The following contains spoiler for Music of Midnight (book 1), read ahead at your own risk.

The spray from the great falls had always been his favorite welcome home. Were it not for the imposing, square brick towers of the Anderfall temple in the distance, this city might actually feel beautiful with its abundant rivers and wide estuary. Certainly, it was more inviting than the dry desert of his childhood years… yet, if Nyx were completely honest with himself, each visit to his maternal grandparents in the mountains was harder to leave. 

If only he could convince his friends that they should move up there… if only he could leave it all behind without consequences. But there would be consequences to running from his people’s expectations, and it did no good to wish otherwise.

They would make him an unwilling groom to an unwilling bride, or they would make him a murderer. Those were his choices now.

Nyx trundled on, rocking in the driver’s seat of his enormous six-wheeled caravan with each pothole he hit, the four draft horses showing no sign of tiredness. Good. He wanted to be back before darkness fell. Terrible dreams of shadowy monsters and grasping, gloved hands had plagued him the past couple of nights of this long, lonely journey home, and each time he awoke in his sleeping loft gasping for breath and trembling from fright. Hopefully, this was not a permanent new affliction; he so enjoyed sleeping in his caravan.

As the downhill road levelled out, the caravan got clear of waterfall spray and the forest thinned as the outermost homes of his city began to spring up from the afternoon haze. That was when the true heat of day hit Nyx for the first time and he immediately wished to be back beneath the pine forests, before his skin could freckle and burn. He spent the rest of the journey sweating through his cotton shirt, clinging as close to the shade of houses as he could and intermittently glaring at the merciless sun. 

By the time the caravan crossed the threshold into the yard of his father’s house, Nyx’s thighs ached and his forehead burned. After pulling into the carriage house and tending the horses, he hobbled towards the front door, where Olli stood waiting for him. His heart instantly lifted at the sight of his friend, then dropped just as quickly. Olli looked sheepish— and that was never a good sign.

“You’ve been gone almost a month. Thought you’d finally abandoned us.” Ollie’s tone had a forced playfulness to it. Nyx was not fooled.

“What’s going on? What’s happened?” He just hoped his friend had not been shamelessly provoking Alina again. They hated each other, but Alina would not hesitate to have Olli killed if he caught her in the wrong mood.

“Nothing,” Olli answered in a squeaky voice. “How’s Grandma?”

“She’s fine, Olli. I’m not in the mood for any nasty surprises; just tell me what you’ve been up to.” Nyx raised a brow disapprovingly as he shoved past his friend into the coolness of the house.

Straight away, Nyx sensed the wrongness. His usually calm home felt tense and quiet, the way the air feels before a massive thunderstorm.

“Now… don’t get mad,” Olli said in an overly placating voice.

Nyx just sighed. He hated conversations that started with ‘don’t get mad’. They rarely ended well. “Olli…”

“This is a good thing. We saved you from having to make a difficult decision. And we made a friend… sort of.” His overly innocent, wide-eyed expression did nothing to comfort Nyx, who simply stared him down. “We…”  Olli put careful emphasis on the plural, “sort of… took that enemy sorceress. Y’know, the one you were supposed to kidnap or kill to prove your loyalty.”

For a long moment, Nyx held not a single coherent thought in his head. Eventually, something resembling a question sputtered out. “Took… you… what? Kidnapped? As in… in my house?!”

“Yeah, she’s in the drawing room. Not a big talker, and she’s a little feral, but… yeah…” Olli wisely trailed off as he noticed the expression on Nyx’s face.

“Let me check I’m understanding this: you kidnapped a girl and you’re holding her captive in my drawing room? What in the name of our ancestors possessed you to do something so ridiculous?!” Nyx almost laughed. Almost.

“I got you off the hook. You were never going to do it; your plan was to run away, as if that would ever work.” Olli folded his arms defiantly.

“Let her go. Right now. With an unreserved apology.”

“Great idea. I wonder which body part of Kris’s they’ll send you first? Maybe they’ll start small, like a toe. Kris doesn’t need all his toes. Or maybe they’ll skip Kris altogether and jump straight to one of us; probably me. Alina would just love a reason to take my head off—”

“Stop!” Nyx yelled, stepping forward. “You’ve made your point.” The images from Olli’s speech were still bouncing around in his brain, making him nauseous.

“You should go see her. Don’t get too close though, she’s a little… sharp and pointy.”

“I’m going to talk to the others first,” Nyx told him. “I want to hear the story from someone less excited about it. Where are they?”

Olli looked unsure. “In the library. Don’t let Paul’s stupid, guilty conscience get to you. He knows I’m right, same as you do.”

With no answer to that but another withering look at his friend, Nyx took off toward his favorite part of the house. There was a remarkably sullen atmosphere hanging over the place as he stepped into the room, Olli on his heels, shooting warning looks at the other two that he clearly hoped Nyx would not see.

He stared at one friend, then the other, learning more from their faces and body language than Olli had bothered to tell him in the hallway. Sebastian looked the worst; bruises and bandages covered him. Strips of white linen around his hand and the opposite forearm, two black eyes and a split lip. And that’s just what Nyx could see. Seb had the tearful, slightly petulant look of a child who had injured himself doing something he had been told not to do.

Paul looked better and worse simultaneously. His only visible injury was a set of claw marks down his cheek. But his face told so much more. He looked distraught, swirling between self-disgust and horror.

