The sun was falling when we identified a small hole in the side of the canyon. That must be the so-called resting spot. The st twelve hours had been a terrifying experience filled with danger. I wasn’t sure how many had made it to the cave ahead of me, nor how many behind me would make it. I had managed to keep my small group together. That contained the group I had come with, as well as Lucil. I admitted I was a little surprised her guards hadn’t stayed closer to her. It might be better to say that her guards had died in her pce, one after another.

  I could understand why they said that this was a safe pce, The hole was only just wide enough to get a horse through. If a wyvern tried to climb in, it would be easy to kill it and use its corpse to block the hole from any monsters on the outside. Of course, then you would be stuck in there until you starved to death, but it was better than nothing, I reasoned.

  I gestured cautiously and silently, bringing my haggard group of survivors into the retive safety of the hole. As we entered, my devil-enhanced eyes could make out the forms of the survivors. There were about twenty men there. Among them was the leader of the queen’s men, who merely gnced our direction briefly before he went back to dictating orders. My ears caught a canceltion request, so he might have been ordering his men to head back to felt us.

  Other than that, he did not attempt to even acknowledge our presence. The rest of the men were sitting in various stats of undress, mostly reted to how much armor had been destroyed in their mad flee for safety. A few were tending to the truly injured, but the rest appeared merely traumatized by the events they had just witnessed. The men were terrorized, and I had a feeling that if any of them made it out of here, Hedgeman’s pass would leave a haunted expression in their eyes for the remainder of their lives.

  I walked up to the leader who was still ignoring me. “Should I expect tomorrow to be like this as well?”

  “If we’re lucky, yes.” He responded, not even bothering to look up.

  We still had the longer part of the journey tomorrow. I decided it wasn’t worth arguing with him. We were already in the past, and it was everything they had warned and more. Just what had the queen been thinking? My party had found a quiet pce to sit. There would be no warm fire or cooked food tonight. The light may be seen by a wyvern, and the smells would certainly be followed. If we wanted any hope of survival, tomorrow we’d need to leave as quiet as a mouse and hope we weren’t detected like today.

  After everything we had experienced, adrenaline was pumping through my veins. Sleeping was the st thing I could do, so while everyone else was trying to recover and possibly get some sleep, I stayed standing. I waited as each of the tired men stumbled into the cave, a look of pure relief on their faces as they realized they were one of the lucky ones who made it, and for the smarter ones, a fsh of horror when they realized it’d be the same thing tomorrow.

  I could still hear the screeches of a wyvern and the occasional scream of men in the distance, even as the moon glowed overhead. The night wouldn’t afford us any safety. It seemed like perhaps the wyvern were more active at night. The darker it got, the fewer men trickled in, and the more screeches sounded out in the night. We had been traveling at the most ideal time. Such a thought even caused a feeling of terror to run through me. I eventually had to pull my eyes away from the entrance. I was certain no one else was coming.

  Of the original group, seventy-three survived. Between all three parties, there were just over a hundred originally. There were only two horses left now, and thirty percent of the group was dead. If we lost another 30% tomorrow, that would probably bring them close to the 50% he promised, although it was likely more would dye tomorrow, especially given the ck of horses.

  As I dwelled on these numbers, idly wondering if there was a better way, my eyes went to the back of the cave, where I noticed a pathway that continued deeper into the caverns. Since I had nothing else to do, I approached my escort once again. He was preparing his own pce to sleep now. This time, as I got close, he immediately spoke.

  “You’d be better off sleeping if you knew what was good for you.”

  “Where does the path in the back lead?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “If it leads to another path, a protected path…”

  He snorted. “You should just listen to your little misses. If such a problem was so easy to solve, then why do you think you’d be the one to solve it?”

  “…”

  He sighed. “It leads to other caverns. There is a network of them. They’re the pce where the drakes and wyverns house at night. You’re welcome to explore them, but anyone who has ever left down that passageway has never returned. That direction is certain death. There is no path out of this valley of death except the one we’re currently traveling… Prince.”

  He spoke that st part after some hesitation, and his voice held scorn. He turned to me with a harsh grin, giving a single nod.

  “Is such an insane order from the queen worth following?”

  He spun around, and his face turned to rage. “You dare speak of the queen?”

  “Shhh!” A voice spoke up, and we both turned to see Lucil approaching. “Don’t raise your voice, fool. You may not value our lives, but if you don’t value your own, then it might as well save us all time if you just took it.”

  His face turned purple for a second. He took one looked at me, sniffed, and then turned away. I took a step forward to grab him, but a hand touched my shoulder. I was surprised by the gentleness in Lucil’s touch, and I turned in surprise. Her hand left my shoulder like it had been burned, and then she put her arms behind her almost like she didn’t trust them.

