Page 30 of A Court of Hearts and Hunger
“Even if you’re invisible?”
“I only have two more of those spells, and I want to save them for our time in the Unseelie lands. The twilight mushroom is a key ingredient, as you well know, and I haven’t been here to procure any in—in—”
“In far too long,” Opal finishes. “Stop fighting it, Sugarplum. Sleep.”
“Fuck… you…” he whispers as his eyes close. “Clara… Clara…”
“I’m here.” I kneel by the sofa and twine my fingers with his, giving them a reassuring squeeze. He sighs, sinking into unconsciousness.
When his hand goes limp, I slide my hand away and turn slowly to face the Fae woman.
“You really shouldn’t have drugged him.” I rise, curling my fingers around the handle of my whip.
“Easy, child.” She takes a pull at the hookah, holds her breath for a moment, and releases a cloud of smoke that makes me cough. “I’m saving both your lives. You should be grateful.”
“You don’t have the right to make this decision for us. I lived most of my life with a man who thought he was protecting me, who made all my choices for me. I didn’t realize how angry that made me until I came to Faerie. Until I began making my own decisions and fighting my own battles. I won’t be ‘protected’ in that false way again. Fin and I are going to save the human girl and claim the book, whether you agree it’s the right choice or not. And you’ll help,” I say, drawing my whip out of its bag. Pink light glimmers along its length, an undying magic birthed from my bond with Fin. “You’ll help us, whether you want to or not.”
“Is that so?” She’s on her feet now, and she seems to be growing taller, thicker, more voluminous—expanding like smoke.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” I tell her firmly. “But I will if I have to.”
“As if you could.” She’s definitely swelling larger, filling more of the room. Talons curve from her fingers, and her eyeteeth stretch into snakelike fangs, long as my hand. Her legs merge together, forming a thick, columnar body, like a caterpillar, or a serpent.
Understanding dawns in my mind. “You’re Unseelie, aren’t you?”
“Seelie, Unseelie—they are merely words. Names, categories, regions. Meaningless. They do not represent the truth of a heart. This one,” she nods to Fin, “he was wounded in that dark kingdom, damaged more deeply than you realize. I will not let him return. You cannot protect him.”
“You care about him.”
“He is a friend. I’d known him for years before his moronic uncle kicked him out of Court. His association with me was one of the reasons they banished him. Yet he never said an unkind word to me, or blamed me at all. He continued visiting me, not just for ingredients, but for conversation. He wanted to fuck me, of course—he wanted to fuck everything back then—but to me he has always seemed like more of a son than a lover.”
She slithers along the floor, encircling me and the couch on which Fin lies. “After his great torment, when he fled back to this side of the wall, he came to me. For weeks he did not speak. The light had gone out of his eyes. I thought he was going to fade away.”
“He hasn’t told me what happened,” I confess. “But if he says he can do this, I believe him. And you should believemewhen I say that I will defend him with everything I have.”
“What if it’s not enough?” Her voice is sibilant now, hissing through her fangs. The butterfly wings between her shoulder blades quiver, the only sign that she’s uncertain at all. “What power do you have to protect him?”
“I will have my disguise, my glamour. He can hide my whip in his other pocket when we pass through the gate, so I will have that, and some of his spells. And I’ll have my wits, and my art.”
“Your art.” Opal chuckles. “What can your art do against the malevolent forces of this world?”
For a moment I hesitate—mute, helpless.
And then I remember the look on Fin’s face when I gifted him the portrait of me. The look on my sister’s face when she saw the depiction of herself, bloody and brave, saving Lir at the Unending Pool.
“To view art is to be changed instantly,” I say softly. “When you experience it, you are perceived in unexpected ways, and in return you perceive an aspect of the world you never saw before. You are altered in the blink of an eye, and you step away as someone new. I will paint something for this Eater of Hearts, an image that shows her truth to me, and shifts something inside her, as well.”
Opal’s tongue flickers between her fangs. She stares at me as if she is drilling down into my soul, and I hold her gaze, unflinching.
“Clara the artist, lover of Finias,” she says at last. “There is more in you than meets the eye. Perhaps you yourself are a piece of art. Fragile, and powerful.”
“Does that mean you’ll let us go?”
“It means I will consider it.” She nods at Finias. “I will help you take him to a room. You can both rest, and tomorrow we will discuss this further.”
She shrinks back to her normal size and her two-legged shape, while I curl my whip again and tuck it back into its bag.
We carry Finias to a darkly furnished room, laying him on a bed with scarlet sheets and pillows. An enormous mirror in an ornate ebony frame hangs above it. On the walls are deep boxlike frames filled with clusters of small, colorful mushrooms—a strange kind of art, but I like it.
