Page 85 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
“I was telling you about the unicorns before you distracted me with your witchery.”
I blew out a harsh breath through my mouth, but waved my hand in signal for him to resume the process of cleaving my feelings into bite-sized pieces with his history lesson.
“Ultimately, the result of the torture inflicted upon them seemed to change their genetic makeup in some intrinsic, irreversible way.” Reaching around me, Lucais gently touchedthe tips of his pointer and middle fingers to the base of the twisted horn placed on the very top of Elera’s head.
She nickered in reply.
“Foals born after the Gift War ended were born without horns at all, and while we waited for many years to see if they might develop, they’ve actually stopped producing them completely.” He pulled his hand back. “There’s nothing we can do about it but care for the horned unicorns who are left, most of whom look like Elera or Shande, and treat the new ones the same as we always have. They’re unicorns regardless; they still own their heritage, they’re entitled to it. And I believe they still have the same magic. It’s just not as easy to take from them now.”
Tears pricked at my eyes, triggered by shame and horror as I ran my fingers through Elera’s mane. It was coarser than her coat, but it slipped through my fingers with ease.Lucky wasn’t always named Lucky, was he?
Lucais merely squeezed my knee with his free hand.
Desperately, I wanted to be surprised. I wanted to feel shock nipping at my fingertips, increasing the speed of my heart as it beat within my chest, but it never came. It never would.
The revelation that the first generation of humans had maimed and slaughtered thousands upon thousands of beautiful, innocent creatures like Elera so they could steal their magic for themselves was the first act of what would ultimately snowball into an entire history of tragedy, greed, and hypocrisy.
It didn’t surprise me, but it made me feel sick to discover new evidence of our inferiority in the midst of a completely alternate realm of shunned possibilities.
“Try not to dwell,” the High King murmured in my ear, sliding his hand a little higher up my thigh as his fingers splayed out across the too-thin fabric of my pants. “Think about that rooftop balcony instead.”
“There are no rooftops balconies,” I hissed, trying to put out the fire that blazed underneath my skin at his words, at the sensual stroke that was his voice. Quite frankly, I’d have preferred the hand around my throat and a bottomless pit of sleep, but I would take whatever mental redirection he was offering, given the only other option. “And even if there are, we’d never find it. You’ve got the whole place submerged in fog as dense as a lake.”
“I’ll make you one,” Lucais suggested lightly. His lips brushed the shell of my ear, but he dipped his head no lower. “Would that make you happy, bookworm?”
A beat of warmth and longing pulsed in my core, lighting up the nerve endings that spanned from the main switch between my legs all the way down to the very tips of my fingers. He could touch the ends of my hair, and I’d feel it resonating in my clit.
“We’ve been over this,” I reminded him, trying to shift away from the pressure adding fuel to the fire. He kept his hand in place, his thumb angled precariously inwards. “You can’t make me happy. You can’t do anything. No soulmate is better than a dead soulmate, remember?”
“Killjoy,” Lucais accused, but he straightened behind me, removed his hand, and said no more.
Without the distraction of the High King’s velvety voice in my mind or his scorching touch on my body, all of my other senses quickly came back to me.
A bit like walking out of a movie theatre and finding that the sun had already set, I found myself slowly coordinating the realisation that we were no longer bathed in an endless sea of impenetrable white fog. All around us, the air was clear and free, and I could see miles ahead of us, across a land that reminded me of the outback during a tropical storm.
Rainclouds the colour of molten silver and indigo rolled over us, looking like the High Mother was exhaling the smoke from apipe and blowing it across the sky. Instead of the cool crispness I’d felt encasing me in Caeludor, I was enveloped in a balmy breeze, and it stirred the tendrils of my hair that had fallen out of the silk ribbon Lucais had used to tie it back before we left the stables.
I let my eyes rove over the scenery as a magenta sunset was chased beneath the horizon by the approaching storm. Flecks of surviving light sparkled above us in certain places, almost like constellations in the night sky back in the human world, but not quite the same.
Before I risked rekindling any dialogue with my ill-fated mate by asking about his skies or his secrets, I cast my eyes around the landscape behind us, trying to discern where we had landed on the Map of Faerie when the unicorns evanesced.The ground was rock-hard beneath Elera’s hooves, the impact duller yet louder than it had been even through Sthiara with each step, and it was totally barren.
Every now and then, a cloud of dust was disturbed by a rogue torrent of wind, but there was no flora. I couldn’t even see weeds surviving between any of the deep cracks in the dry, red dirt, let alone anything planted with intent or nativity.
My mind immediately recalled a barren landscape Lucais had once mentioned to me—the Opiate Desert—but that was inside the Court of Wind, and I knew we needed to get as close to Blythe’s homeland as possible to see the lapsus.
Reckless as he was, it was very unlikely that Lucais would permit us to travel through Gregor’s land, given the current political climate. But if we couldn’t access the Court of Darkness itself, that meant we were in…The Ruins.
“Tell me we are not here to catch a caenim,” I insisted quietly.
“We are not here to catch a caenim, little beast.”
Before the relief could wash over me, a flash of lightning split the sky, and Elera reared back, squealing. My stomach hit my throat before crashing back down with an almighty splash of queasiness.
“Down, girl,” Lucais murmured, stroking her mane reassuringly. His other arm was still holding me against his body like I was an extension of him. “Good girl. It’s okay.”
The muscles in my core tightened at his voice.
“We’re almost there.” Wrenlock clicked his tongue somewhere behind us, and Ace trotted to catch up, pulling against the grip Wrenlock had on his mane as they stepped into line at our side. Ace’s ears were flattened and pinned back. “Should we leave them here with the tree bark and trek the rest of the distance on foot?”
