Page 51 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
“Lucais,” I tried again, when my breathing was under control once more. He was pushing me into confessions that would only breed resentment between us, but I had to do it. I had to stop the accursed dance around fate and soulmates.
“I grew up with a man who used to tell me that he loved me when he brought me a stuffed pony to say,‘Sorry I smacked you across the face and sent you to school with a split lip.’” The admission hung in the air between us, swinging like an axe. “That fucking stuffed toy was wrapped up in good intentions and tied in a strangehold with a bow. But he still gripped me too hard when he was angry,” I pointed out carefully, taking a step closer to him.
“He still knocked me into doorframes and the sharp corners of the kitchen bench or the dining table until I bruised when he was upset. Oh,” I went on around a quivering lower lip, my voice descending into untempered emotion alongside it, “but hesworethat he loved me.” I paused, letting the words sink in. “That’s why I don’t know what to do with yours. That’s why I don’twantit.”
The High King dragged his hands down his face, leaving momentary streaks of white behind on the flesh where his fingertips had been digging. “Fuck, Aura.” He sucked in air through his teeth. “Bookworm, I know.”
“You know?” I parroted back, surprised.
“I figured that he was abusive based on your reaction to him,” Lucais confided with a measured shrug. “Coupled with the fact that, shortly thereafter, I saw him throw your mother into the caenim, and it was confirmed. Of course, I didn’t know the extent of it, but…” He pursed his lips, contemplative.
The way his throat worked around the words meant they were going to be hard for him to say or hard for me to hear. Or both.
“When I brought him to the dungeons in Caeludor, I went through his memories—ah, don’t look at me like that, please. I thought he might have known something about your biological father, but it’s…” He waved a hand around abstractly as if to emphasise the squiggly lines that took up an angry residence inside my father’s mind. “By the Elements, it’s a fucking mess inside his head.”
“Yeah, it’s genetic.”
“No, he’s…” Lucais trailed off, struggling once more to wrestle the words. “The man barely remembers any of his adult life. It’s mostly bits and pieces of his childhood. His parents getting divorced. A drug addiction that started when he was barely an adolescent. And he has some sick, fucking twistedfeelings about you festering in the disaster zone inside his head. But none of them were coherent enough for me to pick out any specific instances of what happened, except…” The High King tilted his head regretfully and gestured to my arm, silently asking permission to take my hand in his.
Swallowing the dread anchored in my throat, I gave it to him—limp, but consenting to whatever was going to come next. I had to know, regardless of whether it confirmed my suspicions or threw my entire world into a tailspin.
Gingerly, Lucais brushed his fingertips over my wrist before sliding up the sleeve of my shirt. I realised, absentmindedly, that I’d left my coat behind on my mother’s front porch as Lucais delicately traced the trio of circular burn marks on the soft skin in the crease of my elbow.
The roughened, healed skin stood out against the thin layer of flesh streaked with the bluish hue of my veins.
As a war raged inside of his eyes, I blinked down at the marks impassively, only forming an expression when I realised how close they were to the scar of the iron manacle the High King had left on my arm from our trip through the Forest. The silence dragged on for what felt like days before Lucais spoke again.
“For some reason, he remembers the night he did this to you.”
The victimology overwhelmed me, ramming into me like a freight train and crushing all the air out of my lungs. I ripped my arm from Lucais’s grip without warning and staggered over to a green wheelie bin a few feet away, barely managing to lift the lid back in time to vomit into it.
Groaning as all of the breakfast Wrenlock had piled onto my plate that morning came back up with a vengeance, I heaved every last trace of it out of my stomach and spat the acid in my mouth into the bottom of the bin.
The dry, raw taste burned my throat, lingering there as I coughed and spluttered, trying to dislodge it.
When I noticed that I was inhaling the bin fumes in my eagerness to beat the suffocation of the memories, I stumbled backwards, dropping the lid with a slam. As a sombre silence blanketed the estate, I realised that even the monsters waiting for us in Faerie had stopped knocking on the door to the world that had made my father.
The High King stood a few paces away from me, torment evident on his face. His body was turned mostly to the side as if he wanted to offer me privacy, but his neck was twisted, craning his head back to make sure I hadn’t fallen into the bin.
I couldn’t have answered his questions even if he’d voiced them.
I didn’t know why my father had done that to me. I never understood what had happened that night.
And I didn’t want to.
“I am never going to love you like that, Aura.”
Tears threatened to pool in my eyes at the sacred vow. I blinked them away. “Then how are you going to love me?” I dared him.
“In whatever way you want to be loved,” he whispered. “Even if that means not loving you at all.”
Despite the warmth humming around my heart, I couldn’t think of anything to say to him in reply. It was all I could do to stand there, watching him, and weigh his words in my mind against everything else that had ever happened to me throughout my whole life.
We might have stood in silence forever if a crack of thunder hadn’t broken it. A flash of lightning split the sky, opening a gap wide enough for a swarm of insects to come pouring in like rainfall. I opened my mouth in awe, the question on my lips, but Lucais’s thoughts were faster than my words.
Locusts.
seventeen
