“Let’s go,” Vance said.
Shane led the way, and I could not help but look at the people who had gathered to bid us farewell. They lingered at the edge of the Family Courtyard, outside the stable, and on the first path we traveled. The eyes that were dry were steely and angry.
Shane did not meet anyone’s gaze, but I could tell from his posture that it was a struggle not to turn back. How much of their despair was ringing in his head despite his efforts to block it out?
Only after we had left the Family Courtyard behind did I hear his breath hitch, just once.
I pulled up beside him, though I didn’t know what I could possibly say that would be comforting at this point.
The day was long, interrupted by few breaks and even less conversation. As dusk fell, Shane directed us to a campsite, where he demonstrated a higher level of competence than I would have expected from a prince. Apparently even Shantel royals knew how to live in the wild.
We fed and watered the horses before sitting down. The Shantel had provided us with supplies, which Shane turned into a meal that in other circumstances probably would have been quite pleasant. If it had been shared by friends around a midsummer fire, it surely would have been accompanied by lively chatter, and maybe singing.
“How many days will it take us to get to the edge of Shantel land?” I asked. I did not ask how long it would take to get to Midnight, but the question was surely implied.
Shane paused and closed his eyes. I wondered if he had a map of the land in his head, which he could consult that way, before he said, “We should reach the edge of this land by midday tomorrow.”
“Do we need to post any kind of watch, or are we safe to sleep?” Vance asked.
“We’re safe,” Shane answered.
So we all prepared for bed. The Shantel prince changed form and chose to sleep as a tawny-colored cougar stretched out on the bare earthen floor of the forest.
Vance pulled me aside to ask, “Do you think we should keep watch over him?”
I shook my head. “Maybe once we’re outside of Shantel land, but there’s no point here. If he decides he wants to get away from us while we’re still in his land, setting a watch won’t make any difference.”
If Shane wanted to get away, we would turn around and find him gone. We wouldn’t be able to track him, and even if Vance lifted into the air a single breath later, he wouldn’t see any sign.
“Do you think the sakkri was talking about Misha?” he asked. “The white queen?”
“I don’t know.” I remembered what Marcel had said about how prophecy always came true, that there was no point in working toward or against it. Even if the Shantel did believe Misha would be influential in the fall of Midnight, they wouldn’t do anything to help her. “I don’t have the heart to ask Shane,” I admitted.
Vance nodded his agreement. How did one have a conversation about hope for the future with a man who clearly didn’t have any?
SOMETHING WOKE ME, jerking my eyes open and tensing my muscles. I sat up, instinctively reaching for a weapon, and found Shane sitting in human form by the fire, looking at me with alarm.
“Nightmare?” he asked.
Maybe. I nodded, though the truth was, I didn’t remember and was glad for that. My mind held too much material for nightmares lately.
Nearby, Vance was still sleeping peacefully. Whatever sound had disturbed me must have been in my own dreams, or he would have been awake as well.
“Did you sleep at all?” I asked Shane.
He shook his head and admitted, “I don’t dare try.”
I couldn’t fault him for that, and what harm could missed sleep do him now? Maybe, by the time we reached Midnight, he would be too exhausted to be scared.
“Do you trust him?” he asked softly, nodding to Vance.
“What do you mean?” I asked. Of course I trusted Vance. Maybe not quite unconditionally, but I didn’t trust anyone that much. I trusted Vance not to hurt me intentionally, or to betray our guild if he had a choice.
“Do you trust him to honor our agreement?”
“Yes.” That, I could answer without hesitation. Though I added, “Unless the magic makes it impossible. He won’t sacrifice us to save you, or your people, if it comes to that.”
Shane nodded. “If I bring you both to Midnight’s land, and wait there for Vance to make a deal, there’s nothing to stop him from giving my location to them without ever negotiating for my people’s safety. He could sell me to the vampires for his own profit, and leave my forest to burn.”
