Page 38 of The Jester

“From where I’m sitting it means you’re cowards.” I square my shoulders and look her straight in the face.

Henrik moves to her side. “We are no cowards,” he growls.

“Kayan, enough.” Maura nudges me. “Don’t provoke them. It won’t help.”

“I’m not provoking them. I’m trying to understand why they’re here. I always thought the Shadowkind were enslaved. Beaten. Badly treated.” I shrug. “Looks like a pretty nice setup from where I’m sitting. All you have to do is abuse some prisoners, and –”

A sharp bolt of blinding pain ricochets through my knuckles. I’d been holding the bars, and fall back as Henrik lowers his iron baton. The mark it has left on my hand blazes red and angry.

Henrik is visibly shaking. “You have no idea,” he spits.

Briony puts her hand on his shoulder. She whispers something to him and pulls him away. At the back of the room, she kisses him gently, and they continue to talk for a few more minutes. Then she squeezes his hand and leaves.

“Why did you do that?” Maura hisses as she examines my hand. “Why prod him like that? Why anger him? Are you trying to get yourself killed?”

“Because I needed to see how loyal they are to their lord.” I meet her eyes, and lean in close. “And I got my answer... They hate him as much as we do. Which means we have a chance of getting them to help us escape.”

Chapter Sixteen

ALANA

THREE DAYS LATER

For the past three days, I have seen Eldrion after supper.

For three days, the court has been filled with Sunborne watching Finn perform, and Briony tells me this is unusual. Normally, these kinds of celebrations happen sparingly. But it seems Eldrion feels the need to show off.

Briony thinks this means he is hiding something, that something is going on which he doesn’t want the other Sunborne to know about, that he is using these nightly festivities to distract them.

If that’s true, it seems to be working. Because every night they pour into the Grand Hall and they watch Finn perform, and they drink and dance and eat and fuck and go home, hedonistically sated.

It surprises me that Eldrion never joins the celebrations, yet his presence still feels palpable somehow. As if he is watching us even though he is not there.

Briony is always the one who takes me to him, and she always waits outside the door until we have finished talking. So far, for three consecutive nights, we have talked until sunrise.

He paces the room and asks me questions about the Leafborne’s abilities, about when they first manifest, and how long it takes us to learn to control them. He asks about the colour of our wings and what it means. He asks whether the Leafborne are more in tune with the earth than the Mountain fae or the Ocean fae, and I tell him it doesn’t work like that. “Although we are fae of the forest, our clan is still made up of many different affinities – water, air, earth, fire.”

“But not you.” Last night, after I had finished explaining for perhaps the hundredth time, he looked up at me from his armchair by the fire and steepled his fingers together.

I said nothing. Just met his eyes, waiting to see exactly how much he knew about me. Because we had still not discussed my gloves, or how he found them, or how much he knew of me before he brought me here.

“You have no affinity. You have mind magic.” When he said that, I frowned.

Mind magic is powerful. Mind magic is something only the Sunborne possess and I am no Sunborne.

“Empathy is not mind magic,” I replied eventually. “But you should know that. You should know all of this. You do not need a two-hundred-year-old Leafborne to tell you the things I am telling you.”

In the shadow of the chair, Eldrion puffed out his wings, impressively wide, studying me carefully. “Who told you empathy is not mind magic?” he asked.

I looped back through my memories. Two hundred years; there are a lot of them. “My parents told me. The elders of my village told me. Our history books...” I pause and narrow my eyes, visualising the books I pored over when I was younger and trying to understand what it was that made me so different from the others.

Eldrion quirks an eyebrow at me. Everything about him is sharp, angular, fierce. His features are chiselled. Even his hair is poker straight, and his wings point like daggers at their tips in a way I haven’t seen before.

“Our books talk little of empaths,” I murmur, lacing my fingers together behind my back and feeling the strain of the corset beneath my dress.

“Every fae you’ve ever met has lied to you,” he said brusquely, rising from his chair and stepping into the dim light so I could see the contours of his face and the dazzling brightness of his eyes. Towering over me.

That was last night.

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