The fox. The boots. The dress.

The female was a plague.

She going to be the death of me.

Her fox was glued to my side, closer than my own damn shadows as I marched through the halls of Cahlish. It made enthusiastic chittering sounds as it kept pace, staring up at me with glassy black eyes. I scowled down at it as I swung a left, baring my teeth.

“Don’t you have somewhere else to be?”

Apparently, it did not. Its mouth hung open, its pink tongue lolling over its teeth as it blinked up at me, and for all of Yvelia it looked like it was grinning at me.

I halfheartedly prodded the toe of my boot at it, and it skittered back out of reach. It did not dart off down the hallway in search of someone else to bother with its presence. No, it maintained its pace beside me, though it did put a little more distance between us.

“She has no idea where you are right now, does she?” I hissed, making a left. It had been an age since I’d paced the halls of my ancestral home. One hundred and ten years in the maze. One hundred and ten years, separated from my people, unable to protect them. Over a century, when I hadn’t been able to visit the places of my childhood or sit in the library and remember my mother. She used to be everywhere in this place. Around every corner, I would smell the soft scent of jasmine, or I would see her standing by a window, smiling down at me, to the spot at her feet where I always used to play as a child, or I would hear her somehow, the soft echoing lullaby that she would sing to me in the dark when I was afraid.

Now, the halls of Cahlish were empty of her. A ghost still needed a foothold. Someone to remember them in order to remain. Without me here to remember her, my mother had faded from this place like a dream was wont to do once a dreamer awoke. I tried not to think about that as I hurried toward my destination.

My heart ached that the halls of my home no longer smelled of jasmine.

It filled with annoyance at the scent that flooded them instead.

It was driving me crazy.

I couldn’t stand it.

“Master! Master, where—wait! Where are you going? Dinner’s almost ready to be served!” Archer bustled around the corner carrying a stack of books in his hands—though he did so gingerly, making sure that the pages didn’t meet his torso. The small fissures that marked his chest ran with tiny rivulets of his fire magic, after all, and paper was known to be quite flammable.

“To my mother’s room,” I told him. “I won’t be late for dinner, don’t worry.” My annoyance was flaring like the sun, hot and volatile, but I made sure to temper its edge so that it didn’t bleed into my words now. Archer’s face was one of my earliest memories. He’d started leaving Bettell biscuits beneath my pillow as soon as I had grown my first tooth. When my father had failed to return from Zilvaren, when my mother had locked herself in the library for six days and hadn’t been able to face the world for the grief that was crushing her, it was Archer who had cared for me. He had taken me down into the kitchens and told me all the forgotten stories of his people and had done his best to shield my mind from my own grief. No matter how foul my mood was, I would never direct a harsh word at him.

“And—” Archer swallowed thickly, a small, flickering flame sparking to life on the back of his hand. He swiftly, rather sheepishly, blew it out before he continued speaking. “And you’re sure you wouldn’t like me to set a place for Renfis? You aren’t expecting any of your other—”

“All’s well, Archer. It’ll just be me and the girl. That’s how it needs to be tonight. I promised Ren I’d make nice with her to keep the peace. If I can’t be seen to be making an effort, there’ll be hell to pay and worse, I’m sure.”

Onyx ducked and weaved between me and the fire sprite; he playfully nipped Archer’s ankles, which made the little sprite yelp with alarm. “Will we be inviting any more of the forest animals inside the manor, Master?”

I grunted my disapproval at that. “It’s highly inconvenient that this one’s made it inside. But it seems that the human isn’t used to being told no. I’ve found that it’s easier to pick and choose which battles to go to war over with her. We must suffer the fox. At least for now.”

“Oh, I don’t really mind him much,” Archer said in a high-pitched voice. “I think he seems to like me.”

I scowled down at the offending creature, and it grinned back up at me again, teeth white, tongue still lolling, as if it knew I was talking about it. “Indeed.”

“Clearly it likes you, too, Master.”

I said nothing in response to that. The fox was a pest. It was not supposed to be following me around my own godscursed home.

“Would you like me to take it back to the young lady’s room?” Archer asked.

Before I’d even had chance to think my answer through, it had already slipped past my lips. “No. No, it’s fine. I don’t—” I cleared my throat. “I don’t suppose it’s doing any harm.”

