Eleven Books

And of the way they set the world on fire

The guards, mercifully, did not immediately detain her. No, they just bowed atop their mounts—bowed low, like they would for her eldest brother, the heir to the throne. A bit nonplussed, she nodded in what she hoped was dignified acknowledgment before looking around, a bit mute, for... whatever was supposed to happen next.

The thirty seconds she waited felt like an eternity, and she was just about to turn back to the guards and ask if something was wrong—

"You came." He materialized out of the shadow of a nearby home, and Ailsa—damn it—jumped about a foot in the air.

"I came," she said, and it was like the sounds of the world sharpened painfully as the realization rushed in.

She'd come.

"I'm an idiot." The words weren't intended to be spoken out loud, but they left her anyway, a little shakily.

Callias looked up from beneath his hood and nailed her with a strangely gentle look. "You're bold."

Ailsa didn't know what to say to that, and she still felt a strange disorientation, so she broke eye contact and flipped her hood up, just waiting for whatever Callias would do next. He didn't comment on it, didn't give her the judging glance she'd come to expect from the ladies at court whenever she stumbled over a curtsy, just motioned for her to follow as he walked into the streets of Bail-Maighán.

They stuck to the shadows, their progress uninterrupted—Callias seemed to know the schedule of the patrol rotations, and led them on a roundabout path through the streets of the capital, once pulling Ailsa into an alleyway, waiting for at least five minutes behind a stack of crates, a hand over her mouth, before continuing as if nothing had happened. Ailsa had never gotten a chance to explore the city, though she knew that its layout of concentric rings threaded with a chaotic tangle of side streets made it nearly impossible for non-residents to navigate. The only straightforward path through the city was the Thoroughfare—the arterial roadway that cut a broad swath directly to the center of the city, wide enough for ten mounted riders to pass each other comfortably. The rest of Bail-Maighán was nearly impassable, a defense mechanism and a point of nostalgic pride for those who lived there.

But Callias was either native to the city or had taken this route many times—he took dozens of turns, never once hesitating or even seeming to rack his brain for the next move. It was thoroughly unnerving.

They moved away from the palace, and Ailsa said nothing, just watching as the few large houses they passed faded to many more two-room abodes, then huts, then shacks.

But there wasn't supposed to be poverty anywhere but the very outskirts of Bail-Maighán.

When Ailsa lingered at the front of one shelter—barely more than a lean-to—Callias paused with her. "What is it?"

"Who lives here?"

Callias looked over slowly. "This was the bookkeepers' district, two centuries ago."

"It can't have been." No commoner had ever learned how to read in Anerah.

"It was."

She was getting a little tired of being talked down to by one such commoner—a man who, literate though he might have been, couldn't possibly have been privy to the exhaustive education she'd been given—but before she could even open her mouth to argue, Callias turned brusquely and slipped into another alley.

They didn't speak again until they hit the outskirts of the city fifteen minutes later. Annoying self-assuredness about the history of her kingdom aside, Callias's ability to navigate the city was impressive. A trip to the Bail-Maighán's edge via the Thoroughfare took thirty minutes walking, and he'd been able to steer them through the back streets in something like forty-five.

Ailsa had lost all sense of direction until they took one last turn, and instead of a dizzying maze of tall, slightly ramshackle houses, they stood facing a path that faded from worn cobblestones to packed dirt—and led into a deep, thick pine forest.

"Three Skies above me, Wind at my back," Ailsa hissed. "You are insane."

"It's the only place no one will find us."

"You're taking me through the Old Wood!" Fréamhan. Bail-Maighán had been built against it because no army in their right mind would march through it.

Other things walked that wood. And in Anerah, messing with the Other was a bad idea. It was a constant presence—everyone had a story about strange noises at night or objects appearing, going missing—but it wasn't something you talked about. It wasn't something you gave a second glance, for fear you'd find it glancing back. It certainly wasn't something whose domain you walked into on the night of the new moon.

But Callias was already walking toward the edge of Fréamhan.

"Are you coming, Princess?"

"That is not a place I should be."

This was a mistake—"Why not?"

"Why not what?" That smirk was going to get really old, really fast.

"Why shouldn't you be here? You're armed with iron and the forest keeps to its own unless disturbed."

So that was why Rhiannon had made her put on the knives.

Callias turned as if the matter was settled, his cloak following in a ripple of deepest black. A wraith, ready to melt into the shadows with the rest of the fell creatures in Fréamhan.

You didn't trespass on the domain of the Other. But perhaps the Old Wood was his domain, too.

Perhaps she wanted it also to be hers. Perhaps she was tired of safety.

Ailsa drew her knives—the metal was indeed cold iron—and followed Callias into the dark.