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“You will find no threat to you or your Queen, Warrior. Not within these walls.”
“How are we supposed to believe that?” I ask her.
“Because we are not your enemy.” She guides us down a path that weaves through taller shrubs and trees until we reach a platform with four heavily braided ropes on either side. Shadow sits up in the center, his face cleaned of blood, wings bandaged and at his sides.
“Shadow!” I rush toward him, Fort on my heels. He whinnies as I kneel beside him, relief washing over me like fresh rain. I run my hands over his face and side, checking for any new injuries. He nudges me with his nose then goes back to eating the grass they’ve clipped and placed for him beside a bucket of clear water. Tears in the corners of my eyes, I look up at Salma. “Thank you.”
“You’re most welcome. We would not have let him suffer. Though we do need to get him up before nightfall.” She looks up and raises her hand then steps onto the platform with us.
“What do you mean—” Before I can even finish asking, the platform begins moving, rising into the air. It jolts me at first, and Fort grips my arm to steady me. “Where are we going?”
“Up,” she replies. “It’s the only safe place at nightfall. Should the walls come down, we will remain protected from the creatures.”
“Creatures?”
Her expression darkens. “No doubt you have heard of them. Unless, of course, history has forgotten them, too.”
“The Tenebris creatures.”
“Yes,” she tells me. “They were twisted by the blood given to them. Animals whose only crime was simply existing. Bears, wolves, rabbits—they were twisted and contorted by the darkness until there was no shred of who they were remaining in their souls. So tainted that even their offspring carries the same curse.”
Unable to help myself, I think of Fort. He’s been injected with giant blood twice in his life—both times when he’d been a child. And while I love the man he is now, it makes me wonder about who he might have been had they not manipulated his blood.
“They come out at night. Hunting and tracking. They will seek weak spots on our walls, and though they will not find any, sometimes they try to get in anyway. Having our homes built this way keeps them from reaching us until day breaks and we can repair the damage.”
“Why can’t they simply climb the trees?” I ask. “If they get over the wall.”
Her grin is savage. “The trees are coated with a thick poison created by a flower that grows in the deepest parts of these lands. It is painstaking to create and takes years, but we have coated every tree here in it. They so much as touch the toxin and their entire body will shut down like that.” She snaps her fingers together then smiles as we continue our ascent. “We hope to be able to coat our walls with it soon, but it was only recently discovered.”
“Why stay here?” Fort asks. “If it is so dangerous. Why not leave.”
“We can’t,” she says flatly, as though he should have already known. “Nothing comes in and nothing goes out. Except through the dwarven tunnels. And as I said—”
“Those have been sealed.”
She nods. “So here we remain, trapped by the magic of elves who have forgotten we ever existed.”
“You’re human?”
“In here we are,” she replies.
Before I can ask her to elaborate, the lift comes to a stop, and we climb off. I turn back to Shadow as ten men step onto the lift and grip the leather he lies on. They lift him, muscles bunching, and carry him off of the lift and onto a steady floor, then head back toward the lift.
Two men remain behind to lower it, taking the warriors back down to the ground.
“It is the only way up,” she tells me. “And the only way down.”
I swallow hard, feeling isolated much in the same way I felt in the elven prison. “What did you mean that you’re human in here?” I question.
She takes a seat on a pillow and gestures for us to do the same. This time, we both sit. “This fortress was created when the Tenebris were beaten and the giants imprisoned beneath the ice mountains. The elves worried that the Tenebris would try to rise again and that their abominations would give them an advantage over the human kingdoms. So they banished the last of the giants, tasked humans with keeping the truth hidden, and trapped every last one of the Tenebris monsters with mountains of obsidian.” Her gaze shifts from us to beyond, clearly wrapped in memories of another time. “We were once elves. Tasked with placing obsidian bars around so that once the monsters were driven inside, they could be erected to hold them in place.”
“You are elves?” I demand, shock evident in my tone.
“We were,” she corrects. “Though I imagine if we left, we would be again.” She moves her hair back, and I note the pointed tips of her ears. How did I miss that before? As if reading my mind, she recovers her ears. “We are not allowed to show them,” she says. “We keep them hidden as a reminder that we are not our past. The elves trapped us here. They knew we would not be leaving, and they left us to rot anyway.” She growls the last two words, anger dripping from her tone.
“We had nothing to do with you being trapped,” Fort says quickly.
“I know you didn’t,” she tells him. “As I said, we are not your enemy. Which means you are not ours.”
