Free Bones of Faerie03 - Faerie After by Janni Lee Simner

a tunnel appeared, and Nys and Allie walked into it. I focused on my breathing once more as I forced myself not to follow them, watching as the tunnel disappeared, taking Nys’s light with it and leaving me in the dark.
    I slept, not because sleeping was safe, but because if I didn’t, I would lose my edge, like a dulled blade.
    When I woke, Tolven stared silently down at me, aglowing stone in his cupped hands. His silver eyes were wild, his breath ragged. I scrambled to my feet, forcing the sleep from my thoughts as I crouched into a defensive stance. How long had he stood there? His muscles tensed, as if preparing to attack—or struggling not to. I held my hands up, a sign that I wouldn’t attack if he didn’t.
    Tolven’s breathing steadied, and one side of his mouth quirked into what might have been a smile. “I will not hurt you.” His nails were clipped short now, but his hands tugged restlessly at his sleeves. “I will only listen. The green you carry is not so troubling, once one stops trying to fight it. That is difficult, but difficult is not the same as impossible.”
    There was a tunnel open behind him. I rocked on my heels, as if to back away, then lunged forward, grabbed the stone from Tolven’s hands, and ran toward it.
    A whisper of ice brushed my face. I caught the scent of something musty and old as gray dust trickled to the floor in front of me.
    I skittered to a halt. A fist-sized patch of darkness sank like mist through a hole in the ceiling. I felt Tolven’s hand on my shoulder, pulling me back from it.
    “Go away!”
I commanded the dark, but it just kept sinking down, down, down. The purple light grew gray and thin as color drained from the room and the air tookon the bleak chill of a rainy winter morning. I smelled the decay of leaf mold, the rot of old meat. The empty food bowl disappeared into the darkness. That darkness sank through the floor and was gone, leaving behind a pile of gray dust where the bowl had been.
    “Close.” Tolven released his hold and stepped around me to block the tunnel. “Too close. Do all humans move with more haste than care?”
    Color seeped back into the room like dye through wool. It hadn’t been lack of care that had made me seize a chance of escape. “What
was
that?” I eyed Tolven and the tunnel behind him, weighing other means of escape, thinking of how he had pulled me back from the dark.
    He could as easily have pushed me into it, had he wanted to. I waited, tense, listening.
    Tolven laughed uneasily. His hair was tied back from his face, twisted into a clear tail that fell down his back, making his eyes large and giving his face the openness of a deer on a path, in the heartbeats before it becomes aware of the hunter. “Surely the Realm’s crumbling is of no surprise to humans? You sent the fires that caused it, did you not?” He tilted his head, as if uncertain. His gaze was clear, nothing wild in it now.
    “You’re—”
    “Sane?” More laughter, gentle laughter that made me think him amused with himself. “I suppose I am,if anyone in the Realm can be deemed so now. It is the seeds you carry. Once I push past the fear, their voices are louder than the voice of the crumbling, and when I let myself listen to them, I regain my own mind. It is a strange thing, to be in control of my thoughts after so long.” He held out his hand. “Give them to me, please.”
    I felt the velvet tug of glamour in his words, but it was weaker than Nys’s, a small thing beside the pull of the seeds in my pocket. Could they truly heal a broken mind? The seed Karin had kept hadn’t helped her.
    “You are human,” Tolven said, “yet my words do not touch you. Why?”
    I dared not tell him the seeds were all that protected me from losing my mind in an entirely different way than he had, losing it to the force of his words.
    “I could try to take them.” Tolven shrugged good-naturedly. “But I am guessing you have other defenses in addition to those