Aside from my short explorations, I tried to keep myself busy so the waiting wouldn’t drive me mad. Briar found some work for me; it’d mostly been wood chopping, with the occasional household chore. She and Veerie weren’t the only servants in the Nest, and there were a dozen or so other goblins and gnomes and strange-looking creatures who all either avoided me or told me to shove off. The head cook, a gnome woman who looked twice as old as Briar, allowed me to peel potatoes once, only to later declare me incapable of such a delicate task and banish me from the kitchen. Who peels potatoes, anyway? 

When Briar ran out of things for me to do, she asked me to sit in my room and not make myself a nuisance. 

“Why don’t you read something, hmm?” she said, gesturing toward the three bookshelves gathering dust in the corner of the room. “That’ll keep you occupied.” 

“It won’t because reading is boring,” I sighed, though I’d much rather tell her to stuff her suggestion someplace uncomfortable. 

“Are you daft or something?” she asked. 

“Or something.” 

“Well, fine. Do you do anything else for fun? Run around in circles? I dunno what humans do. Do you paint?”

“My sister did.” I kept my face expressionless as I continued, “She would paint these little wood figurines I’d make. It always made them look more alive.” 

“Wood figurines!” Briar gasped. “That’ll work! Wait right here.”

She scurried out of the room, completely absorbed in whatever she’d thought up. 

I sat down in front of the fireplace as I waited for her inevitable return. 

It’d been a while since I’d put blade to wood for artistic purposes. Last time had ended with a pretty painful cut across the inside of my thumb that wouldn’t stop bleeding, so I’d taken a break out of frustration and then never returned to it. Or at least not to whittling, which was what I mainly did. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d carved a figure. Probably some weeks before leaving home last time. 

“Here. Will these do?” Briar laid out a leather satchel before me, unfolding it to reveal a series of gorgeous silver knives. None of which were made for woodcarving. 

“Uh …”

“Here’s some wood. You’ll have to go out and chop more if you use up all of these.” 

A pair of male gnomes I’d glimpsed around the house dropped a dozen logs on the floor and wordlessly left the room again. I could feel Briar’s gaze on me as I took in the scene. 

“Where did you find this?” I said for a start, nodding toward the knives.

“Valerien made them a while ago. They were tucked away in his workshop in the to-be-smelted section, so it’ll be fine if you ruin them.” 

I had a hard time believing that, considering how pretty and intricate they were. Then again, Valerien did strike me as the type to destroy something beautiful if it wasn’t up to his standards. 

Wait, his workshop? He made these? 

I took the leftmost knife out of its compartment and turned it in my hand. The handle glimmered in the light from the fireplace as it played across the floral designs. How strange it looked to have something so delicate and pretty in my rough fingers. I almost felt bad for touching it. 

“Valerien doesn’t strike me as a silversmith,” I said quietly. 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Briar sounded offended on her master’s behalf.

“His hands are too smooth. And I can’t picture him sweating in a smithy.” 

“I dunno anything about sweating since he never lets anyone in there while he works. As for his hands, they look like what he wants them to look like.”

I put the knife back next to its brethren and inspected the logs the other gnomes had brought me. All relatively thin pieces of young birch, which was a good wood for its intended purpose of fueling a fire, but too dense to make for good carving.

“Oak would be better.”

“Then go out there and find some. But don’t go too far, Valerien won’t like it if I let you die.” 

Briar scoffed, gave me an annoyed look, and stomped out. I must’ve slighted her by not appreciating her efforts to provide an outlet for me. Which I did, and probably should’ve made clearer, but there was no way for me to actually make anything decent with the resources I’d been given. Besides, sitting here and chipping away at a hunk of wood wasn’t my idea of a productive time. 

Sighing, I stood up and resigned myself to my fate, a process with which I’d become quite familiar in the last week. I got dressed, fetched my ax, and headed downstairs. Had I seen any oaks nearby? I couldn’t recall. 

When I got to the foyer, I froze on the last step. 

The front door had opened, and in came Valerien. 

Something was wrong. 

His normally pale but rosy complexion was grayish and sallow, his lips and eyes dark with a net of thin veins stretching beneath his skin, crawling down his jawline. 

“Valerien?” 

He looked sick. No, more than sick, worse than sick. He looked blighted, like something evil had crawled inside of him and died there, rotting him from within.

“Are you alright? Do you need help?”

He walked past me without so much as an annoyed glare. As he did, I choked on the stench of mold and still water. It was cloying and haunting at once, like smelling an unseen cadaver, but disappeared along with him up the stairs, leaving me to stand there like an idiot wondering what had happened.

Going out to get some oak felt quite inappropriate now, so I waited until I heard the door to Valerien’s bedroom close before hurrying back to mine. 

Maybe he would need my help. It would’ve been heartless to leave him alone in that sorry state.

I debated whether I should check on him. It hadn’t been a moment since I saw him, but if I knocked on his door, he’d be forced to interact with me and I’d be able to take a better guess at what was wrong. 

Before I could decide what to do, I heard Valerien’s muffled voice and inched closer to my halfway open door, sneaking a peek out into the hallway. The door to his room was closed, obviously, but I could make out Briar’s voice. She sounded troubled. 

After standing there for several minutes and hearing nothing but mumbling, I sat down at the edge of my bed, figuring they’d call if they needed me. I shouldn’t put my nose where it didn’t belong, even if I was worried. 

Why was I worried, anyway? He’d been nothing but condescending and callous toward me. Our alliance was one of necessity, plagued with reluctance and dislike. I wanted to believe my concern was less with him personally and more about how this condition of his would impede his ability to fulfill his end of our deal, but that justification felt incomplete. For all of his many, many flaws, I got no pleasure from seeing Valerien in pain. 

That was the part that frightened me most. He was able to get hurt. Weren’t the high fae supposed to be untouchable, all equal in power and only bound by rules which they had created? How could he possibly have gotten injured, gotten sick? 

If something had the power to hurt him, then he was no protector. If he could not protect me, then I was in danger, and through that, so was Sinéad.