Page 44 of Kingdom of the Two Moons

Melody

I start running. But the labyrinth isn’t like before when I found my way in. Now it’s moving, constantly shifting. More hedges sprout out of nowhere, where there weren’t any moments ago. Gaps, too, creating more corridors, leading only deeper and deeper. I keep hitting dead ends, no matter how hard I focus my senses on finding Riven.

I run even faster.

Occasionally, I rush past someone.

Giggles and hisses sound from behind a hedge, the thrumming of hooves over grass, the brush of bodies against the leaves and bushes.

As yet another tunnel with a pitch-black end awaits me, I feel the surge of my familiar panic.

I’m trapped. Trapped in darkness.

I turn, trying to calm my rising fear. It’s just a game. Just a game.

But I hate it!

I’m already sweating, my fingers cold, my heartbeat too fast. I cut around another corner, only to meet another dead end. And again. And again.

As it goes on, desperation crawls up inside me, clenching my throat. I freeze when I turn another corner, only to find two fauns, crimson-horns locked, hips moving in sync. I stare when one looks at me, hissing, his fangs bared, and I back out. Another hedge opens up behind me, sending me stumbling through.

More moaning. The smell of sex suddenly everywhere. Of blood too. My heart beats so fast it’s humming. What game is this?

A fae game, I know. A dark game.

Around another corner, I spot Ronin bent over the naked body of one of the gold-painted musicians. His pants are down, and he holds the man by the hips, his head back, his eyes closed. He thrusts deeply into the harpist, heedless of me or anything else, as the man in front of him sighs quietly through parted lips.

The bracelets on their wrists match.

I pivot on my heels, a dark suspicion dawning in my mind of what this game is about. Of what happens if the hunter catches his prey.

In another corner, there’s Kyrith with a nymph, his teeth and chin covered in her blood while the nymph’s legs are closed around his waist.

Where the hell is Riven?

I run again in the other direction, more panic stirring in me, flooding my system. I won’t get out of this. There is no way out.

I sprint faster when footsteps sound behind me, closing in.

I will fight. I won’t be someone else’s prey. This is a nightmare. I run and run, the burning in my lungs a painful, sobering reminder of when I tried to run from Lyrian.

Before he threw me into the dark cell again and things got bad.

The memory sends another jolt of adrenaline through me, swamping my senses, my barely controlled panic surging further. Tears start to stream down my cheeks as exhaustion kicks in.

No, I will go on. I will find a way out.

I will climb this fucking hedge. I try. It’s too high, my fingers finding nothing to hold on to, as if the whole thing is slippery with some magic.

I give up at the third attempt, and more footsteps startle me. I run on, run for all it’s worth. More corners, hedges, dead ends.

Eventually, I stop in a quiet corner, breathing too hard, my body trembling with fear. I’m trapped. I can’t shake off the feeling that the labyrinth wants me to be found.

I cower into the darkest corner, begging silently for the labyrinth to hide me. To make an exception.

What if I scream? Will it matter to anyone? Will it attract attention? Draw my chaser? Where is Riven? He won’t be able to find me if the labyrinth is preventing it or, with his speed, he would have already. Or maybe he already gave up on me, having seen that I’m not worth it?

I bury my head in my hands and start to cry in earnest while the damn hedges seem to draw closer and closer like the walls in that bunker. I will not be afraid. I will not be afraid. But the words sound hollow. The darkness is too much.

I don’t look up when leaves rustle in a breeze. When a figure pauses in front of me, casting a long shadow. Someone to claim my blood, my body, with whatever sick desire.

But when I look up eventually, I find black eyes rimmed with gold, unreflective for once, and wings behind him.

Wings…

My whole stomach cramps. I slide backward as if I can somehow melt into the hedge.

“I won’t hurt you, Melody,” Caryan says, his power flooding me, dark and entrancing.

It’s so much like the other night, so much like when he whispered all those dark things at my neck. Every word he said clanks through me with new ferocity, my flesh alive with burning fear.

He meant it. And here I am, a slave, an amusement, a fucking plaything. A wretched toy.

“I hate your games!” I blurt out, glowering at him, my body feverish and alert. “They’re sick and weird and…” My voice is all wrong—too loud and breathless. “Everything here is weird, and so backward. Keeping slaves, whipping people for mistakes!”

The words tumble out. It’s all I have left, to let him know what I think about whatever the hell he’s going to do to me .

But to my surprise, he says, more gently than I ever imagined, “I know it appears that way to you.”

