Page 30 of The Wicked Lies of Habren Faire

yn fygythiad ac yn addewid

(A THREAT AND A PROMISE)

Neirin doesn’t follow when I sprint back to my room to grab my sword.

I find the clothes I got from Peg hanging on the wardrobe door in perfect condition. There’s a pang in my chest as I realize Neirin must have organized this, but I smother the sentiment as I change outfits quickly.

I race through the gardens toward the wall of trees that rings us in like a pen, but when I try to run into the forest, I can’t.

The barrier is there, but I can see it more clearly now.

It’s less a strange shimmer in the air and more a great cobweb encasing the entire grounds, spun with silken strands of magic.

I pound my fists against it, sending ripples of shimmering light up to the sky, but it doesn’t give as it did before.

“Habren.”

I whip around and press my back tight to a tree. Neirin stands ten steps away, his hands in his pockets. My chest heaves for breath, heart fluttering from more than the exertion. He’s unruffled. He hasn’t run after me. He didn’t need to: he merely wanted to be here, and so he is.

“Stay back.” I reach for my blade.

He obeys but offers a hand. “Come with me, you’re upset.”

“Is that an emotion you can understand?” I laugh mirthlessly. “Obviously, I’m upset—you’re pitting me against my sister, and you held me hostage here to give her a chance to die!”

“Or to win.” He takes a step forward. “That was my hope. That she would win, that I’d claim her favor, and you could stay with me. I’d only have sent you down there if I had to.”

I can almost ignore all of it, bar those five words: You could stay with me.

I wince at how easy I am to tempt. “You don’t care about Y Lle Tywyll. You don’t care about anything.”

“I hadn’t thought about it that much,” he admits blithely. “I’ve got my reasons, same as you.”

“You want the king’s favor,” I say, brimming with condescension.

Neirin scoffs. “Everyone wants favor from the king.”

“But why do you want his favor? You owe me one honest answer.”

He shakes his head slowly. “Don’t ask me that. You know I cannot lie—”

“Why, Neirin?” I stalk closer.

“—and you won’t like the truth—”

“Just tell me why!”

“Because he’s my brother!” Neirin’s admission explodes from his chest. “He had the hawk that flew away. I tried to go with it when I realized.”

I pause, my hand flexing at my side, painfully aware of the blade hanging in my grasp. “Realized what?”

His mouth opens and closes, struggling for words, for the truth. Neirin would lie now if he could, and it’s so plain to both of us that it’s embarrassing.

“That nothing will change as long as he is king.”

“You’ll use the favor to take his crown.” I advance toward him, shoulders squared. “Did I ever have a chance to ask for immortality? Did my sister? And how were you able to lie to me?”

“I wasn’t lying,” Neirin takes a step back. “Our pact binds you to my court; it’s my right to use your favor. I will ask for the crown, and once I am king I will give you whatever you desire. Eternal life, wealth, adventure—you would be generously compensated.”

“Is that what you told Beth as well? That, if she stayed with you, she’d get a prize?”

Neirin snorts. “I never promised Beth anything, and by the time I wanted her gone, it was too late. Now I’ve been stuck with her far too long, and there’s nothing nice behind her face. Don’t I deserve a bit of empathy for that?”

“You’re horrible.” I step closer. “Is the king irresponsible?”

Neirin blinks at me, his face laid bare by blank panic. “No.”

“Is he mercenary?”

“No.”

“Is he cruel?” I close the canyon between us.

His jaw tightens. “Not to most people.”

The implication sits heavy in the tiny gap left between our chests.

Neirin doesn’t care about this land or the people in it.

He doesn’t care about much outside of his own static life and the boredom that’s consumed him whole.

He’s restless, pacing the floor of his fine cage, trying to claw his way out.

“You don’t like how he tied you to this place,” I say. “But you were happy to trap me here to keep you company.”

Neirin’s eyes track behind me, to the walls of his own prison, which he’s filled with sycophants and empty distractions, and a dull hum fills my ears, then quickly vanishes. My hand shoots back and passes through the barrier.

