Page 124 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
I felt him smile against my hair as he pressed a kiss to the top of my head. “What are we going to do about that block in your head?”
I groaned into his chest. “I have to kill it, don’t I?”
He hummed his agreement against my hair, and I realised that he’d figure it out on his own. I wanted to ask if he’d sifted through my memories to find it, but I decided that it wasn’tworth offending him with the question when I preferred not to know the answer.
“Fine,” I grumbled. “I’ll do it.”
I’ll kill the loudest voice inside of my head.
The High King made a low, satisfied sound in the back of his throat and peppered the top of my head with kisses. “That’s my perfect girl.”
When we disentangled our arms from each other and he stepped back from me, the devilish grin on his face could have sent me to my knees. His eyes were positively glowing with pride and I became aware that I wasn’t getting through it without some of his theatrics.
As if on cue, Lucais bowed, and the fog began to clear away from the courtyard, revealing a grand design of silvery grey stonework with carvings of gargoyles and sharp turrets. I squinted at the sky and found little flags with the Court of Light’s insignia flapping in the breeze high above us, too far up to be witnessed through the usual settlement of fog. The post Lucais had leaned up against was a flagpole, but the flag hadn’t been raised.
I surveyed the courtyard as a whole, open space, and found that it was larger than I’d initially thought. We were dwarfed by the palace heights, encompassed by a curtain wall with high-placed windows. Turning around in a slow circle, I watched Lucais’s power chase the last of the fog away from the corners of our space, like we were in the middle of a snowglobe. The white clouds met along the outskirts, remaining in place a few metres above our heads and the rest of the palace.
“Why do you—” I started to ask, but my question snapped in half when my eyes fell upon the last of the retreating clouds.
The mist cleared around my father, bound and gagged, on his knees in the middle of the bailey.
forty
The Mad High King
My violent fantasies used to make me question myself.
Is this psychopathy? What if nobody can fix what’s broken inside of my head?
I would argue against my own anger until I felt guilty for being angry in the first place, until I was torn in half between feeling righteous and sinful on any given day, and until I was the perfect canvas for a man like my father to play pretend at being powerful.
He wasn’t powerful anymore.
And yet, I still wanted to kill him.
The man on his knees before me lifted his head as if summoned by my train of thought. His face was creased with frown lines, smeared with dirt and grime, but his blue eyes were as cool and clear as I’d always remembered. I had spent weeks of my childhood staring into them with fabricated love, desperately trying to convince myself that we were the same, that I saw something alive in them when he stared back at me.
I hadn’t. I never did, I never would, and part of me had always known it wasn’t my fault—but that part of me had been hanging on by a thread for a very long time.
“He’s weakened and unarmed,” I said, looking up at Lucais.
The High King was leaning against the flagpole, casually watching on as I circled my father like a shark and weighed up my options. When I spoke, he arched one brow and replied, “So?”
“So isn’t it a little redundant now? He can’t hurt me anymore.”
Catching on to the situation he was in at long last, my father began to squirm, and a series of alarmed noises came from his mouth, muffled by the gag. I glanced down to shush him harshly and caught the flash of hatred in his eyes when I did—which didn’t help his case.
Lucais pushed off the flagpole and sauntered over to us, completely ignoring my father and his pointless, incoherent pleas for assistance. Placing his hands on either side of my head with his fingertips on my temples, he bent down until we were eye to eye. “Can’t he?” he disputed. “Isn’t it harder to heal the damage when the bastard who caused it is still alive andactivelykicking you?”
My father screamed into the gag.
“For the love of—” I broke off with a sigh and tore my eyes away from the High King, reaching down to undo the dirty fabric that was stuffed into my father’s mouth and tied tightly around the back of his head. “What could you possibly have to say right now?” I demanded, wincing as I helped him spit out the rest of the linen, wet with his saliva.
“You fuckingbitch—”
In a split second, my father’s head smacked into the cobblestone with a sound that made my stomach somersault. Blood trickled from his temple inside of a large, red welt as helay on his back with Lucais’s boot pressing down on his throat, though I’d hardly caught the flash of his movements.
“That was the wrong thing to say,” the High King snarled. He must have increased the pressure of his foot because my father’s face began to turn bright red all over, and a hissing sound escaped from his otherwise silent, open mouth. “Mind your fucking manners when you speak to her, or the next thing that comes out of your mouth will be the laces of the boot I jam down your throat.”
