Page 9 of Moonmarked

“A secret?”

“Yes. It’s…something nobody can know about. I’m supposed to take it to Blackwater.”

Someone called outside, and my heart jumped.

The boy stuck his head outside of the white fabric of the carriage, and said, “Just a minute!”

Fuck, I was sweating so hard…

“What is it? What are you taking outside?”

“I-I-I can’t tell you that.” Again, those blond brows shotup and something flashed in his eyes—suspicion or disbelief. It made no difference. “But—butI’ll give you a hint.” My voice shook but my mind was working. I’d read plenty of books, damn it. I could make something up. “It’s…uhm…it’s green,” I choked out, then cleared my throat. “And it’s fabric. And—and it hums when it’s near its fate.”

There. That sounds senseless and magical,I thought.

The boy paused for a second, then his eyes fell on the piece of silk I’d wrapped around my head and shoulders.

Magic.It was just magic, and magic could make things hum, couldn’t it? Even if it was the worst idea in history, it was still possible.

“The seer,” he finally said. “Did she seemein her vision?”

Oh, God…

“She saw a helper.” I swallowed hard. “No face—she only said I would have help to make it out of the court safely.”

His eyes brightened up instantly, like I’d just unlocked some part of his brain he didn’t even know existed.

Just like that, he believed me. To this day, I still can’t wrap my head around it, but the boy believed me.

He told me to follow him outside the carriage, to take his hand and keep my head down, and I did. With shaking legs, I jumped off the carriage, not entirely sure what to expect, but it wasn’tthis.

We were in the heart of the city I’d seen from the balcony of the palace, which now loomed far in the distance, and I was only able to see the tips of the towers pointing at the clear blue sky. Every inch of my skin rose in goose bumps, but there was no time to dwell on what had happened the last time I was there.

Fae surrounded me on all sides. Buildings, big andsmall, most made out of white marble, decorated with gold—doorknobs, window frames, fence doors. They weren’t cramped up together like in most places in the fae realm I’d been to so far. Each building had space all around itself, and the streets were wide and open, and the people were all dressed well. Most didn’t wear velvets, but ordinary clothes—like the boy who had gripped me by the hand and I hadn’t even felt it. He was shorter than me, thinner, but when he pulled me to the other side of the big carriage I’d been riding in, I had no chance of stopping it.

Everything turned to a blur around me so quickly, and I kept expecting someone to shout, to call me out—murderer!—and to grab me, chain my hands behind my back.

Nobody did.

The harder the boy pulled me, the more I blinked, and the more I focused on the people around me. There was a fae man wearing a bright red apron while he leaned against the corner of a one-story building and wrote something on a small pad, humming a beautiful melody that the fruit in the carts to his side followed. Several different kinds that had been put together were moving up and arranging themselves into separate carts on wheels, put on display in the front of the shop. The apples went to one cart, the oranges to the other, and something that looked like orange bananas arranged themselves neatly to their side, too.

The fae boy pulled harder, and suddenly we were walking right through a game that seven fae children were playing—where they literally disappeared and appeared again as they jumped into the air to touch this glowing orb that hovered over their heads.

It was giggling. The fucking orb no bigger than a basketball wasgigglingas the kids tried to reach for it, and nobody even looked at it twice.

A little farther away, a woman was sitting near a building reading a book with a blindfold on, and a man was hanging these clothes on a piece of rope—except all he did was pick them up from his basket, shake them once, thenthrowthem at the rope, and they filled in and became stiff, like a ghost had suddenly put them on.

So many things were going on around me, and the fae were just going about their lives, and this was allnormalto them. They saw this every day, they lived like this their whole lives.

Most importantly, nobody even glanced my way.

Not a single fae, man or woman or child even looked my way as the boy led me between buildings, far away from where the carriage I’d been in had stopped—in front of a two-story building with dresses displayed in the front, dresses on dummies thatmoved,and posed and spun all around for people to see them at every angle.

Yes, they were made out of wood, and yes, they did not have faces.

And also,yes,they were most probably going to be starring in all my nightmares from now on.

But nobody cared. Not about the dummies or about a giggling orb of light or aboutme.

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