MistNovel - Read Web Novel Stories & Fiction Online

The child ran toward the dying tree.

Later, Cressa would not remember making the decision to follow. Instinct moved her body while her mind was still frozen in horror at what she had revealed. The guards had not reached her yet, confused by the chaos and the impossible light still flickering across her skin. The crowd pressed in from all sides, some fleeing, others frozen in shock.

But the child, no more than six years old, broke free from his mother's arms and sprinted toward the Heartwood with the terrible determination of someone too young to understand death.

A branch cracked. The sound cut through the noise like a gunshot. Cressa looked up and saw the massive limb beginning to fall, black with corruption, heavy as stone. It would crush the child. Would crush anyone within twenty feet of the impact zone.

She ran.

Her legs burned. Her lungs screamed. The distance between her and the child seemed impossible, stretching longer with each step. The branch fell in terrible slow motion, black veins pulsing with wrongness, death descending in the shape of ancient wood.

Cressa reached the child three seconds before impact. She grabbed him, pulled him against her chest, and threw every ounce of power she had been suppressing for twenty years into a shield above their heads.

Golden light erupted in a sphere around them. Pure. Brilliant. Warm enough to burn away the corruption where it touched. The falling branch hit the shield and shattered, fragments of diseased wood bouncing off the barrier and scattering harmlessly across the plaza.

For one heartbeat, there was perfect silence.

Then the child in her arms began to cry. Not from pain. From fear and relief and the terrible understanding that he had almost died.

Cressa held him, her shield still glowing around them, and felt the weight of seven thousand pairs of eyes fixed on her exposed magic. On the truth she could never take back.

The light faded slowly, reluctantly, leaving her standing in the center of the plaza with a sobbing child and no illusions left to hide behind. Her human disguise meant nothing now. Everyone had seen what she was. What she had always been.

A fairy. Light-touched. Powerful in a way that made her dangerous.

Footsteps approached with measured precision. Cressa looked up and met Riven's gray eyes as he walked toward her through the scattered debris. His expression was unreadable, cold as winter frost, but his hand rested on his sword hilt with the ease of long practice.

"Give me the child," he said.

It was not a request.

Cressa released the boy, who ran immediately back to his mother. The woman clutched him with trembling hands, not looking at Cressa, not offering thanks. People did not thank monsters, even when monsters saved their children.

Riven stopped two paces away. Close enough that she could see the silver threading through his armor, the pale scar across his left cheekbone, the absolute certainty in his eyes that he had finally caught his quarry.

"On your knees," he said.

Cressa considered refusing. Considered fighting. Considered running even though there was nowhere left to run. But the fairy child was still crying in his mother's arms, and the musician with violet wings stood watching from the edge of the crowd, and every fairy in the plaza would pay for her resistance.

She knelt.

The cobblestones were cold and damp beneath her knees. Riven moved behind her with efficient speed, pulling her hands behind her back and securing her wrists with silver cuffs that burned against her skin. Suppression cuffs. Designed to bind fairy magic at its source.

The pain was immediate and terrible. Like having her wings stolen all over again.

Cressa bit down on her tongue to keep from screaming. Blood filled her mouth, copper and salt, and she swallowed it rather than give him the satisfaction of seeing her weak.

Riven leaned down, his breath warm against her ear as he spoke too quietly for anyone else to hear. "You are mine to protect now, whether you want it or not."

The words should have sounded like comfort. They sounded like a threat.

He straightened and addressed the crowd in the voice of absolute authority. "This woman is under arrest for suspected involvement in the corruption of the Heartwood. She will be held in the tower pending investigation."

Murmurs rippled through the crowd. Some angry. Some satisfied. Some simply relieved that someone had been caught, that the Guard was taking action, that their fear had a target.

Lord Korran descended from the platform with the careful dignity of age. He stopped beside Riven and studied Cressa with the kind of attention a scholar might give an interesting specimen. His eyes lingered on her face, her shoulders, the place where wings should have been but were not.

"Fascinating," he said softly. "I had thought them all destroyed."

Cressa's blood turned to ice in her veins. That voice. That cadence. She knew it from somewhere, from a place her conscious mind could not reach but her body remembered with absolute certainty.

Run, her instincts screamed. Run. Run. Run.

But Riven's hand closed around her arm with gentle, implacable strength. He pulled her to her feet and began walking her through the crowd toward the tower in the distance. Guards fell in around them, forming a protective barrier between her and the citizens who might have decided that arrest was too merciful.

Cressa walked with her head up and her breathing steady. She would not give them the satisfaction of seeing her break. Not yet. Not while people were watching.

Riven's grip on her arm never loosened, never bruised, but never let her forget who controlled her movement now. They crossed the plaza in silence, the crowd parting before them like water before the prow of a ship.

As they reached the far edge, Riven spoke again, his voice pitched for her ears alone. "Pray you survive being important."

The words landed like blows. Because he was right. Unimportant people could hide, could disappear, could live quiet lives in the shadows. Important people drew attention. Drew scrutiny. Drew enemies who wanted to use them or eliminate them.

She had just become the most important person in Atheria.

And she had absolutely no idea if she would survive it.