The list of malformed words was still clutched in his hand. “I wonder if your family realizes it,” he murmured. “That everything you’ve done wasn’t about that promise to your mother, or for your sake, but for theirs.” I said nothing, not trusting my voice to keep my shame hidden. “I know—I know that when I said it earlier, it didn’t come out well, but I could help you write—”
“Leave me alone,” I said. I was almost through the door when I ran into someone—into him. I stumbled back a step. I’d forgotten how fast he was.
“I’m not insulting you.” His quiet voice made it all the worse.
“I don’t need your help.”
“Clearly not,” he said with a half smile. But the smile faded. “A human who can take down a faerie in a wolf’s skin, who ensnared the Suriel and killed two naga on her own …” He choked on a laugh, and shook his head. The firelight danced along his mask. “They’re fools. Fools for not seeing it.” He winced. But his eyes held no mischief. “Here,” he said, extending the list of words.
I shoved it into my pocket. I turned, but he gently grabbed my arm. “You gave up so much for them.” He lifted his other hand as if to brush my cheek. I braced myself for the touch, but he lowered it before making contact. “Do you even know how to laugh?”
I shook off his arm, unable to stop the angry words. High Lord be damned. “I don’t want your pity.”
His jade eyes were so bright I couldn’t look away. “What about a friend?”
“Can faeries be friends with mortals?”
“Five hundred years ago, enough faeries were friends with mortals that they went to war on their behalf.”
“What?” I’d never heard that before. And it hadn’t been in that mural in the study.
“How do you think the human armies survived as long as they did, and did such damage that my kind even came to agree to a treaty? With ash weapons alone? There were faeries who fought and died at the humans’ sides for their freedom, and who mourned when the only solution was to separate our peoples.”
“Were you one of them?”
“I was a child at the time, too young to understand what was happening—or even to be told,” he said. A child. Which meant he had to be over … “But had I been old enough, I would have. Against slavery, against tyranny, I would gladly go to my death, no matter whose freedom I was defending.”
I wasn’t sure if I would do the same. My priority would be to protect my family—and I would have picked whatever side could keep them safest. I hadn’t thought of it as a weakness until now.
“For what it’s worth,” Tamlin said, “your family knows you’re safe. They have no memory of a beast bursting into their cottage, and think a long-lost, very wealthy aunt called you away to aid her on her deathbed. They know you’re alive, and fed, and cared for. But they also know that there have been rumors of a … threat in Prythian, and are prepared to run should any of the warning signs about the wall faltering occur.”
“You—you altered their memories?” I took a step back. Faerie arrogance, such faerie arrogance to change our minds, to implant thoughts as if it wasn’t a violation—
“Glamoured their memories—like putting a veil over them. I was afraid your father might come after you, or persuade some villagers to cross the wall with him and further violate the Treaty.”
And they all would have died anyway, once they ran into things like the puca or the Bogge or the naga. A silence blanketed my mind, until I was so exhausted I could barely think, and couldn’t stop myself from saying, “You don’t know him. My father wouldn’t have bothered to do either.”
Tamlin looked at me for a long moment. “Yes, he would have.”
But he wouldn’t—not with that twisted knee. Not with it as an excuse. I’d realized that the moment the puca’s illusion had been ripped away.
Fed, comfortable, and safe—they’d even been warned about the blight, whether they understood that warning or not. His eyes were open, honest. He had gone farther than I would have ever guessed toward assuaging my every concern. “You truly warned them about—the possible threat?”
A grave nod. “Not an outright warning, but … it’s woven into the glamour on their memories—along with an order to run at the first sign of something being amiss.”
Faerie arrogance, but … but he had done more than I could. My family might have ignored my letter entirely. Had I known he possessed those abilities, I might have even asked the High Lord to glamour their memories if he hadn’t done it himself.
I truly had nothing to fret about, save for the fact that they’d probably forget me sooner than expected. I couldn’t entirely blame them. My vow fulfilled, my task complete—what was left for me?
