Page 154 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
The words went straight through me. I was a ghost on a prairie, and the High Lord of the Court of Fire was throwing things at me. Things that shouldn’t have been real, but felt like physical blows to the head and the heart.
“He’s dead now,” he added, feigning a grimace. “He became a liability when he developed real feelings for your mother. Who knows what he would have wanted to do about you once you were born.” Owain gave me a meaningful look. “In the end, his sacrifice helped attune the caenim to your scent, prepping them for the day they went looking for you, so it wasn’t all for nought.”
I felt like cotton candy was being stuffed into my head—puffy, sticky, and overloaded with sugar to the point it made me sick. My hands shook at my sides uncontrollably as I stared at the High Lord and struggled to make sense of a single thing he was saying. In my peripheral vision, Lucais was watching me, his expression a steady portrait of quiet rage—but there was no trace of confusion as he waited to see how I would react.
All of a sudden, it hit me.
Lucais was waiting to see if Iwouldreact, to find out if I already knew or suspected any of it.
I blinked into the open space, utterly befuddled. The beat of my heart ticked over like the hand of seconds on a clock.
I had to say something. They were all waiting for me to say something.
“Why me?” I whispered into the thick, smoky air.
Owain’s eyes flickered with surprise, a flame when the wind changed direction. “Well, it’s bad luck, I suppose,” he answered in the voice of a commentator. His tone didn’t match the malicious admissions he was making, but my question seemed to have been the last thing he expected. “It was never aboutyou.” His eyes fell over me like a meteor shower before sliding to my mate. “It was always abouthim.”
“Me?” the High King cried, outraged. “What did I ever do to you, Owain?”
The question had me suppressing an eye roll because he was a million times more likely to have done something to the High Lord—considering that he was Lucais Starfire, and I had never even met Owain—but I let him put on a show, praying he had a plan.
The High Lord gave him a withering look, but I saw a firestorm brewing in his eyes behind the façade. “I honestly don’t know how to take you seriously sometimes, boy. Do you mean aside from the fact that you disrupted the status quo after single-handedly ending the very first reign of a High King from the Court of Fire by driving him to bring shame upon our people bysuicide?”
Lucais stood with an open mouth and murder in his eyes. “Hugo kills himself and leaves all of Faerie to an infant ruler who was nearly executedtwicebefore his first birthday, and you thinkyou’rethe victim in that situation?”
“That infant ruler drowned my wife!” Owain thundered, shooting to his feet. His large frame loomed over us, double the size of the figure who had strolled in to greet us so casually, and a heat flare almost knocked me to the ground.
The lava in the magma chamber roared, rising in waves that cascaded around us, brushing against the walls and twisting until it sealed over the sky, trapping us like we were inside a whirlpool. The temperature burned through my body while my skin reddened and sweat dampened my hair, making it heavy as it stuck to my nape. My human lungs could hardly breathe through all of the magic and fire.
“Calida was killed by a water faerie,” Lucais contended, pacing between the throne and cage. A hint of doubt crept into his voice as he recalled a memory that surely didn’t belong to him, given the timeframe, but his eyes remained fierce. “You had her murderer tried and executed.”
Owain sniggered, the sound dark and destructive. “Hugo orchestrated that! He insisted, in fact, and I think it was because of your mother.” His features morphed into a scowl. “Do you think I could do anything about you back then? No! I had towatchandwaitalong with everyone else who was put at the mercy of a babbling leader who would raze entire townships if he was told to eat his vegetables! A leader who wailed so hard about a lost rattle that he caused a rainstorm in the south that washed away one fifth of my entire Court! My sweet Calida went to help with the rescue efforts the day she was caught in a flash flood and washed into Ulyssa’s territory, where she drowned in filthy floodwaters and was dragged out to sea through the estuary between the Ruins.”
Lucais stilled. “I didn’t know.”
“Siah was so devastated by the death of her mother that she went to visit the Temple without even telling me,” Owain went on, and the whirlpool of lava around us slowly began towithdraw as he settled back into his throne. “It wasn’t until she returned with the iron-thread and a certain look in her eyes that I realised the opportunity I’d been given. Everyone knew your father was an eccentric who was determined to create abominable creations to take the place of magic in our everyday lives. With all of his mundane notions and ideologies, some might even say that he was the first real human being. But where they saw a pariah, I saw potential. In all of your father’s creations, he had to have struck gold with one of them, right?”
The High King didn’t respond.
“When you destroyed the natural order of things by banishing the inferior beings from our employ and allowing the females to train in your army for frontline combat, I knew it was time for me to act. Your parents and I became fast friends, and it wasn’t long before Gage was inviting me to examine some of his creations. The Memory-Scraper was his pet project—the closest to his heart, given his condition…” Owain cocked his head to the side and inspected Lucais with narrowed eyes. “Did you even know your father was sick?”
The High King shook his head, barely. “He always said the price of his magic was too high. My mother told me that he suffered from an imbalance.”
“I think it was all in his head, to be perfectly honest with you, but he did experience stronger-than-normal side effects from the use of his magic. I witnessed it for myself. It was to the point where it couldn’t be countered with talismans or charms.”
Lucais’s eyes flicked to his hands for half a second before they snapped back to the High Lord’s face, and my stomach bottomed out as I put it together. It took every last ounce of strength left in my body to hold my composure, but nobody else had seen the momentary glitch. Lucais hadn’t told anyone why he wore so many rings. Not even me. And I would not be the one to give him away—even though the prickling sensation of tearswelling in my eyes felt more real than anything had in the past few hours.
“Your father gifted the prototype of the Memory-Scraper to me when I showed interest. The plan was always to swap the devices over if he ever found a way to make the effects permanent, but he never did—”
“You burned the cottage down,” I breathed.
Owain didn’t look at me, but he said, “I had to destroy all of his records to ensure that nobody would discover what we had done.”
“But the cottage was destroyed during the war,” Lucais insisted.
“No.” Owain tapped his fingers on the wood. “It is easier to blame everything on wars, though, isn’t it?”
“You’re a hypocrite, Owain.” Lucais took a step forward, flanked by the guards. “You are well aware that I had nothing to do with the lights in the sky.”
