Page 24 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
The High King nodded, staring intently at his prisoner through the bars. “Yes.”
I’d killed a man earlier in the day in a fit of rage. I’d fought back a self-righteous smile at the sight of the sentry who had hit me strung up like prey. And now I was about tothankthe person responsible for both of those atrocities—the High King who had tortured his own man, kidnapped my father, and then discarded them both in a dungeon without so much as an acknowledgement in the newspapers.
It was the end of the road for me. I could never go back—and I didn’t even want to because the truth of the matter was that the situation I was in with Lucais was where I had been trying to go my whole life. Ever since I was a child, as deranged as I knew it may very well be.
I swallowed the emotional lump in my throat, trying to calm my racing heart and reel in my ecstatic, livewire nerves.
“Please let him go,” I said quietly, doing my best to mimic a businesslike and professional tone. I swallowed, and the sound was audible. “Before I actually fall in love with you.”
A heart beat twice in separate chests.
“Ew,” Lucais scoffed, scrunching his nose as he gave me a sideways glance. His eyes slid back to my father with the ease of an oil slick, but I thought I spied the corner of his mouth twitching. He flattened it immediately and adjusted his shirt. “Control yourself, woman.”
A gurgle of laughter rose up my throat and burst out of my mouth, the sound of a dam overflowing after many years ofheavy rainfall under immoveable clouds and poor maintenance of the overall structure.
I laughed until I couldn’t breathe, until my sides cramped, and I almost fell over. I laughed until Lucais picked me up and carried me out of the dungeon, his faithful orbs of faelight trailing us for the whole journey to a bedroom somewhere high up in the palace. I laughed until tears streamed freely down my cheeks, into my ears, over my throat, and between my breasts. I laughed until my jaw hurt and my throat was raw, until I forgot why I had ever begun, and until I fell asleep.
eight
Wrenlock Elumos
My laughter eventually died inside dreams of the dead faerie. His three eyes haunted me that night. I watched the light leaving them like fireworks all through the dark, flickering on and off as though I were bewitched by a looping reel that could not be paused or closed. Unable to fall into a deep sleep and unable to wake up enough to dispel the images, I succumbed to a form of sleep paralysis that I truly thought I’d left behind in the human world.
At the very least, I was convinced I’d left it in the cottage on the road into the Court of Light. It made sense, since that was the last location in which I’d experienced a nightmare, unless—
Had the House… No, it couldn’t have. But what if it did?
An enchantment such as the one on the House might have held the power to ease the burdens locked inside someone’s mind. To take the edge off the guilt and self-loathing. In the Forest of Eyes and Ears—brought to life with a similar spell—I had felt a sense of peace unlike any other. Maybe the House had attempted to provide me with something akin to that by scaring off my nightmares and quelling my daytime fears. After all, Ireally hadn’t grieved for the loss of Jonah’s life in the bookstore. Not like I grieved for the maroon-skinned faerie with three eyes, whose name I didn’t even know.
When I woke up, thoughts of Jonah, the House, and its attempts to soothe me in the forefront of my conscious mind, I felt wetness stuck to my lashes and cheeks. Tears had started to flow once more, escaping from the corners of my eyes before they had even opened to the melancholy morning. My heart hung heavy in my chest, a low-lying anchor in the sky of my regrets.
Guilt closed an iron fist around my soul and shook me senseless when I stumbled out of bed, a sudden cramping sensation roiling through my stomach. It was like someone was scraping out my insides with an apple corer.
Arm across my mouth, I rushed into the bathroom and dry heaved over the sink. There was nothing in my stomach for my emotions to forcibly eject, so the action only served to create a burn down the back of my throat from the acidity of my saliva.
After rinsing my mouth out, I slipped into the shower and tried to wash off the sadness that drenched me when I realised I had to do those tasks all by myself again. It wasn’t because I had any type of aversion to the act of turning on taps and fetching my own towels; it was the loneliness that the previous night had drilled into my bones, leaving me hollow and wanting for companionship. Forfriendship.
The House never spoke to me, so it had never had the chance to lie to me, but in place of words of affirmation, it communicated with acts of service—a constant and unfailing false sense of security that I would have to learn to live without again. Even when it was shunning me, or it had mysteriously gone quiet, the House had given me Delia in its place to make sure I always had someone to take care of me if I needed it.
And I shouldn’t have been so sad about leaving. I knew that.
But I hadn’t realised until it was too late that the House had shown me what most of my friends had grown up with when I was in school. What I had tried so hard to be for Brynn.
It had taken care of me. It ran my baths, it brought me fresh and clean linen, it cooked all of my meals, and it chased away my fears in the dark. Yes, I had fought with it—in the only way one could fight with something like an enchanted House—and I cursed at it when it didn’t do what I wanted. However, I started to figure out that was all because it cared. And I didn’t say thank you.
I hadn’t even said goodbye.
Wrapped in a towel, I walked into the middle of the bedroom, traipsing water all over the scuffed wooden floorboards as I surveyed my new surroundings. The room was nice if Halloween was the occupant’s favourite holiday.
Smaller than my room at the House, most of the space lay between the floor and the high coffered ceiling, which loomed above me like a dome. There was a huge, unused candelabra pendant welded from obsidian fixed in the centre, dusted with cobwebs. Fixtures of a similar design were fitted to the walls, furnished with candles that appeared to have had their wicks pulled out. Two steep, arched windows made from stained glass were featured against the far wall. They provided a restricted view over the palace’s primeval buttressing and tinged the dismal, fog-weakened light with colour as it slanted into the room between window panes.
An oversized bed sat against a blank wall, adorned with elaborate carvings on its ebony bedhead, the spires of which almost touched the ceiling. I could tell that the blankets were dyed in deep golds and strong whites, but beneath the stained glass they appeared cerulean and turquoise. They were ruffled, an unchecked ocean ready to swallow me whole. I had no cluewhat the time was, but there was no way I would willingly place my body back at the mercy of that mattress.
There was a large, antique wooden trunk at the foot of the bed. I ransacked it for a change of clothes and found that not only did the enchanted Houses fail to offer underwear, but the creepy palaces in Faerie did, too. To my surprise, however, I found some normal clothes—normal by faerie standards, at least.
Once I was dried, I dressed in a pair of plain, well-fitting black slacks and a long-sleeved shirt with buttons and a neatly pressed collar. The fabric was cool against my skin, so I put a long coat over the top and pulled on a pair of pile-lined boots. If it was not safe for me to wear dresses in the House, it was certainly not safe in a city where I could not see past the end of my arm if I stepped outside into the fog.
Hunger had started to stab me below my ribs, clenching and unclenching my sides. The nausea still gurgled, emotions warring with basic need. I took a deep breath and blew it out in a huff of air that clouded in front of my face. As much as I didn’t want to stay in the bedroom, I didn’t want to leave it, either. That would mean facing up to the things that hunted me across time and portals, leering at me when they thought I wasn’t looking.
