Chapter 11

  Glass rained from the sky and smashed all around me. Smaller pieces pitter-pattered against the top of the log I was hiding in, while some of the larger pieces embedded themselves at least an inch or two inside, forcing me to lie flat as close to the ground as I could to avoid getting poked as I sat upright.

  Covering my ears against the noise, I watched the opening of the log, helplessly, as glass fell and shattered outside. One shard of glass slammed into the ground near the log’s opening like a guillotine, thudding into the ground without breaking.

  If it had fallen just a few inches closer, it may have sliced clean through the log—and me.

  The sound of breaking glass slowly faded away like an echo, leaving an awful, empty silence in its wake. There were no chirps, no squawks, no screeching birds. There was only the press of the cold, winter air as it invaded the once completely covered aviary.

  I was only wearing what I’d gone to bed in, and that wasn’t much more than a shirt and a pair of sleeping trousers. The bite of the cold was instant, but I was running so hot, my skin flushed with warm blood and adrenaline, that it almost didn’t affect me at first.

  “Gull…?” I croaked, my eyes stinging from tears, my throat burning from the scream.

  I touched the back of my neck and found only skin.

  No pixie.

  No reply.

  I was alone in the dark and the quiet. I couldn’t even hear Mareen and her friends, which meant they had either stopped laughing, or they’d fled the area. I had no way of knowing how much damage had been caused, not from inside the log, but I was also too scared to crawl out of it and take a look.

  Turning my eyes toward the opening of the log I was in, I saw my fae reflection staring back at me from the body of the huge shard of glass that had fallen only a few feet away. Despite the darkness, I could tell my face was cut up, as were my shoulders, my hands. I was bleeding, though I didn’t know how bad.

  I have to get out.

  Someone would’ve heard what had just happened. The whole castle would’ve heard it. In moments, guards would come running to search the aviary, but how would anyone know where I was unless they saw me? Screaming was out of the question. I could barely talk. The only way anyone was going to find me was if I was out there, making myself known.

  The lack of glass panes surrounding the aviary had allowed a lot more ambient light through, and the shards of glass embedded into the top of the log I was in acted like little disco lights. Now that I could see a little better than I could before, I could get on my knees and crawl, hand over hand, to the spot of light on the other side of the log.

  I had to be careful not to touch any glass, but what few bits there were in here were easy enough to spot. The ones I couldn’t see, though—they scraped against my hands and forearms, opening fresh wounds and causing brand new ripples of pain to go surging through me.

  Wincing, tired, hurt, I crawled toward the opening and stared through it. Stars burned in the night, plainly visible from where I was. The way their light touched the fluffy white leaves of the tree hanging above me made them look like they were transparent, and not white at all, but full of prismatic color.

  Despite the pain, despite the blood, and the panic, I was still able to find a moment of beauty out here. A moment of quiet calm that was just for me. I let my head rest for a moment and stared, blankly, at the ceiling; noticing now the support beams that had once held up the aviary’s glass, dome.

  The way it had shattered and come down like that… what was that? Had Mareen done that? One final kick after I was already down? Maybe it wasn’t enough for her that I was being set upon by birds. She wanted to make sure I was hurt as badly as possible, or maybe even killed, though not exactly by her hand.

  It was an accident, honest.

  Swallowing hard, I reached for the opening above me and tried to pull myself through it, but my hands caught on glass sitting on top of the log itself. Wincing, gritting my teeth against the pain, I yanked my hand back toward my chest. My palm was bleeding from a deep cut I’d just given myself. Worse, there was a piece of glass sticking out of my skin.

  Seeing it made me suck in a deep breath of air through my teeth. I shut my eyes, fighting the sting of tears as they tried to bubble up. I wasn’t going to cry. I was going to get out of this even if it killed me.

  “That’s just great,” I said, my throat still raw and pained, but somewhat working now.

