Page 31

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

T he Other Place was loud. And hot. And smelled like a wet dog.

And Cassandra didn’t want to fucking be here.

She’d protested during the entire walk, a blocks-long torture she could barely power her legs through. By block five, Mireille had stop responding to Cassandra’s whining. Had turned around and given Cassandra an icy stare that promised death if she didn’t shut up. So Cassandra just grumbled her protests in silence.

Ronin hadn’t been kidding about Mireille being even more terrifying than he was.

Cassandra didn’t want to be this person. She’d never been this person. She hated the whiny, mewling, lazy brat she’d become since she’d seen that vision of Tristan and Ione kissing. Even just thinking their names in the same sentence tore a blazing hole through her chest.

She never thought she’d let any man—or male—affect her like this. She’d seen what had happened to her mother after her father’s death, how Mama had stopped living. In order to avoid the same fate, Cassandra had vowed to never get involved with anyone.

But then, like the fucking fool she was, she’d let Tristan creep into her heart with his goodness and bravery. His compassion and intelligence. Not to mention his wicked smirks and playful ribbing. His addicting lips and tempting body. And those beautiful wings.

She’d been a goner since the night she’d stolen his memory at the Pagonis Manor. Back when she thought he was nothing more than a stupidly handsome Vestian Guard.

She should’ve known the minute she’d discovered he was Fae royalty that she could never hope to keep him.

Then maybe she wouldn’t be stuck here in this foul, backwards city with these useless wings on her back less than three weeks away from a literal fight for her life.

Ronin and Mireille had let Cassandra wallow for a few days. Long, endless hours crying in bed, barely getting up to drink tea or broth or to relieve herself. They hadn’t pushed, despite her appeal creeping closer.

But by this morning, their patience had run out. Ronin had barreled into Cassandra’s bedroom, torn her from her sweat-soaked sheets, and thrown her into the bathroom, growling at her to shower and get dressed. She’d barely finished washing her wings when Mireille had dragged her out of the apartment and marched her here to the tavern.

Mireille grabbed a table in a corner, then planted Cassandra in a creaky chair while she went to the counter. She came back with two mugs of beer and two bowls of some kind of creamy stew that made Cassandra’s mouth water.

Okay, fine, she could admit she was hungry.

She dug her spoon into the stew, surveying the patrons of The Other Place. Not even that silly name could make her chuckle today.

There were no Brethren present. Instead, the tavern was filled with a drowsy mixture of the city’s regular citizens wearing dull clothes and tired frowns.

Mireille sipped at her frothy mug, then licked the foam from her lip as Cassandra shoveled in mouthfuls of stew.

It tasted incredible. Though she thought she’d better slow down before she gave herself a stomachache. She’d barely eaten anything these past four days. Could Fae get stomachaches?

She set down her spoon. “Why did you bring me here?”

“So it can do something other than cry or whinge,” Mireille said, lip curling as she placed her mug down on the sticky table. Her silver eyes twinkled with amusement, and if Cassandra wasn’t mistaken, maybe even a hint of relief. “Because you’re on a deadline. And you’d been given the customary amount of bereavement time. Four days. No more, no less.”

Cassandra snorted. “Who made that rule?”

Mireille braced her forearms on the table, flames flashing through her narrowed silver eyes. “I did.”

Definitely more terrifying than Ronin.

Mireille swirled her spoon through her own stew. “What happened the other night? When you touched me?”

Cassandra darted a wary glance toward the other patrons.

Mireille waved her off. “Don’t worry about them.”

“I…” Cassandra swallowed. “I’m not sure how I did it. It’s like I was able to see into your memories without pulling them. It happened once before. At the intake tower during sentencing. I saw one of the Vicereine’s memories when I touched her, but?—”

“Do you know what triggered it? You’ve touched Ronin and I plenty of times before and it’s never happened, right?”

“Right,” Cassandra admitted. “I don’t know. Both times, I was feeling out of control and overwhelmed.”

“Do you think you could do it again?”

