Page 97 of Cursed Shadows 5

I write that Mother demanded I kill Daxeel, and that I tried, but that I failed. I write that she echoed those two words over and over,four, five, and they don’t mean anything to me, but perhaps will mean something to the Four Sisters of the Queen’s Court.

I finish the letter with a demand.

I demand that I be left alone. I demand that this information, the only information I have, is enough to trade for a future free from Licht.

I belong to freelands now.

19

SAMICK

††††††

Hand flat against the air, Samick watches the gentle winds weave between his fingers. The Breeze carries a faint chill in it; it finds a kinship in the ice that frosts over his knuckles.

Pinched between two fingers is a dewy black roll of grimroot. The thick, dark smoke billows from the roof of Hemlock House into the blackness of the skies.

Samick watches the battle, the heat of the grimroot’s ember against the cold bite of the air and the frost creeping along his hand.

Loosening a smoky breath, he brings the grimroot to his pink lips and pauses. His icy green eyes lift to the darkness that blankets Kithe.

A darkness foreign to him. Too dense, too thick.

Itfeelsunnatural.

His eyes strain to adjust—as they often do in the thick darkness. But when his sight does adjust, and he watches the folk skitter around the streets below, he can make out the changes in Kithe.

Two townkeepers carry their ladders from lamppost to lamppost, climbing to the lanterns atop, changing out the flamesfor reds and blues and greens and yellows from the ordinary whites.

Another pair of keepers are setting up weaved ropes of ribbons and tinsel to wind along the borders of the roads, creating a path for the parade to follow. Tables are being erected at the front of every lane, tables that will house paints and dusts and parchments and inkpots for writing letters to the dead.

Samick watches the preparation of the streets for the Sabbat. Two phases away, now.

How quickly it is all forgotten, the blood that ran through the crumbled stronghold atop the hill, the lives lost, bodies spat out from the portal, the town alight with screams of grief.

Fae are hollow folk.

Some more than others.

Samick lets the wonder slip through his mind, a question that doesn’t quite touch him, but whispers as it passes, fleeting;Is he most hollow?

Because—as he draws in a smoky breath from the grimroot, green eyes glide to the ruins of Comlar, those anguished screams fresh in his mind, the loss of Aleana staining the halls of Hemlock, and the brutality of an invasion on his doorstep—he finds that he feels nothing more than a faint echo of ice.

Just that.

Ice. Cold. The bite of winter surviving in him.

It isn’t a new, uncomfortable sensation.

It feels like home.

The air shifts behind him. Subtle.

Unmoving, a statue at the edge of the roof, Samick listens. Hears the faintest creak of the door from the staircase, the softflattening of leather on the roof, weaved with a constant pain that sits hollow in a heart.

Rune’s scent is the giveaway.

It grows stronger with his approach until he stands at Samick’s side—and merely holds out his hand.

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