The firelight danced on his mask, warming the gold, setting the emeralds glinting. Such color and variation—colors I didn’t know the names of, colors I wanted to catalog and weave together. Colors I had no reason not to explore now.
“Paint,” I said, barely more than a breath. He cocked his head and I swallowed, squaring my shoulders. “If—if it’s not too much to ask, I’d like some paint. And brushes.”
Tamlin blinked. “You like—art? You like to paint?”
His stumbling words weren’t unkind. It was enough for me to say, “Yes. I’m not—not any good, but if it’s not too much trouble … I’ll paint outside, so I don’t make a mess, but—”
“Outside, inside, on the roof—paint wherever you want. I don’t care,” he said. “But if you need paint and brushes, you’ll also need paper and canvas.”
“I can work—help around the kitchen or in the gardens—to pay for it.”
“You’d be more of a hindrance. It might take a few days to track them down, but the paint, the brushes, the canvas, and the space are yours. Work wherever you want. This house is too clean, anyway.”
“Thank you—I mean it, truly. Thank you.”
“Of course.” I turned, but he spoke again. “Have you seen the gallery?”
I blurted, “There’s a gallery in this house?”
He grinned—actually grinned, the High Lord of the Spring Court. “I had it closed off when I inherited this place.” When he inherited a title he seemed to have little joy in holding. “It seemed like a waste of time to have the servants keep it cleaned.”
Of course it would, to a trained warrior.
He went on. “I’m busy tomorrow, and the gallery needs to be cleaned up, so … the next day—let me show it to you the next day.” He rubbed at his neck, faint color creeping into those cheeks of his—more alive and warm than I’d yet seen them. “Please—it would be my pleasure.” And I believed him that it would.
I nodded dumbly. If the paintings along the halls were exquisite, then the ones selected for the gallery had to be beyond my human imaginings. “I would like that—very much.”
He smiled at me still, broadly and without restraint or hesitation. Isaac had never smiled at me like that. Isaac had never made my breath catch, just a little bit.
The feeling was startling enough that I walked out, grasping the crumpled paper in my pocket as if doing so could somehow keep that answering smile from tugging on my lips.
Chapter 17
I jerked awake in the middle of the night, panting. My dreams had been filled with the clicking of the Suriel’s bone-fingers, the grinning naga, and a pale, faceless woman dragging her bloodred nails across my throat, splitting me open bit by bit. She kept asking for my name, but every time I tried to speak, my blood bubbled out of the shallow wounds on my neck, choking me.
I ran my hands through my sweat-damp hair. As my panting eased, a different sound filled the air, creeping in from the front hall through the crack beneath the door. Shouts, and someone’s screams.
I was out of my bed in a heartbeat. The shouts weren’t aggressive, but rather commanding—organizing. But the screaming …
Every hair on my body stood upright as I flung open the door. I might have stayed and cowered, but I’d heard screams like that before, in the forest at home, when I didn’t make a clean kill and the animals suffered. I couldn’t stand it. And I had to know.
I reached the top of the grand staircase in time to see the front doors of the manor bang open and Tamlin rush in, a screaming faerie slung over his shoulder.
The faerie was almost as big as Tamlin, and yet the High Lord carried him as if he were no more than a sack of grain. Another species of the lesser faeries, with his blue skin, gangly limbs, pointed ears, and long onyx hair. But even from atop the stairs, I could see the blood gushing down the faerie’s back—blood from the black stumps protruding from his shoulder blades. Blood that now soaked into Tamlin’s green tunic in deep, shining splotches. One of the knives from his baldric was missing.
Lucien rushed into the foyer below just as Tamlin shouted, “The table—clear it off!” Lucien shoved the vase of flowers off the long table in the center of the hall. Either Tamlin wasn’t thinking straight, or he’d been afraid to waste the extra minutes bringing the faerie to the infirmary. Shattering glass set my feet moving, and I was halfway down the stairs before Tamlin eased the shrieking faerie face-first onto the table. The faerie wasn’t wearing a mask; there was nothing to hide the agony contorting his long, unearthly features.