Page 15 of A Dance With Fire
That made her stumble as she walked towards her own tent. A dire, sick feeling climbed up her throat, but she shoved it down. Fanny wouldn’t betray her.
Would she?
No. She had to believe that their years of friendship had counted for something. Theyhadcounted for something. She might have trouble accepting her at first, but Shula was desperate enough to believe that Fanny would come through for her.
All her life she’d been alone, had trusted and confided in no one but herself. She’d come from nothing, a poor orphan with blood on her hem and stolen pearls in her pocket. She’d turned that into a strength of her own; she’d become as human as she possibly could be. Life had been safe, and it had been lonely.
And then she’d met Fanny.
Fanny had been a brightness in the blight of Shula’s soul. For the first time since she’d lost her parents, she’d felt a closeness to someone else. Even if all the puzzle pieces of truth weren’t set in place, there was no faking that connection they shared. Best friends. Fanny did have her flaws, Shula wasn’t blind to them, but Fanny was the one thing she couldn’t give up. Because it was that closeness she craved, and it was that closeness she believed she wouldn’t find with another.
She wondered if that made her weak. Perhaps what was happening went against everything she ever believed in. Had it been anyone else to discover her, Shula would have done whatever it took to keep her secret safe. She would have killed. But Fanny was different.
Friends. We are friends.
She had to keep repeating that to herself, because if she thought for even just a moment that Fanny would betray her, then Shula wouldn’t hesitate to take a blade and plunge it into her friend’s heart.
6
Into the Madness
Davina’s eyes slowly blinked open, but it was her body that was faster to react. She shot up from her pillows and stared into the darkness of her tent. Night had fallen and already; she could hear the cries and shrieks of revelry.
Human revelry was vastly distant from the wild drumbeats of the Fae. There was no magic or passion in it, just dead laughter and eyes that were not fully open. Humans just did not see. At least, not like Davina saw. They did not live with the curse of catching fragments of memories that were not memories at all, but rather a future yet to pass.
It happened in flashes, like bright bursts of blinding light against the vision, and so often that sometimes she could not quite distinguish the differences between past, present, and future.
Sometimes memories of her own long life passed, of a time when her homeland of Tir na Faie, The Feylands, to the south, had been ripe with magic.
She remembered the elegance of the Seelie Court, and the savage madness of the Unseelie near the Black Ocean. Until the blight came upon the lands and everything changed.
No more faerie lights canopied over an endless expanse of trees. No more magic. No more selkies pushing through rivers and swamps, or pixies buzzing in hoards and streaking across the sky like clusters of falling stars.
For the first time, though, the future was clear. And at the center of madness not her own, was Shula Azzarh.
The time was coming, and all the pieces of the future were aligning, falling into place.
And for the first time, Davina felt a clarity deep in her bones.
Standing to her full height, she set to work, pulling a drab, brown cloak over her shoulders. She pulled the turban from her head, unwrapping it carefully. It was second nature now to hide her true self behind drab clothing, and yet what she did was nothing compared to what Shula had done to hide her nature.
What traumas she must have lived to have to hide so.
The thought broke her heart and pushed Davina to move faster. With her hair loose and cascading over her shoulders, she pulled the hood of her cloak up, concealing her features in shadows. Only then did she step from her tent, blending into the darkness and walking on steady, determined feet, leaving Piriguini’s Circus behind.
The place had never felt like home. Not in the way the Obsidian Court in Tir na Faie was home. She had only come for Shula. Because Davina had known what she would be, what the fire Fae would mean to their entire race.
And Davina prayed to Mana that Shula find the fire inside herself before it was too late.
Stepping on human roads in the middle of the night was likely unwise, and yet Davina already knew that nothing would befall her. Not yet. Not at this hour tonight.
Fate would be kind to her as she walked through the semi-empty streets of Tuath, and it was the own power of her visions that guided her down dark, poor alleyways and led her to what looked like an abandoned building.
No fire lantern burned down these ways, and so nothing illuminated the run-down factory. Made of steel and crumbling brick, the entrance was a thin wooden door, held together by thicker wooden planks hammered down with iron nails.
Davina rapped her knuckles across the surface in a four-note pattern that she’d heard in her dreams. She held her breath, gripping the lapels that held her cloak together with one hand, the other hovering over the doorway.
Her heartbeats measured the seconds.
