Page 4 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
He leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his knees, and flashed his sharp teeth at me. “Wretch,” he continued, pursing his lips around the word. A mischievous light danced in Lucais’s eyes, his brows flicking up towards his ruffled hairline.
I scoffed. “No.”
The High King did not miss a beat. “Monster.”
My pupils flared. “No!”
He rolled his eyes, feigning exasperation—I was certain that he had an entire thesaurus of derogatory names to call me, and he quite enjoyed reciting them—and sat back in his seat with a dull thump. “Villain?”
“Ugh—” I broke off, distracted. I’d moved to smack the palm of my hand against my forehead, and that was when I realised I was in chains.
High Mother help him in a minute or two.
He had put me in chains.Again.
But this time, they were not tethered to him. A set of thick, convict-style iron manacles encircled my wrists, fixed to chains that were bolted into the floor on either side of my feet. Anxiety curdled in my stomach. I straightened up, looked down at my confines, and pulled against them instinctively.
Nothing happened.
Blood flooded my cheeks until my face felt swollen.
I knew nothing would happen, but the panic overtook every other sense and logical thought in my mind. With a racing heart, I waited for the cool iron to warm and scorch my skin, but—
“It was a necessary precaution,” Lucais began quietly. His voice was an echo down a very long, dark tunnel. “After the stunt you pulled in the Court of Light, and in front of Enyd’s Court, no less—”
“It doesn’t hurt,” I cut in, looking up at him with fear bleeding from my eyes.Why doesn’t it hurt?I scanned the cuffs around my wrists, on the brink of hysteria, and shot a panicked glance at the High King when I found nothing. “The iron doesn’t hurt me.”
Lucais gave me a bewildered look. “You think I’m trying to punish you? To…tortureyou?”
Confounded, all I could do was shake my head. “No, I-I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.” I heaved an enormous, shaky sigh. “Shouldn’t the ironhurtme?” I yanked, grinding my teethtogether until my jaw ached, and pulled against the chains so hard that the cuffs scraped the first layer off my skin. Another wave of tears pricked at my eyes.Please, please, please.“I have magic,” I hissed at the floor, at the chains, at the iron. At the cold and empty universe. “There was magic.”
The High King’s expression had softened by the time my eyes found their way back to his face. He opened his mouth, then sighed, and said, “Little beast, you’re a human. There is already iron in yourblood.”
Abandoning my endeavours with the chains, I blinked away my tears. They rolled down my cheeks like fat, useless drops of acid. The iron didn’t need to tell me what I already knew; the magic stalking me through Faerie had ghosted me as soon as I gave in to it—which was what I’d been afraid of the wholefuckingtime—and to wish for any further, physical proof was borderline masochistic. The truth was staring me in the face, cold as death and firm asiron.
My powers had disappeared again, exactly as they had done in the human world when I’d needed them most at the hopeless age of eleven. They stalked me, haunted me, tempted me, and then bailed.
Fuck them.I turned my attention back to Lucais, focussing on his words instead, searching for a loophole.
“Being part-faerie, you have less than there is in a full-blooded human woman, but trace amounts nonetheless,” he concluded.
My eyebrows drew together, and I cocked my head to the side. “Are you saying I have low iron?”
Lucais’s upper lip curled. “I’m not a doctor.”
“You’re not a lot of things, you know.” I contained a laugh because none of it was actually funny, and he was looking at me the way he did when he wanted me to feel stupid. “Besides, I already know I have low iron,” I complained.
I’d been diagnosed anaemic as a child, and neither the supplements nor the injections worked because my iron and transferrin saturation levels never went back into the normal ranges. The doctors gave me doses high enough to counteract my vegetarian diet, but beyond that theory, they couldn’t figure it out. In hindsight, though, it made sense.
A blood test couldn’t have determined that my mother cheated on her husband with my flaky faerie father many years after a brutal war permanently separated faeriekind from human beings. Ergo, at the point of conception, my body was damned to become a battleground for magic and iron as the consequences of other people’s actions played out inside my genetic code.
I sighed. Very briefly, I entertained the thought that I’d like to meet another half-faerie and ask them if they ever suffered the same problems. But that was too distracting, so I packed it away for later.
“I don’t understand why iron can hurt you and not me when both of us are supposed to have access to magic,” I went on, my voice adopting a calmer edge than a few moments prior. “Aren’t faeries supposed to be allergic? How do you suppose I’ve ever had magic at all if the repellentlivesinside of my body?”
That would explain a lot, actually.
Lifting a shoulder nonchalantly, he replied, “Well, at the moment, youdon’thave any magic. It’s dormant. I’m working on a theory that you might react to contact with iron when it’s active if your body treats it as a foreign substance externally, but I don’t think you’ll allow me to test it out on you because it’s going to fucking hurt.” Lucais’s eyes flared as if to emphasise his point. “Besides, it doesn’t really explain what I tasted in your blood.” His throat worked, and his tongue darted out to swipe across his upper lip as if he were recalling the experience fondly.
