Page 105 of A Sword of Ice
“Don’t worry,” she whispered to them. “You’re safe now.” She took a step further into the room. They recoiled from her presence like spiders scuttling into the darkness, and she froze mid-step.
Iona reached up and pushed aside her curls to show her ears, knowing it was the one thing that would make them trust her. Because her magic hadn’t been enough. Perhaps they thought it was an illusion, a trick of the mind. Among the fucked up things they’d seen, it was her ears these Fae would trust.
Gasps rang out as they took them in, and she tried to give them a soft smile.
She felt a shimmer in the air behind her and then the warmth of two different bodies. She didn’t need to turn to know who breezed in. It was obvious in the powdery scent below steel and magic of Uric, and the soft scents of a campfire and confections, and Shula’s surprised voice cutting through Iona’s senses.
“Oh, sweet Mana…” Shula’s hand closed against Iona’s shoulder. “It’s true. They’realive.”
A brave Fae crawled towards them, his skin clinging to the fragile bones of his body, his limbs shaking as he pulled himself against the dirty floor, his voice a raspy whisper in the darkness. “Who are you?”
Iona, Shula, and Uric shared a look amongst themselves, but it was Iona who answered, tilting her chin up. “We are the Resistance,” she said. “And we are here to free you.”
* * *
“My mate.”The voice was a rasp of broken glass scraping against a floor, the sound filled with pain, edged with desperate hope. Weak hands grasped at Iona’s arms, dull nails pressing against her skin.
“H-h-help m-my mate…” Tear tracks slid down grime-covered cheeks as the man all but wept in her arms.
Iona’s hands gripped his fragile shoulders, as weak as the broken wings of a baby bird, to keep him upright so he didn’t fall at her feet. He grasped at her arms in return, nails sliding helplessly against the material of her dirty, cut up coat.
“M-my mate w-was t-taken…” His lips trembled and he stuttered through every word.
“Ssh,” Iona soothed. “It’s okay.”
Shula and Uric were escorting the Fae from their prison to their freedom in a single line. The humans had been subdued, most of them dead, but those that were still alive had been tied up in the center of the courtyard at the camp.
They’d only been spared momentarily because Prince Valerio wanted to question them before their executions.
The Fae locked up here were weak, tripping over clumsy, shaking feet, crying out as the last glimmers of sunlight in the sky hit their eyes. Then this Fae had fallen into Iona’s chest, begging her to find his mate.
He was Unseelie, with skin that was a pale pink. His head was shaved, showing one pointed ear and the other nothing but a scrap of twisted flesh, scarring that spread up the side of his head and down his neck. The evidence of torture he’d endured.
She could feel his heart pounding against his delicate ribcage, through the thin scrap of cloth that passed for a shirt. It beat faster than it should, and for a moment she feared it would burst right out of his chest.
“What’s your name?” Her hands squeezed his shoulders with the slightest bit of pressure. She was almost afraid his bones would shatter beneath her grip.
“Larke,” he replied.
“Larke. Can you take a deep breath for me?”
He complied, taking in choppy breaths of air, coughing through the first few before he fell into a steady rhythm of breathing.
“Good.” She smiled. “Now, can you tell me what happened?”
“The soldiers took my mate a few days ago… I—Ithinkit was a few days ago…” His head cocked to the side, his eyes darting around the prison.
Iona’s heart broke for him. To lose all sense of time, with no way to watch the sun rise or fall, to not know how long the love of your life had been taken away. When one minute could feel like an eternity instead of the quick inhalation it should have been for the Fae.
“Do you think your mate is still…” She hated to ask the words, but they were necessary.
Larke’s fist closed over his shirt, right where his heart beat. “I feel my mate in here.” He scratched at his chest, like he could tear the bond out with his bare fingers somehow. “The bond is still here.”
“What does your mate look like?”
Larke blinked slowly. “Namir h-h-has h-h-ho-horns and b-b-b-black-k-k skin…”
She tried to imagine Julius missing and failed to conjure up the image. Swallowing past the sudden lump in her throat and breathing in deeply, she slid her palm reassuringly against Larke’s arm. “Don’t worry,” she reassured. “We haven’t opened the other doors. We’ll find her.”