  I couldn’t close my fist to stop the bleeding, not until the glass was out. That meant grabbing it between my fingers and pulling, but even so much as touching it sent white-hot, fiery pain tearing through my entire body.

  “Fuck…” I hissed, my fingers hovering over the piece of glass. A fresh trickle of blood ebbed from the wound, going all the way down my arm. Seeing it made me nauseous, made my vision swim.

  Blinking hard, trying to fight the dizziness, I took a series of sharp breaths and, holding the last one, I grabbed the shard of glass and removed it from my hand. The thing tore at my skin on the way out, forcing another hoarse scream to peel out of my mouth.

  Hand shaking, I tossed the shard of glass aside and immediately went to work tearing a strip of my shirt off to create a bandage. It was hard, having only one hand to work with. The rapid blood-loss didn’t make things easier, either. Lucky for me, I’d torn more than enough fabric with my teeth in my life to know exactly what to do and how much of it I would need.

  After wrapping my palm up as best I could, the next step was fashioning some kind of a knot to keep the thing pressed tightly against my skin. That was the hardest part, and it needed me to grip an already bloody strip of fabric with my teeth to complete the task.

  I could taste my own blood in my mouth. My heart was pounding, and my head wasn’t doing much better. I had no idea how the hell I was going to get out of this log, let alone be found. Then I noticed the soft, green light catch against the large shard of glass on the other side of the fallen log, and my heart leapt.

  “Gullie!” I said, forcing the word to manifest.

  “Dee?!” Gullie hissed. Her little green light bounced from glass to glass as she zipped around, searching for me in the dark.

  “In here! Oh my Gods, you’re okay!”

  She found the hole above my head by listening to the sound of my voice. As soon as she saw me, she fluttered down into the log and hovered in front of my nose, the green glow from her body making the glass in and around me glitter and shimmer.

  “Oh no…” she said, little tears streaming down her face. “Dee… I’m so sorry.”

  I offered her my other hand to land on, and she did. “It’s not your fault,” I said, or struggled to say. “I’m glad you’re okay. I thought I had lost you.”

  “They caught me by surprise. They were so fast coming into the room—I saw one of them blast Melina with magic, but before I could reach you to attach myself to your skin, another one of them was already on you. I didn’t know what to do, so I hid.”

  “You did the best you could do. I don’t blame you for hiding.” I shut my eyes again and took another deep breath. The adrenaline was starting to wear off, and the reality that was the world of pain I was in started to fall on me like a waterfall of needles. “It hurts so bad, Gull…”

  “Let me help,” she said, and she kicked herself into the air again. Cupping her hands together and blowing into them, she created a cloud of green dust that raced toward me. It tickled my nose as I breathed it in and seemed to twinkle as it brushed past my ears.

  A moment passed, and just as the pain started to rise, it fell again.

  “Better?” Gullie asked.

  “Better…” I said.

  “Good, but I can’t heal you. We need to get you out of here and get you to someone who can help with those wounds.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t get out of here, Gull. There’s too much glass.”

  “We can’t stay here, Dee. You’ll bleed out, or you’ll freeze to death! And I can’t… I can’t lose you. I won’t.”

  “Someone will come. They have to.”

  “And you’re counting on them pulling you out? They’ll throw you in jail!”

  “Me? For what?”

  “You took down their aviary… this is way worse than what happened in the library that day.”

  “No… that was Mareen’s fault, back then. And this was, too. They locked me in here and made the birds go bat-shit and start attacking me. Then they made the roof fall over me.”

  Gullie paused and stared at me. “No, that’s… Dee, that’s not how it happened.”

  “It has to be. What other explanation is there?”

  “I followed you all out here. I had to keep hidden because, you know, I glow, so I couldn’t get too close. But by the time I reached the glass tunnel, they were already leaving, scurrying back into the rooms like rats. When they went past me, I zipped into the tunnel to try to reach the glass door to the aviary.” She paused. “I heard you screaming in there… it was the most awful sound I’d ever heard. But then there was this light, like a star going supernova, and the aviary exploded.”

