Page 12 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
To my relief, he looked genuinely horrified. “No,” he promised. “No, Aura, I would never do that to you.”
Another crack speared through the ice. “Then why isn’t anyone looking at us? I’m human, and you’re…half naked.”
Wrenlock smiled at me warmly. “I’ll show you, if you like.” He held his hand out with his large, smooth palm turned up towards the sky. “Do you trust me?”
“No,” I countered honestly.
“What I meant was…” He sighed. “Do you trust me enough to evanesce a few hundred metres further into the city with me?”
“Oh.” I chewed on my lower lip as I considered.It might be good practice for my ultimate escape.“I suppose so.”
Taking his hand, I felt a jolt of electricity and familiarity strike me at the touch. It was not unlike the moment we had experienced in Lucais’s bedroom in the House—back when the High King was still pretending to be Wren—where some twisted and confused part of me had recognised him as my soulmate.
Although, as he squeezed my hand and I stepped into his embrace, I began to wonder if that recognition had stemmed from something else.Is it possible that I—
My scream caught in my throat as Wrenlock’s power sucked us into a vortex and we vanished in a fit of wind, swept up from the quiet street like runaway ribbons. With my stomach flipping and twisting angrily, we landed inside a mini tornado down an alley off the side of a bustling street. Dampness hung in the air, hand-in-hand with an icy chill.
Teetering to the side, my hand found purchase on the grooves in a wall covered with slimy moss to hold myself up. Feeling violently unwell, I wondered if there was another way to travel using magic that I could learn to master instead.
This particular mode of transport will simply not do.
When I reassembled my wits about me again, Wrenlock put a finger to his lips and beckoned me to follow him to the opening end of the alley. He crouched down behind a stack of crates filled with vegetables waiting to be brought through the back door of a nearby establishment—perhaps a restaurant or a bar, if the animated echo of voices spilling out into the street every time a door swung open was anything to go by. I was surprised to see how many of the supplies looked like normal, human-grown food items.
Judging by the crowds of people walking or flying up and down the street, we were much further uptown than I’d expected.
Giant frogs, the size of small dogs, hopped up and down along the side of the road. Cats lazed on top of the slanting rooftops, tails flicking over the edges of the guttering, taunting the frogs who were jumping up to try to snatch them with the end of the long, red tongues catapulting out of their mouths. Children—faelings, they were called—were racing each otherthrough the street. I’d never seen a faerie child before, and it was like being punched in the gut.
Brynn.
But with wings.
Tiny little wings like those of a dragonfly were attached to the shoulder blades of the faelings. They were translucent, patterned only by the barely noticeable, wafer-thin bones that stretched up and down each wing, reinforcing their delicate structure as they beat with all the force of a lady beetle and the stubbornness of a human toddler. For all of their efforts, the faelings barely made it a footstep or two into the air each time.
They were chasing orbs of light, balls of fire, droplets of water, and little hurricanes of wind up and down the street, playing with them as if they were snowballs. Older faeries were watching, talking, and waving—
Waving with the elements.
My brows drew together as I studied the way those people were greeting each other. Every wave of a hand displayed a very small, harmless show of the faerie’s power.But my train of thought was brought to a grinding halt by a sudden, intrusive silence.
All at once, everyone and everythingstopped.
Wrenlock nudged his head towards the road, and it clicked that he had brought us up ahead of the High King’s carriage. The clip-clop of the six sets of heavy unicorn hooves on the cobblestone was unmistakable.
Some people vanished. They simply evanesced from the street—there one moment, gone the next. Many took faelings or large frogs with them, while others hurried to usher the young off the road, either hiding them behind their legs or shoving them behind doors. The faeries with wings took off into the sky or settled to the ground and folded their wings behind theirbacks in a motion that seemed very redolent of a human putting their hands in front of their face as a mark of self-defence.
Somewhere, a window slammed shut, and the sound of a set of curtains being drawn followed it, the sharp scrape of the metal eyelets against the rod distinctive and ominous.
And then there was Lucais’s carriage.
I couldn’t see him inside it, and I wasn’t sure if anyone else could, but there was no mystery shrouding its ownership or doubt surrounding its occupancy. His presence was as powerful and naturalistic as a change in the weather outside or a drop in the temperature in a room.
The six black and white unicorns pulling the carriage were frightening in a spine-tingling way when I observed them up so close. Their dark grey horns looked like a mess of tangled vines, like thorny brambles growing atop their heads. Truly, I couldn’t tell where one horn began and another finished. They were much larger than Elera—if that was even possible. They looked proud, strong, and absolutely menacing.
The carriage itself appeared to be carved out of a giant shell. White and gold shimmered like that of a pearl, a faint sheen of luminescence falling over it in a blanket of light—a striking contrast to the darkness pouring out from the inside.
Lucais wasn’t using his magic at all. Didn’t even seem to be in touch with it.
Normally, he was light magic on legs. His hair, his eyes, and his skin unfailingly glowed with some semblance of light. Even under a grey sky, even on a foggy street…but the inside of the carriage was pitch-black. No light lined the tiny gaps in the curtains. Nothing glowed or even glimmered from within.