  “If you wish to sow dissension among followers, the faery is the wrong species to do it with.” She whispered.

  “How so?” I asked.

  She began returning to our camp, so I followed her as she spoke. “The faery follow a very strict caste system. Every faery is born with its specific role. These faeries are warriors. They were warriors the moment they were born, and they will be warriors until the moment that they die.”

  “So… the queen?”

  “The queen is the only queen there is, and she’s the only one who can be queen. If Mother dies, then the faeries would rather fall as a country than elect a new leader.”

  “That is… extreme,” I responded, not sure how else to respond to such a rigid belief system. “How could she have gone to the human realm then?”

  “Spoken like a mortal.” She snorted, and then coughed. “Ah… mortal is the term faeries use for none-faeries.”

  “Aren’t you also a mortal?”

  She jerked and then sighed. “At least you’re not insisting on saying you’re one of them.”

  I reasoned out quickly that a half-breed like my sisters and me probably didn’t fit on that list. That’s because they were biologically beastkins and I was biologically a devilkin.

  “I understand the difference.”

  “Well, faeries have extremely long lives. They’d remain in their prime for thousands of years. A faery-mortal coupling doesn’t result in a faery being born. For Mother to sleep with Father, she could be with him their entire lives, and father a dozen children, and it’d be nothing more than a brief fling in her eyes.”

  “Then why bother?”

  “It pcates the humans. They see the queen of the faery as the queen of the humans too. Their sons and daughters would go on to have sons and daughters, and generations would share biological simirities with the humans. Some would go off and make their own countries, like the beastkin, the elves, and the dwarves…”

  “And the devilkin.”

  Her eyes fshed. “That is a lie!”

  “Keep your voice down,” I responded calmly.

  “I don’t like lies.” She cleared her throat, looking slightly embarrassed. “They do it as a peace offering. It’s a means of showing humanity their love.”

  “I thought you didn’t like lies.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You said they do it as a peace offering. That is a lie.”

  “It’s not!” She frowned. “Why? What are you saying?”

  I shrugged. “It’s about subjugation. The faeries turned the human realm into their shield to protect them from the devils and the demons. We act as a buffer that protects them from the rest of the world. They’re segregationists, who cut them off from the rest of the world in every way possible. They pick the most remote and hard-to-reach pce to live and then create a border of serfs to serve and protect their kingdom. Every faery queen needs but tame one king, and for that, they obtain a thousand years of peace.”

  “I won’t be swayed by your dark words.” She made a face. “Mother isn’t like that.”

  “When will the queen pass on her throne to the next?” I decided not to argue with her but pile on more questions while I had the chance.

  She shook her head, blinking. “She should have already. Various… there were issues and she wasn’t able to conceive a faery child.”

  “I see… so the queen is the st in the faery line and the only one who can mother the next queen. I wonder who her potential father would be.”

  “You’ve already met him,” Lucil responded, nodding her head.

  I looked in the direction she nodded and was shocked for the first time in a while. “Him?”

  “General Duheart, royal css. He had been courting mother for years. He probably is doing this favor for her in the hopes of winning her heart.”

  “I see…”

  “Don’t get me wrong, Mother has many suitors, but she has shunned them all. Other than my father, she hasn’t accepted another man. This has caused many faeries to become bitter and resentful toward humans. Even if you weren’t what you are, the faeries would likely still hate you.”

  “Thank you… for telling me this.” I responded sincerely and I reached out and touched her shoulders as gently as she had touched mine earlier.

  Her face turned red and she spped my hands away, anger fshing. “Never touch me! I-I didn’t do anything anyway.”

  She spun away and fled into one of the tents. It appeared that the dies had nded enough tents for themselves, and the men were out. After my previous night, I was denied the right to sleep in a tent, alongside Captain Moar. He flopped down two beddings, looking up at me.

  “Women, huh?”

  I found Captain Moar’s comments both profound and profoundly stupid. I plopped down in my bedding and threw my bnket up over my head.

  “Get some sleep. We’ll have a hell of a day tomorrow.”

  Even though I gave such an order, sleep was a long time passing for me. It wasn’t the wyvern or the dragons that kept me from sleeping. Rather, it was my thoughts on the dynamics of the faeries. Although I had spoken of the faeries using the humans to Lucil, that had been aimed at unsettling her. However, the more I thought about it, the more I wondered about this world. The beastkin, the elves, the dwarves, and the humans fought to keep the country from being taken over by demons and devils. We were all known as the mortals. The faeries weren’t immortals. They did have a lifespan. I had seen many die just recently, but the faeries tended to the celestials in the north. Just who were the celestials, and what was so special about them that they would be called immortals? They were dangerous enough that even God felt he needed to warn me about them.