  I frowned at her. “What?”

  Gullie turned her head, then sighed. “I don’t know. I have no idea how to interpret any of this, or what it means. I just know what I saw and what I felt. The explosion knocked me to the ground.” She looked at me again and then pointed up and around. “This whole thing… Dee, this was you.”

  Silently, I stared at her, eyes wide, breath caught in my throat. My heart hadn’t stopped hammering once, my hands were still trembling, and worse, the cold was starting to settle in. It was insidious. I could feel it trying to find a way into my very bones.

  The winter chill.

  “What… what are you trying to tell me?” I asked.

  “I just said I don’t know,” she said, “But we should be focusing on getting out of here before the cold kills us both.”

  Shaking my head, fighting away the cabaret of unhelpful thoughts trying to force their way into my mind, I looked up at the opening above me, and then at the one on the other side of the log. There was glass everywhere, broken pieces poking through the wood, others scattered on the ground near me.

  Getting out of here was going to hurt if it didn’t kill me altogether. Then I heard voices. People talking, boots crunching, swords clanking. The sounds were distant, and echoing, but within the depths of the silence around us, they were easy enough to pick out.

  “You hear that?” Gullie asked, perking up.

  “Guards,” I said, “If the blood-loss and the cold doesn’t kill me, they will for sure.”

  “They can’t, remember? You’re a contestant—you’re protected. Can you yell? Get their attention?”

  “I can barely talk, Gull. How am I going to yell?”

  Gullie looked around, the light from her little green body playing on the shards of glass all around us. Finally, she settled on her own reflection in the huge pane of fallen ceiling nearby. “I’ve got it!” she shrieked, and then she zipped toward the large chunk of glass.

  “Gull, what are you doing?” I called out.

  “Sending them a sign,” she yelled.

  “But they’ll see you!”

  “Maybe, but they’ll see you first.”

  I watched her flutter around in front of the large glass pane, then stop. A moment later, she balled her hands into fists, pulled her knees up into her chest, and with her face screwed up and a breath held, the glow of her body began to intensify.

  Magnified by the glass pane near her, the light started to catch on just about every broken piece around it. Within seconds, the pixie’s glow illuminated nearby trees, and leaves—enough that I heard someone call out.

  “Over there! Look!”

  The sounds of boots crunching on glass got louder and louder as the moments passed. Gullie kept the magic up for as long as she could, exhaling her held breath a mere instant before being discovered. I held out my hand for her to land on it, but I could tell she was woozy and tired. Her flight wasn’t as smooth as it usually was, and the light from her wings flickering, and fading.

  “Gull,” I said, worried, “Gull, are you okay?”

  “Other side of your hand,” she panted as she approached.

  I turned my hand over, and Gullie landed on its back. “Please tell me you’re alright.”

  She cocked a thumb. “I’m a… a-okay.”

  Then she collapsed on the back of my hand and burst into a cloud of green pixie dust. My heart lodged itself inside of my throat. I wanted to scream, but when I saw the black and green butterfly tattoo on the back of my hand, I held the scream inside.

  “The glow is gone!” I heard someone yell.

  “I’m over—” I croaked, “Over here.”

  In mere moments, a soldier wearing full plate armor and a metal helmet loomed over the opening above me. His eyes were cold, and blue, and they shone with interna light. He scowled, his nostrils flaring.

  “What did you do?” he snarled. “You’re coming with me!”

  “I didn’t do anything!” I shrieked. “Hey, let me go!”

  He was reaching for me, sticking his hand through the hole and groping to try and get me, as if he was going to drag me through it—never mind the glass, or what condition I was in. I batted him away, trying to keep him from grabbing me, when another voice tore through the broken aviary.

  “Stand down!” It was the Prince. “She’ll be coming with me.”

  Chapter 12

  I wasn’t sure where the Prince was taking me, but wherever it was, he didn’t want his guards around. I heard him call for someone to fetch my Custodian and clean clothes before he carried me, in his arms, into the palace. He didn’t take me back to my room, though.

