Chapter Five
Lonan
I clenched my teeth hard, forcing myself to sit upright even though it sent agony searing through every inch of me. Belial’s poison still burned in my system, making my wounds itch and sting unbearably beneath my clothes.
I knew I was even paler than normal, and my skin felt clammy. Sweat beaded on my hairline.
I just had to hope neither my mother nor my brothers noticed.
It had been a week since Ash’s escape. I’d had to return to Belial for three nights until he had dosed me enough for the wounds to start knitting back together. I could smell the sweet stink of his poison seeping from my pores.
At least the doses had dropped me into a dead sleep the moment I stumbled to my room on those nights, but I hadn’t had the same blessed relief since. Every night I lay in bed gazing at the jar of Ash’s sweet, warm fire on my bedside. The warm acorn at my throat just made the pain worse, even as it soothed me. The only thing of him I had left.
Balor was watching me again, I realised too late, so I forced myself to reach out and pick up my spoon. The action made the wound he had given me on my chest scream in protest, and my fingers trembled for just a moment before I willed them to stop.
I slowly brought a spoonful of syllabub to my mouth, throat already bobbing with rising nausea at the thought of eating it.
Another night nearly over. Just get through it.
It was cloyingly sweet and melted on my tongue too easily. I kept my eyes on the glass dish in front of me as I ate another mouthful in silence.
“Have they found any hint of him?” my mother was asking, her voice tense. “Anything at all?”
They were still talking about Ash. They hadn’t stopped, ever since he had snapped his chains and escaped. She kept her guards out in the forest, scouring it for any sign of him, but he had vanished.
I desperately hoped he had made it somewhere safe. That the fae leaving him the notes—the Golden Son, his half-brother—had found him and was protecting him. That Ash finally had someone he could truly trust. Because he had trusted me, and I had betrayed him in every way.
I hadn’t been deserving of his trust. His love. But now I wished with every part of me that I had said the words back to him just once, even if I hadn’t felt worthy of it. At least then he would have known, even for a short time, that I loved him more than anything. That he was everything to me.
“No, mother,” Balor said, sounding bored even though he had been a fervent, eager participant in her plans. “Perhaps he made it to the Brid’s land. Youdidtell him he was her son.”
She let out a snarl. “If he had made it there, we would know. He’s still in the forest.”
I was still staring at my bowl, trying very hard not to throw up everything I’d eaten all over the table, when I felt Balor’s cold eyes settle on me.
“Where do you think he’s hiding, Lonan?” he asked lightly. “Youwatchedhim for months. Where do you think he would go?”
My stomach clenched hard. I already knew that he hadn’t said a word to the Carlin about me helping Ash to escape as the wolf. Bres had been there too, but he was a clueless fool who talked too much to take anything in.
Balor wasn’t. Balor saw everything. Balor noticed all.
He was the only one of my siblings who knew that I could shift into more than a crow and a blackbird—the first thing I had ever turned into, and my namesake. The rest of the unseelie knew only about the crow. Most spiritsmiths had only one other form. I didn’t know why I had many. I didn’t know if it was a natural gift, or because I was High Fae, or just from the ruthless, brutal training the Carlin had inflicted on me to strengthen my power.
Balor had watched with a lazy smirk as my mother whipped me mercilessly when I was young, until I could shift into a new animal. Until I could shift into any animal. It had taken many years.
And I knew why he hadn’t told her that I had attacked him as the wolf to help Ash escape. It was another thing to hold over my head. One more debt to add to the list he already had.
“He didn’t know the forest,” I said shortly, realising I had to answer him.
“Well he’s hiding in there somewhere.” The Carlin dropped her spoon into her empty glass dish with a clatter. “Like a frightened little snake slithering through the dead leaves.”
Her words made me tense even more, making me think of the dinner she had forced Ash to attend here. Fury had churned inside me when the main course had been brought out. Pork, beef and snake. An insult to Ash and his seelie heritage, hidden in plain sight. The seelie Folk revered boars and cattle and serpents, due to their ruler having complete control over them all. Eating any of them was tantamount to cannibalism among the seelie.
My mother and brothers had been laughing at Ash right in front of him, without him even realising.
I felt only intense shame that I shared blood with these people. Any foolish eagerness I had felt as a child to make my mother proud—to have brothers I could trust to look after me—had been burned away years ago. Scoured off by years of trying to treat the lashes on my back as I huddled alone in my room, weeping from the pain and not understanding why she had inflicted it. Years of hiding in little spaces in the palace to avoid the cruel taunts and punishing kicks of my much older siblings.
I had no loyalty to any of them. I hadn’t for years, even before Ash, but now I knew with certainty that I would murder all of them to keep him safe.