Page 13 of The Wicked Lies of Habren Faire

y ffordd yn ?l

(THE WAY BACK)

I roll over and collide with the hard toe of a boot. “Must you keep so close to me?”

“We have a deal,” replies a voice that douses me with cold water. “And I always uphold my end of a bargain.”

I’m on my feet in seconds, backing away.

The soldier sleeps by the fire, heavy with exhaustion, and Neirin stands before me.

He wears a frilly, high-necked shirt beneath a deep-purple coat with the silver buttons—very different from his earlier attire.

His arms are crossed but his fine face is amused.

I throw my arms up in exasperation. “I know it didn’t take you all this time to pick another ridiculous shirt.”

He looks down at his clothes as if he’s forgotten, then laughs. “I thought you could use a good scare, Habren Faire, and to see what happens to human girls who go running off alone into the woods.”

My hair stands on end at the barely hidden warning in his words. He must have known where I was, seen the danger I was in—and still he chose to stay back until I was sufficiently chastened. I refuse to give him that, so I hold my chin up and meet his eyes with a glare.

“Don’t call me that.”

“Why?” Neirin takes an elegant step closer, wearing a smile Byron would have struggled to copy. “Fair you are, so ‘Faire’ I will call you.”

I think of my own face, the dissatisfaction it fills me with each morning in the glass. “I don’t take kindly to being mocked.”

“I wasn’t mocking you. You mustn’t assume everything is an insult.”

“In my experience most things are.” I look away from him. “How did you find me?”

“The trees saw your every step and whispered them back to me. You were easy to follow. Humans have a certain… smell.”

I scowl. “Like dirt, I’m sure.”

Neirin laughs softly. “You’re like your valley—all washing lines and baking bread. He, however”—he nods at the soldier, still sound asleep—“stinks of grave dust.”

We stare at the soldier in silence. A dream shakes the brittle branch of him, so close to falling from the tree.

“Leave him alone,” I say without looking at Neirin.

“I should be saying the same to you,” he bites back. “We have a deal, Habren.”

“He is helping me reach Llys-y-Ellyllon.”

“You really think he knows where it is?” Neirin laughs a little too loudly.

I grab Neirin’s arm and yank him to the riverbank that borders the clearing so that he won’t wake the soldier.

He laughs. “Is this what being manhandled is?”

“Behave.” I drop his arm and ball my fists. “You don’t need to accompany me to court. I’m perfectly fine without you.”

His smile is wry, knowing. “And what will you do if you get to court? You aren’t one of us; you can’t even see properly. If you had listened, I could have told you that was a hag calling out and not your sister.”

My whole body goes boneless for a moment, arms limp at my side.

“I don’t have a sister,” I say through the lump in my throat.

“I do so love watching you lie, but you clearly have a purpose far more urgent than winning a prize.”

I gape for a moment, then shake my head. “You said you lost me around the river! How could you possibly—? You can’t lie—”

“I wasn’t lying. I did lose you around the river.

” He beams at me, then flicks his wrist sardonically.

“After I listened in on you and the mermaid discussing your sister at length. Then you went running after a hag yelling about sisters. It also helps that, even before we met, I saw another human storming quite determinedly in the direction of Y Lle Tywyll.”

I lunge at him, but he sidesteps me adeptly. “So why didn’t you offer my sister this deal? Why did you follow me?”

He purses his lips, thinking, then shrugs. “Your sister has sight. She had no need for me, and she made that very clear before she went on her merry way.”

It strikes me like a slap. Not only has this foppish ellyll had the run of me, luring me into a deal to protect my sister, but he tried the same trick with Ceridwen, and Ceridwen had been smart enough to see through him.

Shame mingles with rage until I’m made mute.

I’m supposed to be the clever one—I was the one who listened to Dad’s stories—but at every turn my sister has bested me in Eu gwlad, while I didn’t even know we were competing.

“Strange that one of you has sight and the other doesn’t. Perhaps I’ve picked the unlucky sister,” Neirin says plainly, giving voice to every poisonous thought in my head.

Even Neirin, who calls me fair and acts as if I am fascinating, would still prefer Ceridwen.

A choked, angry noise escapes me. “Don’t compare me to my sister!”

The silence that falls is a thornbush and we are the insects left impaled by a shrike. We wait to see who will bleed out first.

“Then why do you wish to save her?” Neirin asks.

“Because she’s my sister.” There’s nothing else I can say.

“Fine.” He glances away from me. “I know the burden of being lesser.”

I stare at him in open surprise. I can’t imagine a teg, let alone an ellyll like Neirin, feeling inferior to anyone. I hope he’ll explain, but he doesn’t, of course.

“I’d sooner throw my lot in with a dying man than a sneaky one.”

“I’m not a man, Habren,” he reminds me, and it’s like I’ve missed a rung on a ladder.

No, he isn’t.

“The soldier is.” I shrug. “Or he was. I understand him.”

Neirin’s eyes narrow, burning dark as coals. “Your soldier is hardly a man. He’s an idea of a man. He hasn’t even been born yet; he is a thing that will be, and, still, he is already dead. Just like your sister—just like you.”

I open my mouth to argue but nothing comes out. It’s impossible to win against Neirin because there is one insurmountable difference between us: he is eternal, while I am tearing through dates on a calendar. He has infinite time, experience—he will always come out on top.

“Send him into Y Lle Tywyll.” Neirin steps closer, leans toward my ear. His breath caresses the shell of it and I jerk away. “Maybe the favor could fix… whatever’s wrong with him.”

