Page 78 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
It couldn’t cleanse the touch or the lingering taste of the Malum who had created it by syphoning evanescent power from the gateways into Faerie—not the haunted glint in her shallow eyes, not the imprint of her words upon my brain.
Give her to me, or Faerie will burn.
A full-body shudder was halfway through assaulting my skeleton when Lucais tossed his coat over the top of my head, startling me into stillness.The interior lining was slightly damp, but the outer layer of his coat was resistant to the torrential rain and provided some degree of shelter, allowing me to fully open my eyes without raindrops blurring my vision.
Parting my lips to speak, I twisted towards him, but all I accomplished was to obtain a mouth half-full of the water slipping down my cheeks from my soaked hair.
The High King put one of his hands on each of my arms and abruptly walked me backwards by three steps before shoving me away from him—
—and straight into Wrenlock’s waiting arms.
The force he used was armed with purposeful restraint and care, but the action was so unexpected and completed with such speed that my heart took a swan dive inside my chest. I almost choked on my next gasp of air as the breath lodged in my throat like a stone.
Wrenlock was already turning me around to face him, fingers gripping me tightly, but I scrambled back, spinning like a top as I pushed him away and searched for Lucais’s luminescent hair in the darkness and pouring rain.
Hands reaching for him, the coat he’d given me slipped from my head as I skipped a few clumsy steps forward, and I barely caught the last trace of him in a glance as he evanesced from the hillside in a fit of tumultuous, heartbroken shadow and fog.
Lucais!
My call was futile, even mind-to-mind.
He was gone.
Coat in hand, Wrenlock stepped towards me. The material was soaked through and covered in mud, but I took it from him regardless and clutched the garment to my chest as the Hand to the High King wrapped me in his burning hot embrace and whisked me out of the unrelenting downpour.
I didn’t know why, but I had expected—no, I hadhoped—to find Lucais in the palace when we arrived back there.
Even so, part of me was not surprised at all to discover that he was nowhere to be found.
Morgoya and Batre were waiting for us by the fireplace in the dining room. It wasn’t until I noticed their damp hair that I realised they had been standing on the hillside with Wrenlock when Lucais and I exited the portal.
Concern was slathered over their features. Morgoya locked eyes with me; the green of her irises shone like a coral reef beneath tears she hadn’t blinked free yet.
A sob hitched in my throat, finally breaking away from my chest when I rushed into her open arms. She squeezed me tightly, very softly patting the back of my rain-flattened hair as tears spilled down my cheeks.
“He’s at the bank,” she murmured.
Choking down my escalating horror, I forced my mind into the present. “The bank?”
“The Memory Bank,” she clarified for me.
Jerking my head back, I frowned and muttered, “What?”
Batre appeared at our side with a fluffy white towel in hand. Smiling sympathetically, she gestured to my hair and began dabbing at the ends, which were curling around my collarbone and leaking rainwater like a faucet that hadn’t been turned offproperly. Angling my head for her, I quickly realised that I had run straight to Morgoya as if all was forgiven.
And she’d let me.
I chewed on my lower lip.
Maybe it is forgiven. Can it be that simple?
“You’ll notice that faeries don’t trade in currency the way that you’re used to doing in the human world,” Batre explained. “Money—at least, the way that you know it—is a concept that was created after the Gift War as a way for humans to continue trading without their access to magic. Here, in Faerie, we use memories.”
Blinking rapidly, I reached up to take ownership of the towel and continued to dry certain parts of my hair and dress that were creating puddles on the floor around my feet.
Wrenlock knelt in front of the roaring hearth, the fire crackling and spitting at him like it recognised his proximity, and warmed his hands by it. He shook off the excess water in his curly hair before he looked up at me, bracing a forearm across one knee.
“A memory in its purest form is too much for a human to bear,” he began. There was a grave, foreboding edge to his voice that disturbed something deep inside of me. He took a long breath. “You can tolerate magic in very small doses—mostly in myth, legend, stories—but it is not compatible with your minds and bodies by default.” His mouth twisted in a grimace, and he quickly added, “No offence. I know it wasn’tyouspecifically who relinquished your claim to magic during the war, but the consequences remain the same. You reject magic, and magic starts to reject you.”