He holds out a hand to me, and only then do I notice the green bracelet, his color not matching mine. He isn’t my hunter then. “That’s why I came to get you,” he adds.

I stare at his hand. He’s different. So different from the fury and anger when he found me in the desert. Different to last night too. Last night he was himself, I realize with a start. Untamed. Wild. And a little bit unhinged. Now he’s—well, I don’t fucking know what he is right now.

When I look up into his face again, his features have softened, the blackness of his eyes morphed into that resonating blue.

He has come to get me. Twice now.

I slowly edge closer, though I don’t take his hand. He straightens and I stand up too.

“We have to fly back,” he declares somberly.

I glance at his huge wings, then at him, unsure how it would work. “Can’t we just… walk? It’s your world, your labyrinth…”

“It’s enchanted for the night. I would have to break the whole spell.”

I try to ignore the surge of his power flickering up my skin once more. Try to ignore how his eyes draw over my half-translucent dress. About how that makes me feel.

As if my skin is too small. Aching. Raw.

Too bare.

The blue in Caryan’s eyes turns into midnight hues. “This isn’t for you. Riven shouldn’t have brought you here.” He seems to say it more to himself.

And there I feel it, a hint of his fury again.

“It wasn’t his fault,” I say too quickly.

Caryan’s gaze snaps back up to me, his pupils flaring. “It wasn’t? He shouldn’t have left the clearing.”

I startle at the sudden change in his tone. Darkness teems around him, his wings are suddenly night-kissed.

“It was my idea. I needed a break and snuck away.” My words come breathlessly. Panic of a different kind is stealing my thoughts. The image of David; pushing itself into my mind.

“I tasked him with the solemn duty of watching and guarding you. He knows better than to let you out of his sight, especially now.”

“But he didn’t do anything. It was I who left him. And he just… followed me. I know it was foolish to run, and I shouldn’t have done it. I won’t do it again, I promise.”

“Won’t you run again?” He tilts his head then, stepping up to me, his wings a monstrous wall behind him. Nothing could have prepared me for his tone, vicious and scraping as he leans down to me. “I wonder—how does it feel? To eventually obey to my word to protect him?”

Something in me recoils at the sudden anger and bitterness, all tangled up in his voice. My heart restlessly flutters in my chest as I look back up at him.

“Why don’t you tell me how you want me to feel?” I whisper very quietly.

It’s the intensity of his gaze that triggers me. Changes me. Makes me aware again of how he just looked at me in that dress. Is looking at me right now.

We are all alone here.

I want to run from him. To hide.

Another part of me, though…

All I can suddenly think of is the way he looked at me last night.

The way he just kissed that woman. How she resembled me. And what… what would have happened if he had been my hunter?

Briefly, I’m afraid of my own mind. Of the way he can read my thoughts, sense the reaction of my body.

His eyes darken, shadows in them guttering in answer.

I quickly look back down to the ground. For the length of a heartbeat, there’s only thrumming silence.

Again, he holds out his hand to me. This time, I take it and he pulls me up to him.

“Hold on tight,” is all he says .

Then his strong arms wrap around me, clasping me against his hard body. Reflexively, I do the same, hugging his torso when he spreads his wings wide and shoots up in the air.

The world blurs, my senses swim with the rush, my panic, the height. Caryan’s sudden closeness. His scent, invading me. The feeling of his hard, powerful body against mine… the land beneath us so small, so foreign, so insignificant.

Harmless. A star-strewn paradise.

I might be hiding my face in his neck. He might have tightened his grip on me ever so slightly.

A moment later, there’s the feel of soft grass under my feet. I instinctively step away from Caryan, not daring to look at him. Too afraid that he can read my confusion all over me.

It’s Riven’s voice that makes me turn. Then my gaze falls onto four fauns kneeling on the lawn, their heads bowed, their hands tied behind their backs by Caryan’s magic. A shiver rakes through me. One of them is the chef. He must be one of the fauns who grabbed me. I didn’t look at their faces.

My heart lodges in my throat as I spot too clearly in their aura what they expect to happen next.

“Take her to your rooms, Riven,” Caryan orders, his voice cold again.

The chef raises his head then, his blue eyes shimmering bright like the day sky. “It was a grievous error, my sire. We never intended any harm. It was just merrymaking. It is equinox and part of the tradition, after all. Please, let us atone.”

I just stare as Riven gently takes my arm to steer me away.

Caryan says, “I made it very clear that the rules changed for the time being. I promised an execution to anyone who stepped out of line, so you will have it.”

