Page 57 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
It continued on a loop of unattainable pleasure until Morgoya knocked on my door a few hours later to let me know theCourt thingywas beginning to assemble downstairs—in case I wanted to wash off all the dirt and unresolved sexual tension first.
twenty
You’d Look Good with Duct Tape Over Your Mouth
Everybody was staring at us. I felt exposed and fragile, like I was standing in a display cabinet with all of my ugly truths sketched into the wall behind me for the world to bear witness.
Killed a faerie. Abandoned her family. Lied about being slapped by her teacher in the second grade.
A familiar heat grazed the back of my neck before trailing down my spine in a playful caress, and I glanced towards the High King.
I was far too deep in my own inner monologue to reprimand him for prodding me with his magic in public, but the words were washed away—one by one scrubbed clean off the walls of my mind like Lucais’s attention was a splash of water on fresh ink. I studied his side profile, watching his awareness of my gaze tilt one side of his mouth upwards.
Thank you.
He ignored me, but his lips twitched.
The collapsing palace had a great hall carved into the northern wing. It was a hollow, cavernous space—a ceiling sohigh I couldn’t discern the colour of it with absolute certainty, large white pillars lining the outskirts of the room, and arch windows of stained glass high up on the otherwise bare stone. No wall sconces. No rugs lining the hard, cold floor. No chairs, save for the enormous throne placed in the centre of the dais at the far west end of the room.
Lucais lounged in it, the seat crafted from a substance that mimicked the aesthetic of glass. As far as I was concerned, he had a poor track record with furniture—particularly chairs—and yet the throne was so delicately transparent. After we entered with Morgoya and Wrenlock, he assumed his position at the forefront of the room, and the entire frame lit up with a blazing gold as his light filled the spaces around him.
He was the King of Light. It made perfect sense that he would perch upon a Throne of Light.
Absently, I wondered if it was the same for all of Faerie’s rulers. I pictured thrones of darkness, fire, water, earth, and wind—mostly to distract myself from the hundreds of eyes that hadn’t left my face even to blink since I’d walked in through the enormous double doors. But for a fleeting moment, I was curious about what sort of throne I might be given if I was to accept the mating bond with Lucais and become his High Queen…
The concept was repulsive from any angle, so it very quickly wilted away and died.
I didn’t want a throne. I didn’t want a mate. I didn’t want a crown.
Lucais wasn’t even wearing his crown. Like me, he’d cleaned up after the locust attack and quite possibly taken a power nap, but he’d made a promise to me that the first time I saw him in his crown, he would be wearing absolutely nothing else. He couldn’t very well keep to that promise in a situation where somany other faeries had flocked to stare at me while they listened to him speak.
As we stood and waited for the High King to address the room, a niggling sense of pride wormed its way into my chest because I was able to recognise so many different races of faeries.
I spied Eldrick standing near the front of the crowd with a handful of other Hobgoblins. He inclined his head to me deferentially, but I watched his tongue slide out of his mouth to lick his lips when he did, and I cringed inwardly.
Behind him, there was a small group of Vampyrs with skin painted in various tones of death and ebony hair that looked like torn pieces of shadow pulled from the night sky. When I met their reproachful gazes, they bared their extra-long fangs at me and hissed.
Lucais silenced them with a single look, but hurt still pooled in my belly when I remembered their sister had been accidentally impaled by one of Enyd’s soldiers in the House. Their grief had been a tangible substance that exploded across the room, coating everyone’s skin in its ashes.
Many of the High Fae were present, and their gazes were somehow the harshest to bear. Some resembled the familiar humanoid form with accentuated features and elongated ears, but others seemed to have adopted scales, tails, horns, and additional eyes, fingers, or even limbs. Their skin tones embodied every colour of the rainbow in varying pigments.
Elera was standing by the door with two other unicorns, and while I decided not to question it, I did spend a moment wondering what her group’s political investment was in Faerie—if they had one.
A group of translucent figures lingered by the door on the opposite side, coming in and out of focus. Instinctively, I thought of them as ghosts, but then I remembered that Lucaishad referred to them as Spectres when I’d accidentally killed the maroon-skinned faerie.
I picked out a group of men I might have mistaken as human beings were it not for the considerable amount of extra hair on their bodies and claw marks across their faces—the Wolf-Folk, surely—and opposite them were large creatures bearing a striking resemblance to the caenim, taking up as much space with the two of them as an entire family of Centaurs did.
Lucais immediately reassured me that they were Bogeymen when he sensed my alarm through the bond—and explained that when they come to Court, they were always on their best behaviour, but I’d better steer clear of them in dark alleys lest they feel the need to take over my mind and body for sport. They had eyes and ears where one would expect to find such body parts, but their jaws were much longer and wider, and they had mouths like a baleen whale. Almost as soon as I looked at them, I averted my gaze.
I recognised a Basilisk—and regretted it—as well as the group of Ogres, a pair of Trolls, a lone Cyclops, the group of Elves, a beautiful creature who might have been a Wood Nymph, and a shorter gentleman who bore a striking resemblance to a Leprechaun. I even observed Goblins long enough to mark the differences between them and Eldrick’s kinfolk.
Lastly, there were airborne creatures who flew too fast for me to really see them, but I was fairly sure they were the Pixies and the Sprites.
When the doors finally closed at the end of the long walkway between the clusters of faeries, I expected Lucais to begin speaking. Instead, he simply stared ahead at the bare floor between his constituents. My eyes darted back and forth almost a dozen times before I saw them—and recognised them.
The Little Folk.
They were, quite frankly, the smallest creatures I had ever seen before in my life.