My eyes widened. “He wouldn’t do that.”
“He was raised there,” Shane said. “He’s one of them. How do I know he didn’t turn back the first time because this was his plan all along, to get me to go with you? Maybe the forest assaulted him because it knew he would betray us.”
“He’s one of us,” I insisted. “Obsidian.”
“The Obsidian guild lives a hard life in winter,” Shane pointed out. “Who’s to say this isn’t an opportunity for the little quetzal to buy back his mistress’s favor?”
I shook my head. I understood why Shane felt the way he did, but he didn’t know Vance. Some days even I wondered if Vance would leave the Obsidian guild, and return to Midnight or the Azteka, but if he went he would go alone.
“There’s a reason my people don’t let escaped slaves return, Kadee,” Shane warned. “Even a day in that place can be enough to warp someone. Vance had fourteen years.”
“I was born human,” I argued. “I spent years in a human town with human parents, and then I lived in the serpiente royal palace, with Hara Kiesha Cobriana the closest thing I had to a sister. What does that make me? Not human, and certainly not royalty. We are what we make ourselves, not what others want to make us.”
Shane stood, stretched, and crossed to one of the sturdy trees that ringed this campsite. As he set a hand against the rough bark—for support, or to talk to the tree, I didn’t know and didn’t much care—I glanced at Vance and realized his eyes were open. He had probably heard everything we said, both about him and about me.
How badly had Shane’s doubts stung him? “Vance, Shane didn’t mean—”
“He did,” Vance answered as he sat up. Across the clearing, I saw Shane sigh, but he didn’t look back to acknowledge our conversation. “I don’t care what the Shantel think of me. Thank you, though, for defending me.”
“You’re one of us,” I answered. I wanted to say more, but I didn’t want Shane to know anything about the personal fears Vance had shared with me about his return to Midnight. The Shantel prince was still near enough to overhear everything we said.
There was a pause, and I saw the thoughtful expression on Vance’s face that meant he was considering how to say something. I knew what he probably thought of humans. Was he worried he would offend me if he asked about what I had said, or was he already reevaluating what he thought of me?
I went back to our conversation a few days ago, after Farrell had helped me when I had woken from my nightmare shaking.
“The first seizures came when I was a child,” I said, easing into the topic but not hiding from it. “My parents … my human parents … didn’t know what caused them or how to cure them. Marcel saw me, and understood what was happening. She took me from my parents and back to her people before the seizures could kill me.” I tried to keep my voice even, but those simple words summarized so many fearful parts of my history.
I saw Shane glance back at us as if he would add something, but then he stepped off into the trees instead. I didn’t chase him. As I had said to Vance before, if a prince of the Shantel wanted to disappear in this forest, he would do so. For now, I thought he was trying to give us privacy.
“How can you be a serpent if your parents were human?” Vance finally asked.
“For the same reason you aren’t an Azteka priest,” I answered. “My blood-father was a traveling merchant of some kind. He seduced my mother and abandoned her before he knew I exis
ted. The man I consider my real father married my mother and raised me as his own. He didn’t care that I wasn’t his blood.”
I was thinking of Vance’s place in the Obsidian guild when I referred to his not being what his birth could have made him. When his gaze went distant, I realized he was thinking of something quite different.
Vance grabbed my hand and squeezed it once, but didn’t look at me when he said, “I’m not sure you’ll believe me, but I know how you feel.”
I wasn’t sure how to reply to that. Vance’s “parents,” the ones who had raised him despite his Azteka bloodlines, had been sadistic vampires. He didn’t talk about them much, but that one sentence told volumes.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Vance, if you ever want to talk about them … that’s okay.”
I didn’t know if I could tolerate many sentimental stories about creatures who enslaved and tortured humans and shapeshifters alike for fun and profit, but trying was the least I could do.
Apparently I wasn’t the only one who didn’t want to hear an answer. Shane broke unapologetically into our conversation, saying, “We should move on.”