“Not really capable of feeling anything at the moment.” Cassandra lifted her shoulder, non-committal.

“What did you see? In my memories?”

“I saw myself.”

Mireille’s poker face betrayed her with a slow blink.

“And my father,” Cassandra continued. “He was glowing. So was the man standing next to you. When you looked at him, I… I think I jumped into his mind. His present mind. I could tell it wasn’t a memory. He was…in a cabin somewhere. Maybe on the continent? It… I don’t know how to explain it, but it didn’t feel real.”

Mireille cocked her head, considering, then laid her hands upon the table, and speared Cassandra with an important look. “That was my father. In the Halfway. His name was Gareth Fortin.”

A bolt of icy hot adrenaline tingled through Cassandra’s limbs, and a multi-faceted voice stole through her mind. The one she’d heard during that vision she’d had when she’d been trying to un-obliviate her mother.

Find her .

At the time, Cassandra had thought the voice was telling her to find Adelphinae, the Fallen Goddess. Perhaps the voice meant a very different her .

Mireille continued. “I never knew him in life. Our first meeting was when he showed me that vision of you as a child with your own father. He said I was destined to cross paths with you. That the Goddess had called upon me to help you.”

Cassandra’s feathers shivered. “Help me what?”

“Live,” Mireille said with a finality that echoed through worlds. “He told me that you are our only hope for salvation.”

Cassandra swallowed, her stew a lump in her stomach. If she had thought she couldn’t bear the weight of her burdens before…

But getting out of Mireille’s shop and into the fresh air, moving her body more than a few inches, even getting some food into her system… It had all helped. A bit. She wouldn’t go so far as to say that she felt better , but she did at least feel…not worse. Even with the terrible importance of what Mireille had just shared.

“If your father was a Fortin,” Cassandra began, “that means?—”

“I’m half-human.” Mireille said theatrically, and the entire tavern came to a screeching halt, utensils dropped, chairs turning.

Mireille smiled, summoning the closest group, who joined Cassandra’s table, mugs in hand.

And Cassandra spent the rest of the afternoon learning the sad history of Tartarus’s mixed heritage prisoners.

“Most of us were locked up during or just after the war,” said Silas, the handsome, ochre-skinned Windrider Cassandra recognized from Harvest Night. “But I’d been fortunate enough to evade that fate for centuries. Penelope and I were well-hidden, I thought. Well past the danger.”

He ran a finger through the foam trailing down his mug as a sad smile ghosted over his lips.

“We weren’t, of course. A squadron of Imperial soldiers arrived at our farm, and I thank the Creator every day that my wife wasn’t there to see them haul me away.” He took a sip of his beer. “She’d gone to visit her Fae parents—she was full-blooded—and I was supposed to join her the next day to share the good news. We’d just found out she was pregnant with our first.” A tear plunked onto the tabletop. “And only.”

Cassandra blinked back her own tears as Mireille shifted in her seat.

The Other Place was nearly empty now, the flaming sconces the only source of light since dusk had fallen.

Silas was the last patron Mireille had conscripted to…what, exactly? Talk some sense into Cassandra? Prove that everyone had their own trauma to work through? Appeal to her martyr complex?

Damn the sly, copper-haired she-wolf, it was working.

Silas tipped his moss-green eyes up to Cassandra’s. “Eighty years and it never gets any easier. People might say ‘well, this prison isn’t so bad. There’s no manual labor. There’s access to resources.’ But the Koenig and his pure-blooded Brethren keep the best of Vestan’s gifts for themselves. And Wormwood guarantees that only we mixed-species Fae ever get selected as Harvest Night sacrifices. It’s the same fucking system of power perpetuating itself, whether on the Ethyrian continent or trapped beyond the Tartaran mists. What’s the point of authority if there’s no one to rule?” He raked a hand across his stubbled chin. “I’ve survived all that, made my peace with it even, and still the worst pain is never having known my child.”

He drained the last of his ale and leaned back in his chair.

