The man gulps, Adam’s apple bobbing in undulating fear. “And...and if I do, you’ll l-let me go?”
I laugh. The noise makes him flinch, but then his mouth opens wide in shock as I lash my magic into him, rotting the bottom row of his teeth from his gums. Letting the enamel brown and crumble till they slip from their places and disintegrate to the ground.
“Oh, no. You won’t be leaving this room alive. But it’s up to you how I let my rot toy with you.”
It’s funny how quickly he sings. Or rather, lisps.
He doesn’t tell me anything I hadn’t already figured out, but doling out punishment helps my dark mood. Only a little. But it helps.
When I walk away a couple hours later, with the sun in the sky and the taste of sweet rot and cold ash in the back of my throat, I should be relieved that we were able to get all of Midas’s spies and send them to a frozen grave.
But relief is the furthest thing I can feel, and Midas’s people no longer matter.
It’s the rest of Orea I have to worry about now.
CHAPTER 25
SLADE
Age 15
There’s a festival today in the city—a celebration of the winter solstice. I know this because we passed it on our way to the hills. There was already dancing in the city streets, blue lights hovering in the air with magic. Tonight, after the sun goes down, they’ll offer sacrifices to the cold stars and play music to the moon.
I passed by it all on the back of my horse, and that was the closest I’ve ever been to one of the city’s festivals. My father has chanted his entire life the importance of staying separate from the rest, to hold ourselves above.
“Get your head out of the clouds,” my father seethes, making my head snap back in his direction.
“It wasn’t in the clouds,” I reply. It was firmly on the ground...back at the city.
He raises a thick brown brow, his bald head so shiny that it can be blinding when the sun hits it at certain angles. “You’re slipping. Pull the rot back in where I told you.”
I look down at the ground and grimace when I realize he’s right—the rot has spread past the circle he’s drawn in the ground around me.
When we first started doing this lesson, there was no circle. He would just bring me out here, and my rot would explode out, killing everything in view. It was uncontrollable. Destructive.
Slowly, I’ve learned how to pull it back. To only rot the ground, coaxing it back from a tree, avoiding a lake.
It’s taken a lot of time and endless hours of practice, but now, I have a tiny circle drawn around me, the top line hitting the tip of my shoe. It takes a lot of willpower to keep the rot contained in such a small area.
Some fae have to work to expand their power. Not me. My power has always wanted to rip out of me. It is containment and control that have taken years of practice.
When it became clear what my magic truly did, it scared me. I was a danger to everyone and everything, was terrified of my power. When my father figured out I was scared, he dragged me out of the house. Took me right through the city teeming with fae. He told me I either had to control it or I’d have their deaths on my conscience. I threw up twice during that exercise and rotted an entire street, but I didn’t kill anyone. Not that time.
He loves to force me to train with consequences. Says it’s not real otherwise. So I had to learn very quickly, but it didn’t happen without very real ramifications.
The people celebrating in the city wouldn’t want me there, even if I were allowed to go. That’s what happens when you rot someone right in front of them. Even though I was able to pull it back, to make sure the fae lived, the city never forgot.
My father may be known as The Breaker, but I’m The Rot.
It doesn’t help that I can never hide who I am. I might be able to hide away my spikes, but the rotted lines that run down my arms and up my neck are a constant reminder.
“Concentrate,” my father snaps, arms held behind him as he walks just outside my circle.
“I am.” I grit my teeth, while lines of rot squirm beneath my feet. The grass is dead, the ground gone dry and hard, like anything alive in the soil has shriveled up and died.
The rest of the landscape is gently changing for winter, but even so, the hills still have patches of grass, the trees holding on to the last of their leaves. If my rot were to spread, there would be nothing gentle about it. There would be no natural progression from life to death, or the circle of nature’s rebirth.
There would just be a blight.
With his foot, my father draws another circle, concentric to the smaller one around my body. “Put the rot between the two.”
With a nod, I concentrate and look down at my feet as I move the rot away from me. I push it out further to the other side of the line, sweat beading on my forehead as I struggle to make sure it stays contained.
My father nods in approval. At one point in my life, I would’ve been ecstatic at that. But I’m long past that now.
I loathe him.
Even though I’ve never seen him strike my mother since that day seven years ago, I remember.
I watch.
My beautiful, kind, strong mother, yanked from her world and looked down on by all fae, has to put up with a tyrant and yet still manages to love her sons. To find moments to smile for.
I learn this for her. Not for him.
I learn so that one day, I can be strong enough to take her away from him. So that I can bring her somewhere in Annwyn where no one’s heard of The Breaker. Where no one hates Oreans. Where we can be happy and free. But to do that, I have to learn to be strong. And who better to teach me than the male I want to beat?
“Tighten it at the back, Slade.”
I look over my shoulder to see where it’s slipped, but he snaps his fingers. “Eyes forward. You don’t need to see it to know where it is.”
My teeth grind together. But instead of opening my mouth and saying something that will piss him off, I close my eyes and sense my power. Even though my magic is external, I learned that I can feel it internally. The rotten veins beneath my skin are the same as the rotted lines I force into the ground. But although I can feel it, it doesn’t mean it always wants to listen to me.
My father draws another circle, and then another, and then another. He has me doing all sorts of new things I’ve never tried before, like making half the rot go in one section, the other half going somewhere else, spreading in opposite directions. It leaves the once lush grass dried and dead, with cracks of earth showing through. Despite the cool air, I start dripping sweat, my body shaking from the physical and mental exertion.
“You’re getting sloppy,” he says with a sigh. “Control, Slade. Are you some common fae to lose it so easily? Or are you going to be worthy of the blood in your rotted veins?”
“We’ve been going at this for hours,” I reply, though I’m careful to keep my tone neutral. The sun is going down, and something about being out here without it makes everything seem harder. “I’m tired.”
My father sneers at that word. Even though he’s hundreds of years old, even older than my mother, the only lines he has in his face are from the frowns dug between his brows and bracketed around his downturned mouth.
“You’re tired,” he mocks, practically spitting.
My stomach drops, because I know what’s coming next. In the next blink, he’s snapping a finger in front of me, and the ground shakes, splits, breaks.
I stumble, almost crashing down when the shaking relents. The ground is breaking in perfect circles, right where he drew my lines. Gaps in the earth surround me, making it seem like they could break all the way through to the world’s core, crumbling beneath my feet.
But he’s not done with his display.
With another snap of his finger, he makes the full tree just behind us break in half, the huge trunk snapping like a twig and falling over with a crash.
The ground barely stops shaking when he lifts his hand again.