“It’s still dark,” I replied, startled both by the suggestion and by his presence. I had actually forgotten he was there. Shantel magic, or had my own worries about Vance’s reaction just eclipsed concerns about Shane in my mind? I wanted to continue the conversation with Vance … but not here, not now, not with Shane nearby.
“Yet we’re all awake,” Shane replied. “The sun will follow soon enough.”
In most places, I would have argued that traveling by horseback in the nighttime forest wasn’t a good idea, but who was I to argue with a man whose mind was magically melded with these woods?
Despite the early start, we did not reach the edge of Shantel land by midday, as Shane had said we would. We trudged along, stopping only to gather water as we passed a stream and to rest the horses sometime in the early afternoon. The Shantel forest always twisted the light, making it impossible to judge direction by it, but as the sun began to sink toward the trees behind us, even I could tell we had been traveling the wrong way. The Family Courtyard should have been to the east, with Midnight to the west.
Vance flew to the tops of the trees to confirm what we all already knew: even traveling with a prince of the Shantel, we were lost in these woods.
“Well?” Vance demanded as he returned to the ground and human form. “You say you can feel the forest’s edge. Where is it?”
“I don’t …” Shane dismounted his horse and knelt on the ground, dropping his head with his fingers splayed in the dirt as if trying to beg it to let up its secrets. “It feels like we should be almost there. It has felt that way all day. I don’t understand.”
I had resisted asking since I saw Shane with her yesterday morning, had resisted asking while we wandered—quite possibly in useless circles—all day long, but now I needed to know.
“Are you and the sakkri lovers?”
Shane looked up with such horror on his face that he did not need to say a word.
“Oh, hell,” Vance swore, turning away to lean his forehead with a thump against a nearby tree.
“It’s not like that,” Shane said, the age-old denial of everyone who has ever done something outrageously stupid, and been caught.
“Not like …” I trailed off, because there were no words strong enough to describe how pathetically useless it was for him to protest. “That’s what the sakkri were fighting about,” I said. “The sakkri is supposed to be untouchable, unclaimed by any mortal in any way. She—”
“Do you think I don’t know that?” Shane snapped, shouting.
“Then you two are why we can’t get out of this forest,” Vance replied. “Your connection to each other is stronger than the rational side everyone keeps insisting should win out.”
“It happened once,” Shane hissed, “and we both knew it was wrong. It’s been over for months.”
“Tell that to the woman who is going to let us all die rather than let us take you to Midnight,” I said.
How were we going to get out of this one? The sakkri’s connection to and conscious power over the land relied on her detachment from mortal concerns. Even if we reasoned with her, there was no way of knowing if she still had enough control to override her own instincts and desires.
Vance shook his head. “You kept this information from us, when you knew damn well it was why you haven’t been able to get out, and why I couldn’t get out on my own. That’s grounds for me to break the deal I made with your people. Kadee, do you agree it’s time for us to leave?”
Did he know, when he looked at me with that cold, focused gaze, that I wanted to turn and run?
“We can’t abandon them all, just because two of them made a mistake.”
“Then give me another option,” Vance said.
If we stayed here, and Midnight burned the forest, we would get caught in the pyre. Reasonably or not, the younger sakkri clearly believed Midnight couldn’t threaten them here, so appealing to her to protect Shane wouldn’t work. Even if I shared her confidence, I did not want to remain a prisoner in the Shantel woods forever.
Reluctantly, I admitted, “We can’t fight Shantel magic. We shouldn’t die for it.”
“You made a deal with our people, and our sakkri agreed to it,” Shane said. “Both of them did, even if one of them disapproved. I fear you’re probably locked in the same trap as the rest of us.”
“Do you think so?” Vance asked.
“Normally I can’t feel outsiders in the land as well as my own people,” Shane explained, “but I can feel you both. That means the land is holding on to you.”
