Page 155 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
The Dragon War.
“You’re a light faerie, though. I can’t blame them for making the connection, even if I don’t subscribe to superstition myself.” Owain shrugged. “Besides, it was perfect timing. Your parents had agreed with me that you weren’t cut out to rule Faerie before the Gift War even began, so it wasn’t hard to convince them to approach you with the Witch Experiment. Your father was the most excited about it, because I gather it would have solved a lot of problems for him personally, and he was the most disappointed when you dismissed them. His disappointment was what crushed your mother, I think, but I already knew your answer would be no. You see, I’d watched it through Siah’s visions. After you killed Calida, my little Oracle returned to me with a list of ingredients for your downfall stored in her head. Since you were a child, Lucais, this is what I have been doing—waiting.”
“Waiting for what?” I whispered.
Yet I already knew the answer.
Owain turned his unfeeling gaze on me. “For you to be born.”
My face felt numb, my lips shaking as I forced out a single word. “Why?”
“Because Siah saw that the High King was destined to take a human mate long before the Oracle’s prophecy was ever revealed to the public. And what better hiding place is there fornoxaeternathan in the mortal girl with whom he cannot help but fall in love?”
Everything fell into a state of slow motion, suppressed by the single word with a lifetime of power behind it.
Noxaeterna.
The Malum’s Curse. The Malum’s Curse. The Malum’s Curse—
My head was foggy, stuffed full of images and sounds that spiralled crosswise inside of transient blinks and muffled echoes, like I was struggling to swim through the shipwreck of my own thoughts and memories at the bottom of a midnight ocean. I was looking at everything through ripples and aftershocks. It was suddenlyfreezing. And it had been so much easier to focus on the picture above the surface, the vision of what my life should have been like breaking through the light above me on dry land—a warm, clear, attainable reality that I had never grasped because it didn’t truly exist.
And then it shattered.
Noxaeterna. The name of the Malum’s Curse.
My curse.
I was all alone at the bottom of the ocean, looking up at the world through the pieces of a broken mirror, distorting the shadows and shapes around me. Some of them might have been clouds eclipsing the sun, but some of them were definitelysharks, and my lungs burned as I dragged my tired body to the surface while memories dove for me with wide-open jaws filled with sharp teeth.
“It is the most intricate spell I have ever seen, as a matter of fact, and it was placed on Auralie Roberts before she was born,” Owain announced to the room, as I stood paralysed in the centre of the platform. “It was woven with the brilliant little caveat that she could not think or speak of it until the curse was named. It’s always risky to embolden a spell with something like that because, at any point in her life, someone might have said it without even realising what they were doing. Then, she would have figured the rest of it out.”
My head was spinning so fast that my vision was nothing more than a smear of colours, shapes, and stars within an endless darkness. I lost all sense of gravity. I could have been floating upside down for all I knew as I burrowed into the recesses of my soul andfinallypicked up the thing that had been inside me all my life. It was small, dark, and slippery, wriggling like some kind of leech as I snatched it with my mental hands and snapped it in half.
The sensation was liberating and crippling at once.
In the distance, I heard a scream that I thought was my own, but I was too far gone as my soul raced over two decades back in time to the day that someone put the curse inside me. I knew my throat was being shredded by my own voice, although it felt like no more than a delicate hum as I lost my hold on time and space, and I named it in every corner and every moment of my existence.
Noxaeterna.
Power seared through my veins as I wrestled back control—knowing it, naming it, banishing it. I stepped out of the curse like stepping out of layers of clothing that I’d been wearing for my whole life without realising they were making me overheat—until, finally, I became aware that they were suffocating me. Through years and years of my life in the mortal world, I named the nameless friend that had spoken to me through the dark, and vanquished it.
And it was like breathing.
My whole life, I’d been choking, unable to fill my lungs, unable to keep my head above water, unable to clear my mind. And then, all of a sudden, I was on dry land, and there was fresh aireverywhere.So much air that I didn’t even have toworkfor it anymore. I was light as a feather. I was free from the stifling darkness of my confines.
When I finally caught up to the time and place I had been in when I learned of the curse’s true name, I found myself on my hands and knees on the floor, panting heavily as I faced a puddle of blood and black ink that spilled out beneath my body. I was lighter than ever. My vision was clearer. My head was no longer plagued by thoughts that were not my own and could not be controlled.
I lifted my head with a smile, only to find that Lucais was being restrained by five guards—one for each limb, and one for his throat—and the look on his face immediately switched from horror to relief when our eyes met. Wrenlock stepped between us, brow creased, and a shadow rose from beneath me, pushing him to the ground and out of my way.
“What the fuck?” the former Hand muttered, brushing ash from his hands as he scrambled back to his feet.
“Hmmm.” Owain’s face was wrinkled as he perceived me from the distance of the throne. “Well, that’s going to be a problem.” He gestured to one of the guards holding Lucais. “Bring me Cacindra and the little dark faerie, would you?”
The guard bowed, then vanished. A moment later, he returned to the same spot with a woman on either side. He heldropes attached to iron collars that were secured around each of their throats.
One woman had hair as white as starlight and skin as pale as the moon, tinged with an ethereal sapphire hue. She held her posture, spine straight and shoulders back, and the fierceness in her silver eyes told me that she was doing it as a statement of strength and defiance. The iron collar didn’t seem to be scorching her flesh, and her ears didn’t protrude from the curtain of her hair like the High Fae. In fact, she looked more human than any of them—smaller in stature and frame, with fewer enhancements to her physique, and much rounder eyes with thicker brows—but I didn’t need to see any of that to know what she was anymore.
A Witch. Cacindra.