Caryan turns away from me, from us. I can feel his deadly magic rise, forming like a spear aimed at the chef.

I tear free from Riven’s grip and throw myself over the faun, my eyes closed, my whole body locked up, bracing myself for imminent death.

For a moment, time itself seems to stop.

Then… nothing. Just the ragged breathing of the faun under me, matching my own.

I blink as a black wind of magic brushes around me, no longer carrying the promise of death.

When I dare to look at Caryan, I find his eyes wide and blazing, but… horrified.

The sentiment is replaced by a mask of Arctic ire. His voice is dead-cold when he orders, “Step away, Melody.”

I glance at Riven, only to find him staring at me wide-eyed, his aura a storm of shock and terror before I look back at Caryan. “No. Please. Please, spare them. It was a mistake. I’m unharmed. He… he’s my friend.” Tears well in my eyes, my hands still curled around the horns of the faun under me, his head at an awkward angle, pressing into my belly. I dare not move. I dare not let go of him either.

Caryan’s eyes are damning. Promising that I’m going to regret this.

I venture, “I offer you a bargain. Please, spare them, and I’ll do whatever thing you want me to do.” I say it without looking at Riven. I can’t. I know what I’d see in his face. Horror. Grief. Destruction. But I know I won’t regret it, not when it saves their lives.

I’m not sure Riven would— could —understand.

Caryan looks at me for a long while before he agrees, “Very well, a bargain it is. A thing called in anytime from now.”

I hiss as something hot and sharp seeps into the skin of my left wrist. When I glance down at it, I find a black tattoo there. Two wings, folded around two crescent moons, burned into my flesh. It thrums. Thrums with a part of my soul that has been forged into it and caged there.

I force myself to not let my terror show on my face when I eventually let go of the chef and straighten.

“Do not ever court my ire again,” Caryan says to the fauns.

The shackles around their hands loosen, but they stay kneeling, their heads bowed so low their horns touch the soft grass.

“You are dismissed. All of you,” Caryan says with a last, long glance at me before he spreads his wings, their span easily twice my size, and shoots up into the air.

***

“What have you done, my little one?” Riven asks once we are back in the enclosure of his chambers. A warm black and lilac fire jumps alive in the huge fireplace as soon as we enter, and I sink before it, my legs pulled up tight against my body.

Riven hasn’t spoken to me until now. We walked back in silence. I was numb, stealing glances at the strange tattoo.

I make myself meet his face at last, surprised to find only softness there. He holds out a tumbler to me, a liquid as black as elderberry sap in it. I take it, swallow and shudder against its taste, the way it fragrantly burns down my throat. A kind of distinct pain coming along with it, one that distracts from everything else.

I take another sip. “I know you’re disappointed,” I say finally, looking back at the beautiful flames, the black dancing with the violet.

“How could I be if you offered a bargain for such a noble reason?”

I frown up at him. “I’ll admit that you surprise me,” I say, quoting his words from a night that feels years back rather than mere weeks.

He gives me the gentlest hint of a smile. “Is that a good or a bad thing?”

I shrug before I get up. “A dangerous one, I guess.” My eyes come to rest on his. My voice falls quiet. “Caryan has never done that before, has he—execute people for tiny mistakes? I saw your aura. The surprise there. The horror,” I continue before he can answer me. I’d glimpsed it on that lawn, the moment Riven had been too distracted to keep up the veil.

Riven turns his head away, staring into the flames. “No, he has not.”

“It is me, right? ”

His jaw tenses but he doesn’t answer.

“He still thinks that whoever was behind that incident in my room will try again, doesn’t he?” I ask.

“They are going to try again,” he retorts darkly.

“Why?” Again he avoids my eyes. “What is so important that they want me? Please tell me, Riven.”

When his eyes slide back to mine, there is so much in them. “I already told you that I wish I could. Dearly so. But I cannot. You have to ask Caryan yourself, my little one.”

“Why?” I ask sharply, unwilling to accept his answer.

“You know why. My hands are tied,” he replies, his voice hoarse. Raw. Angry.

“He scared you, on that lawn. Caryan scared you,” I push. “Why?”

Riven lets out a long exhale before he runs his fingers through his hair. “It scared me what he might do to you. I’m used to sacrifices, but you would be the one I am not willing to make,” he says eventually. “Do you understand?”

I want to shake my head. No, I do not. Because no one will fucking tell me anything. But I swallow my anger and walk past him over to his huge bed.

If no one’s going to tell me anything, I’ll find out on my own.

I will go to Niavara tomorrow. Find whatever that book wants me to find.