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Time to go.
He rolls to his feet and rakes a hand through his unruly hair, only managing to tousle it more. I stare at him against the gray pre-dawn light and I think my heart must be breaking.
“You’re leaving,” I whisper. I don’t know why I say it, why it breaks me. It was bound to happen sooner rather than later, it’s just that—he just kissed me, pressed his body to mine, made me feel things I’d never felt before, things I’d never hoped to feel and...
“Yeah.” He stretches his arms over his head, his spine popping. “Better do it now, before everyone in town is up.”
I nod, my chest so tight I don’t think I can breathe. “Where will you go?”
“We are going.”
“What?”
“You’re coming with me.”
My mouth drops open. “Why?”
He grins that wolfish grin of his and starts buttoning up his shirt. “Why not?”
“Seriously, Wolf. I... I’m sick.”
“But you want to live. You haven’t changed your mind about that.”
“No.”
“Then I’m taking you to a gate.” He finishes buttoning up his shirt and reaches for his gray knitwear. He pulls it over his head, shoves his arms into the sleeves and pushes back the hood.
“A gate to Faerie?”
“Is there any other kind that counts?” He hunts for his boots under the rickety table shoved against the opposite wall. At some point, someone must have thrown in here various broken pieces of furniture that nobody really used until I arrived.
“You’re proposing to take me across, to the Land under the Hill?”
He stops, one boot in his hand, and levels a serious look at me. “Is it worse than staying here and dying?”
Put that way, he really has a point. Still, I hesitate. I have never left this city, except for my little foolish escapades that landed me here. And I’m aware of how weak I am from the sickness.
“I’m not sure I can even run,” I confess, a knot in my throat. Not sure why I’m trying to sabotage this one chance I have to leave this tower. “Or walk.”
“I’ll carry you,” he says, his eyes still boring into me.
“Ah...” I swallow hard. “And what if I can’t cross the gate? Or if it doesn’t cure me?”
“It will cure you, I am certain of it. As for crossing, most humans go mad if they do. However.” He lifts a hand to forestall my shocked exclamation. “If you have a Fae token, you will be fine.”
“A token? Where will I find a t—?”
In two strides he’s in front of me. He takes off his ring, grabs my hand and slides it onto my middle finger. “This will protect you.”
I open my mouth to say something, anything—thank him, tell him he shouldn’t, it’s the one thing he has left from his past—but I can’t speak because looking down at the ring is like dropping into a dream, images flitting through my mind.
The pink sky, the strange mountains, the sense of urgency, the flames on my fingers.
The ring on fire.
“Good.” He takes my shocked silence as acquiescence. “All set to go.”
Before I know it, he’s sat on the chair and pulled on both his boots and has rooted inside my trunk for traveling clothes. His cursing tells me there isn’t much that meets his approval in there, if anything, which isn’t surprising, as I wasn’t meant to travel anywhere but the other world.
It is kind of fitting that I will be traveling to the underworld anyway.
If he really takes me to a gate.
If I can really cross over.
If it really heals me.
It strikes me that I’m depending on the claims of a man, a Fae, I barely know. Any good girl, any good princess worth her salt wouldn’t follow him a step further.
But I’m not just any girl, any princess. I’m not good. And I’m dying. It frees me of all responsibility and ethical concerns. On the way to the grave, who cares what society thinks?
And if he ends up leading me to my death, well... nothing has changed on that account.
***
This is insane.
The thought runs in a loop inside my head as Wolf helps me sort through my meager belongings and wrap a few clean handkerchiefs and a change of undergarments in a thin blanket, then puts two pairs of woolen stockings on me so that my feet barely fit inside my shoes. Finally, he pulls a thicker blanket over my shoulders.
Books, threads, they all stay behind as he straps his knife at his side and climbs onto the windowsill, looking down.
“Climb onto my back,” he says, and the insanity worsens.
“That’s your plan?”
“Afraid I’ll drop you?” He bares his teeth at me. “I’m Fae. I’m as strong as five men.”
“But there is no rope or anything to climb down!”
“Don’t worry, I’m like a cat. I can climb down just fine.”
“I thought you were a wolf,” I mutter, my small bundle tied across my chest so that it rests on my back, over the blanket I’ve wrapped around me.
He says nothing, only crouches down, and awkwardly I climb onto his back. I haven’t been carried on anyone’s back since I was a toddler and I don’t quite know where to put my arms, and then my legs.
With a quiet curse, he pulls my hands together around his neck, then grabs my legs and folds them around his hips, and there I am, hanging off him like a bug. How is he going to even climb out like this? How is he going to—?
