Page 37 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
“In where?” I enquired softly, my hand still resting atop his rebelliously fluttering chest.
“In thelapsus,” he replied. “It’s what we call the place between one location and the next. When we travelled through the gateway between your hometown of Belgrave and my empty field”—he slyly opened one eye to gauge my reaction, and then closed it when I poked my tongue out at him rudely—“we had a singular moment in time where we were in the lapsus. Here, there, everywhere, and nowhere. That blink-of-an-eye moment.”
I pursed my lips, observing the homely cottage interior around us.A place between one place and the next.“Like this?” I asked. “The cottage is a lapsus?”
He shook his head, ruffling his blond locks. “Not quite. You can’t stay long enough in a lapsus to build anything like this,” heexplained. It was funny to watch him talk with his eyes closed. I found myself smiling at his eyelids. “This is a permanent establishment, built onto an outer corner of tangible existence with a doorway spelled into a key, and itrequiresa lapsus in order to reach it just like anywhere else you can’t get to through a physical door.”
“Okay,” I said gently. None of what he was saying made any sense to me whatsoever, but he was so pretty when he was being polite. I didn’t want to risk deterring him from doing it again.
“When we use a gateway in or out of Faerie, or we open a portal from one place to the next, or even when we evanesce, we encounter a lapsus,” he informed me, seeming to sense my confusion. “But there is also one within the wards—which is how people are able to get through them—and there are wards up between every single Faerie Court. There have been ever since the Gift War, but they don’t extend to the tunnels beneath them. If someone wants to get into the Court through the tunnels instead, they have to be let in by someone on the other side of an iron door.” Lucais lowered his head back down and opened his eyes, staring at the fingers I still had splayed over his heart.
I quickly withdrew my touch.
Lucais grabbed my hand and made a prisoner of it in the cage of his long fingers. And I let him.
“The wards serve to function as protection more so than they do in the capacity of teleportation. We never needed them for travel before the Gift War, and I control them all now, which means that I can see who is entering and escaping from each Court,” he admitted. “I don’t use them to track the comings and goings of regular faeries—or even the interesting ones, really—but if creatures like caenim or Banshees try to gain entrance into one of the six Courts, I can very quickly and easily reinforce that ward’s protections and shut them out. Or, as it so happened with Blythe’s Court, I can trap them inside of the lapsus, too.”
“How so?” My brow creased. “If you can’t stay long enough to build anything…”
“The passage of time in the lapsus is not continuous,” he replied. “At best, it’s singular, and at worst, it’s repetitive. They are not stacking moments in time on top of one another like building blocks to move forward like we do. The lapsus is climbing and falling all over the same, single block.” He sighed deeply. “I imagine… I don’t think it would be pleasant if there is anything sentient trapped inside of it. It would be like reliving the same, single split second of time again and again. The lapsus is filled with electricity. Whatever is living inside of it now must be feeling like it’s being electrocuted continuously—zapped back in time by a split second every single time it tries to move forward.”
The hairs on my arms raised, even beneath the warmth from the long sleeves of my shirt and coat.
“It all started years ago,” Lucais went on softly. “Blythe hadn’t shown up to any of our normal events for a while, and she hadn’t been spotted outside of her own land, which was also a little bit darker and quieter, according to reports from neighbouring towns. To be fair, though, this wasn’t totally out of character for her or anyone who lives in the Court of Darkness. That’s why we didn’t think anything of it—which means that nobody knows exactly when she first went missing or when the shadows overtook her place on the Map.” He shook his head, staring past me at the wall.
“I last saw her seven years ago across the room at a party, so my guess is that things went awry shortly after that. But I didn’t start investigating what happened until the first human body showed up beside the gateway in the Court of Light two years later—when I realised Blythe might actually be missing, and her Court was vanishing, too.”
“You said it was a Malum infestation,” I reminded him. He’d started to explain it to me on our first day at the House, but he hadn’t been forthcoming with information, and we’d gotten off track about the Gift War and my family history. Then Lucais—Fake Lucais—had walked up the stairs, and the lies swept all of us away.