  Instead of heading toward the place I was sharing with the other contestants, he took me up the grand staircase and to a quiet bedroom that, strangely, wasn’t lavishly decorated at all. Not that I was in any state of mind to judge his décor, mind you.

  It just wasn’t as opulent as many of the other rooms in the palace.

  Or any of them.

  I had been holding onto his neck this entire time, my nose buried in his chest. I didn’t want him to put me down. Never mind the awkwardness of what had happened on the balcony yesterday. It seemed like it was a lifetime ago that happened. Right now, I wanted to be held.

  Like this.

  By him.

  But the time came for him to set me down on a bed. He did so gently, carefully, like he was worried he would break me if he was even an ounce too rough. I didn’t dare move. My whole body ached. Here, under the light from the sconces burning on the walls, I saw the extent of my injuries to my arms, my hands, my legs.

  I was covered in blood, and grime, and dirt. My hands were black where they weren’t red and brown. My feet were so sore I couldn’t feel them. I had to look down to make sure they were still there, attached to my legs. Somehow, all I could think about was how I had just ruined the bedsheets I had been placed on.

  The bed, and his clothes.

  “Your shirt…” I croaked.

  “Irrelevant,” the Prince said, and he went rushing around the bed and into an adjoining bathroom.

  A few moments later, though I couldn’t tell exactly how long, the Prince returned with a bowl of water in his hands. He set it down on the bedside table, grabbed a small towel, and started soaking it in the water. I thought he was talking to me, because he started mumbling, but then I noticed he had his eyes closed and he was talking to the bowl of water.

  I watched him while he worked, rolling the towel in the water, squeezing it between his hands, then pulling it out and wringing it over the bowl. Then I noticed something—a spot of light burning against his forehead. I saw the light explode like a firework in slow motion, creating an intricate pattern of curvy, glowing lines along the front of his head, between his antlers.

  The water in the bowl then started to steam, and change color, becoming a sort of warm, turquoise salve that the coated the rag in his hands. He turned to look at me, then knelt by the side of the bed.

  “Some of your injuries are severe,” he said. “I can treat them before the healers arrive, if you will allow me to.”

  I nodded. “I’m not in a position to argue,” I said.

  He scanned me up and down. I realized how I must’ve looked to him, wearing night clothes that were bloody and tattered, and cut up in places. I noticed his eyes settle on my midriff. A large chunk of my shirt was missing there, exposing my stomach. I clenched my right hand tightly around the fabric I had used to tend to the wound there, then I showed him the hand.

  His lips pressed together, and his jaw clenched. The Prince was no stranger to blood, I was sure. He was a Prince. He had fought and killed giants. He had survived out in the deserts of the summer court and seen countless other horrible things in his life. But this, seeing my hand black, and red, and brown, streaks of blood drying on my arm, that gave him a moment of pause.

  He took my hand in his, and I opened my palm, slowly. I’d held my fist closed tightly until this point, and that had worked to keep the pain at bay, but stretching my fingers out caused me to grimace and groan.

  Carefully, the Prince picked at the bandage I had wrapped around my hand until it came off, sticky and red. Not caring about where it landed, he tossed the bandage aside and looked at my hand, studying the extent of the damage, trying to figure out where exactly to place the wet towel in his possession.

  When he finally dabbed the towel against my skin, I was expecting pain unlike anything I had felt before to flare up. I was expecting to scream, to cry out. None of that happened. The towel was warm, and soft, and it sent a ripple of that same warmth echoing through my body like a wave crashing around the inside of an empty building.

  I shut my eyes and turned my head up, breathing deeply and exhaling as the Prince worked on my hand with the towel. I could feel the warmth of the magic working through me, from my hand, through my arm and down my center, all the way to the tips of my toes. They curled in response, as if triggered to do so, eliciting a soft moan.