed ears. She was alive, I knew she was. The little prickle of fear at the back of my neck was just superstition.

‘What now?’ Cotus asked.

‘I find Baba Yaga.’ I opened my eyes to see Cotus frowning at his feet. ‘What?’

‘There’s plenty that could have got the princess long before the witch. And if she did get her, then she’s lost to us,’ he muttered, scuffing at the floor.

‘Oh please, only a man would be so afraid of her,’ I scoffed, acting far more confident than I felt.

‘She eats people.’

‘Not everyone.’ At least, I didn’t think so. ‘Sometimes she helps women in trouble. Surely you would have heard that at least a few times while working at the Nymph.’

He muttered something about ‘women’s business’, and I huffed my disgust that he could have worked in a suvoir and still be so squeamish. What he termed ‘women’s business’ very much began as ‘men’s business’.

‘We’ll stay here tonight, and tomorrow we’ll go and find her.’

He jerked his gaze back to my face at that. ‘Don’t be daft. We can’t just go wandering about in the Yawn if we don’t know where we’re going.’

‘If we get lost, she’ll come to us.’

‘Where do you get all of these ideas from?’ he moaned, running his hand through his hair again and leaving it a dishevelled mess. ‘Is it the bloody girls at the Nymph? Have you made all these decisions based on a bunch of gossip?’

I took another slow breath and bit down against the tide of vitriol that threatened to spew out of me. Our relationship was already strained, and he held too many of my secrets for it to rupture. I needed to keep him on side. So instead of swearing at him, I said, ‘Because women talking is always gossip, is it Cotus? When I asked you to take the princess into the Yawn in the first place, it’s because I knew Baba Yaga would help her if she met trouble. And you think I based that decision on nothing more than gossip?’

‘But how—’

‘Cotus,’ I snapped, ‘I’m your queen. Your job is to follow orders, mine is to give them.’

The red was high in his cheeks now. ‘Right. Sorry, Your Majesty,’ he mumbled. ‘I’ll get your trunk.’

When he left the room, my temper deflated. So much for keeping him on side. I’d need to do better, but his determination to see me as nothing more than a damsel in distress at best, and a silly girl at worst, was irritating. As was his dismissal of the folklore women passed to each other through the backstreets of the Trough, of the witch in the Yawn who would help a woman down on her luck, who would offer her protection from an abusive husband, who could end an unwanted pregnancy, who could heal sickness and see into the future. For a price, of course. I supposed the only part he was interested in was her boundless hatred of snatchers and binders and anyone entering the Yawn with the intention to profit from it. And possibly the rumours that she ate human flesh. Which was surely just a rumour.

It was too cold to expect Cotus to sleep outside, so we hunkered down in the cabin together, Cotus on the floor by the door and me in the bed. He seemed to have enough sense of self-preservation to keep from trying to share the bed with me, which was a relief. I didn’t much think that fending off an advance would endear me to him. I’d have to be particularly nice to him on the journey home if I hoped he might continue to protect my secrets.

After a few hours of tossing about, gnawing on anxiety, I rose in the middle of the night, my eyes stinging with sleeplessness. I crept out of the cabin while Cotus slept and stood just beyond the door, scanning the surrounding trees as they shivered in the dark, hoping in vain that a memory would be triggered, that I’d recognise something that would confirm that the jaunty, desperate journey into the Yawn I’d made with my mother as a child hadn’t been something I’d made up.

I’d been very young when we’d hitched rides in the back of a string of wagons to find our way out of Lee Helse and into the foothills of the Yawn. I couldn’t remember much of the journey, only flashes of being cold and uncomfortable, of dancing in an inn for a bowl of grey stew, of a farmer with a gap-toothed grin kissing my mother with his hand up her skirt in exchange for a ride to the next town. I couldn’t remember much of our time in the Yawn, either, just the smell of herbs, a dark room in a small house, strings of words in my mother’s voice as she begged the witch to rid her of the child she was carrying.

And then the sharpest memory; an old woman bending down to look me in the eye and take my hands in her clawed ones. I’ll not hurt you, child.

Plunging my hand into a pocket in my skirts, I withdrew the heavy gold necklace Dovegni had given me. The stones looked black in the dark as I ran my thumb over one of them, still undecided. Last time, it had hurt. And perhaps it was just superstition, but knowing how those stones were created, where the magic came from made me a little wary to use one in this place, where fall spawn creatures roamed free.

‘Fuck it,’ I whispered, and wrapping my hand around the stone, I thought of Baba Yaga. Where can I find her?

I was braced for the moment my vision went blank this time, the vertigo of my mind being yanked away from my body. My vision cleared, the black turning grey, until I saw… nothing. I looked around me, and all I saw was grey and fuzzy, like I was standing in a fog. I swiped my hands in front of me, as though I could clear it, but nothing changed. A few moments later my vision darkened again and then I was slammed back into my body, my stomach lurching. Flinging my arms against the cabin wall, hoping it wouldn’t fall down as I did so, I waited for the nausea to pass and glared at the necklace. Trust Dovegni to gift me something that didn’t even work properly. Thrusting it back into my pocket, I straightened and hugged myself against the chill.

I’d have to venture blindly into those trees and face whatever might find me. The stories said that the witch could see you coming, would seek you out if you wandered lost for long enough. But even if she didn’t, I knew the words whispered to women with nowhere else to turn.

To seek the crone

Follow the ribbon

Strung between the valley

Of her beckoning fingers

Silhouetted against the stars, twin mountains loomed above me, ending in two elongated rocky peaks, each with a distinctive curve. Like two fingers. All I would need to do was find the ribbon of water weaving between them and follow it.