  I didn’t have any answers to those questions. In the end, I drifted off into a fitful and uncomfortable sleep. It was dark and nebulous, and I felt a foreboding darkness that I couldn’t describe creeping up on me. It wasn’t the first time I had such a dream. They were why I felt so strongly about bringing the human realm together. Something was coming, and we needed to be ready.

  I woke up to being shaken. I had told the girls that I didn’t like them let me sleep to the point that it caused trouble, but that didn’t mean I was happy being jostled about either. My eyes snapped open, and as soon as I saw Saria’s panicked look, I knew something was wrong.

  “What is it?” I immediately asked.

  “Your mother is gone.”

  I sat up immediately, nearly headbutting her. “What?”

  “She shared a tent with Aeryn while I shared one with my sister and the Grand Magus.”

  “This morning, the sleeping roll next to me was empty.” Aeryn decred, looking worried for the first time.

  My mind worked furiously. Why would Mother leave in the middle of the night? She couldn’t have seriously thought she’d be helping me by leaving so that I couldn’t be tracked? Was she scared of meeting the queen? She wouldn’t have sacrificed herself because of that, would she? For all I knew, the queen built an automatic suicide switch for her when they got in a certain range. I had been so foolish!

  I kicked Captain Moar, who awoke with a start. “Huh? What?”

  “Our people are missing,” I growled, throwing my covers at him and then getting back on my feet.

  As I gnced around the cavern, I could see just the hint of light starting to come in from daybreak. Many of the soldiers had gotten up and were rummaging through their stuff. They were still getting ready for the next stretch of the road. Some of it was physical preparation, but there was just as much mental preparation.

  “I got one of the guards to speak.” Lucil approached us, her eyes fshing. “They say that the woman left her tent and headed down the back path st night.”

  So, she didn’t flee out the front door, but why did she leave?

  “What?” I hissed, nearly grabbing her again before I remembered her words not to touch her. “Why didn’t they stop them?”

  She made a face. “He said that they weren’t his concern.”

  “That bastard…” My eyes quickly found the man she was just talking to, and I memorized his face.

  “It’s time to set out.” Duheart gave the order.

  “We’re not going.” I immediately decred, causing all of the armed men to look in my direction.

  “Excuse me, is there a problem?” He asked, his eyes fshing in a way that suggested to me he might know exactly what was going on.

  My mind worked furiously. I was being set up. I was certain of that. Duheart had just pulled off something clever, and it was not in my interest.

  “One of my people have gone missing. I have reason to believe they have gone off deeper in the cavern. Give me an hour to look for them.”

  He licked his lips and let out a chuckle. “No.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The abomination that dares profane our queen can die.”

  Up until this point, Duheart had shown a pcid and uncaring expression toward everything around him, but when he said those words he finally showed his real intent. He had pyed the long game, luring me into a sense of self-confidence before striking when we were at our most vulnerable. Only now did he reveal his malicious intent. Many of the faeries around him seemed to agree with his vicious words, as they wore slight smiles as well.

  “I’ll go, you don’t have to risk any of your men.”

  “I’m supposed to escort you to the queen.” He shrugged. “No one said anything about a fake person.”

  “Like you’ve cared about my life up until this point! Everyone who goes that way dies, right? So let me go that way and just report me dead.”

  “Heh… a promise is a promise. I’ll bring you to my queen, even if it’s just your head.” He thumbed the bde on his belt as he said that.

  I had initially taken his zy stance to suggest he wasn’t that skilled, but at that moment, I had a clear feeling that he must be a will user and a strong one at that.

  “You bastard… you knew… what did you do to lure her away?” I demanded.

  “What did I do?” He raised his arms innocently. “I didn’t do anything. It’s well known that there is always a risk of women being spirited away in wyrm territory. Your women knew the risk before they came.”

  “Sp-spirited away?” I frowned.

  “I-it’s my fault.”

  I turned to an unlikely source. It was Baba who stood there with a guilty look on her face like she had done something bad.

  “What did you do?”

  “It’s… you’ve heard about the… em… proclivities of the drakes, right?”

  “Mom said they liked to snatch women and py with them.”

  “They do…” She sighed. “But they don’t need to physically grab them. They can release a scent that can ensnare them. The women will lose all faculty and just walk right to them.”

  “Th-that…”

  “I cast the spells on all of them, but your Mother had protections put on her by the queen that kept me from enchanting her. I assumed that these protections would protect her from the drakes as well. Your mother should have known…”

  “Stop,” I said, my body shaking, causing the usually flippant Baba to look genuinely worried. “We need to-”

  “You’re coming with us.” I could hear the sounds of a dozen swords ringing out as Duheart’s voice broke through. “Today, you’ll take point.”

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