Page 158 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
“Lucais,” I said, panicked. “Lucais, stop—”
“I tried to avoid it.” He sighed. “I tried to avoid you for the most agonising weeks of my life so I could be the High King my people deserve, but it’s not working either way, Aura.” His golden eyes darted to Wrenlock. “They can’t kill me because someone else will just take my place, so they’re going to keep you here in order to control me. That is how this will work. They will force us apart, and I will not be able to stop the things they do to you, even if I do everything he says. They might cease the torture sooner. They might make it a little bit less gruesome. I will be able to keep you alive, but you will never be safe.”
By the time I realised what he was planning to do, it was too late for me to think of a way around it. I tried to summon the parts of the curse I controlled—like I had done when Wrenlock obscured my view of Lucais—but it required a level of anger and concentration I couldn’t access while my eyes were glued to Lucais’s face and my heart was splintering into pieces.
“This is the only way,” he told me.
It hit me like a punch to the gut. “No,” I protested. “No, you don’tknowthat—”
But I had seen it in my dreams. The prisoner in the dungeon who was being tortured while I stood there, powerless to save him. And I had shown him those visions, so he knew it, too.
“I do.”
“I saw Wrenlock, too,” I blurted, my hands and teeth trembling violently. I had. I’d seen Wrenlock in the dark first, but I’d called Lucais’s name. “I know it doesn’t make any sense. In the dungeon with you when we kissed, I showed you the dreams I’d had in the human world of you, but the night we came to Faerie, I swear, I dreamed of Wrenlock instead. You both had the same injuries.” I deliberately left out the part about them having the same tattoos because the reality distortion hex was falling apart at the seams like I’d been warned, but I was desperately clutching at straws. “You don’t know that this is the only way, okay? You can’t possibly know—”
“Aura.Bookworm.” His voice was going to break my heart. “Those dreams you were having?”
“Yes, exactly—”
“I was having them, too.”
All the hope gathering in my chest deflated like a balloon, replaced by sadness—and fear.
“What?” I breathed. The cracks in my reality were irreparable. “Why didn’t you say anything? Youknewthe whole time that this was going to happen, and yet you brushed me off when I tried to warn you? You let me keep going like we even had a future—”
“Aura, my sweet girl.” He did it. He broke my heart with his mouth. “I am not the prisoner in the vision,” he whispered gently. “I never was.”
Frantically, I glanced at Wrenlock, but he was staring at a fixed spot on the volcanic floor.
“It’s you,” Lucais murmured. “It’s always been you.”
“No,” I pleaded, but as the tears fell down my face and I shook my head to disprove it all, the memory rose up. It was as clear as anything I had ever seen.
The picture of the dreams morphed from a male body to my own as the magic fuelling the illusion fell away like pixels on a screen in my mind, and I realised the curse was embedded so deeply inside of my identity that there were still layers to it I hadn’t even touched.
“The dungeons in Faerie are reinforced with iron,” Lucais explained. “They’re designed to suppress magic. The only reason you were able to show me your memories of the dreams down there was because the iron weakened the magic of the curse just enough to let it slip through, but the reality distortion hex on it was too strong, so you were never able to see for yourself who was really pictured in the vision. But you see it now, don’t you, bookworm?”
Sadness branded my cheeks. My lips trembled.
“Thenoxaeternamade her forget the visions once the prophecy’s lifespan ended. But the reality distortion hex was still required as a safeguard because she never would have come to Faerie if she so much as suspected what would happen to her when she did,” Owain explained. “But you complicated it unnecessarily when you refused to give her your real name.”
Lucais didn’t move his eyes from my face. “I know,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry.”
And then he rushed at me.
The High King of Faerie broke free of the iron manacles, and for a fleeting moment in time, I really believed that we might be okay—
Until his hands closed around my arms in a familiar embrace that smelled like the rain and the muddy portal outside of Caeludor.
His body against mine was like a jolt of adrenaline straight to my heart as we collided, and I screamed for him to stop. To find another way. To give me another chance. But once again, he pushed me into Wrenlock’s waiting arms, and the man whobetrayed us locked his hands around me like a python, and then my heels were being dragged along the floor as he spun us around.
Shouts rang out from all sides.
Orders were fired left, right, and centre, and I wanted so desperately to chime in and agree—
“Stop them!”
Stop us.
