Page 141 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
The thought circled my head for what felt like hours before the sting of my eyes became too much, and I broke my concentration so I could shoot an exasperated look at my friends.
“Okay. That’s okay.” Morgoya brushed her hands down her floor-length, black velvet gown and went over to the teapot sitting on the magical cart. “Let’s take a little break. Have some tea.”
While she made up three cups, I tossed the notepad and pen aside, feeling a rising sense of dread filling my throat.
We had tried levitation and enchantment, and I’d attempted restoration on my own. At the House, I’d also tried to master teleportation the day I’d blacked out, so we all agreed to leave that one out of our practice sessions in case it had the same outcome. Nothing we tried was even the slightest bit fruitful, which left us with summoning, vanishment, transformation, and destruction. And I had the worst feeling that I’d only do well at the last form of magic.
I sipped my tea and sat cross-legged on the floor, hoping Morgoya had dosed it with a sleeping pill or poison. “Do you remember what we talked about on the staircase?”
The High Lady hummed into her teacup from where she sat perched on Batre’s lap as they relaxed on the throne. “Which part in particular?”
“The part about Lucais not caring what people say,” I clarified. It had struck a chord with me at the time, but I didn’t get the chance to question her about it—like I hadn’t been able to question Lucais on something he told me in his bedroom the first morning we woke up together. “What exactly happened to him when he was a child?”
The High Lady’s impenetrable mask of kindness momentarily slipped into something cruel. “I don’t know how much you’ve been told, but Lucais was a child when he became the High King.”
“He told me the story of Hugo,” I offered, taking another sip. “I have the vague gist of how he obtained the crown—the coronation and the countdown and all of that.”
Her shoulders rose and fell incrementally. “Hugo, along with Gage and Raella, tried to keep things calm and amicable during that time,” she conceded. “But nobody can really force a child that young to stop being a child, no matter how hard they might have tried. Lucais was a toddler, so he had tantrums, and the crown doesn’t place age restrictions on a ruler’s mood. He unwittingly caused a lot of damage in the early days, usually due to the incessant attempts made to separate him from the crown as if the magic didn’t supersede all of it. There were storms so violent that towns flooded, lightning set farmlands ablaze, and cyclonic winds tore apart a lot of important infrastructure in Faerie. It wasn’t his fault.
“He was a minor, and his parents were acting in the crown’s interests without legitimate authority, aside from that spinelessHugo telling them to cover it up no matter the costs. In the end, it was so bad that there were calls for his execution. There were people who wanted him dead—who planned to murder anactual faeling—simply because they were so desperate for the weather events to cease. Gage wouldn’t stand for it,” she recalled, frowning into the reflection in the mirror as if it were a window into the past. “Raella wanted to run, but I told her the crown would only follow. At the time, I was already High Lady, and it was a big deal for us to have a light faerie rise to power. Lucais’s family weren’t much for the city or civilisation, so I often visited them here.
“The palace was overrun with fire faeries, and I didn’t want them to feel alone. The human world didn’t even exist, the Aboveworld was off-limits due to the war, and we were on shaky ground with the Underworld. They stayed and fought for him in the end, but Hugo didn’t,” she lamented. “He was so worried they wouldn’t be able to quell an uprising that he killed himself and left Lucais as the sole High King of Faerie—at the mercy of his politically challenged parents, and in a palace of staff who travelled here in order to serve Hugo and would leave as soon as he was gone—when he was barely out of his cloth. It took meyearsto build back public confidence in what they were calling theEra of Infancyand theBoy Kingeven after Lucais grew up. He was still a young man when they began to trust him again, but he was no longer a child. I left him to his own devices with his parents then, and I watched the same faeries who had marched through the streets calling for his execution begin to fall in love and chant his name in exultation.”
I hugged my knees to my chest. “What went wrong?”
“He was still too young.” Morgoya’s eyes were worlds away. “He was given the most power for the least effort, and it made him arrogant. He saw a problem in the way the High Fae treated other faeries and immediately removed it. He actedfirst, apologised later—or not at all—and refused to consider the potential blowback from some of the more influential members of his Court, which led us straight into the Gift War. It didn’t help that his parents were still around, vocalising their eccentricities about switching to pure magic and inventing tools that could do the things we traditionally used our gifted magic on. Lucais was smart to shut them down, but again”—she grimaced—“I think he was too brazen about it. I often wonder whether his parents would have rebelled if he showed more tact. If he was patient, the Malum might not even exist.”
“Do you really think that?” Batre piped up, tilting her head to gaze into her lover’s face.
“I’ll never know.”
I pushed my teacup further to the side and moved so I was sitting on my knees. “I’ve been wondering about something like that myself,” I started, a burn in the back of mind. “Lucais said something to me about the enchantment he placed on the Forest of Eyes and Ears, and I haven’t been able to make sense of it.”
“What is it?” the High Lady pressed.
“The enchantment was a mistake,” I remembered, squinting at the foggy windows. “He wanted to hide from his parents, but he combined a mind-reading spell and a…cloaking hex? He said the end result was that the Forest became sentient, but he mentioned that it reads the minds of travellers and moves things around depending on who they are and where they want to go,” I confessed. “It attacked him when we were there together because we were arguing. The part that bothers me is that the cottage predates the enchantment, which means that Gage and Raella were the only ones who knew where it was when it was set on fire…”
The High Lady gracefully rose to her feet and began pacing in front of the throne. Batre leaned forward, eyes narrow and lips slightly parted.
“They would never.” Morgoya turned to me with horror painted all over her face. “Gage was a highly-strung scientist. All of his notes and inventions were stored in the cottage, even after they moved into the palace. There is nowayhe would have burned his life’s work, and Raella wouldn’t dare.”
“Were they living in it when it burned down?” I queried.
She started pacing again. “They had recently moved back. The fire happened some time after Lucais publicly denied his father’s request to harvest the essence of the Witches to complete a trial only days before they became Malum.”
A heavy silence fell over us, so dense I could hear the ticking of my heart like a time bomb in my chest, counting down the moments until I worked up the courage to say what all three of us were thinking out loud.
“His parents knew the person who burned their cottage down,” I mumbled. “They trusted them.”
forty-nine
Mmhmm
We had two questions, and absolutely no answers.
Who burned down the cottage that night, and why?
The Forest would have read the intent of arson in the mind of the visitor if they required the Forest’s help to find the cottage. I was sure of it, even though it meant the Starfires had to have escorted the arsonist to their destination personally—or at least given them directions.
