Page 40 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
“You.” I blushed at my faux pas and hoped he couldn’t see the tinge to my cheeks. “It’syourfault. I don’t know why I saidwe.”
“And you say you don’t want to be High Queen,” Lucais muttered. Begrudgingly, he climbed to his feet. “You terrify me, little beast. I cannot turn my back on you within striking distance lest you try to behead me for my crown.”
“You’re not wearing a crown—” I broke off as I glanced up at him. My eyes narrowed. “In fact, I’veneverseen you wear a crown. Why is that? Is your head too large?”
Lucais gave me a withering look and came to stand opposite me against the table. “I’m saving it for a special occasion, whereupon I shall wear my crown and absolutely nothing else.”
“Am I in this daytime fantasy of yours?” I questioned with a long-suffering sigh.
“Indeed, you are.”
“Well.” I slapped my palms on the wood and beamed up at him. The sting was worth it for the dramatic effect. “At least if you’re wearing a crown, I’ll havesomethingto hold my interest.”
“Vicious wretch,” he grumbled, bracing his hands on the table as he hovered over the Map and stared daggers down at it. The humour in his expression quickly faded. “If the Court of Darkness truly survived the absence of their High Lady and the presence of this blight in her place, they may very well try to kill me for what I did to them.”
I felt as if he might have been saying that more to himself than to me, but I responded nonetheless. “You don’t know that anything bad actually happened to them, though, right?”
“No, I don’t. It’s still in there, angrily prodding me, zapping flickers of magic. Maybe it left them alone, or maybe they’re all dead.” He turned on his heels, pushing away from the table with a little too much force. “But I have to find out.”
“How do we do that?”
Cocking his head to the side, Lucais threw an amused glance at me over his shoulder.
“How doyoudo that, I mean?” I cleared my throat with some degree of discomfort. “Because, like I said, this is completely and utterly your own fault.”
“Iwill have to let the ward down again, but on the outside this time.” He strode to the kitchen window and began collecting books and pages that had been thrown into disarray upon our arrival. “There is no one-way travel through these wards. That kind of magic has been outlawed since the Gift War. So, if something can enter, then something can escape at the same time. Which means—”
“Wait,” I interrupted, circling the table. “Why is it outlawed?”
Lucais stopped what he was doing but didn’t face me. “It’s a safeguard.” His voice took on a dark edge. “The wards were made in a time of warfare you could not imagine, a little beast though you might be. Faeries used to lure humans—their own kin, who had only just been rendered powerless—into portals to entrap them. And then they sent through hideous creatures to torment them to death. They’d place bets on how long the human would last before they screamed, bled, begged for their mother, or died.”
Something in my stomach flipped over, cold and slimy. I covered my grimace with one hand as I stepped up to his side. “That’s horrible.”
“I’m sorry.” Lucais glanced down at me with a wry smile, not looking like he’d ever been sorry for anything before in his life. “I thought you expected that sort of thing from us.”
“From you, maybe.”
He pulled a face at the window. The sun was, in fact, setting in that imaginary world between places. I watched it paint his features in beautiful colours and brutal shadows as our reflections stood together in the glass.
“I’ve never done something like that,” he stated. “If I wanted to kill a human, I’d do it myself with my bare hands. I’m notlazy.”
“How reassuring.” The space between my shoulder blades tingled as I tried and failed to stop myself from imagining him doing a lot of other things with his bare hands. “How exactly do you plan to protect the rest of Faerie when you let down the ward?”
“Two ways,” he replied matter-of-factly. “I’ll create another lapsus outside of the border. Balancing them up against each other like that is precarious, though, so if that fails to contain it, thethingwill probably take the opportunity to escape into Faerie rather than hide in the Court of Darkness any longer. Which means…we need to shrink Faerie.”
“ShrinkFaerie?” I repeated, disbelief widening my eyes. “How do you intend to dothat?”
“Not by scale,” Lucais clarified, turning to me at last. He folded his arms across his chest and looked down his nose at me with a mixture of apprehension and remorse warring on his features. “I’ll have to reduce the size of the ward around the outskirts of the six Courts—the one that stands guard between us and the Ruins. That will allow me to approach the Court ofDarkness from the far northeast, hopefully luring thatthingto the outskirts.”
“What about outlying towns? Are there none?”
“They’ll need to evacuate.”
I frowned. “So you’re going to tell them—”
“No,” he interjected, finality resounding in the air between us. I was suddenly struck with a feeling of impending doom. “They’re going to decide to move further in towards Caeludor by themselves.”
I groaned. My suspicions that he was not headed somewhere I’d like were correct. I could already taste the ire budding on the tip of my tongue. “And you’re going to orchestrate that by…?”