He grabs the window frame and jumps onto the sill, then turns and swings himself off the ledge.
A scream is caught in my throat. Icy wind buffets us as he climbs down, fingers wedged between the stones in the weathered wall, feet scuffing against stones further down. His pale hair shimmers above me. I wonder briefly, in my blind panic, if he can even breathe with my arms so tight around his neck—then I tighten them more when he misses a foothold and lurches downward.
“Wolf!” I scream.
“Trust me!” he says. “Hold on tight.”
How can I trust him? He’s scaling down the bare face of the tower with me hanging on his back, sure to plunge us both to our deaths at any moment. Even though I’ve been facing certain death for a while now, fear of heights and lack of safety seem to take precedence where panic is concerned.
So I cling to Wolf’s neck and close my eyes, praying to the Gods above under my breath, tightening my knees around his hips and hoping against all hope that we’ll survive this descent.
His foot seems to find a foothold and he resumes his descent, impressive muscles straining under my hold as he moves down. We’re committed now. When I instinctively open my eyes to look the second time he misses a foothold, I see the ledge of my window so high up I doubt we could ever climb back up there, and below...
Oh Gods, the earth is still way too far, the white roofs of the palace like tiles. My arms and hands are cramping, my heart racing so fast that my chest hurts. My teeth are chattering. My bones feel like they’re about to snap from the tension. My hair is lashing at my neck, my face, blinding me.
I fear that a strong blast of wind might throw me off Wolf’s back and into the void.
It doesn’t happen, though, and steadily, stubbornly, Wolf climbs down and down and down until he stops.
“You can open your eyes now, Princess,” he says and I shake my head, refusing to.
“Can’t. No.”
“We are on solid ground. It’s over.” He puts his hands over my frozen, cramped ones around his neck and slowly his words sink in.
He’s not climbing anymore.
We’re not hanging from the wall like spiders anymore.
We have reached the ground.
Relaxing my knees from around his hips is almost impossible, the muscles taut and jumping. Finally, I manage, still hanging by my arms—but then he crouches down and my feet land on soil.
He turns as my knees buckle and catches me before I fall. Then, as he had done in the room in the tower, he lifts me in his arms. “I’m going to run. Hold on, all right? Trust me.”
This time I nod, because I trust him. He got me out of the tower, brought me down to the ground, and so far he has done everything he has promised.
***
As the light of day brightens, more people move through the streets of the city of Kyrene. Held securely in Wolf’s arms, glancing up occasionally at his grim face that’s shadowed by his hood, I let him carry me away from the palace and down, toward the city wall and the moat. We pass through familiar squares and market places, outside familiar houses of merchants and aristocrats I’ve visited with my parents and my cousins.
This is my city.
It has betrayed me just like my family, just like my body, abandoning me in that tower. The anger I’d suppressed for so long is simmering up to the surface now, warming me up against the cold. Though the day will warm up, the sun will be much better than the fire up in the tower with its cold stones and marble, as I move away, carried in the arms of this handsome, enigmatic Fae who has promised to carry me to a Faerie gate and push me through it to the other side.
And leave me there, I imagine, as he goes on his way, fighting for lords with coin, thieving, wondering forever about his past.
If I cross to the other side and am healed... what will I do there on my own? Without knowing anyone, a human in a land of dangerous, hostile Fae and fairies, without magic of my own, without any valid currency? A princess with no skills at anything but embroidery and the occasional court dance. How would I survive? Wouldn’t crossing over be a fate worse than death?
I don’t have much chance to linger on my increasingly panicky thoughts, though, as Wolf’s strides widen and he hurries down to the main bridge linking the city with the rest of the world, passing over the slow-flowing water in the moat. He’s so fast everything is a blur, the houses crowding around the moat, the rest of the city sprawling out, two-story houses and inns and stables and carriage houses... Trees and fields and farmers setting about their day’s work, probably up long before us, before the sky lightened, to tend to their animals and head out to the fields. A carriage passes us by.
If anyone has noticed us, I see no sign of it. When Wolf takes a turn in the road heading out into the plain, I see Kyrene up on the hill surrounded by its defensive walls, the palace on the summit and the tower I just escaped gleaming like a white needle in the morning light.
Fitting, for a needle-worker.
And good riddance, I think, finally buoyed by a wave of exhilaration and joy at having left, finally realizing that I have truly escaped my prison.
No matter what comes next, it won’t happen inside that hated round room with its single window and its view of the passing clouds.
It will be out in the real world.