Page 33 of The Jester

“Thirty?” I breathe out heavily. That’s thousands of years.

“You enjoyed the dance?” he asks, smoothing some dark grey lotion onto his fingers, then bringing them to my thigh.

“Enjoyed?” I bite my lower lip as his fingertips meet my skin. “I found it harrowing, actually.”

A wry smile parts his lips. “You’d be the only one,” he says. “I perform that dance every time Eldrion asks me to entertain the citadel. Every time, I think maybe this will be the time they realise what they’re witnessing. They never do.” He pauses, frowns, and looks up at me with his deep brown eyes. “Or maybe they do and that’s why they enjoy it. I wouldn’t put anything past a Sunborne.”

“Explain it to me.” I lean forward as he caresses my wound. The lotion has already soaked in, and yet he is still making slow circles with his fingers. “I understood it was about your servitude. But I feel as though there’s more than I could see...”

Finn sits back on his heels, slowly removing his hand. He passes me a vial of something blue and gestures for me to drink it.

I swallow it down quickly, wincing as it burns my throat.

“The dance is a reflection of my people’s history. How much do you know about Shadowkind fae?”

I tuck my hair behind my ear. “Shamefully little,” I reply. “There isn’t much in our history books.”

“Of course, there isn’t.” Finn chuckles. “Well, the Shadowkind have been in captivity for thousands of years.”

I glance at his piercings, my stomach tightening.

“When the Sunborne first started using us for labour, they began to bind our wings.”

“Bind them?” I swallow hard, trying to force the words down the sudden thickness of my throat.

Finn nods and adjusts his mask. Behind it, his eyes are rimmed with charcoal. “And still today,” he says. “When a Shadowkind is born, their wings are bound to their body. While Leafborne and Sunborne have magic deep inside, ours is inside our wings. By binding them, preventing them from growing, we are stripped of our magic.”

Cold, lingering disgust snakes down my spine. “How did I not know this?” I breathe.

“Few people do, and even those who do pretend they don’t.” Finn places a hand on my bare knee, and squeezes. “Don’t feel bad, Alana.”

I hold my breath, acutely aware of the rise and fall of Finn’s chest, the sound of his breathing mingling with the crackle of the flames in the grate of the fire.

“I’m an empath,” I laugh. “Feeling bad for others is what I do.”

“But you’re shielding right now?” he says, raising his eyebrows at me.

“How do you know?”

“I’ve known empaths before,” he says. “Not many. But a few.”

I stifle a yawn, and Finn smiles at me. “I want to keep talking to you.”

“You should rest.” He slips his arms beneath me and lifts me from the chair. I allow myself to brush his lips with my thumb.

But he does not kiss me. Instead, he lowers me onto the bed and tucks me beneath the sheets. He is at the door when he says, “What happened behind the falls cannot happen again, Alana.”

I sit up, searching for him in the shadows.

But once again, he is gone.

Chapter Fourteen

FINN

Seeing her face in the crowd of Sunborne was like seeing the brightest, most beautiful jewel in the world and realising it had been stolen. Caged. Contained.

It took every ounce of strength I had not to stride over and take her in my arms and whisk her up into the air, high above those aristocratic fuckers.

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