Page 27 of Fae Exile

But neither of them said it loudly enough for any of the captives to hear. The queen made it impossible to keep all our promises, no matter how much we might want to. I’d promised Ramana I’d always keep her safe. And now she was as dead as many of these fae probably wished they were.

“We have to hurry,” I said, the reminder perhaps unnecessary to my friends who would be as aware as I that the queen would have alarms and spies in place here, where no one was ever supposed to come without her explicit permission.

I felt the next roar in my bones an instant before I heard it.

Just as furious as the previous, we were closer to it now. It whipped past us like a gust of wind intent on barreling over anything in its path.

The four of us pressed together to weather it, and when it finally passed, West’s short hair was left standing on end.

He whistled under his breath. “Are we sure we want to head towardthat?”

It was a rhetorical question. When it came to Embermere and the rest of the mirror world, we rarely got to do what we wanted, only ever what we were duty bound to accomplish.

No one else was going to save faekind from the queen’s darkness.

“Let’s go,” Ryder said, and I resumed our progress, heading back toward the depths of the dungeon, where none of us had gone before. While we stalked forward, several prisoners called for help.

We couldn’t answer, not even when they begged. Their cries might not trigger whatever spells the queen must have in place,but our responses, loud enough to reach the prisoners thirty, maybe forty feet from us … theycertainlywould.

Feeling like the most callous of pricks even though we were doing all we could, aiming to take down the queen and offer them all permanent freedom instead of a temporary escape, I kept going until I reached a bare wall. Moisture dripped along the edges of its old, worn stones, but in the dim lighting of the dungeon, I spotted no ridges, no lines, nothing to indicate a passageway.

“There’s gotta be a way through,” Ryder said in a hush. “The pygmy ogres live down here.”

The three of them stepped forward to join me in examining the wall. We trailed our hands across it but had found nothing when I edged toward where the barrier intersected a cell.

“Hey, Rush,” a male voice croaked from within the darkened depths of it.

Reluctant to witness the state of its captive, I steeled myself and neared. “Yeah?”

“It’s me, Gadiel.”

Shock rolled through me, and I hurried to close the distance between us. With my free hand, I gripped the bars, peering between them. The last time I’d seen Gadiel had been in the arena, when he’d shot an arrow at the queen up on her balcony. As part of our ruse, we’d helped apprehend him. We’d handed him off to her guards—who would have captured him anyway—then they’d dragged him away.

“I thought you were dead,” I admitted softly. Gadiel had been the visdrake of Magiarantos. Had we known he was so willing to risk his life and that of those he cared for, we would have approached him about joining our rebellion. But we hadn’t known, and secrecy was paramount to our success. Already, the queen knew too much.

His chuckle was rough and hollow, but at least he laughed. “I’ve lost count of the amount of times I wished I were.”

Gadiel’s voice had been full of life. Now, it was a husk of its former vitality, seeming to beckon toward the end he yearned for.

“We didn’t want to be the ones to capture you, and if we can, I promise we’ll come back for you and get you out of here.”

“I understand, truly I do,” he answered, while the others, hearing me talk, flanked me.

“Gadiel?” asked Hiroshi, sounding as stunned as I was to discover the man with whom we’d sparred many times over the years, with whom we’d drunk when our paths crossed as diplomats for our clans.

“If only I’d actually killed the bitch,” Gadiel answered on a rasp.

This time, I sensed the beast’s fury before its roar, and gripped the bar hard.

The bellow, deep and loud enough to threaten to crack the earth in half, wound around us, as if trying to find its way inside us, to split us open too.

When it quieted, I was left panting.

“You must hurry,” Gadiel implored. “There’s an illusion in place, that’s why you couldn’t find the door.”

11.WHEN THE SACRIFICES ARE WORSE THAN WHAT WE’RE FIGHTING

~ ELOWYN ~

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