I could run. He wants me to think that he’s better than his brother.

Neirin made me his weapon and turned me on people who are more like me than he’ll ever be. And I was foolish enough to be surprised: as if I didn’t see how he’d used Beth and then cast her aside, or how he let Mabyn bear my punishment for his trick and laughed all the while.

I thought I was smarter than the other girls that came before, but I’m not.

“They were disposable to you,” I say, voice thick with the threat of tears. “I—I’m disposable, my sister, too.”

“No, you’re not.” He steps closer, and I stagger back as his hand reaches out.

I shake my head, a mirthless laugh on my lips. “Oh, well done. You’ve talked to one peasant for a few days and decided I’m a real person. Does your brother deserve whatever you have planned for him?”

Neirin tugs at his hair, as if the answer sits at the roots. Lying is a gift I did not appreciate enough, not until this moment. He throws his hands up again and surges toward me.

“Damn you. You know the answer, Habren!” he yells.

“No, he is a fine king to all bar me, and it’s been many years, and I can’t let that go.

I am so bored! It’s festered.” He hammers a fist against his chest. “The years of being walked over, of bowing and scraping to prove I deserve the glorified cottage to which he bound me so I could be no threat to him, of never being able to stray too far, and of nothing changing, nothing getting better, ever. One cannot live when things are always the same—you of all people understand that.”

His appeal sours on my tongue. I twitch and frown at him, just barely biting back furious tears.

“And yet you would force me into a cage to keep you company.”

“It’s different now.” He reaches for my hand.

“Now?” I back away. “Why, Neirin? I’m still the same girl you’ve tricked from the beginning.”

Neirin’s lips part, but no sound comes out, and the silence he creates develops a life of its own. It grows until it fills the space inside the barrier, ensnaring us in gnarled roots and tight branches that neither of us can break.

We don’t need to. The answer has been there all along.

Neirin wants me. Wants me to stay, wants me to entertain him, wants someone to talk to who’ll really talk back. He wants to keep me by his side.

I clamp down on the urge to laugh or punch the air, because of course the first boy ever to like me is just as bad as I am. Possibly even worse.

He’s caught me in a perfect portrait, in a pose I don’t remember choosing but have become stuck in. I hate it. But for the first time, I see him just as clearly as he sees me. If he had his way, we would be here in his manor, bickering and laughing at his court, fixed in our portrait, forever.

I thought that if someone ever looked at me and found something to like, that I would fall in love. But I always assumed I’d have had the time to become the person I am meant to be by then. If Neirin has his way, things will change for him, but this is all I will ever be.

I want to change. I don’t want to be forever the angry, jealous girl who stole her sister’s ring. I want to be so much more than that.

“How long have you known my sister?”

When I finally look at him, he’s seething. His head is lowered, and his coal-dark eyes burn like embers.

“Five of your years,” he finally admits.

Ceridwen was fifteen when she first came here, younger than I am now.

My eyes squeeze shut. “You were the trickster Morgen spoke of.”

He stills. “Pardon?”

“She didn’t name you,” I say, quickly coming to Morgen’s defense. “But if she’s of your court, I imagine she can’t, can she.”

Neirin says nothing, only holds my gaze with a ferocity that should make me shrink away. But my fury matches his own. Maybe surpasses it twice over. Then, his lips turn up, and he gives a slow, sardonic clap.

My fury is definitely double his.

“Well done, Habren Faire,” he says. “Yes, your sister made the same deal with me months ago. But she didn’t need true sight—unlike you.

I’d come to the forest’s edge that day to meet her, but she left without me.

She got all the information she needed and then broke our deal, which is when you found me.

She never gave me her name. She always went by another.

You’re not the only liar in your family. So I took precautions with you.”

Pride in my sister burns in my chest. “Why didn’t Morgen tell me that my sister knew you?”

Neirin shrugs. “Morgen’s tithe to the court stayed her tongue.

