Page 140 of Moonmarked

Suddenly the Midnight King was in front of me, dark hair and thick beard, eyes cut out from the darkest parts of the Midnight sky.

“This is your price, boy. You will not remember. You will never rise to power.”

Then came the pain, white-hot and searing as his small blade pressed to my chest. From it came the ink, black and all-consuming nothingness at the command of a cold merciless man.

“Be forgotten. Be bound,”said the king. “Die.”

It didn’tmuch matter now what he’d said then, or if that memory was even true, if it had happened, or if I was making it up.

All that mattered was that I hadn’t been stronger than the darkness that claimed me before Raja was done.

All that mattered was that I’d fallen.

forty-four

NilahDune

Time had never crawled morethan it did today. Each moment had lasted an eternity, but somehow, I’d made it. Sitting there in the middle of the gazebo, waiting for a bird made out of light to find me, I’dpushedthe seconds with all my might, and they’d fought with me every step of the way.

But the wait was finally over. God help me, it was only a few minutes to midnight, and soon I was going to be unbound from Lyall. Soon, I was going to be free to walk out of this palace and search for Rune.

I’d thought about how to find him all day. I’d thought about where to go, and though every instinct insisted I stay away from Raja, I knew I’d have to go to her eventually. I’d search every inch of the Seelie Court first, but if I didn’t find him, my destination was Blackwater.

Just as long as Rune was okay, I wouldn’t mind swimming past the Eternal Water or running all the way to the Neutral Lands, too.

Just as long as Rune was alive.

The guards had brought me to the eighth floor again, only now not in Lyall’s office, but somewhere down the hallway on the other side. Marble floors and gold-framed paintings, lanterns on the walls and lights floating in the air—every inch of this place looked the exact same to me by now. My attention was elsewhere until they pushed a set of doors open and led me down a dark narrow corridor and through an arched doorway, behind which was a room that could have been separate from the rest of the palace.

It was round, the edges both around the floor and the ceiling glowing faintly gold, like they had LED lights buried somewhere underneath. It wasn’t electricity, though. Just magic.

In the center, what I thought was a mirror was actually apool,shallow water ringed in thick dark stone. On the right side of it, in the middle, sat the seer wearing her white dress, no tears of blood streaming down her closed eyes, her skin clean. She had her hands in the water up to her wrists and she stood unnaturally still, like she wasn’t alive at all.

And across from the doorway was Lyall dressed in a white shirt and dark red pants, hands folded in front of him, his hair sleeked back like always.

I stopped in my tracks. His attention sent a charge of energy through me, and so did his looks.

The prince’s beauty was effortless, easy to admire, so perfect you were tempted to believe it was just your imagination enhancing whatever real face he wore. I thought I’d get used to it by now, but I never did. All fae were beautiful like that—toobeautiful for my merely mortal eyes.

Except Rune.Hisbeauty was the kind that might hurt tolook at for too long, raw and real in a way that I hadn’t seen on any other fae I’d come across until now.

“Thread to thread, flame to flame,”the seer suddenly whispered, drawing my eyes to her, but nothing had changed. She still sat there with her eyes closed, which made me wonder if maybe I’d made it up.

“She’s preparing for the ritual, that’s all,” Lyall said, and he slowly walked around the pool to come closer to me, his eyes never leaving my face.

Swallowing hard, I forced my body to move and went deeper into the room, too. The guards who’d escorted me here remained outside the doorway.

It was just the three of us in here now, and Lyall was already in front of me.

“You’ve cried,” he said as he analyzed my face.

“It’s been an…emotional day,” I admitted because it would be foolish to try to deny it when my eyes not only looked butfeltswollen almost entirely shut. I hadn’t meant to cry so hard, I really hadn’t, but the tears had snuck out of me all the same, always for minutes and hours before I realized they were there.

“We can always postpone,” Lyall offered, and he looked…concerned, if I would dare to believe my eyes when it came to him.

“No,” I said, and the word was final. “I take it you haven’t…figured me outyet?” It was the reason why he’d asked me for another day.

A day which had pulled me apart and knitted me back together several times within every hour.

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