Page 83 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
“At least you’re learning about the real fantasy worlds now,” he stated plainly, squaring his shoulders as we approached the group. “Some people learn better on the job than they do from the textbooks, anyway.”
I rolled my eyes at his back as he pushed on a side door that opened into a courtyard. The fog was considerably thinner, and as we walked across the bailey towards the stables, it was an effort to keep my head down and my feet in a steady rhythm.
Because all I could think about was whether there actually was a rooftop with a balcony anywhere on the palace grounds.
twenty-seven
You Sound Surprised, Bookworm
As if travelling through thin air on the magic of the wind was not discomfiting enough alone, the High Fae simply had to insist upon doing it on horseback, too.
While I had suspected that it was a practice they implemented, it was no less disturbing to experience it for myself.
Elera whinnied gleefully as she evanesced to a completely different section of Faerie, her hooves slamming into the hard dirt with loud clomps, kicking up a small cloud of dust in her wake. The impact jolted me with such force that I would have gone flying from her back if Lucais didn’t have one arm firmly secured around my waist, holding me against him with the power of an airlock seal.
Gasping for breath, I choked on a mouthful of powdered dirt as the horned horse trotted in a circle, shaking her head and snorting while she waited for the others to join us.
There had been no debate over with whom I’d ride. Elera had made that decision for us by coming to stand directly at my side at the stables while Lucais and I waited for Wrenlock,Morgoya, and Batre to lead out their own animals. She had nudged my arm with her soft, furry muzzle in a borderline aggressive manner until Lucais hoisted me onto her back and swung up behind me.
It felt strangely comforting to ride her again, though I trusted her about as much as I did her High Fae companion.
In the human world, I’d spent a lot of time with horses at the farm my grandparents owned. My mother used to send me there for week-long stays whenever my father came back—at least, before they sold it and moved into a retirement village across the country, closer to my mother’s half-brother—and I’d found comfort in the calm and steady presence of the horses.
Elera and I hadn’t gotten off on the right foot or the right hoof.
Admittedly, her horns had startled me, and the High King’s joke about devouring me didn’t help, either. Nor did the fact that, while I’d spent a lot of time around horses, learning how to care for them when I was much younger, I’d never spent much time learning to ride them for fear of falling. But Elera had exchanged a look with me when I tumbled out of the High King’s carriage on the outskirts of the city, and that look was part of the reason I decided to stay.
It was steeped in knowledge and forgiveness, and I didn’t argue at all when Lucais helped me climb onto her back.
Wrenlock and I hadn’t yet found the time—or privacy—to talk about what had happened in the hallway, and Lucais and I had been interrupted by the warning sirens before I had the chance to form a proper response to his demands and that ridiculously emboldened declaration of love. Truthfully, I didn’t mind waiting to talk about it. Mostly because I didn’t know what I was going to say or how I was going to phrase it, but also because I knew that neither of them were going to like it no matter what.
One way or another, it was temporary.
My time in Faerie was always going to be short-lived. I tried to rationalise my way around it, but I couldn’t outrun my responsibilities. I was delaying the inevitable the longer I stayed at the palace with Lucais and Wrenlock in Caeludor—and, deep down, I’d known all along that it wouldn’t last.
It couldn’t.
From every possible angle, I still had a feeling tightly woven around my heart, a pressure on my chest reminding me that I was trapped inside an hourglass, and the only way to survive would be to turn everything on its head.
Again and again and again.
Like I had been doing all of my life.
Lucais wouldn’t understand that, but Wrenlock might.
As if on cue, he appeared atop an absolutely beautiful black stallion who met the ground with grace as he landed, holding his head up high as he walked to stand near Elera. His eyes were wide and bright, and one met mine with a youthful sense of curiosity before he hastily turned his head. The two restless males were mirror images of one another—large, strong, and darkly handsome. When Wrenlock reached down to stroke his neck, the stallion’s flesh quivered beneath the touch, and I noticed that he had no horns. None at all.
Morgoya and Batre materialised next, the former riding a palomino mare with two straight horns in the middle of her head, and the latter on a roan stallion with a single horn protruding from his forehead like the depiction of traditional unicorns I had seen pictures of as a child. His colouring was an ashy blue-grey, but clear patches of pure grey formed around his eyes, horn, and muzzle.
As he walked beside Morgoya’s mare, an eye met mine like the much younger stallion’s had, but his gaze was filled with thewariness of a wise creature rather than the curiosity of a new one.
“What’s his name?” I called to Wrenlock, nodding to the proud black male beneath him.
“Ace,” he sang back, beaming as he patted the stallion’s neck again. He gestured to Morgoya’s horse as she came up beside him. “That’s Shande, and that old trooper is Lucky.”
The roan stallion beneath Batre snorted at the wordold.
“When will Ace’s horns come in?” I wondered. He was obviously the youngest of all the horses.Unless…“Is he a unicorn too?”
