Page 97 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
“What are you looking at?” Morgoya murmured.
My mouth watered, filled with a sour taste, and my head swam as I tried to choke the words up. It felt like someone had fixed a lasso around my lungs, and even the slightest effort to bring in and dispel fresh air became a mammoth task with variable success rates. The burn in my throat was horrific.
“Proof,” I said, though I wasn’t sure I’d managed to actually utter a single sound.
Scrubbing the tears away from my eyes with my hands, I glimpsed my clear, pale skin before my arms dropped back to my sides, and my gaze landed on the vines wrapped around my ankles. Before I could react, Morgoya stroked a soothing hand down my back.
“It’s okay,” she whispered. “Batre pulled you out.”
Batre was the one who yanked me out of the maze?
Grunting, she pushed herself up into a sitting position as well, and I turned in time to catch her curl one hand into a fist. In synchrony, the vines unfurled from my ankles before withdrawing into Batre’s sleeves.
“How the fuck did you do that?” I asked, not even caring how rude it sounded. I hadn’t meant to lose my manners, but they were snowed in under the shock on my face. The feeling sizzled beneath my skin, sick and uneasy, because frankly—
How in the fuck had she done that?
“I’m from the Court of Earth,” she admitted in a low voice. Her smile was flat. “I was born there. Most of my family still lives there, actually. I’m one of fifteen children who were born into a long-standing bloodline of earth faeries.”
When my jaw fell open with an audible click, she shrugged.
“My parents are soulmates, and they’re very old. Truthfully, most earth faeries are quite old.” Brushing dust from her palms, she grunted softly, and I couldn’t discern the meaning behind her inflection when she added, “They’re anold, proudnation.”
I blinked in stupefaction, but with a main city calledImmorta, I supposed it wasn’t surprising.
“I don’t…” I trailed off, eyes straying to where Lucais and Wrenlock were visible in the distance.
They were disposing of the caenim executioner-style; the latter held the beasts up while the former swiped his sword in a sideways motion that made it look very much like he was slitting their throats. I had the momentary thought that they had managed to maim all of their attackers during the fight, and since it had calmed down, they were going back and ensuring that all of them were actually dead.
I still felt Lucais’s mental hand around mine, the dial tone beeping quietly again on the phone line between us, waiting for someone to punch in the right numbers.
“You live in the Court of Light.”
“I will live wherever Morgoya lives,” Batre replied simply, and then she smiled in earnest. “You don’t have to live in your own Court. Many High Fae travel, work, and live in different Courts. It’s just not as common as it is in Caeludor, for example.”
“Right.” My head was throbbing, the pulse in my brain enough to drive a psychiatrist insane. “I didn’t know that.” I cleared my throat, meeting her eyes despite the raw, skull-penetrating ache that was begging me to close my eyelids and allow them to coax me into an eternal sleep. Or as close to it as I could reasonably get. “Thank you for saving my life.”
Batre’s long, thin lashes fluttered. “I would do it again and again, Aura. I’m just glad that Icouldpull you out. Lucais was trying everything.” She looked over to the High King and his Hand. “I almost thought he would end up tearing into the dark like it was a real, living thing with his bare hands. He rained light down on the shadows like bullets from a machine gun and sent waves of it crashing into the wall. He even sent something like a sky-dragon at it. It was made of light and breathing light like fire. I’ve never seen anything quite like it before, but the shadows predicted every move he made and deflected as if it were light fighting light. It was so…”
“Strange,” Morgoya finished for her, drawing my attention back to her face. The wound on her ear had clotted, but she’d definitely need to see a healer and take a long, hot bath to clear off the caenim gunk that had coated her from head to toe. “It’s more than being two sides of the same coin. That wall is totally resistant to light. It played with the sky-dragon like it was a puppy.”
I swallowed. “Which means I’m not a light faerie. Which means that my father definitely isn’t a light faerie, either.”
The High Lady studied me, her catlike eyes narrowing, causing a delicate crease to form on her brow. The movement cracked a line through some of the dried beast blood on her face, and a strand of her dark hair sprang free from where it had been plastered onto her temple. “I suppose,” she began slowly, “you are correct.”
I held her gaze, brimming with questions.
“I never did believe him when he told me you used light magic to kill that Banshee.”
A miserable laugh drifted up through my chest, popping like a bubble at the base of my throat. “I never did believe him when he told me I killed it.”
In a whir of black and gold, the High King appeared before me, kneeling on the ground. His hair was dishevelled, splattered with green and black blood, and his face was covered with dirt, soot, and a look of exhaustion. The colour in his eyes had dimmed to a barely noticeable yellow, like the sun through a thin sheet of cloud.
“Bookworm—”
Lucais didn’t get to finish his sentence because, a second later, Wrenlock appeared in a furious gust of air a few steps away, and then he lunged at the High King.
He tackled him to the ground, and I barely had the time to pull my legs back so they didn’t get caught up in their tussle. Wrenlock pinned Lucais beneath him, and the High King stared up at him with an expression of confusion and disgust reshaping his features moments before the Hand punched the look off his face.
