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The carriage ground to a halt on the city outskirts, the streets so thick with costumed revelers now that there was no chance of getting back through.
Jaspar muffled something about turning around and trying another gate. But the comforting warmth of the drink was starting to drift, being replaced by an awful emptiness.
And just outside the window was the opposite of that emptiness. The pressing crowd. The wild dancing. The flowing wine.
That is where I should be...
“Wait!” said Jaspar.
But it was too late. She was already out in the press—young women in various stages of undress, with wreathes of flowers and close-curled goat horns on their temples. Men wearing nothing but leather loincloths, if that, alongside a smattering of sea-green feathers of sirens or the glistening snakeskin of gorgons.
She melted into them, the beat of the drums smacking her lungs. A beautiful woman with hair hanging past her bare breasts offered Teigra a mug, which she guzzled without shame and replaced with another.
No sooner had she downed that, gasping for air, than her arm was taken and spun into a swirl of dance. Another arm came—a middle-aged woman with a riotous cackle, then an old man barely keeping up with the pace. Arm after arm, face after face, passing her off, swirling her deeper into the sweet embrace of the party.
And in that moment, she wished it to consume her. To make sure she never had to think about Calix again.
“Teigra, stop!” came a shrill voice, pulling her from the fray. Jaspar swung across her vision with the residual momentum of the dance.
“Let me go!” she said, trying to break free.
He gripped her by the wrist as she reached for another cup, held aloft by a dancing young man. “Come on, Teigra. This isn’t like you! Let me take you home!”
His big eyes bored into her—so hopeful, so expectant, so caring. And in his words, still lingering, she heard something more pathetic than anything else she’d done this evening.
This isn’t like you...
“Well, maybe this should be like me, Jaspar. Maybe this is who I’m meant to be,” she said, pulling her hands free and sinking back into the fray.
The music filled her. The movement and the people were all she could feel. For eons she swirled and drank and laughed, never wanting it to end.
Then, across the haze, a familiar voice spun her around.
“Well, well! If it isn’t Ms. Cosmin!”
72
AURELIUS
Aurelius crept through the dark house, every new room causing his breath to catch, expecting to see Calix appear in the dull shreds that filtered through glassless windows.
No, not Calix. The satyr—the beast that Calix spent his life trying to trap away. The only being in all the world that truly scared the prince.
The only thing, perhaps, apart from Aurelius.
The front door had been locked tight, but it was quick work to find the right tool—a double-headed farm implement from the stables, caked with black soil, which Aurelius still carried in his clenched fist.
He’d ignored the braying of the stallion, just as he ignored the voices that warned him off this venture.
Calix cannot live like this. He deserves to be free!
The main rooms bore no reward but blackened silence. Eventually, at the back of the kitchen, the hearth still warm with coals, he came upon a set of narrow stairs, so far inside the house that there was just the faintest hint of a door at their base, tinted murky red by the fading fire.
With cautious steps, he descended.
He paused at the bottom, tracing his hands over the rough wood, adorned with a strange carving—a circle with a small star at its center, itself surrounded by a three-headed twist of coil.
The door was held by a fist-sized lock.