“Start at the beginning,” was all Nyx said before dropping into an overstuffed chair to hear the whole sorry tale. 

To Olli’s credit, he allowed Seb to do most of the talking, even as his youngest friend undoubtedly embellished and dramatized the details. How an acquaintance had told Olli of the girl’s presence in the city, how Olli had convinced them they would be doing Nyx a kindness, how they had charged into her suite at an inn… and the ensuing fight. Seb had made a deliberate point of describing this wild and wilful sorceress as someone who had almost killed them, how they had barely won the fight, and how he had almost died trying to bring her down.

Olli chuckled. “Well, you just kept on throwing yourself at her without a thought; what did you expect?” He turned to Nyx. “To be fair, she put up a fierce fight. Don’t feel too sorry for her.”

Nyx bristled. “You think that makes it okay? Do you think anything you did was okay? Do you think I have sympathy for any of you? You deserved everything you got!” His anger had been squarely focused on Olli, the obvious leader of this fiasco, but it was Paul who promptly burst into tears and fled the room.

Olli rolled his eyes. “Ignore him. He freely agreed to the plan, same as Seb, but he’s been sulking ever since.”

All Nyx could do was stare at the closed library door as Paul’s exit. It was most unlike his friend to sulk. “What’s wrong with him? Was he injured?”

“Nah, just a scratch.” Olli shrugged.

“I think he doesn’t like that the girl is scared of him, but she’s scared of all of us. I think he thought he’d be able to calm her down, but she’s having none of him.” Seb’s answer, at least, was more insightful.

He found Paul in the sunroom, listlessly picking tomatoes from one of the many fruit plants they had growing. “Your reaction is the one I find the most normal,” Nyx told him by way of a greeting. “It reassures me to know at least one of my best friends doesn’t have it in him to be a cold-hearted mercenary.”

Paul smiled at him in response, but it did not touch his eyes. “It’s infuriating that I can’t think of a single argument against Olli’s logic. Everything he said is technically right, but…”

“But it feels wrong.” Nyx answered for his friend.

“Wrong? No, Nyx, it feels like we did something unholy!” 

“Unholy?”

“That girl… that poor, sweet girl… she’s something more than us, more than human. It’s like we committed some kind of divine sin. It was heresy.”

Blinking at Paul, Nyx tried to think of some clever response but had nothing. “I’m horrified too… I understand…”

“Have you met her yet? Have you even seen her yet?”

“No… but Paul, all we can do—”

“Is let her go,” Paul interrupted with tears in his eyes. “Why am I the only one who can see how monstrous this is? I can see it in your eyes; you agree with Olli. But a necessary evil is still evil.”

“How did you know where to find her?”

“An acquaintance from the temple.” His friend seemed baffled by this change of topic.

“So, Alina knew?”

“I guess…”

“So, if you hadn’t gone for her, do you think she would have left this city unharmed?”

“No. That doesn’t make it okay!”

“It certainly makes it a little better, for my conscience, anyway. Really, you saved her from a much worse fate.”

For a brief moment, Nyx thought his oldest friend was going to swing at him, such was the fury in his eyes. But Paul simply swallowed it, clenching his jaw. “Go and meet her then. See the fate we saved her from.”

Nyx could hear nothing from behind the drawing-room door. He had expected sounds of distress, or perhaps righteous anger, but there was only silence. Perhaps she was asleep. Perhaps she had escaped. That would solve some problems and present several new ones. 

Whatever happened next, Olli had tangled them all up in a situation from which there seemed no escape, and the worst part was the fracture it had caused within their united friend group. Their position among their people had been growing more precarious by the day; they could not afford to fight among themselves because of an old sorceress who had pissed off some High Priest millennia ago.

A wave of resentment rushed through Nyx, irrational though it was, at the stranger in his house who would draw far too much attention from the prying eyes of the temple. Dangerous, he decided of the unknown woman, picturing Paul’s scratches and Seb’s bandages, she will ruin us. 

Then he pushed open the door.

The room within was dimly lit but stuffy, catching the ceaseless rays of the afternoon sun through half-closed drapes, one ray of orange light falling across the largest couch

There, a tiny figure sat cross-legged, her pale hands clamped over her ears, rocking back and forth, and muttering what sounded like desperate pleas to be left alone.

How could she be so distressed already? He had not even spoken, and he had entered the room in near silence. Creeping closer, another moment of listening to her broken whispering revealed that none of her words were meant for him. In fact, she seemed utterly oblivious to his presence, lost in some other reality behind her closed eyes.

This unwanted girl, who had caused so much trouble, was all bones, with white skin, black clothing, and black hair bound on top of her head. She was young, though; no ancient sorcerer to look at. Just an underfed teenager, with her elfin face downcast and contorted with anguish. A single tear spilled from between her dark lashes and rolled down her cheek. The sight of it disquieted Nyx, pulling at his heart and bringing a lump to his throat.

None of this is her doing, he realized at last. Any frustration he felt should be aimed squarely at the temple, not at his friends, nor this unfortunate creature, still muttering about knives and darkness.

Sitting on the chair across from her, Nyx waited for her to notice his presence. One thing he knew: he must not touch her. Sebastian’s story in the library had taught him that. It would not be the beginning of a respectful friendship if he startled the poor thing and ended up with his eyes scratched out.

Inexplicably nervous, Nyx snapped his fingers…