Page 79 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
Iron in the blood,I thought as I nodded to convey my understanding.
Morgoya took the damp towel from my hands and offered me a thick, woollen blanket in its place. I accepted it, wrappingthe length around myself as Batre nudged me towards a plush armchair near the fire.
“The faces on your financial notes are a glamour of your Kings and Queens to cover up the faces you are really trading in,” Morgoya elaborated. “Memories hold a great deal of power, so with each transaction, that is the true value being exchanged.”
My eyebrows, still slightly damp, rose towards the ceiling. “I don’t think I understand a word of what you just said. You cannot possibly deal in memories.Wecannot possibly deal in memories. They’rememories.”
The High Lady gave a blasé shrug. “Where do all the memories go, Aura? The ones you can’t recall but surely must have because you lived a life full of infinite moments. Once you forget about them, where do they go?”
“I…” My lips parted, closed, and then split apart again. “They disappear, don’t they?” I glanced between the three High Fae, trying to discern the likelihood of the conversation being a joke or some new type of faerie trick. Their expressions were dispassionate—and, worse than that, they werepatientas they waited for me to process and accept what was surely a fable.
“Impossible,” Batre informed me softly. “They don’t disappear. They don’t die. Haven’t you ever remembered something that someone else forgot? Or misremembered something?”
My mouth twisted. “Like the Mandela Effect?”
“That’s a good example.” Morgoya perched on the arm of the couch directly opposite the fireplace. “It’s the phenomenon created when a person accidentally trades with their own memory more than once, or when a widely remembered event is traded off by too many people, effectively distorting it.”
“You can trade in other people’s memories?” I started to shake my head. “That’s insane. Isn’t that unethical—”
“People share memories of things all the time, Aura,” the High Lady interjected. “We do so quite harmlessly in passing, which in turn creates duplicates, and once we run out of space in our own heads—and when we’ve inevitably created new memories upon which we place a greater value—the other memories are deposited in the Memory Bank.
“You might call it forgetting because humans no longer have access to the magical properties required to trade in these things with mindful intent and purpose,” she went on, “but the High Fae retain a sense of awareness that certain moments have been stored away in the Memory Bank. Perhaps we recall the time of the event, but the details have been banked. As High Fae, we rarely need to complete trades like this because we have magic where you require money, but if we do so happen to require the use of a particularly powerful memory, we can make a withdrawal.”
“What about people who forget? Amnesia? Alzheimer’s? You can’t tell me they do that on purpose.”
Morgoya winced. “No. They don’t. In cases like that, the memories are stolen—but how and by whom is a whole other conversation entirely.”
My head was spinning.
It wasn’t simply the cold chill from becoming soaked with rainwater under a sudden downpour—or even the harrowing threats from conversing with Lucais’s mother inside of a portal trying to break through the High King’s wards—that made me begin to shiver. The revelation that we traded in memories without realising it was perplexing, scary, and almost comprehendible.
Children always seemed to remember things adults had forgotten.
Brynn constantly reminded me of promises I’d made that I hadn’t yet fulfilled, and sometimes, it frustrated me to noend because she delivered her reminders with absolutely no consideration for the burden of monetary value and adult responsibilities.
My irritation was unwarranted. I’d tried to shield her from all financial matters in our household as much as possible, so of course she didn’t know.
But children remember.
And adults recall things differently.
The manifestation of memories in notes and coins was such a strange concept that I turned to Wrenlock for clarification with a dubious scrunch of my nose. “So you’re saying that memories of lesser value would be coins, and higher value would be notes, correct?”
I watched the microexpressions flitting across his face as he considered my question.
“Think of it more like a credit card,” he suggested at last. “Humans just like to hoard things—so you created notes and coins. But it is highly subjective, and I think that’s why you’re always running into issues because you really don’t have any idea what you’re doing. A trip to the supermarket the day that the freezer section had run out of frozen broccoli florets may not be an important memory for someone who wasn’t planning to make a stir fry noodle dish that same night, but it will take a higher precedence for someone who was. Unless they’re really singularly disturbed by the event, it will be the first memory they try to offer up for their next transaction over a set period of time, ergo becoming the most valuable until they deplete its worth or bank it.”
Stir fry noodle dish.
Rolling my lips together, I tried to keep my expression composed and my mind on track. The dark, broody, ethereal High Fae man crouched down in front of me with long, pointed ears and muscles that were carved from one of Michelangelo’swet dreams had just looked me dead in the eyes and made a reference to a stir fry noodle dish with broccoli florets.
And I tried, but I couldn’t keep it together.
“You eat—” I broke off as an unwelcome laugh bubbled out of my mouth, causing me to choke on my words. Coughing, I did my best to reign in my expression, but the upwards curve of my lips was solidified like concrete. “You eat broccoli florets?” I laughed. “Have you ever been to a supermarket?”
He frowned, rising to his feet, but a grin slowly spread across his face as he approached me. “Oh, now you’re mocking me?” he teased.
A sequence of giggles floated out of my mouth. “Yes,” I admitted, beaming up at him. “I am.”
