She doesn’t tell him that her life up until now was worse than what he has described. She couldn’t respond at all to people’s questions before today. She shudders, thinking of the talking bird that taunted her . . . the one bearing Malfleur’s crest.
“The Borderlands are full of them. However you got here, you’ve wandered into the deadliest part of Sommeil. Deadlier than Belcoeur.”
Aurora shakes her head. Belcoeur is dead, she thinks. Slain by her sister.
She shivers, even though the room is warm. For years, she and Isbe would play at being Malfleur and Belcoeur, taking turns at the ultimate battle between faerie sisters. If only Isbe was here now.
“Are you sure you’re not an Impression?” he says, pulling her back toward him, so close that their foreheads are almost touching. His not-square jaw is lined in stubble. Surely the princes of Aubin’s faces are freshly groomed, she thinks. Were.
He pushes her long hair over one shoulder and moves the collar of her cloak away, then leans in, almost as if to kiss her neck. She’s so surprised she freezes in place, his fingertips tickling her just below the ear. She shivers uncontrollably. She has never known what it was like to be tickled—she has no words, and no context, for the shock of it. His lips almost touch her skin, and then . . . he sniffs.
“What are you doing?” she blurts out.
“You smell real,” he answers.
Heat rises up her neck from where his breath lingers, until her cheeks feel hot.
“Aha.” He runs his hand through his messy hair and looks at her, holding her gaze. Then he grins slightly. “That’s good too. That’s a relief. Now I know you’re not an Impression.”
“What? Why?”
“Because,” he says smugly. “Impressions don’t blush.”
Her face burns hotter. “Who—who are you?”
“I’m Heath. And I’m here to save your life. Now let’s get out of here.”
She glances around at what is clearly a children’s room. How can this place be dangerous? But she doesn’t have time to wonder, as he has already begun to head down the stairs.
“But . . . my sister,” she protests as they descend. Then she stops talking and grabs on to his arm with both her hands, overcome by the alarming sensation that the stairs are disappearing beneath her feet, as though made of clouds she might sink through at any moment. Like in a dream.
She’s relieved when they make it into the front room. It must have just been another moment of light-headedness. Then she realizes her hands are still clutching his sturdy arm. She lets go quickly, the burn of contact simmering through her.
In the daylight she can see that the cottage’s furnishings are sparse, but there’s a small chair in the corner, curiously turned so it’s facing the wall. It gives her an odd, unsettled feeling. Something is not right about this place.
Turning around, she spots another doorway. She cocks her head, confused. The door is at the side of the room, which, if she’s correct, should lead directly into the staircase on the other side of the wall. But the open doorway leads to another room. The cottage seems to have no internal logic.
“We must hurry,” Heath says, turning back toward her.
But she’s drawn to the unexpected doorway. She peers inside the next room—a smaller sitting room, this one with a table. On it, by another window—which, by her calculations, has no right to be there, as this ought to have been an interior wall—sit a teacup and a sugar bowl. As she gets closer, she can see that the sugar bowl is heaped high. Beside it, there is an inch or two of tea in the teacup. She dips her pinkie finger in, and yanks it out with a yelp. The tea is scalding. Automatically, she sucks on her finger to try and soothe it—something she has seen others do. The pain of her finger throbs inside the warmth of her mouth.
She stares at the tea set. Someone else has been here recently.
“Aurora, please do not mistake me,” Heath says behind her. “If we don’t leave now, we may never get out of here. The cottage has a way of, well, disappearing.”
“How can it . . . disappear?” The last word ghosts off her tongue almost without effort, despite the fact that her mind is reeling over all of this:
Belcoeur—the Night Faerie—is not dead but alive and mad, ruling over a place called Sommeil.
A royal forest that shifts and sways.
And her voice, her sense of touch. She’s never known a faerie tithe to come undone before.
“I’ve come upon this cottage many times,” Heath explains, “but it’s never in the same place twice. I might not have found it today had it not been for your screams.”
Heath leads her away. They pass through the parlor room not once but twice, and then a third time before reaching the front door.
“It’s happening already,” Heath says, pulling her over the threshold.
Once outside, wind grasps at Aurora’s cloak and her hair, whirling them in a frenzy around her. For a few seconds she feels she is the wind.
She’s so distracted by the myriad sensations racing across her skin that she doesn’t realize what she is seeing: the trees in the royal forest. Moving. A dark green mass of pine needles swaying, limbs branching before her eyes, trunks rearranging themselves—the entire woods shuffled like a deck of cards.
Heath begins to run, and she struggles to keep up, dazzled, dizzied, nearly tripping several times and almost losing her cloak to the creaking reach of a tree branch. If she weren’t so disoriented, she might be tempted to slow down in wonder as shafts of sunlight interplay with the shifting forest. It’s more beautiful than anything she’s ever seen.
And then, with a gasp, Heath stops, thrusting his arms out to catch her. Aurora crashes into him. He holds her steady as a swirl of mist surrounds them, the green of the forest blending into the gray of fog. She sees with terror that they are standing at the very lip of a precipice that drops as far as the cliffs of Deluce, though she cannot tell whether land or water waits at the bottom.
One step farther and she would have fallen.
Thunder rumbles from the chasm, and then a massive flock of blackbirds shoots upward in a frenzied cloud, circles overhead, flapping hard before flying off.
Heath’s breath is in her ear; his chest rises against hers. “Wait,” he whispers. “Wait.”
Slowly, as though in a foreign dance, he steps back, guiding her body against his. Then to the side. Then a turn. Then they are no longer by the side of a cliff but instead staring at a high stone wall that seems to go on endlessly in either direction.
Heath sighs, and she does too, finding relief as soon as he has let her go.
“Come, help me find the rift,” he says, tracing his hands along the ragged face of the wall.
She’s never been more confused in all her life. “Rift?” The word floats out of her and away. A forest, and then a cliff, and now a wall, each trading spots with the last as though rearranged by an invisible hand.