Page 4 of The Fae Queen's Captive
“Which ones?” I echo distractedly. I’m following the movements of the new person and trying to think of what I can say to make them leave. They don’t seem drunk, but maybe that’s worse…
“Aren’t you going to ask which whisper?” Maynard says in a silky murmur. “Which thought?”
His words from just a moment ago come back to me.
We came from only a whisper away. From only a thought away.
Maybe theyaredrunk, or he is, at least, and the thought is almost comforting. Drunkenness I can work with.
“I’ll ask you which whisper if you walk me up to the fair over the hill,” I say in my bestlet’s go have an adventurevoice. “They’ve got drinks and food up there and everything.”
“A bargain!” says the woman delightedly. “She wants to make a bargain!”
“As if she could,” the third stranger says. His voice is sneering, cold, and what I can see of his face in the torchlight is beautiful and severe. “She has nothing we want.”
“She has something the queen wants,” Maynard says, not taking his eyes from me.
My mind is filled with corgis and boxy handbags for a moment. “The queen?”
“It was fortunate we came upon you here,” Maynard says as if I hadn’t spoken. “We thought we might have to go to the Shadow Marketto find you, but here you are, right at the mouth of hell. You would have wandered in all on your own, wouldn’t you?”
“Just take her, Maynard,” the woman says. Her face is pitying as she looks at me. “If she’s not brought in tonight, the tithe might fail, and if the tithe fails, we will all pay the price.”
“Speak for yourself, Idalia,” the cold stranger says.
“I only ever do,Your Highness,” Idalia rejoins, her voice on the furthest edge of what could be called polite.
I am still stuck onjust take her.
“Okay, wait,” I say, shoving my phone in my coat pocket so I can have both hands free. I hear the crinkle of a paper wrapper as I do—one of those eco-friendly bamboo cutlery sets that came with some long-ago takeaway lunch, crammed into my pocket and promptly forgotten.
I lift both my hands in front of me, like I’m talking to a drunk girl in a club bathroom who’s just puked all over her dress. It’s myokay, okay, we can figure this outstance. “You don’t need to take anyone anywhere.”
“And yet we do,” the cold one says.
Idalia makes a regretful noise. “He’s right, poppet.”
“And for whatever opaque reason she has, it must beyou,” the cold one says. “No one else.”
“S-she?”
No one else?
“He means the queen,” Maynard says, and how his deep purr can sound both helpful and ominous, I have no idea. But I do know he’s close enough to touch me now, and that abruptly feels too close, far too close.
I try to step back and end up stumbling over part of a tarp as I do. It’s what gets me in the end, that fucking tarp, because in my windmilling efforts to catch my balance, its layers slide over one another, and I’m falling back—
Maynard catches me. Hard hands on my biceps, effortless strength.
“The bard is gallant tonight,” the cold one says, and this must be some joke at Maynard’s expense, because Maynard’s mouth—dramatically full in the middle, even more dramatically thin at the corners—flattens into a line. But his eyes remain on my face.
“Come with us, Janneth, and you will have every wish fulfilled. Come, and you’ll know not hunger nor cold nor the stale kiss of death. I will sing to you of your own whispers and your own thoughts; I will croon to you of secrets untold for lifetimes. And you will know the taste of your own longing only as a garnish, not as its own meal, for in our world, there is only ever surfeit, never any lack.”
I blink up at him. His grip on my arms isn’t painful, but its close enough to it that adrenaline still doses my blood. I realize the metallic taste in my mouth is fear.
“How do you know my name?” I ask shakily.
“That question will be answered, and many others, if you come with me now.”