Cassandra sat back in her own, shell-shocked by all the heartbreaking stories. No one in the colonies had ever spoken of the atrocities that Leonin Erabis and his Empire had committed against Fae with human heritage. Parents and children torn apart, spouses separated, even entire families locked away to rot.

And all because they had the potential to be Anointed by Adelphinae. To gain the long-dead elemental magics the Empire viewed as a threat.

“Thank you, Silas,” Mireille said. “I know it’s not easy to talk about.”

“If any of what I said helps you win your appeal,” he said to Cassandra, “I’m happy to help.”

He stood and she shook his roughly callused hand before he exited The Other Place, leaving Mireille and Cassandra alone.

Mireille pushed up out of her seat. “We should get going. Only fifteen days left until your appeal. We really need to get back to training tomorrow.”

Cassandra stayed in her seat. “Where are all the humans?”

Mireille pressed her lips together.

“I know there must be some,” Cassandra insisted. “The Empire sends humans here. Surely a few of them must’ve survived the mists over the years.”

Again, Mireille kept silent.

“Tell me.” Cassandra glanced up. “Please.”

Mireille released a heavy sigh, then turned for the door.

“I might as well just show you.”

The first thing Cassandra noticed was the smell.

It whipped her in the face as soon as Mireille opened the door to the squat building shoved up against the city wall.

Human excrement. Unwashed bodies. Rot and infection. Scents she recognized from Thalenn’s slums.

But beneath those familiar scents was something sickly sweet and putrid.

Despair.

So thick she almost choked on it.

She slammed a hand over her nose and nearly dropped the basket of apples she’d insisted they pick up on their way here.

Until this very moment, she’d forgotten she could scent human emotions.

Her sinuses burned with angry tears.

All was quiet beyond the door. Quieter than she’d anticipated. But her new Fae hearing caught the subtle shift of bodies, the soft hiccup of tears, the slow, rattling breaths.

Cassandra made to step over the threshold, but Mireille grabbed her upper arm. “Are you sure you want to see this?”

“I’m sure,” she said, her voice tight with restrained fury as she stepped through the door and her eyes adjusted to the darkness.

Iron-barred cells, barely six feet deep, lined the narrow enclosure and the only light came from two glass oil lamps bracketing the door. There weren’t many cells, maybe thirty in total, fifteen along each wall.

Mireille hung back as Cassandra approached the first and peered inside. Its occupants—four human women with barely enough room to lie on the floor without piling on top of each other—shrank back.

“It’s okay,” she said softly, crouching down. “I’m not going to hurt you. I brought… I brought you some apples.”

Her throat closed and she could barely get a breath down. Apples? She’d brought these poor souls apples . When they clearly needed so very much more.

A level of fury she hadn’t felt since her sentencing rose, a fiery knot unfurling in her stomach and glowing incandescent.

Pale, thin fingers curled around the bar, and a young woman who didn’t look a day over twenty-five blinked at Cassandra. Her brown hair fell in matted clumps and purple bruises marred what was likely once a very pretty face.

But when Cassandra offered her an apple, she shook her head.

“The others,” the woman croaked. “Give them to the others in the back cells. They don’t… They are not called upon as often as we are. They rarely get a chance to eat.”

Cassandra laid her own hand over the woman’s fingers. “I am going to end this place. And free you. I swear it.”

The woman grimaced, then pulled her hand away and burrowed back under the ripped, threadbare blankets with her cellmates.

Cassandra strung the basket over her forearm and walked down the aisle toward the darker cells in the back.

Each step added another brick to the pile on her chest. There were so many humans. Men and women—but praise Anaemos, no children—growing older and feebler the further back she traveled.

When she reached the end of the aisle, it was so dark she could barely see—even with her Fae eyesight—and the scent of despair was far more concentrated.

She crouched before the final cell, and tapped her fingers on the bars.

An old woman with sunken gray cheeks and wisps of white hair creaked out from underneath a blanket.

