Page 153 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
“Yes, she is.” The tone the High Lord adopted made my stomach churn, as if the girl were a machine and not a person, and it worsened as he approached the cage, pointing to the metal band on her head as if he were identifying the selling points. “See that? It’s your father’s invention, Lucais. He was a very talented memory-scraper, that man, but the price his magic demanded of him was too high. So, he found a way to create a machine that could do the work for him. There’s a loophole in everything if you look hard enough, and Gage dedicated his life to this. Bytakingthe memories from Siah, we overrode the agreement she made inside the Temple of All to keep her knowledge to herself. She doesn’t have to consent—”
“Because she never would,” Lucais muttered.
“—and she doesn’t have to do anything. It’s brilliant! The Temple of All ensures that no living creature can access the knowledge by force, but this invention is artificial. It can do what your father couldn’t by taking his magic and developing an artificial intelligence. This is a scanner, pulling everything she knows out of her head and feeding it into a separate device that stores it for me to look through whenever I wish. Like an Oracle of my own.”
The High King’s expression was as granite-hard as his voice. “What’s the catch?”
“Gage couldn’t make it permanent,” Owain admitted, tilting his head from side to side as if he were trying to reckon withthe moral consequences. “In order to truly beat the safeguards of the Temple, Siah has to wear the device at all times so it can continuously scan her memories. Otherwise, the visions completely disappear from my orb and the memories of anyone who has ever peered into it.”
Lucais’s expression softened before he faced the girl again. “Siah,” he crooned, a delicate croak in his velvet voice. “You must be in an immeasurable amount of pain.”
Siah was incapable of speaking through the iron-thread, but a single tear slipped from the corner of one eye and rolled down her cheek. The sight caused my heart to flare with a long, poignant ache.
With a profound sigh, Lucais stood, pivoting towards the High Lord with his fists clenched beneath the iron manacles. “How could you do it?” he implored, an acidic bite to his tone. “How could you do this to your own child? She’s yourdaughter.”
Owain was unaffected. With a deep laugh, he said, “What do you mean, how could I do this to my own child?” His dark eyes were scrutinising, and I detected a sliver of authentic perplexion inside them. “Don’t you remember that I had two children, Lucais? Has it really been so long that you’ve forgotten my son?”
An itch crawled over my skin like ants and spiders in the silence that befell the room as Lucais churned through the words. The quiet in my mind was intolerable, but I didn’t risk reaching for the bond, even though my agony magnified the moment the High King figured something out before I did, and I had to watch it dawn on his face in isolation.
“No,” he whispered.
“What?” I hissed.
“Yes,” Owain affirmed, utterly unbothered by the fury simmering in Lucais’s golden eyes. “Siah is theluckyone. Not only does she get to play a pivotal role in this, but she gets to be the one who lives to see it all play out.”
“How did Alaric really die, Owain?”
The High Lord smiled cruelly. “He died during a training exercise with the caenim.”
Lucais brought his hands, still cuffed together at the wrists, up to his face and started banging the knuckles of his thumbs against his forehead. “Why? Why?Whywould youdothat?” he beseeched, voice edged with hysteria. “Why would youkillyour own son?”
Owain rolled his eyes, amusement replaced by a sudden surge of anger. “Because he fell in love with the bitch, didn’t he?” he returned, thrusting a hand into the air as he spun on his heels and stalked over to the wooden throne. The High Lord’s voice became mocking, his hands moving in wild motions. “He wanted tostaywith her in the human world. And, worse than that, he developed grand plans to steal her away from that pig of a mortal husband she had so they could raise their faeling together here in Faerie. That was certainly never going to happen because that would have ruinedeverything.” He shook his head, heaving a harsh breath as he sat down. “He would have ruined everything.”
“How?” the High King demanded.
“Because the child was the perfect hiding spot so long as it remained in the mortal world,” he snarled, slamming his fist down onto the arm of the throne. “The baby being conceived was the wholepoint.”
Visions sliced across my mind like broken windows into the reality that Lucais had uncovered, fleshing out the inflections in the High Lord’s words, but none of them made any sense. I scanned the faces in the room for clues, though nobody was looking at me. Wrenlock stood behind me wearing a mask of stoicism, John hung his head so low I would have had to lie down flat on the floor to be able to glimpse it, Amelia was oblivious as she filed her nails down with a pocket knife, Siahwas unable to move, and both the High King and the High Lord were staring each other down.
I stumbled a step forward. “Can someonepleasetell me what is going on?” I begged, and everyone turned to look at me as if they had forgotten I was ever there. Irritation nipped at the corners of my mouth. “I get that John and Amelia were spies, but which baby are we talking about? What happened to it?”
Brynn? My brother?
Fear and hope battled to the death in my heart.
Owain examined me, looking at me properly for the first time since he had strolled into the crater of the volcano. There was a calculating darkness around the corners of his eyes that seemed so familiar to me, like I’d glimpsed it before in the reflection of the mirror, and I could have sworn I saw the shadows recede for a moment. In the next second, they came flooding back, and he broke our stare with a bitter chuckle.
“What baby do you think we’re talking about? And what do youthinkhappened to it? Are you telling me you have no idea who I am?”
I blinked once, the battle abandoned. “Why would I have any idea who you are?”
“Really, Auralie?” The High Lord of the Court of Fire put on a look of mock offence. “You don’t recognise your own grandfather?”
fifty-six
The Malum’s Curse
“My son, Alaric, is your biological father.”
