Page 31 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
The High King’s perfect face grated on my last nerve. I couldn’t stand it any longer; I shuffled as far away from him as I could get on my seat, pressing myself up against the carriage wall, and glowered out the window as the fog lifted and the unicorn fleet pulled us deeper into the city of Caeludor. He was trying to take me apart like some kind of wind-up toy, and I’d be damned if I let him succeed.
Our ride remained bumpy. I had every muscle known to humankind tensed and ready to stop me from jolting forwards and landing back in his lap should we hit a particularly rocky piece of road again. The tension in my abdominal muscles was dangerous but necessary.
Lucais, on the other hand, was like a lazy house cat perched precariously on top of a washing machine, watching me with a glint of satisfaction shining in his eyes.
I wondered what went on inside his head. Under the circumstances, the only conclusion I could draw was ugly—that he was a sadist, toying with me because he liked me best when I was upset, and part of me contemplated the idea that I might actually be the masochist he’d been searching for his whole life.
The thought struck a chord, so I buried it—like throwing a blanket over a bell to muffle the sound.
Caeludor, at least, was neutral.
The city was waking up for the day as we travelled through it, like a yawning dragon blanketed by smoke. The gloom never entirely dissipated, but the upper town was distinctly clearer than the lower, most likely due to the sloping angle of the city’s overall design and the fog’s inexplicable pull towards the palace itself. It was as if Lucais’s home was a magnet.
There was no logical, scientific explanation. The fog was magical by nature, possibly sentient, and seemed to prefer torest in higher places like the palace spires. It coiled around the building like a serpent rising from the ground to the sky. I just couldn’t work outwhy.
Out my window, there were faeries flitting from one place to the next, completely oblivious to our presence as we trotted through the streets.
Their lack of attention was an immediate red flag.
Even if the occupants of the carriage held no interest for the townsfolk, there was no chance that not a single one of them would experience the reflex reaction of looking up to search for the cause of the resounding thunder the unicorn hooves created when two dozen of them hit the cobblestones in unison.
I felt the sting in my chest as part of the ice around my heart reformed.
Lucais saw me righting myself in my seat, heard me suck in a sharp breath, and arched a brow.
“You’ve put a glamour on me again,” I stated quietly.
The game was over, and we’d both lost.
I fell back from the window abruptly as my cheeks flared with an uncontrollable, searing shame. Disappointment sank to the pit of my stomach and rolled around there—a marble at the bottom of a bowl, weighed down like a sword thrown into a lake and buried to the hilt upon its bed. It hurt so much, and I couldn’t explain why. I only knew that it felt worse than what Wrenlock had done to me.
It felt worse than anything.
“You keep putting glamours over me,” I whispered, blinking dubiously at his boots. He didn’t want me to be spotted—he was making sure there were no witnesses. “So why wouldn’t you just let me leave when I tried? You know I would have laid low. Why pick me up and chain me to yourself again?”
A sharp intake of breath, and then the High King said, “You really want them to see you, little beast?”
I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter what I want.”
But Idid. I wanted them to see me, and I wanted them to see what he was doing to me. The hot and cold torture, the trickery and deceit, the spells that cloaked me in their streets while I grappled with the fate he’d sealed for them during a war before I was even born. I wanted them to know me so they might understand why I didn’t want to be their High Queen and live out the remainder of my sentence of eternal servitude at his side. I wanted them to see so that, one day, they might forgive me.
Lucais’s voice cut into my thoughts like a steak knife into a fillet. “I want what is best for the people of this realm,” he told me plainly. “I hope that, as their intended High Queen, you would want the same.”
“And I am not what is best for them,” I mused.On that, the High King and I might agree.“So your solution is to stow me away inside of your spells like some kind of fucking mistress.”
Lucais’s head swung from side to side. “Nope. Try again, you maniacal woman. That is not what I said.”
“Okay.” I sat forward, feeling a pleasant shift in the atmosphere between us as the carriage moved smoothly around a bend. “Then what’s the problem? Why the glamour, Lucais? It can’t be the Malum or the caenim. You said the city was secure—”
“Itissecure.”
“Is it Blythe and the Court of Darkness? Do you think I am indispensable in your quest to find her and figure out what went wrong, and you don’t want anyone to know you’ve brought in reinforcements?”
“I don’t care about finding her.”
“Thenwhatis it?” I threw my hands up, and they landed with a slap on my thighs as I leaned back again. “Is there something about me you find so utterly atrocious you cannot bear to reveal it to your people?”
He blinked at me. The High King just stared at me, blinking like an idiot for long minutes.