Cassandra didn’t say a word—if she opened her mouth, she was sure she’d burst into body-wracking sobs. She held out an apple.

The old woman reached for it with wobbly fingers and wide, shining eyes, her tongue rolling over her cracked lips.

“It’s okay,” Cassandra whispered. “I’m not going to hurt you. I’m here to help.”

The woman’s features twisted into a grotesque mask, and she slapped the apple from Cassandra’s hand. It went bouncing down the center aisle before rolling into another cell.

“I don’t need your charity, do-gooder,” the old woman rasped in a voice that sounded like it hadn’t been used in decades. “You preening Fae come down here with your food and your potions, acting like you’re kinder than the ones who did this to us. The ones who locked us up in the first place. And why? So you can feel better about yourself?”

Cassandra scrambled back from the bars as the woman lunged for her, much quicker than Cassandra would have expected.

The woman barked out a breathless laugh. “Fuck back off. And quit peddlin’ your cruel hope.”

Oily shame coated Cassandra’s tongue as she saw herself as the woman saw her. The two feathered wings sprouting from her back. The sharp beauty of her ethereal features. The small fangs that, even now, pressed into her bottom lip.

She shuffled away from the cell, then emptied the basket into the next before fleeing down the hallway. She would come back here. Every day. Multiple times a day, if necessary, to bring these humans food, water, healing potions, whatever she could.

At least until she ended the fucking male who’d corralled them here in the first place.

Mireille materialized from the darkness. “They call it the Kennel.”

“This is horrific,” Cassandra said. “And so much worse than I could have imagined.”

Mireille’s head dipped. “I know. I visit as often as possible. So do many of the Fae you met in The Other Place today. A few decades back, two of them petitioned the Koenig to let the humans go, stop treating them like livestock.”

“Livestock is treated better than this,” Cassandra scoffed. “What happened to the petitioners?”

“What do you think?” Mireille said, her face a mask of cold fury. “No one has asked since. The Brethren come down to borrow them sometimes. For feedings, and—” Mireille shook her head, as if shaking away some terrible vision. Cassandra didn’t want to know.

“This could have been me,” Cassandra whispered. “If I hadn’t… If Tristan hadn’t…” Rage hardened her voice. “This could have been me.”

Mireille did nothing but nod. What else was there to say?

“We cannot allow this to continue,” Cassandra said fiercely. “Not here. Not anywhere .”

Mireille placed her hands on Cassandra’s shoulders. They were about the same height, Mireille slightly taller. Their faces were in line as Mireille’s silver gaze bore into hers, reflecting the same fierce determination.

“We won’t,” she vowed. “But the only way to ensure that is to win your appeal and get out of here.”

Cassandra nodded, gripping Mireille’s forearms.

“They’re my people, too,” Mireille whispered.

Cassandra cocked her head. “What was he like? Your father?”

Even in the dim light, Cassandra could see the love and pride that glowed in Mireille’s eyes. “I imagine he was very like you . Kind. Brave. Righteous. I wish…I wish I’d gotten to know him in life rather than only in death.”

Cassandra squeezed Mireille’s forearms tighter. “He regrets it, you know.” Mireille flinched, understanding that Cassandra now spoke of a different he . “It was painfully apparent while he told us your history. Obvious that he still?—”

“Don’t say it,” Mireille breathed out. “It doesn’t matter anymore. And even if he did, it would be nothing but a distraction in here. We need to focus on surviving the appeal. Everything else is extraneous.”

High Gods , Cassandra wanted to meddle. Wanted to mediate. Wanted to fix what was broken between Mireille and Ronin. Especially since she couldn’t fix her own broken heart.

Mireille grabbed Cassandra’s hand and pulled her toward the exit. “Come on. You need sleep.”

Cassandra glanced over her shoulder, wishing she had more time, more food, more supplies.

Mireille squeezed Cassandra’s hand as she nudged her through the door, her smile a thing of delicious savagery.

“Training resumes in earnest bright and early tomorrow morning.”