The Shattered Dark

“Hey,” he says, forcing me to stop when he cuts off my path. “Hey. Lena will help you.”

I sidestep around him, pulling at the bindings again. The damn knot tightens.

“I’ll talk to her,” he says, falling into step beside me.

“Don’t bother.”

Aren grabs my arm, turns me toward him. “She’s exhausted. She misses Sethan, and the nobles aren’t cooperating with her on anything, but she will help, McKenzie. I’ll help.”

“Lena won’t help because she shouldn’t.” I pull my arm free but don’t try to move past him again.

Aren tilts his head to the side. “She shouldn’t?”

“No.” The air whooshes out of my lungs. Sometimes, I really hate being reasonable. “She has to think about what’s best for the rebels—for the entire Realm, really. Paige is only one person, and she’s human. She’s not Lena’s responsibility. She’s mine.”

“McKenzie.” Aren’s voice is laced with a warning.

“What?”

“Don’t try to get her back on your own,” he says. He reaches out to help me untie my cuirass’s bindings.

“I wasn’t planning to.”

His silver eyes meet mine. “I know that expression, nalkin-shom. You have a plan.”

Nalkin-shom. Shadow-witch. The title should irritate me. Instead, it makes my stomach flip. The fae have called me nalkin-shom behind my back for years. I didn’t know that until Aren told me fae children have nightmares about me. Their parents tell them no one can escape the nalkin-shom, that if they misbehave, I’ll read their shadows, I’ll suck their magic dry. I still think he’s exaggerating. I might be the best at what I do—when I read a fae’s shadows, they almost never escape—but I’m not a monster.

Aren’s not looking at me like I’m a monster. Somehow, he makes shadow-witch sound like a term of endearment.

“I don’t have a plan,” I tell him. Not yet, at least.

He raises an eyebrow.

“I don’t,” I say, maybe a little defensively. Aren just shakes his head with that little half smirk I used to find infuriating. It’s not infuriating anymore. It’s alluring.

The bindings of my armor finally loosen, and Aren helps me lift it over my head. My hair gets caught on something. Aren gently pulls it free before setting the cuirass aside, then he lets my loose ponytail slide from his hand. When he does, his fingertips graze my neck. It’s a brief, accidental contact, but my edarratae react instantly. By the way Aren’s gazing down at me, it’s obvious he felt the lightning’s heat, too.

“Jorreb,” someone says, surprisingly close to us. Fae have better hearing than humans, but Aren stiffens just enough to indicate that the nearness of the fae startles him, too. He takes a step away from me as he turns toward Jacia.

Her silver eyes move briefly to me before settling back on Aren. “Lena wishes for the shadow-reader to speak to Naito.”

A muscle in Aren’s cheek twitches. “It’s only been two weeks.”

Two weeks since Naito’s lover, Kelia, died. My throat tightens. Kelia was the rebel fae who taught me to speak their language. She was almost a friend, and I envied her relationship with Naito, a human shadow-reader. Despite some bumpy times, they were happy together—they were good together—but Naito’s father, a hateful man determined to eradicate the fae, killed Kelia the day we took the palace. Naito hasn’t been the same since.

“Lena needs him in the watch rotation,” Jacia says. “And she needs him to read the shadows.”

“I’ll talk to him,” I say, even though I agree it’s too soon. But I haven’t seen Naito in several days. I want to see how he’s doing.

Aren looks at me. I think he wants to protest. Instead, he says, “I need to help secure the veligh. I don’t know when I’ll see you again.”

This is the problem with starting a relationship in the middle of a war. Including today, I’ve seen him only three times since I ended my relationship with Kyol. For us to work out, I need time to get to know him. The thing is, it’s very possible we won’t have that time. Despite the way Aren acts sometimes, he’s not invincible. I’m certainly not, either.

My gaze goes to Jacia. I don’t know her at all. I don’t know her view on human and fae relationships or if she would rat us out to a high noble if I wrapped my arms around Aren. That’s what I want to do. I want to forget our responsibilities and run away to somewhere remote and quiet, someplace where we can be normal and sit and talk and…do other things.

Aren must know the direction my thoughts are heading. The half smile he gives me is both an apology and a promise. “I’ll find you as soon as I can.”

After he leaves with Jacia, I have to assure myself a dozen times that he’s going to be okay and that I will see him again. Then I start looking for Naito. Surprisingly, he’s difficult to find. A human with lightning-covered skin kind of sticks out in this world, but I check his room, do a quick walk-through of the sculpture garden, and search a few other locations where he’s likely to be, all without any success. I finally start asking the English-speaking fae—we decided it’s best that the high nobles don’t know I’ve learned their language—if they’ve seen him. After half a dozen negative responses, someone tells me Naito’s in the royal archives. I clarify that with the fae more than once, though, thinking he must have misunderstood me. Humans aren’t allowed in the archives. At least, they weren’t under Atroth’s reign. Eventually, though, I head in that direction because I don’t know where else to look.

“McKenzie.” Kavok smiles when he opens the door. I can’t help but smile in return. I’ve always liked the archivist. He’s dedicated to his job. So dedicated he didn’t leave the palace when Lena gave the Court fae the opportunity, and when I worked for the king, he was one of the few fae who was always willing to talk to me. That’s mainly because he’s so curious about humans. Whenever he had the chance, he questioned me about my life and my world, and sometimes, he told me a few things about his.

“Hi, Kavok,” I say, looking into archives behind him. Drawers line the walls of the large room. The symbols on them are illuminated by hanging orbs, which are lit with magic. The combination of blue and white lightning inside them creates a steady, slightly tinted glow that doesn’t damage documents like the sun or lights from my world would. But that’s not the only thing that preserves the records in here. Kavok can, to a certain extent, control the weather. It’s a useful magic, one that’s in high demand. Farmers employ fae who can tweak the weather if there’s a drought, and the former king used to use them to darken the sky when he thought it would give the Court fae the advantage during an attack. Kavok, though, uses his ability to regulate the temperature of the archives. He keeps humidity out, too, and from what I’ve heard, some documents in here look like they were created yesterday even though they’re centuries old.

“It’s good to see you,” he says. Then, his face brightens even more. “I found an earlier reference.”

I have no idea what he’s talking about, but he turns to the desk that’s just to the left of the door. At least, I think there’s a desk under the mountains of papers, thick, leather-bound tomes, and haphazard stacks of anchor-stones. An entire alcove in here is set aside for storing the latter. Locations both here and on Earth are kept in drawers in case the king needed fae to fissure somewhere they’d never been before.