Page 46 of Cursed Shadows 1

It isn’t an invitation to go with them to the town just a walk from Comlar. Wouldn’t be more than an hour away, even if the pace was wandering.

No, it’s Eamon warning me that Daxeel will be here soon, on the tower, and I find myself suddenly annoyed.

“He knows about this place?” My tower. The one I marked as mine with all the goods I stole from around the garrison to bring up here. The one I decorated and stocked with honeywine and snacks.

Aleana offers me a tight smile. There’s guilt in there to be found. “He came to get me the other Quiet.”

From my tower.

My mouth bunches to the side.

But I know deep down I’m more bothered by them stealing away my Eamon than my tower. Aleana has him every phase, and then they all stay at the family’s house in Kithe. All of them—Daxeel and Caius; Rune and Samick; Aleana and my Eamon.

I know, I know. He made a bargain to protect me. This is part of it. He has to keep her company but also guard her of sorts.

Yet I still feel more alone here than I ever have before, and it’s not even two weeks into the two months.

“Well,” Aleana starts and lifts her golden-wine bottle in salute, “we have time, so let’s enjoy the peace up here.”

I nod and, with a lazy cheers her way, guzzle down at least half my drink.

“I was asking Eamon—” Aleana turns to me “—why the litalves don’t compete to whisper into Mother’s slumber.”

Eamon falls further back into his special cushion, the odd thing I found in the library, a giant velvet sack filled with dried out willow-beans. It crunches beneath him as he lies down and looks up at the pure darkness beyond the gentle white gleam of the fireflies.

He offers no answer, and she looks to me for one.

“Why not use it to make a wish?” she presses. A frown knits her perfectly arched and full eyebrows together as one.

Eamon’s the one who answers, and it surprises me since he seemed so disinterested in the topic, in yet another conversation surrounding the Sacrament.

“Litalves don’t believe theyshoulddo that,” he says. “They believe the gods have done enough and more for them, and to disturb them is a great evil.”

As if needing my confirmation, she blinks at me.

I hum and swish the wine around and around. “The ancient bloodlines in our land,” I add, “are our royals. The princes and princesses and their children. Only they can go into the Sacrament and speak to Mother. There’s no chance of that happening,” I say with a smirk. “They’d never risk the royals against this many dark fae.”

Because any dark one in the Sacrament—everydark one—would target one of our royal contenders. The slaughter would be swift and brutal.

Aleana nods and, after sipping more of her wine, seems to think aloud, “Our royals aren’t of the ancient bloodlines.”

I nod, because I know this.

Their royals—the dokkalf ones—are old bloodlines, sure, and powerful ones too, since they came from the fiercest warriors in history who united tribes and courts to create Dorcha.

But the ancient bloodlines, the ones that came before the fierce warriors, the bloodlines that are said to be the first of the dokkalves—they are the lords, the ladies, the nobles ofonecourt. The Shadow Court.

It’s only the descendants of that one bloodline, from that one court, who can compete in the Sacrament with hopes of making a wish to Mother. Any other dark fae—like most of them here—compete to pave the way for the descendants, because no other’s whisper will pierce through the shadows of the veil and reach Mother’s ear.

“Which court do you belong to?” I lean on my side, nursing my near-empty bottle, and with a free hand I snatch up a white plum. “I’m in the Queen’s Court,” I add. “But at the border, so I might as well be in the Light Court.”

Eamon snorts at my slight jab, because he himself lives in the Light Court.

I just shoot a dark smile his way.

Aleana follows my lead and steals a white plum. She bites into it.

I watch bloodred juices slide down her chin. She swats at the mess, then licks her fingers clean. It’s a moment of awe that has me watching her. This sickly female, a supposed weakling, but I see nothing less than danger in the way she eats a plum.

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