Page 38 of Cursed Shadows 1

The trick is to keep all my weight on the big toe. Oh, and to polish the sword beforehand, it helps with the spin. So when I spin, hard and fast, then jolt to a stop and face the crowd, I manage to keep my balance steady and raise my other leg up, up, up, until it’s all the way.

I don’t cut myself.

I don’t smile, not for myself, not for anything.

When I first landed my spot in this throng of performers, the pride raised my chin and curved my lips into a contained smile. I only let the excitement burst out of me when I told father all about my audition.

Now, it’s all dampened.

Kill me.

Daxeel wants to kill me.

The logic of it doesn’t shock me. Yet I’m stunned and pained enough that I find little joy in this performance.

I feel gutted, dead inside, like Daxeel already got his wish and carved everything out of me.

Not even when I land a jete, where I propel myself into the air, do the perfect splits, then land with my feet on either side of the sword, do I feel accomplished. Not even as I manage to ace my performance in this impractical white dress, my breasts nearly spilling out of the naval drop, the thigh splits meaning there are two strips of material falling between my legs and just threatening to trip me over.

I’m just… numb.

And if I wasn’t so numb, I would be wracked with nerves. Not just around him, but around so many dark fae—right in front of me, prowling the same courtyard I dance in, some of them watching me… or watching the dancers, shifting their gazes to each of us.

Really, only about half of them watch the dance. The other half are listening to the songs, or looking up at the grandstands, searching the spectators for familiar faces, or looking up at the dark skies beyond the strings of glowworms and fireflies, or even murmuring soft conversations that they shouldn’t be having right now.

All the litalf contenders watch us perform.

I wonder if father is watching, if he’s proud or if he’s more concerned about a certain dokkalf in the courtyard, the one I don’t look at, though I know he’s near the alcove.

Pandora will be out there in the throngs of folk, maybe watching me, maybe smiling a little. She would have found her husband Ronan by now, maybe they hold hands, steal kisses, and forget all about my dancing.

‘All that agility and you waste it on dance,’ she once said.

‘You’d make a sneaky spy.’

Not a good one, I notice she didn’t say, but a sneaky one.

I bet she knows now, among so many of the dark fae, I would make a dead spy. There’s no room for someone like me to sneak past one of them.

Dark fae are no stranger to the light lands, not since the treaty, not with our unity in the Fae Eclipse. I’ve seen many before, in passing or at ceremonies at the court, or at gatherings where they might be friends with some of my kind.

Always, the terror of them clanged through my bones. It was instinct that writhed my gut whenever they were around. I could sense the prickle of power beneath their hard skin, like their flesh was moulded from the smooth hardness of marble.

But this one—the one who I glance at when I scrape up enough masochistic courage—is different. He watches me from the shadows of the alcove, flanked by Rune and another fae I don’t know or recognize. All three of the males watch me. Not just the dance. Me.

Daxeel’s stare is the edge of a blade scraping coolly down my exposed breastplate to the nick of my bellybutton. I loathe it, only humans have them, some halflings, an ugly mark on my stomach. But still, he doesn’t look disgusted, he doesn’t look anything at all. His daggered gaze flicks between my legs when I kick high, it looks with the promise of a cut, then slowly lifts back up to the obvious flush of my face.

This dance, I wear no mask to hide behind.

I’m exposed, and I feel every bit the cornered mouse.

Rune and the other—the icy one I guess is Samick—watch me but there’s nothing cruel or harsh about their gazes. It’s more of a detached consideration, as though they’re taking in the appearance of the one who hurt their friend, and they’re looking for those sharp claws I should have but don’t.

It’s Daxeel’s stare that unnerves me, makes me feel I’m standing in front of a frozen blizzard, ready to unleash hell upon me.

We shift into the second dance, and for this one I lift the sword hilt from the ground, then stab the tip into the wooden dais. I’ll be flipping over it, spinning around it, dropping alongside it, and I wonder if he’ll watch—watch and wish that I knew how to actually use the sword.

It’s a new thought—did it bother him back then that I’m no warrior, no fighter? I dance and read, I fall into music and words. But swords and daggers? I know little about them and have even less interest in them.

---