“But my sister—”

“Does her right to the favor matter more than his?”

Again, my tongue ties itself into knots. I have no intention of letting Ceridwen go near enough to Y Lle Tywyll to claim that prize, so I have no answer to the question.

Neirin glances past me to the waning fire and his lip curls. “Never mind. Your soldier’s gone.”

I snap around, expecting another trick, but the patch of earth beside the smoldering fire is empty and only a dark, bloody stain remains. The soldier is nowhere. A shadow, lost to the night.

I curse and when I glance back at Neirin, he’s grinning.

“What did you do?” I look him up and down. “Bring him back.”

“Me?” He points a finger into his own chest, overstated offense on his face. “I couldn’t command him away. I don’t have his name and, while you may be new to magic, I assure you, it would take a far more powerful ellyll than I am to make a grown human vanish.”

I cross my arms, indignant. “You could’ve made him invisible or turned him into a bird. How am I to know what you could be hiding when you still haven’t give me sight?”

“What an imagination you have. Have you considered the soldier simply decided this wasn’t worth his trouble and slipped into the night?”

The simplest explanation rings truest, but I don’t want to accept it.

“And neither of us saw him leave?” I challenge.

Neirin lets out a frustrated sigh. “Habren, I was enjoying our argument far too much to notice where your mutt wandered off to.” He sweeps an arm toward the forest. “Leave, if you want. I’ll release you from our bargain.

Have fun navigating the woods blind and unarmed; you might make it to the palace as a ghost eventually. I wish you the very best of luck.”

“I don’t need luck,” I insist. “I just need sight.”

“If you want sight, you must stay with me,” Neirin replies as if I’m stupid. “Simple as that.”

A fat splash from the river interrupts us and a malformed, winged ball sails over our heads. It splats on the grass, making strange gasping sounds. I recognize those crossed eyes immediately—it’s Dwp.

I whirl around while Neirin stares at the flopping creature. Morgen’s eyes appear over the edge of the riverbank and she slams her webbed fingers onto the mud.

“Stop arguing! You’re wasting daylight.”

“It’s night.” I point to the sky.

She waves me off, drips of water flying everywhere. “Never mind! Fact is, I followed you and—”

“Hello, Morgen,” Neirin finally says.

Morgen stiffens. She slicks her hair back, turns and fixes him with a level gaze. “You’ve stolen my rescue party, Neirin.”

“I’m helping Habren find her way to Llys-y-Ellyllon ,” Neirin says. “Which is where you need her to go, too.”

“What has the human told you?” Morgen goes rigid.

“He overhead our conversation, he knows about my sister.” I sigh. “You two are acquainted?”

Neirin finds Morgen’s eyes and she recoils. “Morgen is sworn to my court, though her absence from our rivers and lakes has been felt of late—I did figure out why, eventually.”

A look passes between Neirin and Morgen that I can’t read. Neirin’s eyes glitter, a tricky smirk on his lips that would make me mad with anger if it were turned on me.

Morgen’s nostrils flare and her tail flaps, sending an arc of water into the air. “Why are we standing here arguing? You need to find her, she’s far from water. She must be at the palace already, preparing to head north. Whatever you’ve been doing has lost us an entire day.”

I look between my two terrible allies, throat tight with terror. “We’re running out of time?”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” Morgen says flippantly. “Without sight, time here is stranger for humans.”

I think of how I slipped between day and night in the space of a few steps, and how sleep claimed me out of nowhere when I was hardly tired.

Without sight I truly am running blind through the forest and, though I know I cannot help that, I still blame myself for the distance this failure has put between my sister and me.

I take a deep breath. “How much time have I lost?”

Morgen’s mouth is a grim line. “I don’t know.”

My fists clench at my side. Neirin lifts his eyes to mine and their corners crease as I scowl. Only he can give me sight and stop me from getting lost again. He knows as well as I do that he’s my only chance.

“You’ll get me there as soon as possible,” I tell him. “Summon the horse.”

“Of course, when we get back to the road—”

“To the road? Can’t you just… magic us there?”

“It’s not that far,” he snaps. “And whose fault is it that we left the road anyway?”

“Yours! You wouldn’t—still won’t—just give me sight, and without it I followed the hag’s trap and lost even more time,” I say quickly.

Neirin laughs. “You’re remarkable, you know that? I’ve never met such a pigheaded human. I can get us back to the road. We’ll reach it before dawn and be at the palace for sunrise. Once you’ve made the deal with the king, we head for Y Lle Tywyll.” He holds up a finger. “With one quick detour—”

“No more damned detours—”

“—to get you a weapon.” Neirin smiles coyly.

I bite the inside of my cheek, considering him. “I want a sword. And sight.”

“Sight, fine. But you”—he jabs a finger in my direction—“aren’t big enough to wield a sword.”

“Don’t point that at me.” I slap his finger away.

Morgen bangs a hand in the puddle that’s formed beneath her arm and we both jump apart. I hadn’t realized we’d stepped closer together, but our chests were near touching, my chin lifted to hold his eyes. Now we’ve put a valley between us.

“Stop bickering, catch up to your sister and…” She gives us a sweet smile. “Can you return Dwp to me?”

Both our heads snap around to the thing gasping and flapping on the grass. Neirin grimaces.

“Do I have to touch that?”

“No need,” I tell him. “This one’s on me.”

Without another word I sidle up to Dwp, hitch up my skirt and boot the ugly little bastard into the river.