The Real Lucais nodded, meeting my gaze with hooded eyes. “I thought it was at the time.” Worrying his lower lip, he bent his head to the side, cracking his neck. “Because the Court of Darkness is shadowed by default, I had to guess. I couldn’t actually see any of those insidious little balls of angry black ink that represent the different hordes of Malum on the Map. They weren’t out in the Ruins like they always are, so I assumed they had infiltrated the Court of Darkness. I thought maybe there were just so many of them that it created an entire wave of shadow that spread over her land, but I was wrong. I think I was very wrong. I realise now that they were probably hidden inside the tunnels, and Gregor was already helping them.”
Glancing down at our hands, I rubbed the pad of my thumb over one of his knuckles. Even for hands so slender, one of his could still completely engulf both of mine. “So the northeast corner of the Map went dark, the Malum vanished inside of the underground tunnels…” I clicked my tongue. “I am not understanding how the Court of Darkness was sent into exile.”
Lucais’s throat bobbed. “I think they were cornered by something in there, and it took me far too long to realise. Seven years ago, around the time I last saw Blythe, I caught something in the lapsus of the Court of Darkness’s wards. I felt it—the immediate, undeniable sense ofwrongnesswithin it—but it disappeared. When it returned two years later, I acted before it could move one way or the other, lest it escape from my reach again.” He pinched the bridge of his nose with his free hand, squeezing his eyes shut.
“I didn’t realise I had shut down the entire function of the wards around Blythe’s Court, effectively locking everyone in and everyone else out, until it was too late. I’d never had to do something like that before. We were busy trying to work out where the fuck Blythe had gone, why the shadows were playing up on the Map and obscuring her Court—not to mention figuring out why all of those human women were showing up murdered inside the gateways. Then…somethingmoved.It was like a monstrous snake beneath the water, dangerous and stealthy, and it swam right into my net.”
Cringing at the analogy, I pulled my hand back from his grasp and wrapped both of my arms tightly around myself. Lucais looked down at his hand like I’d cut off part of his finger in the process.
“I tried to find a way around it,” he carried on after a moment, “but thethingwas using the ward’s connection to me as some kind of conduit. It started feeding on my power, draining me of a microscopic drop of my energy each day. The more attention I paid to it, the more it took. I have reserves of power in spades, so I was able to ignore it for a while, but the problem was finding a solution for everyone else. The few soldiers I sent into Blythe’s Court never returned, and the risks quickly outweighed the potential benefits, given that there are numerous other threats worthy of my attention.”
The veins in his neck pulsed, his throat tightening. “The Malum, for one. The numerous faeries living in my city who would like to see me either ruling differently or decorating their table as an exquisitely handsome blond centrepiece, for another.”
I gave him a dubious look. “How do you know the thing in the lapsusisn’tMalum?”
“I don’t.” Lucais dragged one hand through his hair, leaning back on his other. The hem of his shirt rode up, and I avoidedpeeking at the slip of skin it revealed. I deliberately didn’t notice the curve of his hip, the line of taut muscle, the deep grooves and outline of something that travelled lower and longer.
“The Malum have a distinct presence on the Map. Have done ever since they came into existence,” he reminded me, oblivious to my straying interest. “They’re back to skirting the edges of Faerie within the Ruins again, and I can’t spot any inside of Blythe’s Court now that you’ve scared all of her shadows away. Besides, the Malum should not contain anywhere near the amount of power or skill I can feel inside of the lapsus.” He smacked his hand on his thigh. “Until the human killings began, the Malum had lived—well, not peacefully, but they weren’t violent, either.” The High King shrugged.
I cocked an eyebrow at him, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was staring off through the window.
Not violent?I thought.Pfft. They were violent before they became Malum. They planned to rape the Witches.
“To be honest, I had a very strong suspicion that Blythe was thethingin the lapsus,” he confessed, sounding as though he was still partially convinced of it. “Would’ve sucked to be her in that case. If it was, though, then it wasn’t reallyheranymore. Blythe may be a raging bitch, but she’s not vicious—and whatever is in the lapsusis.I could feel it attacking me, each strike like a snake biting me repeatedly and injecting a speck of weakness into my powers every single time. With each blow, it took something from me and used it to strengthen itself.” Lucais stared at the wall in serious contemplation of his next words.
“Blythe is a bad decision maker, a sore loser, and she has one of the most unhinged belief systems I’ve ever had the displeasure of arguing about, but she’s not a thief. She wouldn’t try to steal someone else’s power. Wouldn’t know what to do with it if she did, honestly. She’s a purist.”
I choked down an unexpectedly sour taste in my mouth. “You know her that well?”
