Page 84 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
I could have sworn Elera sighed. A heavy silence fell over our group. The mood plummeted like a boulder down a cliffside, and I was quite obviously the person who had pushed it.
“There are no horses in Faerie,” Lucais informed me in a soft voice. He clicked his tongue in a signal to Elera, and she began to walk.
Glancing back, I saw the others fall into step behind us in single file, their heads hanging heavy with dolorous expressions. I faced the front and wracked my brain to determine what I’d said or done wrong.
Bookworm.The High King’s voice was in my mind as we rode on, his tone gentle and brimming with warmth. I immediately felt him all over me, from my head to my toes, and from the inside out.Here’s another textbook history lesson for you. Faerie only has unicorns, but Acey boy won’t grow any horns because he was born after the end of the Gift War.
Why?I dared to ask, though as soon as he had mentioned the war, I felt a sudden pinch in my stomach, suggesting it was better not to know.
Unicorn means one horn in the old language,he said. The horn of a unicorn is filled with an extremely potent type of magic. It has healing and regeneration properties, amongstother things, but they cannot be transferred. A unicorn cannot use the power within their horn to heal others, only themselves—or whoever has possession of the horn. So, during the Gift War, the humans realised they could harness those powers organically if they baked them into pills and stirred them into potions. It allowed them to continue fighting against us, to take bold risks and chances, knowing they could heal their own if they made any fatal mistakes. But they had to saw off the horns from the unicorns to do so. And so that’s exactly what they did.
My gaze became unseeing, locked in a straight line ahead of us. I felt the blood draining from my cheeks, and I clamped my lips together firmly as a mouthful of bile shot up the back of my throat.No.
They killed very few of them, considering the numbers,he went on.The unicorns were kept awake and alert, restrained with ropes and chains because the horns had to be taken without any type of anesthetic, and then they were usually left alive. Those who survived eventually grew their horns back. As a defence mechanism, we think, the unicorns who were captured and maimed grew back an extra horn. And then again, when those were stolen, until some became so deformed that there is no telling where one horn begins and another ends.
Sickly glimpses of the six unicorns pulling the High King’s carriage flashed before my eyes, their wildly tangled horns growing like sets of brambles.
Sharp blinks of pain stabbed at my stomach as my mind cycled through the numbers, trying to reconcile with how many times each of those horses—thoseunicorns—must have been tortured for their horns to grow back in such a state.
And Elera…
We cut her horns offtwice?The thought was out of my head and burrowing into Lucais’s mind through the bond before I could stop it.
Not you, but yes. You sound surprised, bookworm. But that was only the beginning for human beings, wasn’t it?
The truth was a cruel mistress.
I cringed, but the action only pressed me further back into the hard and unforgiving planes of the High King’s chest. Anger blazed beneath the surface of my skin, disgust as thick as ipecac, an emotion that became lodged in my throat because my heart did not want to digest it.
A world like mine—a world turned by the cogs of timeless and nescient regret, operated by a group of people who had given up their magic, only to spend the rest of eternity trying to replicate it in barbaric, bloodthirsty ways.
Shaking my head with nearly imperceptible movements, I forced myself to swallow it down. I’d been swallowing it down my whole life, after all.Why stop now?
Lucais stroked a reassuring thumb across my upper thigh, but an intrusive thought bloomed in my mind like a pitcher plant, and I wished that he would put his hand around my throat and squeeze until I blacked out.
Just until I fell into a sleep deep enough to forget the horrific truth I’d uncovered.
“No,” he whispered in my ear. His breath was a heady temptation, a sinful caress. “When I put my hand around your throat, you’re going to remember everything I’m doing to you while it’s there.”
“Get out of my head,” I commanded under my breath, digging my elbows into his arms for emphasis.
“You get out of mine first.”
“Pfft.” I shot a reproachful glance at him over my shoulder. “As if you’d let me,” I muttered. “I bet you keep me locked away in there like some sort of pet.”
“I think you meanpest,” Lucais corrected, grinding his knuckles into my side. His voice adopted a lighter tone, asthough driving his fist into my rib cage like a screwdriver released some tension. Knowing him, it probably did. “I have tried to evict you from my mind, Auralie, but short of dousing you in pesticides, I’ve run out of ideas. You’re an itch I can’t scratch.”
I gave you the choice, and you said no,I reminded him, switching back to our mental telepathy.
We were well ahead of the others, but the mention of what had transpired between us in the palace’s ruined wing felt like something that should be kept between the two of us—and not only because the destroyed section of the palace was a secret. I needed to balance my priorities, at least until I could figure out what to tell Wrenlock.
And by refusing you, I continue to give you choices,Lucais replied matter-of-factly. Even when he spoke into my mind, he was annoying. The cryptic messages he knew damn well I didn’t fully understand were becoming tiresome.
“What does that even mean?” I mumbled aloud.
“Let’s circle back,” the High King replied, clearing his throat as Elera slowed to a stop near a copse of dead trees.
The trunks were husks, hollow and flaky, and small, brittle branches poked out in abstract shapes, all of them needle-thin and sharp. Elera was undeterred as she leaned over and tore a piece of bark from one, chewing patiently as she waited for the other unicorns and their riders to catch up.