“As you wish, Master.”

“Archer, when are you going to heed me? Please call me Fisher. This ‘Master’ business sets me on edge.”

“As you wish, Master.”

“Archer.”

He gave me a hangdog smile. “Sorry. I—I’ll do my best…to try to…to be better at…to try to call you by that name. But the love I bore your parents demands I show respect when I address you.”

“Respect I do not deserve—”

“Master!”

I shouldn’t have said it. It was only natural that he would reject the statement, but he didn’t know the truth. If I could have told him about Gillethrye, I would have done so in a heartbeat. Guilt choked me night and day; my soul craved to confess all I had done and all I was responsible for where the people of that fallen city were concerned, but the oath Belikon had forced upon me cinched tight as a noose around my neck whenever I even thought about speaking of it. So Archer would never understand. He would think of me always as the little Faeling that he had helped raise. He would know nothing of the monster that I had become.

We were approaching the end of the long, carpeted hall—perfect timing. I changed the subject. “Are my mother’s rooms open, Archer?”

“They are, Ma—Fisher.” In fairness, he had always hated using my name like this. “I thought you might want to visit her library now that you’re back. I was on my way to return these books there, as you can see. I hope you don’t mind. You did say I could borrow stories from time to time, and I’ve been careful not to damage them, I promise.”

“Peace, Archer. That invitation stands. You may borrow whatever you like from her library, or from the house’s main library, whenever the mood takes you. You don’t need to explain yourself to me.”

If a fire sprite could have blushed, then Archer most certainly would have.

We reached the door to my mother’s rooms at last, and my heart squeezed its way into the base of my throat. I banished all emotion from my face as I turned the handle and entered—but I felt it, all right: the ache. The hollow. The empty well.

Here, there was more of her. Every little knick-knack, every trinket, paint brush, book, scrap of silk, and hand mirror…it was all her. She had allowed me to clamber into her massive four poster bed with her, and we had constructed forts out of her sumptuous feather pillows. It was harder to lose someone from a place like this, where every piece of furniture and every scrap of cloth had been touched by them in some way. She was in the very fiber of this place.

Archer forged ahead, passing through my mother’s sitting room, oblivious to the falter in my own step. I had caught up with him by the time he placed his craggy hand on the doorknob that lead through to her bedroom. He swung that door open, too, and stepped through, hovering, as though he knew that this part might be hard for me. When I stepped through after him, he continued.

“I’m afraid some of the shelves in the library needed to be replaced eight years ago. The roof leaked and caused some damp, but…nothing to panic about. None of the books were lost.” Archer looked back over his shoulder at me. “Sire? Are you coming?”

I had stopped in the center of my mother’s bedroom—the room that had once belonged to my mother and my father. “I wasn’t headed to the library, Archer. At least…not tonight. I just came to collect something.”

Archer hadn’t refined the art of keeping his emotions from his face while I’d been gone; his eyes, with the orange glow of a small, flickering flame within, rounded out as he processed this. “Oh! Do you need any help finding what you’re looking for?”

I gave him a small, sad smile. “No, I’ll be all right. Please, go ahead and return your books. Select some new titles to read while you’re in there. I won’t be in here long. I’ll see you at dinner.”

Archer wasn’t bound to me. Unlike some High Fae households, Cahlish was no prison. The sprites and the other Lesser Fae creatures who resided here were not sworn to serve the lord or lady of the house. They were free to come and go as they pleased. They received pay for their work. And if they didn’t like their work, they were free to explore other roles or leave to work elsewhere. My parents had been progressive in that sense. There weren’t many other High Fae households that operated like Cahlish, but it had always been our way. It worked. Those who chose to keep Cahlish and serve its master did so because they wanted to, and Archer was no exception. In fact, it was possible that Archer loved his role here at Cahlish a little too much. I had been gone for just over a hundred years; now that I was back, he clearly would have breathed on my behalf had he been able, if only so I wouldn’t have had to trouble myself with such a mundane task. He actually looked a little disappointed that I didn’t need his help, but he dipped his head and bowed regardless.

“As you wish, Kingfisher.”