Your sister tricked both of us, I think.

She pretended to bargain with me, and kept Morgen in the dark so I couldn’t get the truth from her.

And then I found you, running through the forest, begging for everyone to look your way, and I thought I could let her try first, and then just… try again.”

The urge to tear the skin from his face hits me like a train. I can hardly move, can hardly breathe.

“I miscalculated,” he adds quickly, fixing me with an imploring gaze.

“I thought you hated her. You act like you hate her, as though she’s a great burden.

I kept you here to keep you safe. Honestly, I was barely thinking about your sister when you were injured at the bell tower. She didn’t occur to me in that moment.”

I wish I had an answer for him, but his fickle wants and desires are opaque to me. I shake my head, disbelieving. “Is that supposed to be a kindness? You let my sister go off to Y Lle Tywyll alone and unarmed.”

Neirin hesitates, then his whole body sags. “You and your sister are not what I expected. You aren’t stupid like other humans. I understand that now.”

“You understand?” I shove his shoulders, and he stumbles back, grasping a nearby tree to right himself. “You don’t understand anything! We aren’t like you and your brother. There is no world where I can win without her, no life I could live without her being a part of it.”

I keep hitting Neirin with balled fists, pummeling his arm as he doubles over. What shocks me most is that he doesn’t fight back. He lets me scream and kick and rage at him, and he doesn’t say a word.

When I tire myself out, he quietly steps away, unharmed, and leaves me heaving for breath. I brace my hands on my hips, air burning my lungs and my throat raw from shouting. He watches me, his head hanging a little lower than I’m used to, and he steps forward with one hand outstretched.

“It’s different now,” he repeats. “Now that I—”

“Don’t bother.” I back away. “You can’t lie, Neirin, but your idea of the truth is twisted beyond understanding anyway.”

“There’s more to it than that, and you know it.”

For all his charm and the fireworks he lights in my chest, Neirin is merely John Branshaw dressed up like a fairy prince—and he’s happy to use me just the same.

“I have to save my sister,” I snap at him.

“We have a deal.”

“I lied!” I throw my arms wide. “Isn’t it wonderful? I can say whatever I want and mean nothing of it.”

“I know you.” He jabs a finger in my direction. “You weren’t lying—”

“I just needed a guide—”

“You trusted me for a moment—”

“For a moment, yes! Until you locked me up in your big house, even after everything I told you. You’re no better than your brother. Now get your finger out of my face!”

Neirin points at me again. “You dare compare me to my brother?”

“Get your finger out of my face before I cut it off!”

“You’ll come crawling out of Y Lle Tywyll as some mindless thing, banging on the wall to my manor without even knowing why,” he says hoarsely, like he’s exhausted with me.

I go almost blind with fury at his lack of faith. He sounds just like everyone else who’s ever doubted me, everyone who’s treated me as less than a person. My rage is so strong it’s almost choking me, and I know that if I open my mouth no sense will come out.

Neirin takes my silence as acceptance and, with one last joust of his finger, he says, “Or you’ll die in there, like your sister probably has.”

All I see is the finger pointed in my face.

My blade slices through the air and takes his finger with it.

The iron practically melts through him; I can smell his flesh cooking. Neirin’s shriek of pain pierces me, right to my core, and we both stagger back in empty astonishment.

I’m not a violent person. At least, I try to believe that I’m not—that I couldn’t be—but the still-twitching digit lying on the grass between myself and the fairy prince is damning evidence. I lied and cheated my way here; I’ve stolen, I’ve marred flesh; and now I’ve taken a finger in the process.

I’ve loved Eu gwlad all my life, believed even when I couldn’t see it—but it was never meant for me. I’m not Habren Faire, despite Neirin’s encouragement and how much I want to pretend. I’m only Sabrina Parry, and this was never meant to be my story.

We both lunge for the severed finger, but Neirin is a dissolute royal in pain, and I’m fast and hardened and burning with regret. I shove it in my pocket and dash into the night, leaving Neirin screaming behind me.