Page 29 of Prisoner of Darkness and Dreams (Fated to the Sun and Stars #3)

Morgana

W e’re just an afternoon’s travel from Starfall when I sense Etusca watching me again.

She’s left me alone since our first meeting at the Miravow’s edge, but now I sense that she’s looking for the right moment to approach.

I steel myself, bracing for whatever she’ll say—still not sure how I’ll respond.

“I have a question,” she says, her expression determined as she pulls her horse up beside mine.

“Can’t you ask one of the others?” I blurt out, a little panicked. But I wince internally afterward. I didn’t mean for my tone to sound so harsh. It’s difficult, staying calm and indifferent, when there’s so much hurt between us.

“No,” she says. “And I already tried to answer it for myself. In fact, I’ve been racking my brains, trying to work it out.”

Her words catch me off guard enough that I turn to look at her.

“You’re a reasonable person,” she says. “And I know I raised you to be fair, so I can’t for the life of me understand why the prince gets your forgiveness, but I don’t.”

I gape at her. The begging and meekness she displayed back in Filusia are long gone. There’s a resolve in her face now, her chin lifted in challenge.

“That’s different,” I say, instantly defensive .

“It is different,” she agrees. “For one, you’ve known me much longer than you have him.

Even if you can’t ever forgive me for lying to you, you know I care about you, and you have at least some reason to believe I truly thought what I did was for the best. But he lied to you too.

” She nods at Leon, riding a few horses ahead of us.

“ He betrayed your trust too. And yet I’ve seen how you are with him.

There’s no ill feeling between you now.”

“His betrayal wouldn’t have been possible if it wasn’t for you,” I point out, even if I know it’s beside the point.

Etusca looks regretful, but she doesn’t back down.

“I believed him when he sent me a message saying he wanted to keep you safe, and I thought that with the Temple aware of your celestial powers, Filusia would be the safest place for you. It looks like you eventually came around to that idea too,” she says, and something in me rebels at the knowing look in her eyes.

“I gained a lot from my time in Filusia,” I admit.

“But none of that changes that going there should have been my decision. You and Leon both went behind my back and took my choices away. But the difference between the two of you is that while Leon might’ve lied to me, he never pretended to be anything other than what he was.

I knew all along that he was dangerous, and that he’d do anything to get what he wanted.

It shouldn’t have surprised me that he’d play dirty to protect the people he loved. But you ?—”

I swallow, a sudden wave of emotion swelling in my chest.

“You were supposed to be someone I could trust. You nurtured me. Brought me up. You were the closest thing to a mother I ever had.”

Etusca is silent as the words spill out of me, but her eyes shine with tears.

“Your motives might have been purer than his, but you can’t excuse yourself by saying it’s alright that you deceived me and betrayed me because you wanted to keep me safe.

Not when we both know how badly you failed at that.

If you’d been more present, more awake to what was going on, you would’ve seen how being locked away in that manor was destroying me.

You would’ve known how much danger I was in from the guards. ”

“And I’ll never forgive myself for not realizing that, Morgana,” Etusca says, a tremor in her voice as she holds back her tears. “I should have been stronger, no matter how many years I’d been away from the Miravow. I should have done more to protect you, to shield you from all that ugliness. ”

“You should have helped me be strong enough to face it. Instead, you locked away my power and let me think I was weak. Sickly. Unable to protect myself. That’s the difference between Leon and you.

Leon’s never been afraid to help me find my power.

He lied to me, but when you two made the pact to take me to Filusia, you were just focused on keeping me safe and hiding me away.

He took me to the Lyceum so I could learn how to use my magic and become stronger. ”

I look ahead at the broad frame of the man I love riding through the trees. I think about the way he opened up to me at the Lyceum, slowly sharing his secrets. About how he swore to help me kill my aunt, even before we knew whether I could heal his brother. Even when his grandfather forbade it.

“And since then, he’s never gone back on one of his promises to me, no matter what it might cost him,” I finish.

