Page 119 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
“The humans?” He chuckled bleakly. “Nothing. I let them go free, but it was only a matter of weeks before I banished the whole lot of them into a non-magical realm and ended the war.”
When I opened my eyes, I had the bones of an apology on my tongue, ready to assemble them and offer it to him whole. I’d spent a great deal of my life feeling guilty for things, so it was easy to assume a sense of responsibility for the horrors that had been inflicted upon Lucais and the other faeries, but I found him standing in front of the window again and lost my ability to speak.
His silhouette was dark against a halo of bright light, bleached through the fog, and two enormous wings had appeared on either side of his body. They were tucked in close to his shoulders, barely spanning past the sides of the window though the apex of each wing surpassed the top of the arch, and I realised that it was because he couldn’t stretch them out any further.
Built like an angel in their outline, they were translucent as a dragonfly and delicate as the winged faelings I’d watched flittingup and down the main city streets when I arrived. I found myself crawling off the edge of the bed and wandering over to him, entranced by the seamless way they’d appeared, the way they melded with his flesh as easily as his arms. He was silent and patient as I approached, marvelling.
Up close, I could see the damage. The light flooding in through the window made it difficult to tell from afar, but the membrane had been torn to shreds until hardly any of it was left between the thin veins and digits that crossed over the entire surface area. Only the outer margins survived intact, though barely. Every second or third digit had sustained what looked like fractures or breaks—very small cracks and abnormalities to their structure, resulting in a deformation of the overall wing that hadn’t been obvious at first.
“Can I touch them?”
In the thick, heavy silence, I heard him swallow. “You can try.”
With a featherlight touch, I traced the sturdy outline of Lucais’s outer wing—
They disappeared.
As easily as they’d appeared, they vanished. I blinked a few times to adjust to the change as he slowly turned back around, pulling a plain white cotton shirt over his head. The action ruffled his hair, and he swept it back from his forehead before speaking again.
“It’s not you,” he promised, reaching for another glass of wine. “It was a reflex. They’re never exposed to the open air these days, let alone a woman’s touch. I have a permanent glamour over them to help reduce some of the pain and put an end to all the pitiful fucking looks.” He swallowed the entire contents of the glass in one gulp again, looked at the perplexity written all over my face, and then let out a resigned sigh.
“You don’t have to—”
“In High Fae culture, I am considered disabled,” he interrupted quickly. “Amongst my people, our wings are a point of pride, and the ability to fly has always been as standard as walking is for yours. To have lost that is devastating. Some people who hold onto the old ways too tightly still think it’s shameful, weak, disgraced. Nobody dares to fly around me anymore, not even Wrenlock and Morgoya. They think it’s respect, but I think it’s pity. I can still rule and live a perfectly normal life with some alterations, such as evanescing, which didn’t become popular until my wings were butchered by the fucking humans and I decided to make it look like fun.”
A sharp pain stabbed me right in the heart.
I knew he wasn’t talking about me. It wasn’t about me at all. Still, I wanted to cry for him.
“Alright.” Lucais placed his glass back down with a loud clang and smiled, though it didn’t quite reach his eyes. “We’ve officially shot the mood to the pits. Do you want to share your deepest, darkest, most shameful secret with me now, and then we can move on?”
I tried to smile back at him, but I thought about it. I seriously considered it.
Could I tell him about the worst thing that had ever happened to me? Could I admit to it, knowing that it hadn’t even happened tome? Because that was the truth of the matter—my greatest shame was hidden inside the fact that the worst thing that had ever happened to me, the horror that kept me up at night and completely altered my brain chemistry, had not even happened to me.
I’d only witnessed it. I’d onlybeen therefor it. I’d only contributed to the reason it had happened in the first place.
I didn’t even own my own fucking trauma.
“I can’t.”
Sighing morosely, Lucais took both of my hands in one of his. “Aura, I hate to bring this up right now, but I really need you to think about this. The mating bond is not a fix-all solution. We are still going to enact it, so you don’t need to look at me like a jilted bride, but it’s not going to protect you from the Malum.” He pointed to the fog beyond the windowpane. “It’s not going to shield you from the caenim and the locusts. It may not even completely solve your pending issues with the Court of Darkness, if I’m completely honest. You’re going to need to rely on yourself more than you have in the past, which means dismantling the block in your head preventing you from using your magic.”
I shook my head. “No.”
Dismantling patriarchal belief systems that had been ingrained into me since birth? Yes.
Dismantling magic blocks designed to suppress catastrophic powers for my own protection? No.
“Aura,” he said again firmly. “I lost my wings because I was distracted for a split second in the middle of a war. What happens if this escalates to that point again? What if, next time, there are soldiers as well as caenim and locusts? What if my father has been breeding an army of Malum this whole time, and I am too busy looking at you to see them coming?”
Pulling my hands out of his, I turned around, snatching the first pair of pants I could see lying on the floor. They weren’t mine, so I pulled the drawstring extra tight around my waist and then fixed it in a double knot so that they would stay up. The length would be an issue if I didn’t walk carefully, so I walked over to the chest of drawers and rifled through them until I found a pair of socks. Bending over, I pulled them on until they were almost up at my knees, and then I tucked the excess length of the pants into them. I hadn’t worn shoes to his bedroom the previous night, so I resolved to leave without them.
“I get it,” I said, running my hands through my hair as I straightened up. “This was a bad idea. You said it from the start—it’s dangerous. We are dangerous and a very bad idea, so let’s just thank Lady Luck we didn’t get quite that far, and then we’ll call it a day.”
I moved to open his bedroom door.
“Bookworm, stop. That’s not what I’m saying, and you know it.”
