Page 126 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
Lucais grimaced, wrestling with his natural urge to conceal the truth. I wasn’t sure if he was being more open with his expressions around me or if I was getting better at reading them. “The entire city would fall to pieces,” he admitted in a hollow voice, waving at it half-heartedly. “Buildings would collapse. Homes and businesses would disappear. Playgrounds would crumble. That sort of thing.”
My eyebrows shoved together. I’d been through the city multiple times, and it was always full of faeries living, working, and playing. The palace, on the other hand, was devoid of life more often than not, so it made sense that nobody had really noticed the crumbling wing. But for the city to be disintegrating…
“How do they not know something is wrong?”
“Oh, they do. Everyone thinks that the fog is part of the Oracle’s prophecy,” he revealed, dropping his eyes to the ground between us. “They think that it’s mood related, that I’ve been pining for you since I first glimpsed you inside of the Oracle.”
The puzzle pieces came crashing down in front of me like bricks falling from a disintegrating wall, and my stomach dropped with them. “That’swhy you glamoured me?”
“Yes, so you’d best get a wriggle on with dismantling your block.” Lucais gave me a pointed look, nodding his head towards his prisoner, and then chased it with a handsome grin.
“How long has the city been submerged in fog?”
“Mmm. What is it, like, four or five months now?”
A memory tugged at the corners of my mind, but I couldn’t grasp it. Every time I extended my mental hand, it darted out of my reach like a kite caught in the winds of a cyclone. I shook my head, forcing myself back into the present moment.
“It’s only a matter of days or weeks now before my people realise that it’s been a ruse the entire time and they start to panic in earnest,” Lucais pointed out. “I have no intention of relinquishing the enchantment over the city, but I’d say mass hysteria might pose a bit of an issue on that front.”
I pressed the heel of my palms into my eyes, dagger pointing towards the heavens, and began to pace, dodging the legs of my father, who was still lying on the ground with his hands and feet bound, probably hoping that we’d forgotten about him.“Why did you do it then?” I demanded, spiralling through pitfalls in my head. Lucais had kept the secret from everyone—his best friends, his Hand and High Lady, and me—at great personal risk for months, only to blow the lid off the primary cover on a whim one afternoon. “Why take the glamour off me when you knew it would destroy the illusion you’ve been fighting so hard to keep? When you knew your city might fall into ruin?”
He held my stare in his unflinching gaze and spoke very slowly when he gave his reply. “Because you wanted to be seen.”
Although my stomach couldn’t help but flutter with the endearment, my head was still spinning. I never would have asked him to do that if I’d known what was really going on. I never would have complained about it in the first place. Ineverwould have asked him to put my feelings above the lives of his people.
“Are you mad?”
“I might be.” Lucais shrugged nonchalantly. “The Mad High King has a nice ring to it.”
“It does not.”
A crushing smile bloomed over his mouth. “Bookworm,” he purred, stepping towards me. He touched my cheekbone and chin with gentle fingertips—a steady calm in a sea of chaos. “You’ll have to forgive the clumsiness in my handling of our relationship. I’m sick with obsession. It’s been extremely inconvenient, actually.”
I shook my head, trying to shake free of the infatuation that his words were going to pull me into.
His sweetness was a vortex, and those revelations were proof that avoiding the acknowledgement of any feelings was the right decision, though I was afraid we’d already taken it too far. His eyes simmered as his gaze fell into mine, enveloping me in an entrancement that felt unyielding and forever—even if it cost him the world.
“At what point do you decide it doesn’t matter anymore?” I whispered, trying to inject some acidity back into our dialogue. It was too soft, too sweet for all the damage we were doing. “What’s your tipping point? Where do you draw the line?”
Lucais gazed at me for a long moment before he answered. His eyes traced the features of my face as if he were memorising the lines of a poem. “I don’t,” he said at last. “You draw all of the lines, Auralie. I merely enforce them.”
Feeling the blade in my hand again through the haze of my emotions, I inhaled deeply and turned back towards my father. I was heartbreakingly aware that I had to put an end to it once and for all because Lucais needed to know that I was capable. He needed to see the line being drawn in the sand, though it zig-zagged in an awful pattern between right and wrong and the undefined spaces in between.
There was no other way.
If his eyes were on me, everyone’s lives were in danger. His death would kill the enchantment holding the city together like it would the House and Forest—and my death might kill him. By the time new leaders emerged from the Court of Darkness and Caeludor, there was every chance it would be too late, and the heart of Faerie would have already been condemned. The Oracle prophecy would come to pass, and the Courts of Light and Darkness would be unified at the cost of everything I had witnessed inside of the lapsus—a total eclipse of silence and erasure.
Staring down at my father, I signalled for Lucais to pull him back up to his knees, and then I lifted the blade in the air, examining the glint of steel in the gloomy light. My hands knew what they wanted to do, but the magic wasn’t speaking to me. It hadn’t returned since I’d left the House, but I pushed back against the self-doubt and pulled on my focus. I was going to draw the line with or without magic. I was going to be brave. I was going to kill the loudest voice inside my head.
The voice of my father.
Angling the blade above his chest, I walked around in a half-circle to stand behind him. Closing my eyes, I felt the pull between the blade’s razor-sharp point and the dead space inside him where a heart might have once rented out a room.
There was nothing there, and I didn’t have the upper body strength to try to find it, so I moved the cool kiss of the blade to his throat. I felt completely human as I pressed the tip of the dagger against his skin, wondering if Lucais’s power was preventing him from squirming as the blade pierced through the first layer of my father’s flesh, and a trickle of blood spilled onto his stained, ripped shirt.
I pictured the end result in my mind’s eye—my father’s body, blue eyes alien and lifeless, as the end was dealt to a lifetime ofmisery and suffering through which I’d begged for answers that could be given but never would.
If I had been different, would it have made a difference?