I took a moment to collect myself once he’d disappeared into the library. Only when my pulse was steady and I felt grounded did I skirt around my mother’s bed and open up the double doors to her dressing chamber.

Jasmine.

Soft laughter.

The brush of satins and silks against my cheeks.

‘And where could my son be? Where, oh where, is my Kingfisher? He couldn’t possibly be hiding in here.’

I shook my head, dislodging the memory.

She had never been a collector of things. Never hungry to drape herself in finery. It had been my father who had purchased the silks for her. Gowns of every color and fabric. My strongest memories of my father all seemed to feature the quiet way he came alive and glowed with pride when he showered my mother with gifts from the other realms he visited.

Scores of gowns hung along the left-hand side of the  dressing chamber, all still perfect, their colors just as vibrant as they had been the day my father had bestowed them upon his love. They spilled over onto the other side of the closer in a wave of tulle, embroidered skirts, and brocading.

His clothes weren’t quite as ostentatious. There were smock coats and subtle but well-tailored jackets in blue, and dark green, and black. My father had lived under the reign of Rorik Daianthus. He had known peace in his time, before Belikon had crept into the palace under the guise of friendship and had killed the true king, and his wardrobe reflected that. Once, he’d had no need to be clad in leather and armed to the teeth from dawn to dusk. There had been balls, once. Hunting. He had built things with his hands, and taught me how to ride, and he had shown me how to steer a skiff down the Darn, when the temperatures rose, and the river melted for a month or two.

But that had been a long, long time ago.

I fought the urge to run my hand along the sleeves of his shirts, refusing to linger in the past as I went to the back of the wardrobe and stooped to collect what I had come for. The boots were heavy. Black. Strong, good leather. The kind of boots that would last a male a long time indeed if they were taken care of correctly. I picked them up and spun around, eager to leave as quickly as possible, but then—

I halted.

A row of garment sleeves were tucked away, right at the back of the wardrobe. The royal blue fabric of the sleeves touched the ground, which was the only reason I even noticed them at all. None of my mother’s other dresses were stored this way. Like my father’s clothes, they had all been charmed by the air sprites long ago, their magic protecting the material and warding them from the damage or decay that accompanied long years shut away from the world. The handful of dresses shouldn’t have caught my attention the way these ones did, but…

A voice urged me to step toward them, its tone soft, unlike the quicksilver with its unhinged demands—a voice as familiar to me as my own, though I hadn’t heard it in a lifetime.

Hers, my love. These are hers.

Heat boiled up the back of my throat and strangled me.

No. Not happening. Not today. Not…not fucking ever. I spun around. I stormed out of the dressing room, slamming the door closed…

The fox yelped. I’d trapped the damned animal in the dressing chamber, but…it served it right. It shouldn’t be so underfoot all of the time. It let out another plaintive howl as I walked away. I was halfway to the door when my stomach dropped. Hesitation hit me, and…something unknown. Some strange, unwelcome tug that had me growling under my breath as I reluctantly turned and stormed back to the cursed dressing chamber. I tore the first wrapped gown from the rail and bit out a curse as I finally bolted for the door, making sure that the human’s pet was no longer trapped this time.

It seemed to be grinning extra wide at me, sticking extra close, as I left my mother’s rooms. My blood beat a thunderous tattoo in my ears as I made my way back through the halls of Cahlish, grumbling between clenched teeth the whole way back to the room where the female and the idiot smuggler had slept last night. She wasn’t there when I barged into the room—but he was.

Lounging in one of the wingback chairs by the window, the smuggler looked perfectly at ease with his feet kicked up onto the low table and a book in his hands. The light spilling in through the casement window behind him gilded his hair and set his copper strands ablaze. When he saw me striding toward him, he had the audacity to smile up at me as if he were actually pleased to see me.

“Ahhh, look who it is!” He snapped his book closed. “My rescuer slash kidnapper, looking just as brooding and handsome as I remember.”

I slapped his dirty, bare feet off the table, scowling profoundly. “I see you’ve made yourself at home.”

“What else was I supposed to do?” He laughed in an unaffected way that made me want to open-palm slap him. “Roam the halls, wailing and sobbing, in search of the nearest exit?”

“No one would have stopped you. I have no business with you. You’re free to leave whenever you like.”

