She leaned toward me with knife in one hand and fork in the other. Her voice lowered. “You’re practically a child who can’t properly harness her magic, remarkable though it may be. You have no immunity to poisons. You can’t hit a target more than thirty paces off. You’re a changeling who knows nothing of our court, much less of Feyreign. You can’t even read our language. You’re achangeling.”
She recited as though she kept an internal tally. These were all things I knew, but placed together they became a bouquet of shit. And each brought a sting, though I managed to keep my face mostly straight.
When she had finished, I said, “Thirty-five.”
She blinked. “Thirty-five what?”
“I can hit a target at thirty-five paces.”
Her hands hovered over her plate, brow lowered. Then herwolfish grin emerged. “There it is—that cheek in the face of everything. Who taught you that?”
My mother. Theo. Elisabet. Isa. The whole of the Dip.
I picked up the outermost fork set before me and stabbed it into one of the rashers. “I was raised by wolves. The worse things seemed, the more we raised our chins.”
She pointed her knife at me. “That there is why.”
“Why what?”
“Why I picked you over Rhiannon.” She flicked her napkin off her lap and onto the table and rose. “Aside from the saving-my-life part.”
I stared up at her, half a rasher still on my fork. “Going to assault more flowers?”
“Something like that.” She nodded me toward the door. “It’s time for the hollow pool.”
“I have a feeling I’d rather stay seated.”
She leaned forward, set both flat palms on the table. “The Festival of the First Light sits on the horizon, and at least one of those primped, pastel queens will absolutely shank you with her knitting needles. Now would you rather gobble your ham, or learn to see in the dark?”
Faun led me from the dining room down, down beneath the Sylvanwild citadel. We passed by the root cells—one of which I had spent wretched days in, discovering I was a changeling—and descended until the earth enclosed us like a cold, wormy hand.
She carried a purple crystal, which seemed dim until we descended so deep, we were past all other light sources from the dungeon. When my feet touched stone, I stepped back. Dripping sounded somewhere nearby, droplets falling from on high.
“Where have you taken me, Faun?”
My voice swelled, echoed, caromed back at me.
“Have you ever wondered why the water tastes so lovely?” Themischievousness of her words sharpened as they rose into the air, expanded. We stood in a vast space, the ceiling lost to shadow. “It’s because we sit atop a reservoir.”
Water. We must be near enormous amounts of it—none of which I could see. Only Faun’s fingers were visible, holding the crystal high. It bobbed forward, and I followed close behind. A stone path carried us down, around and around, until she came to a stop.
I had no idea what lay at the edges of this place, much less two paces away.
“I forgot to ask,” Faun’s voice said, “can you swim?”
“My almost-father taught me to float in a?—”
The crystal moved almost as quick as Faun’s rapier in the cave behind Virellan Falls. Something hit my chest—her hands—with the force of a sledge. I stepped backward, and instead of meeting stone, my foot met air.
I fell, fell, and fell.
My back hit water, and I was submerged as soon as I registered it. A shocking chill, an absolute glove. I couldn’t breathe.
I was in the reservoir.
Instinct took over, and I clawed toward the surface. But where wasthat? Didn’t matter; the water seemed to buoy me, and a second later I burst into the air with a ragged gasp. I’d only been under for two seconds, but I had never been more grateful to breathe.
I still couldn’t see, but now I treaded endless black water. The crystal’s light had disappeared.