When I look into Etusca’s eyes, I wonder if she’ll ever be able to see me as anything other than the fragile, lonely child I once was. There was nothing about that girl that seemed suited to be a queen, but when Leon looks at me, all the wildest possibilities feel within reach for me.

Etusca sighs and lightly dabs at her eyes with her sleeve, looking off into the distance of the forest. “I think in the beginning I really did want you to be strong—within certain limitations, of course. I didn’t see why you couldn’t grow up to be a happy, healthy woman, if we just kept an eye on your magic.

I suppose I didn’t really consider how it would affect you to grow up believing you had no magic at all. ”

“Or how it would feel to grow up cut off from the rest of the world?” I add pointedly. “No family, barely any companionship—always isolated and alone? Did that seem like a recipe for a happy, healthy life, with or without sadistic guards?”

Etusca’s lips tremble. “No,” she admits.

“It doesn’t. I hated to see your unhappiness.

But whenever I heard from your parents, they always remained firm in their belief that it was the only way.

I thought that maybe, with time, I could change their minds, or that they planned to find a way to let you be free eventually, but as the years went by, my body started to fail me.

” She stops abruptly, her expression distant with the memory.

“What’s it like?” I ask, wanting to understand. “How does it feel, being a dryad and being separated from this place? ”

She thinks. “It’s hard to say. Honestly, that feeling is so far away now I’m here again. But I know my brain was in a constant fog, like I was looking at everything underwater. And the pain…my very bones ached. Every day, it felt as if a fresh splinter had worked its way into my heart.”

She shudders, her green complexion a little paler as she recalls it.

“It was certainly bad enough to make me blind to the danger you were in. Even though you were the person I cared about most in the world, my dear, I found it impossible to focus on anything except keeping your existence and your magic a secret—that was all I could manage.”

When I think back to those days and the faded, ghostly person Etusca was by the end, the contrast with her now is startling.

I’d found it painful too, knowing she couldn’t leave the manor because of me.

Can I really blame her for not having the strength to fight for my sake?

Even when Leon kidnapped me from the palace, she didn’t go home.

Her worry for me was so strong that she waited in Trova until we were reunited.

Even though every day she stayed away from Agathyre must’ve cost her.

I’ll never agree with what she did to me—but at the same time, I’ve never doubted that she loves me. During all those years spent lying to me, Etusca was in a cage too. Now we’re both free, hasn’t she been punished enough?

“I’m glad you came back to Agathyre when I told you to,” I say.

Etusca’s face is anxious, clearly wondering where I’m going with this.

“It means you could find yourself again. I can’t forgive the woman who let me down at Gallawing, because she’s not here anymore.

The girl who was her charge doesn’t really exist anymore either. Maybe both of us can start fresh.”

I offer her a small smile, and she returns it.

“Thank you,” she says. “That’s all I hoped for when you sent your message. But it’s not the only reason I agreed to help, of course. In fact, there’s something?—”

She’s interrupted by a series of yaps and whines from Dots, who comes running back down the line of riders. He circles my horse, his protests getting louder, making my horse shift from one hoof to another skittishly.

“There’s something coming this way.” Leon’s warning is calm and measured, but I can sense his alarm. Dots keeps darting into the forest and then back to us, as if trying to herd the horses into the trees .

“Dismount and get off the trail,” Leon instructs. The abruptness in his tone means none of us hesitate. He rides up beside me and swings down off his horse to help me lead mine in between the trees. All the while, he’s monitoring over his shoulder, back the way we were heading.

I hear it then: the rustle and snap of something big moving through the Miravow.

Etusca gasps and snatches up a plant from nearby, shredding the leaves between her fingers.

As we move deeper into the undergrowth, she frantically scatters the pieces of plant in her wake, whispering a prayer under her breath in Agathyrian.

I only catch one line—something about protecting us from the touch of death.

We hit a patch of large, dense ferns, their fronds big enough for us to crouch down and be mostly screened from sight. The horses won’t lie down, too spooked by the rustling behind us that’s only getting louder, so the fae settle for hitching them to a tree a few yards away.