He pouted at this. “And Saeris? I take it that same freedom does not extend to her?”

“She can move freely around Cahlish as much as she likes.”

The smuggler called Carrion Swift smirked knowingly, wagging his finger at me as if I’d just made his point for him. “Y’know, she isn’t one for being told what she can and can’t do.”

“She struck a bargain with me. It doesn’t matter whether she likes it or not. She swore she’d do my bidding in return for the favor I did for her—”

Carrion let his head drop back against the chair, a bark of laughter bursting out of him. “Some favor, your lordship. She’s worried sick about that hapless brother of hers. You were supposed to bring him back here, and instead you brought back me.”

“Yes, well. Trust that no one regrets that more than me.”

Carrion’s eyes darted quickly down to the items in my hands, smiling an open-mouthed smile. “And yet here you are, bearing gifts. I’m used to people falling fast when they meet me, but I think this might actually be a new record.”

“You think you’re smart, don’t you.”

“Mm.” He shrugged. “Fairly.”

“Your mouth is the only smart thing about you.”

He arched an eyebrow at me. “So, the boots aren’t for me, then?”

If I killed him, how long would it take for the human to notice? It was a toss-up. She had been adamant that I couldn’t leave him at the Winter Palace, but she didn’t even seem to like him. From what I’d witnessed of their interactions together, she could barely tolerate his presence. As far as I could tell, I’d be doing everyone a favor if I accidentally shoved him off a cliff somewhere. But then again, I did not have the best luck with coin tosses…

“The boots are for you—”

“Great. My feet are freezing.” He went to take them, but I held them beyond his reach.

“You can have them on one condition.” My cheeks felt hot. Everything did. I hadn’t breathed through my nose since I’d entered the room, but I did so now, and the second I scented that faint, barely-there perfume—the same perfume that had hung thick in the air the other day, when the girl had been writhing all over me in my lap—my blood began to boil. “You need to take a bath.”

His face crumpled. “A bath?”

“A long one,” I added.

“But I don’t—”

“It isn’t up for debate.” Gods and martyrs, if he said one more word, I wouldn’t be able to hold back. “You’re taking a bath, and you’re losing a couple of layers of skin. It’s up to you whether you earn yourself a pair of boots or a black eye in the process.”

“Well. When you put it like that, I guess I’m taking a bath,” he said.

Right on cue, there was a rap at the door. When I’d gone looking for a water sprite in the bathhouse earlier, Maeyla had been the first of her kind that I’d crossed paths with. She hadn’t flinched when I’d explained what I wanted her to do. Not even when I’d asked her to gather as much Wanderer’s Moss as she could find, either. As she entered the bedroom now, her long blonde hair streaming out behind her like was moving underwater, I watched the smuggler’s eyes skip over her curves and had to clench my jaw to prevent myself from saying something. He’d had the human. He had touched her, and kissed her, and presumably taken her…and he still felt the need to look at other females? There was something deeply wrong with him.

“My sisters and I are ready, Master,” Maeyla said, in gentle, lilting tone. Her words were like distant music. All water sprites bore that gift—the ability to mesmerize the unwitting with their silvered voices. I had still been wet behind the ears the last time I had allowed myself to be swayed by their magic, though. I had long-since developed the ability to withstand their influence. Carrion Swift had not had that opportunity.

He already looked glassy-eyed and half-drunk as he stepped forward toward the female. “You have sisters?” he asked.

Maeyla laughed softly, nodding. “Indeed. I have three. Would you like to meet them?”

“There isn’t a single thing in this world or the next that I want more.” His words were muffled, as if his tongue were suddenly too big for his mouth.

Maeyla looked to me, seeking permission to take the smuggler. I didn’t return her gaze. I simply inclined my head, staring at the rug beneath my boots as she took Swift by the hand and led him from the room.

Insanity.

Even if I hadn’t learned how to guard myself against water magic, I would never have taken that female’s hand so easily. Not after knowing the human.

Human.

Even thinking the word did something strange to me. A human should not have been able to evoke such strong emotions from me.

And yet…

I crossed the room and stood before her bed. It had been made, the covers neatly smoothed; there was no sign of her here, but I knew that it was hers. I could scent her here, too. The fragrance was different. Not as intense. It still made my head spin, though, as I removed the dress from the—

The door began to open.

