Page 118 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
“The Forest was large, dense, and glorious even before the enchantment,” he continued, leaning back on his hands. “I spelled it to cover my tracks, concealing me from anyoneor anythingthat might come looking for me. For example, the crown—or my mother. But I mixed it up terribly. Instead of spelling it so thatIcouldn’t be found, the incantation made it so thatshecouldn’t be found. In the end, I had to mix a mind-reading spell in with the cloaking hex, which was an awful concoction. The combining or layering of spells and hexes is a terrible idea and should be avoided at all costs, by the way,” he added, giving me a severe look. “It’s a dangerous business and almost always means that something in one of the spells is bound to go terribly wrong. In this instance, the thing that went terribly wrong was that the Forest became sentient, gained the ability to read minds, feels justified in moving things around to manipulate travellers, and resents me for the rest of eternity.”
“But you found your mother?”
“Yeah.” Lucais exhaled in a light huff. “She was pissed.”
I remembered the way the Forest had gone straight for his throat when we originally travelled through it, and I couldn’t help the laugh that bubbled up and out of my lips, though I probably didn’t try as hard as I could to keep it down. Theboyish, good-humoured look on his face sent me into a fit of giggles so contagious that even Lucais couldn’t hold back a snort of amusement.
That only made the whole thing even funnier, and soon my waist was cramping. I clutched at it, tilting to one side as uncontrollable laughter spilled out of me until my eyes were wet and I couldn’t breathe. The tray of dishes clinked with the movement on the bed, and Lucais waved it away before he went down, too.
We switched from laughing at his anecdote to laughing at each other in an instant. Even as my mouth went dry and the chuckling subsided, I couldn’t wipe the smile from my face as I stared at him, his head resting on the pillow next to mine, his hair as gold as his eyes, his smile as hopeful and fragile as mine.
“I sent the food to your room,” Lucais admitted after a long stretch of companionable silence. He dipped his head. “I treated you poorly. I said some terrible things to you—truthful things, but I let them get twisted out of context, knowing they could hurt you that way. I was so scared that you would feel the things I felt. And, admittedly, I was furious that I was even feeling them there for a while, too, but I kicked myself afterwards. Every single time. I sent the food and coffee up to your room and drew your baths so that you’d feel…”
Loved.
He didn’t finish the sentence, and he didn’t need to. I knew exactly what he was telling me, because I’d felt loved by the House. Cherished. Valued. Protected. It had cared for me through moments when I was on the brink of giving up on caring for myself. It had shown me a sense of belonging that I’d never felt before in my life and didn’t think I’d ever feel again—
Until that exact moment.
“Thank you,” I whispered, dropping my gaze.
Lucais nodded curtly, staring at where our fingers had found each other in the space between our bodies. His knuckles were soft as they brushed up against mine, but the underside was roughened by calluses from his training. I knew he left them there intentionally because he could so easily spell them away. It reminded me of something he’d said in passing that I had filed away for later exploration.
“I have a question.”
Lucais’s eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly. “Yes, bookworm?”
“You said something downstairs about broken wings.”
His fingertips stopped in the act of stroking circles over the palm of my hand. I could feel the immediate tension rolling off him, though there was very little change to his demeanour otherwise. For a moment, I weathered a stroke of regret for daring to ask about such a sensitive issue, but we were taking so many baby steps forward.
“I noticed that there are faeries in Caeludor who do have wings,” I ventured, warily. “But I’ve never seen yours.”
His throat worked around a hard swallow. “Those faeries are much younger than I am.”
“But what does that mean?”
Lucais hesitated, pulling a long breath into his lungs, and threaded his fingers through mine, squeezing once before he recoiled and rose from the bed. “My wings were irreparably damaged during the war.”
In the blink of an eye, I had a flashback to the gnarled mess of horns on top of the unicorns who pulled Lucais’s carriage and the glinting steel of unclaimed weaponry scattered across the mountain range, and a dark chill rippled through me. As Lucais walked towards the dresser against the wall, I watched the muscles rippling across his back, following the shadows ofthe tattoos that dipped and flowed over the ridges of his strong shoulders and arms.
For a war veteran who maintained the wear and tear on his hands deliberately, it was odd that he had no scars anywhere else.
“I was only one of many soldiers who were wounded, but most were able to repair themselves or seek the attention of a healer in time,” Lucais explained. His voice was distant, though he remained so close. “It’s not often that faeries suffer long-lasting injuries. You need a significant trauma to occur first, and then there has to be a substantial delay in obtaining the necessary care. Most of the time, we can heal ourselves. Other times, like the time I was stung by a locust, we rely on others because we are unable to do it ourselves.”
I wrapped my arms around myself tightly, recalling the panic I’d felt searching for a healer in the House the day that he was stung.
Most of the faeries downstairs had laughed it off because they thought I was talking about the real Wrenlock instead of the actual High King. I’d wanted to throttle every last one of them—except for the small girl who had stepped forward to help me, the faerie who had saved his life with my blood.
“The damage is sometimes invisible,” he continued. “There are some severe psychological impacts amongst the faeries who served with me, and there are some physical injuries that persist against the test of time because they weren’t able to be fully healed. The symptoms come and go for them. For me…” Lucais trailed off as he poured himself a glass of wine from the crystal drinking set on his drawers and downed it in one gulp. “There are very few like me who could not be healed at all. My wings were permanently broken during theBattle of Burning Watersoutside of Caeludor. The humans who shot me out of the sky had a short period of time alone with me before the rest of mycompany could get there and intervene, but it was enough time for them to make sure I’d never fly again.”
Suddenly, I remembered the day he’d left me behind in the Court of Light, and it made so much more sense. Elera and Lucais had gone through so much together. They’dlostso much together. He’d delayed our travel arrangements on purpose, choosing to walk instead of evanescing in order to spend more time with me alone, but it had made him agitated. I’d never understood why. Not until the moment he told me that he was born with wings and the war had broken them.
Elera and I needed to feel the wind on our faces.
It was the closest they’d come to it again.
My eyes fell shut of their own volition. “What happened to them?”