“Hurry,” Etusca murmurs, her whole body rigid as she beckons them back to the cover of the undergrowth.

Leon crouches down beside me, and I feel the heat radiating from his thigh as it brushes against mine.

I focus on that rather than my fear. Whatever’s out there, it’s enough to make a dryad like Etusca invoke her most powerful prayers.

They believe in the cycle of life—that everything has a beginning and an end.

She wouldn’t ask the goddess Viscalis to ward off death unless it’s a dark, unnatural force approaching us from the trees.

We huddle in silence, watching the trail ahead, until the light shining through the trees darkens.

Something huge moves along the path, heralded by the snapping of twigs and a dry clatter, like chattering teeth or the wind through loose window shutters.

There’s a smell too, the sweet scent of decaying fruit, and underneath it something more earthy and unsettling.

The creature moves along the trail. From here, I can only make out bits of it between the trunks—enough to know it’s not made of flesh.

At least, not entirely. I catch a flash of pale bone, sickly moss, and the dark, uneven texture of rotten wood.

It seems neither alive nor fully dead, but some poor soul trapped between the two.

Leon’s hand finds mine, and he loosens the fingers digging into my palm as the thing shambles down the trail, out of sight .

Eventually, the rustling fades and the air clears of its stench. Etusca rises from the ferns, signaling it’s safe, but her expression is still tense and strained.

“What was that?” Mal asks, brushing leaves off his tunic.

“A mortifus,” Etusca says. “The magic in this forest is extraordinarily powerful—and that’s not always a good thing.

If a creature here has a bad death, killed without the proper rituals, the Miravow’s enchantments won’t let it truly die, and the spirit of the dead thing lingers on in the husk of its body. ”

“That’s horrible,” Tira says.

“It’s rare,” Etusca stresses. “Agathyrians are careful to respect the creatures of the forest, even when we hunt, but it happens.”

“Clearly,” Alastor says, staring off down the trail in the direction the mortifus went.

We move on, more quietly than before, all shaken up by our brush with the undead.

I’m glad when the trees start to taper out and the sunlight brightens through the thinning canopy.

The cushioned forest floor gives way to short grass and there, in the distance, the shape of towers rises up from above the tree line.

Starfall.

Our horses pick up the pace, sensing our excitement at being within sight of civilization again.

A low whine stops me short, and I turn to see Dots pacing at the edge of the forest. His tails are wagging, his tongue lolling with easy energy. He doesn’t seem to sense any danger, but he’s clearly trying to convey something. Tira stops too, watching him.

“What is it?” she asks the animal, dismounting. I follow suit, returning to where the korigos waits by the trees.

“I don’t think anything’s wrong,” I say. “This is just as far as he goes.”

Tira lets out a gasp of dismay as she understands what I’m saying.

“He’s staying,” she says, voice flat. I realize this loss, after everything, is hitting harder than she expected .

“This is where he belongs,” I say, reaching out toward the korigos. Dots steps forward and nuzzles my palm, and I’m hit with a wave of sadness myself. We’ve come a long way since we were both locked away in Respen’s palace.

“You know, when you were the Temple’s prisoner, some mornings he was the only thing that got me out of bed,” Tira says. “He’d jump on me and rip at the blankets until I was forced to get up or face trying to explain the damage to Heda.”

I laugh. “He’s been a good friend to us both.”

“But now it’s time for him to go home,” Tira says. There’s a wistful note in her voice, and I can guess the questions she’s asking herself. When will we get to go home? Where even is home, anymore?

I crouch down, looking into Dots’s dark, clever eyes.

“Thank you for everything,” I say. “We couldn’t have made it without you.”

I’m not just talking about our journey through the Miravow. Without Dots, I wouldn’t have known how to heal Fairon or fight the aisthekis, and the others might’ve never succeeded in rescuing me from Qimorna.

The korigos nudges me with his nose, gives Tira’s palm a lick, and then turns and trots into the forest. He doesn’t look back, doesn’t turn and bound toward us, yipping. Wherever he’s going, he doesn’t want us to follow.