Page 147 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
We landed in a strange forest, dark but not quite nighttime. Without the fog to suppress any light, the evening sky peeked through the canopy of overhanging trees in a mixture of ashy greys and deep oranges, like the sunset was a fire in the sky.
On the ground, the trees were so close together that they barely allowed Elera the space she required to slow to a stop. After a near miss with a giant log, she turned in a tight circle inside of a very small clearing, and then doubled back to exact vengeance by ripping at the bark on a nearby tree.
“The caenim will go straight for you if given the chance, so stay alert and wait for me,” Lucais instructed as he helped me down. “If we do get approached, there is a good chance that my title and standing will be respected, but if it looks like it’s going the other way, I’m going to need you to bolt for this clearing. Elera will take you back to Morgoya.”
My stomach twisted at the thought of there being such an uncertain assortment of allies and enemies in Faerie, even amongst those who didn’t know about the Malum. But the fact that Lucais mentioned it eased some of my worries. He knew about the rumours and the unrest, so I prayed he was factoring it into his decisions. Logic told me that he was Lucais, so he definitely wasn’t, but the mating bond seemed to have dulled some of my logic in favour of lust.
Wrenlock appeared on the ground nearby with the grace and silence of a cat, his footsteps nothing more than whispers against the forest floor as he approached. Lucais pressed a finger to his mouth when he looked at me, bestowed a gentle pat upon Elera as she gave the tree bark a piece of her mind, and then motioned for us to follow him into the trees.
All three of us tried to keep our steps silent, avoiding branches that might snap underfoot or piles of rustling leaves because there wasn’t another sound for miles.
My ears strained to pick up something. The silence was unnerving. There weren’t birds in the trees or insects flying through the air, let alone the sound of voices or activity, and the atmosphere was so dry that my skin immediately felt the impact.
The forest was perfectly average at first glance, but every second or third tree had been cut down to a stump, and there were stacks of kindling all over the floor, which was covered in little twigs, pine needles, and trace amounts of ash and charcoal.
After only a couple of minutes, we came out of the thickest part of the trees to the very edge. Immediately, I smelled smoke, like someone had a bonfire burning nearby—but it was the entire Court that was on fire. Owain’s Court was exactly as Lucais had described it; like a meteor had crash-landed in a red desert and the civilisation of fire faeries had been built on top of it.
As far as my mortal eyes could see, there were small fires burning through stacks of wood, lighting the entire landscape up in a warm, orange glow. The atmosphere was a haze of smoke spread thin across the roads into town, almost like Lucais’s fog if it was diluted to allow for normal visibility levels, but the smoke curled into thicker wisps as it rose into the sky and took the place of rain clouds.
“I’m going to lower the ward long enough to slip the caenim through,” the High King informed us quietly. He came to stand behind me, leaning down so he was at eye level with me, and pointed ahead at a small building with a tin roof. “Do you see that little hut in the distance? That marks the furthest corner of the first town. Once the caenim are loose, they tend to go for the nearest source of food, but these ones have been programmed to follow you.”
I stared at the little tin rooftop—and then the penny dropped.
“You need me to lead them towards the town,” I realised, unsurprised. I should have known there would be a price to pay for wanting to come with him.
“I would have done it alone, but they won’t follow me if they know you’re here, so we’ll have to do it together.”
I twisted my neck to look up at him, unimpressed, but he simply placed a kiss on the tip of my nose and grinned at me like a fiend before he strode off towards the tree line. He left me battling a deeply rooted sense of distrust with a new, more potent sense of infatuation and lust, and I was afraid the mating bond would always win.
While Lucais worked, I tried to distract myself in some productive fashion by attempting to make sense of the magic he was wielding. The Ruins were a deadzone, which meant that the forest we had entered must have been part of the very outskirts of the Court of Fire. And if that was the case, we were already inside of the wards. Wrenlock hung back, leaning against a tree in the shadows provided by the canopy overhead. I turned my back on him so I could watch Lucais.
His hair was so gold it was nearly red beneath the fiery skies. Adorned with so many weapons glinting in the waning light, he looked like a High King and a God of War enchanted into the body of a single man who was simply trying to do the right thing the only way he knew how. I felt a pinch in my chest, stretching all the way down to my rib cage and stomach as I watched him standing completely still except for the slow, deliberate movements of his hands as if he were moulding invisible clay into the shape of a key. The air around him shimmered like the distortion of heat.
Summoning, perhaps.
He hadn’t explained the finer details to me, so it was all I could do to assume that Lucais had the caenim cloaked inside of a spell somewhere, and he was going to use summoning magiconce he’d manipulated the wards to allow them to enter. As far as I knew, the individual leaders of each Court weren’t attuned to the wards, so it wouldn’t alert anyone to the threat—
I felt movement behind me, shifting the pine needles on the ground, but my gasp was muffled as a large hand cupped my mouth at the same time as the sharp edge of a blade kissed my throat.
Warm lips pressed a kiss to my temple, and smoky breath whispered against my ear as a male voice said, “I’m sorry.”
Wrenlock.
Lucais whirled on us half a heartbeat later, the shifting of the wards falling away as he completely dropped his hold on it, and his eyes burned like the molten core of the sun as they settled on us. I held perfectly still, refusing to even breathe. His glare would have torn my captor to ribbons if he were literally anyone else in the world, yet his voice was menacing and cold as ice.
“What. The.Fuck. Are. You. Doing.”
The blade was steady against the delicate skin of my throat, even as I felt a shudder ripple through Wrenlock’s chest with my back pressed into him. “I will do this if I have to,” he warned, his tone severe. “It would hurt me to lose her, but not as much as it would hurt you.” He swallowed, and it was audible. “Take all of your weapons off and put them on the ground.”
Lucais was shaking his head even as he obeyed. His eyes locked onto mine, a whirlpool of emotion swirling inside them, and I found myself struggling to breathe with the hand over my mouth as fear stuffed itself down the back of my throat and made everything feel swollen.
“Take your fucking hand off her mouth,” the High King swore viciously, unbuckling his weapons belt and casting it aside. “She cannot breathe.”
Wrenlock hesitated, but his hand retreated a moment later. The blade remained against my neck, and I winced as it made atiny slice into my skin, caused only because my throat expanded to accommodate a huge gasp of air. Lucais’s eyes raged, and he took a step forward, but Wrenlock responded by moving the blade to the centre of my throat, poised ready to slash it clean across, so the High King’s steps faltered to a clumsy halt.
“I’m going to kill you,” Lucais promised. His voice was calm and still as undisturbed water, yet lethal as the monster hiding beneath the surface. “I’m going to feed those hands to the caenim, finger by finger and bone by bone, and then I’m going to cut off that soft cock and wrinkly ball sack and jam them down your throat until you choke on your own semen.”
The imagery made me blanch, but I held still, knowing my focus needed to remain on minimising the breaths I took while a blade was angled against my throat.