Vance shrugged. “That same land is acting to protect you, right?” Shane nodded. “And it doesn’t require the conscious knowledge or response from the sakkri to make a decision?” Again, Shane nodded.
It seemed to happen in an instant. One moment Shane was kneeling on the ground and Vance was still astride his horse. The next, Vance had Shane’s hair balled in his left hand and a knife at the prince’s throat.
I dismounted and started toward them, but Vance glared at me warningly, while Shane went very, very still.
“I can think of a sure way to make this forest get rid of us in a hurry,” Vance remarked.
“You’re bluffing,” Shane replied. The slight movement of his throat caused the edge of Vance’s blade to draw a bead of blood to his skin. “Magic reacts to intent, not just words.”
“Am I?” Vance asked. “The way I see it, it’s your skin or ours.”
“You’re not a murderer.”
“Your people made me kill over a dozen people, actually.”
“Vance,” I said softly, “this isn’t—”
Vance’s attention turned to me just for an instant, and Shane used that moment to act. He grabbed the quetzal’s wrist with one hand, long enough to shove the blade away and throw himself to the side. Vance started to respond—
But Shane was gone.
We both instinctively tried to follow, and that was when I heard the order: “Drop your weapons, or you won’t draw another breath.”
THE SHANTEL FOREST had indeed let us go, and dropped us in the middle of the serpiente royal delegation. By the time Vance and I gained our bearings, there were four guards facing us, two pointing bows and the others circling behind us with drawn swords.
It was too late to run for it. They would shoot us before we took two steps.
I had my bow, but my hands were already empty, and it seemed safer to hold them out to my sides rather than reaching for a weapon. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Vance’s knife fall to the ground. I wished I knew exactly where we were. If we were on serpiente land, we were dead. If we were on Midnight’s land, we might still have a chance. Either way, I was tired of being disarmed. It wasn’t like I would win in a fair fight against a trained guard anyway.
“We apologize for coming so near your camp,” I said, keeping my hands carefully away from m
y weapons so they didn’t have an excuse to shoot me. I glanced around, hoping Hara wasn’t about to appear through the trees to identify me. “The Shantel forest dropped us here rather abruptly. We’ll leave, if you’ll let us.”
The style of our clothes and weapons gave us away as Obsidian, but if we were in Midnight’s land, they were supposed to let us go unless we threatened them. On the other hand, we were part of the Obsidian guild and we were probably within shouting distance of their princess. They could reasonably consider that a threat all by itself.
“Kadee.” One of the guards that had moved to flank us spoke my name, and my blood ran cold. “Do you really expect us to let you disappear into the woods, so you can sneak up again behind our backs?”
Any chance I had of escaping this intact disappeared. We had to be on Midnight’s land, or else they would have shot us both by now, but I was wanted for treason and had walked armed into the royal camp. According to Midnight’s laws, that gave these guards freedom to do whatever they wanted with me.
I could still save Vance.
“Are you going to slaughter Vance Ehecatl on Midnight’s land?” I asked, using Vance’s full name, the one we almost never bothered with in the Obsidian guild. These guards would know it. It was their job to know anyone who might be a threat, either actively—like me—or because they were important. Vance, with his unspecified ties to Midnight, fell into the latter category. “We’re on our way to Midnight in order to negotiate a deal on behalf of the Shantel Family,” I added. “If we don’t arrive, Midnight will wonder why.”
The last bit was a complete fabrication, but these guards wouldn’t know that. They wouldn’t risk killing Vance if it might bring Midnight’s wrath down upon them and their royal charge.
The guard with his bow pointed at Vance wavered slightly as he glanced at the man who was probably his commander. “Sir?” he asked. “Do we let him go?”
“Midnight only needs one to make a deal,” the guard who had recognized me pointed out.
“Children of Obsidian have an irritating tendency to come back for each other,” the commander replied. “Liam, go get your Arami. This isn’t our decision to make.”