Page 69 of Shade of Ruin

He is good to the girl, though. A model of kindness and strength for her to see. Not once has the sylph seen him say anything negative about his wife, even though he hasn’t seen her in seven years.

As the sylph gets closer to the girl and her father, she smells it. The unmistakable scent of sickened shadows on the wind. Revulsion. What has the girl seen? What has she done?

The sylph leaps into the air, no longer worried about her glamor. No longer worried about anything other than the safety of her ward. Shedding her human appearance, she becomes the wind, and moves through the trees so fast that nothing can keep up, for the wind is everything and everywhere at once.

And the Sylph becomes the wind. Flying faster than she’s ever flown before. In seconds, she’s found the girl. The scent of thosesickened shadows is everywhere. And in the center of it stands the girl, completely unharmed.

She holds the spear that the sylph had made her, her thumb constantly brushing the glyph that she’d set to activate the power that had come directly from her ward. The shadows had dissipated, but what had they taken with them?

What had the eight-year-old girl forced into the darkness?

Coming close to her, still nothing more than the wind, she whispers to the girl as she has done so many times in the past, “What happened?”

The girl knows her voice. She trusted the voice on the wind as she climbed trees and raced through the forest. She’s learned that the wind knew the world better than she did. It had been one of the first things that the sylph had taught her.

“He was lying…” the girl mutters. “He lied about my mom. He told me she was…” Tears run down her dirty face, but she doesn’t wipe them away. She doesn’t do anything. She only stares ahead at the forest that she’s spent so much of her life in with the sylph.

“He said she was Fae, and I was a Wyrdling,” she whispers. “I… He’s gone. Where’d he go?” So much confusion. So much pain on her face. The sylph glances at the ground and sees the Forgotten Ring laying on the forest floor at the girl’s feet.

The sylph swirls around the girl, blocking out the sound and light of the world, a tempest that only this one girl would trust completely. Grass and dirt billows around her, yet nothing touches her delicate skin, and the sylph whispers to her in a way that only the most powerful of sylphs can do. Directly mind to mind.

There is a reason that this sylph was the Queen of Shadows’ handmaiden. More than her loyalty and her cleverness, the Queen valued her strength. Not to fight with, but to manipulate. To whisper. The sylph was one of the few who could whisperdirectly into someone’s mind just as only the strongest of the House of Shadows could move through the darkness.

“Pick up the ring, Maeve,” she whispers, not being light with her mind’s touch. “Never take that ring off. If you do, you will feel it calling to you.”

Without a second thought, the girl bends over and picks up the ring, slipping it over the ring finger of her right hand, and the sylph continues. “Your father is missing, and I need you to hide. I need you to sleep in trees. You’re going to be sad, but you must be sad without speaking. Without sound. Sleep and cry, but do not make a sound, and do not touch the ground because the ground is not safe.”

The girl doesn’t hear the words. They’re not sound as much as feelings, unexplainableknowing. The tears fall down her cheeks, but she doesn’t respond. “Maeve, do not be afraid. Your father won’t come home, but you will be safe. I won’t let anything bad happen to you.”

She lets out a soft sigh filled with soul-crushing sadness, and the sylph does not understand why this is not enough for her. The sylph’s kind do not understand love. Even less than High Fae, they do not understand the way a child feels for her parents.

The sylph believes the girl is crying because she is afraid. The girl hasn’t even considered that she is in danger because the wind has always kept her safe. Not her father. The wind and her teacher have been there when things were scary. Her father was there when it was time for hugs. When she wanted a story or needed affection.

But not when she needed saving. Her father was not like the wind. He was human, and the wind was so much more than that. But she did not love the wind. She would not cry for the wind.

“Go now,” the sylph whispers to her, and the girl runs. Fleeing the scene of the most terrible thing that has ever happened to the girl.

The sylph waits. With the scent of revulsion and shadows on the wind, there’s no doubt that any harpies in the area will be here soon. The sylph must deal with them, but she isn’t sure how.

She is a tutor, not a warrior, and sylphs were not meant for battle. Yet, she can’t let the harpies find the girl, for they will kill her.

The best she can do is draw them away from this place. With the strength of a storm, she pulls the wind to her, a storm without a cloud. The scents of death and shadows follow her like hounds on the trail of a fox. Where she turns, they turn, and she leads them to the very center of Blackgrove, a place that the harpies will be hesitant to go.

For it is illegal for Immortals to hunt humans outside of the region directly outside of Draenyth, and those harpies’ master will be furious if they attack humans without cause. Even if it is in the search of shadows. Instead, they will wait for as long as it takes. They know that someone with shadow magic is here, and they won’t leave this area until their prey gives them a reason to.

As long as the girl never takes that ring off again, everything will be safe. The harpies will feed on the wildlife. The humans will be safe. And the harpies won’t be able to tell who created those shadows that hang on the winds.

Everyone will be safe. Except the girl’s human father. It’s only now that the girl is away in the trees that the sylph realizes that her mistress, the Queen of Shadows, had just lost her husband, and the hole in her soul would never heal.

The sylph could not comprehend this, though. She was not made to understand the emotions within High Fae, much less the feeling of loss left in a widow. She knows her mistress is strong, though.

And there is nothing to be done about the human that had been so important to both her ward and the Queen of Shadows.

For now, all she can do is continue to fulfill her role as the girl’s protector and tutor.

Chapter 31

The thrones will anchor the magic. The Great Houses will be the conduit. The Painted Crown will be the balance.

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