Page 87 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
“I don’t know whether they’ll come from the north or the south, but I am certain that a horde of the Malum’s delightful little friends will come out to greet us if we muck around with the lapsus for too long. Ideally, we need to capture them all so we can use them later on. Kill them if absolutely necessary, but the fewer trips we need to take out for this, the better.”
“I’ve never faced one of these creatures head-on,” Batre mumbled from where she stood at Morgoya’s side, their arms around each other to ward off the chill in the air. “Are you sure this is the only option?”
The High King almost looked remorseful. “Yes. We’ve already been out here about a hundred times over the last few months, but I can never break through the exterior wall of shadows to catch even a glimpse of the creature inside the lapsus. We’re running out of time,” he went on, throwing me a sidelong glance. “And unless the Malum’s visit was only intended to scare everyone, we can’t shrink Faerie. Gregor can let them in and out, but they’ll get trapped on the wrong side of the border if I realign the external wards while they’re knocking on Caeludor’s front door like salespeople.”
I cringed away from the thought, and Batre’s round, pink-tinged cheeks rapidly drained of colour.
“We nab the caenim in case Raella leaves,” the High King went on. He gave a cursory glance to Morgoya. “I need you both to stay with Aura. The last time she was around thesecreatures, she was too busy drooling all over the gloriousness of my violence while I slaughtered them all to notice the one that nearly ripped her spinal cord out from behind her.”
A northerly breeze brought a precipitous chill over us, and the cold instantly burrowed down into my flesh, burying itself beneath the layers of my coat.
“So you keep saying,” I grumbled. Throwing my hands up in the air to conceal a shiver, I groaned. “What am I even doing out here this time, then?”
Lucais regarded me quizzically, the faintest of smiles playing across his full, pink lips. “You’re the cheese,” he said at last.
Morgoya finally turned away with an exasperated sound and joined Wrenlock by the unicorns.
“The cheese?” I repeated, glaring at him.
“Like the cheese you lay out for rodents and the beasts inside dark and wonky little places.” He pursed his lips and hastened to hold up a finger in the air between us. “Before you get snippy with me again, I’ll have you know that I think very fondly of cheese.”
Dumbfounded, I stared at Batre, but the poor woman was unable to offer me anything but a sympathetic half-smile. I slid my carefully expressionless gaze back to Lucais, who smiled sweetly at me with all of his teeth.
“It is not surprising at all that you didn’t have a girlfriend when I met you,” I groused, dropping my eyes to my feet and rubbing my left brow bone to stave off the brewing headache.
“Oh, Auralie.” The High King tutted at me like a scolding adult as we began to walk back to the copse of trees. “If I did have a girlfriend when we met, I would have left her immediately.”
Even though I knew that he was absolutely serious, I could not refrain from biting.
“They would have sent me a thank you note,” I sniped, coming to an abrupt stop.
The storm rumbled in the clouds above, and Batre wisely continued on without us. A crease had formed between my eyebrows, and I couldn’t smooth it out before seeking clarity. We’d talked about shrinking Faerie, catching caenim, and visiting the lapsus—but only very briefly, and never with self-sacrifice as a key point of our strategy.
“You seriously brought me all the way out here as bait? For the caenimandthe lapsus?”
Lucais made a conflicted sound in his throat, twisting his mouth as he considered how best to respond. “It is your scent they’re trained on,” he bargained at last. “And the lapsus is a gamble. Absolutely nothing might happen, or something very interesting might happen. It might help if you think of it from a productivity perspective. Two beasts, one soulmate?”
My mouth flattened into a hard line.
“Help me out here, bookworm. I’m desperate.”
I arched a brow at him. “And what happens if I die?”
“I’ll let you kiss me one more time before we get started just in case you do.”
It was absurd and childish, but I couldn’t get the retort out of my mouth.
The sound of a loud slap yanked our attention over to our companions, standing a few feet away from us. Batre’s eyes were widening by the second as she stared down at Morgoya’s hand, laid flat against her stomach as if she’d just hit her with the back of it.
“I fuckingknewit!” the High Lady hissed.
Batre bit down hard on a smile.
Their feelings were clear—from the moment Batre had approached me at the House to enquire about our bond all the way through to when Morgoya had snubbed Wrenlock not once, but twice, in the palace.
Even Lucais communicated his feelings well enough for me to feel confident in my understanding of them.
At first, he’d accepted the way I felt about his best friend. Part of me was inclined to hold on to that even through recent times, when the High King’s opinion seemed to sway back to the other end of the scale. I didn’t know that he felt jealous so much as excluded. But Wrenlock…