Fuck.

She couldn’t know I was here. She could not see me. I reacted on instinct, throwing out a cloud of shadow that pooled in the corner of the room. In a split second, I had dimmed the remainders of the daylight flowing in through the window, and I had stepped into the newly darkened corner, allowing my shadows to envelop me. And the fox! The cursed fox followed with me! I glowered down at it, daring it to make a sound, but it just weaved between my legs and sat itself down on the top of my right boot, looking pleased as punch. I made to grab it, but then she arrived.

Her skin bore a sheen of sweat from the forge. Her black hair swung in a thick braid down her back as she cast around and found that her annoying roommate was nowhere to be seen. Her eyes were bright, pale and crisp as a winter morning sky. Her nose was slightly upturned at the end. Adorably so. With her high cheekbones and her slender frame, it was no wonder that my mother had thought she would be Fae when she’d seen her in her visions. But her ears…

Round.

Human.

She was human, which meant that she would live and die in the blink of an eye. She would flare bright, a flame lighting up the darkness. And then she would be gone.

“Hmm. Bath? Where would I be if I were a bath?” she muttered under her breath. She opened the door on the far side of the room—the one that opened out into the adjoined sitting room. By the time she’d turned back around, I had thrown out a wave of magic that did not come easy to me—the magic that I had inherited from my father. The shadows had come from my mother. They were there, at my fingertips, whenever I needed them these days. But the gift of illusion existed deeper within the well of my power. I had to reach for it, and it wasn’t always there when I tried to grasp hold of it. Today, thankfully, it was.

Saeris thought nothing of it when she spun around and saw the door close to her bed—a door that had not been there a second ago. She walked through it, into a bathroom that had also not been there a moment ago, and began to draw a bath for herself in the copper tub that I had just conjured for her. For all intents and purposes, it was real: the walls, the ceiling, and the thick, warm towels on the rack. The soaps and the shampoo, and the piping hot water that rushed out of the taps when she turned them. It would be real for as long as she observed her environment. Once she was finished with the bathroom, it would all simply cease to exist.

She began to strip out of her clothes, and through the rectangle of light that shone through the half-cracked door, the images that had been plaguing my dreams began to take shape. Her shoulder blades jutted out too much. Gods alive, she was too thin. Zilvaren had kept her lean. And even if my mother’s journal was wrong and she wasn’t my mate, I would still see to it that she packed some flesh onto her bones while she was bound to me. She would eat while she was with me. She would never go hungry or thirsty again. I would keep her safe, no matter what. And when the time came, I would send her back to Zilvaren, and—

The thought evaporated.

It refused to exist.

I would need to send her back at some point. I would have to. And—

Oh, Gods. She was taking off her pants.

With a gentle motion of my hand, I drew the door closed, blocking off the view into the temporary bathroom. I would not look upon her. Not like this, uninvited, the intimacy stolen and not shared. I—I would not look upon her at all. Whatever pull I felt yanking ruthlessly on my insides could not be, and—and—

I had to leave. Now.

Stepping out of the shadows, I took the dress I was still holding onto like some kind of fool, and I laid it numbly out onto the bed.

As soon as I saw it, I knew for certain that it wasn’t one of my mother’s dresses. The material was midnight black, the fabric sheer, liquid silk. The neckline was low, and there was a staggering split up the side of the skirt that would undoubtedly travel from ankle to hip. My father would never have commissioned this for my mother. It simply wasn’t her style.

I could picture it being her style, though. It was a maddening article of clothing, designed to flatter and accentuate every curve and plane of the body. I had no idea where it had come from or how long it had been sitting there in that dressing chamber amongst my mother’s things, but this had been made for Saeris Fane.

I spent a long second looking at. I closed my eyes and tried to breathe, but maybe Archer had inadvertently stolen this ability from me in the end, because my head was spinning like a top as turned from the bed and hurried out of the room.

I could get through this dinner.

I could be an absolute pig.

I could make her hate me just enough to make all of this bearable for the both of us.

And when the time came, I could send Saeris Fane back to her realm.

I didn’t have any other choice.

Because she would never be truly safe here with me…