. . . I’ve still never seen anything more beautiful in my life.”
Inis hadn’t come this far by letting herself daydream about the past. She never paused to wonder what might have happened in another life.
If Tomman hadn’t discovered the decay rotting beneath the Hill.
Things were horrible but honest. Inis laid a hand on Lais’s chest and leaned in to press her mouth to his soft lips.
Lais sucked in a breath and his lashes fluttered. When he looked at her with his good eye, Inis was shocked to find herself nervous. Her. After everything they’d dealt with. After she’d been struck by lightning, tormented by the Last.
“We should have done that a long time ago,” Lais said.
“Speak for yourself.” A certain sensible tartness appeared in Inis’s reply. With it, she felt more like herself than she had in days. “I’ve been busy saving your Resistance.”
Lais’s answering laugh was choked and soft, but satisfying. He put an arm around her shoulders and she let him keep it there. When Somhairle approached them to see what was so funny, a warm rush of gratitude settled deep in Inis’s bones.
She’d regained a part of herself when she’d gone back to the Hill, something she’d believed was lost forever. She couldn’t know when she’d get to see Ivy again, or their mother, or Bute.
She could manage that because she wasn’t fighting alone anymore.
Two had done more than bring Inis back to these princes. He’d brought her back to herself.
90
Rags
Time lost all meaning in the tunnels. They stopped only for brief spurts of rest, always with a fae keeping watch. They survived on mushrooms that Shining Talon insisted weren’t poisonous. Rags never wanted to see another, had dreams that he was turning into one.
Had it been weeks? Hadn’t they passed those same glyphs a hundred times? Had the sun ever been real?
After days of walking, they finally entered a broader tunnel and from there made their way into a massive chamber. The True Palace wasn’t anything like what Rags had expected.
This was a black castle beneath the earth, tall spires wrought from the stone they stood beneath. It was attached at the floor and ceiling, delicate towers piercing downward from the dome in which they stood. Inlaid silver made patterns within the rock. Fae lights beckoned from the windows, steady and unflickering.
It looked haunted as fuck. A place no one in their right mind would ever call a safe haven. But they were out of options, and they were following four silver fragments and a fae prince. Their right mind had already left the party.
“Are we home?” Happy asked.
Smartass squeezed Rags’s hand and said nothing. The wearier he got, the more Rags found himself missing the ass part of the little fae’s personality.
They were far under the earth, but the curved walls around them stood high in a space so cavernous that Rags itched to shout to hear his own echo. He didn’t—what if he made the ceiling cave in on them? But still.
A staircase had been hewn into the stone, polished steps leading toward the palace. The rocks set into the cave around them glowed like torches, lighting the way so it didn’t feel impossibly dark.
Tal led them through the palace doors. Down a level. Past parallel feasting tables set with silver cups and plates, waiting for an absent court. Again, creepy, but the kids didn’t seem to think so. They rushed forward gladly, settling onto benches, picking up plates and inspecting them. Rags set Happy and Smartass free to join their—friends? Brothers and sisters?
After what they’d been through together, maybe the distinction didn’t matter.
Rags rubbed his chest. The pain had faded over time, had been mostly replaced by the sting of the blisters on the soles of his feet, but he still felt its phantom traces, the scars left on his heart. He’d checked the real scar on the flesh over his ribs only once, then decided to avoid looking at it for the rest of his life.
Dirty and beaten down as he was from days of traveling and forced mushroom consumption, he was in better shape than most.
Hope still held the fae girl’s corpse, had barely eaten a bite on the trek. The big guy, Prince Laisrean, had needed to be half dragged the last day, the bandage over his missing eye clotted and stinking something fierce, and Somhairle wasn’t much better, although he and Inis had done