A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors: Lucais's POV
"Merry Christmas, Please Don't Call" by Bleachers.
Something beneath my left rib pulled, and the feeling was almost enough to force me back to my feet. It was almost enough to make me stand up, resume fighting, and raze Owain Everspark’s volcanic palace to the ground in order to free myself and find my girl.
My girl.
Auralie Roberts.
The girl who was safely beyond the wards, hesitating along the cusp of The Ruins. The girl pressing her finger into her rib cage, trying to provoke me to do the same. The girl waiting for me out there.
Alaric’s daughter.
Owain’s granddaughter.
My soulmate.
Fuck. How did I miss the resemblance?
Perhaps it was because Alaric Everspark never gave me lip about my sense of humour and he knew the Oracle-damned difference between a horse and a unicorn.
Auralie had her mother’s eyes, but the flame-red hair was an obvious family trait. Almost too obvious, honestly.
Owain had indeed found the perfect hiding place for the Malum’s Curse. In plain sight, pouting at me, distracting me with those long lashes, and the valley of curves I travelled with my hands while I fell headfirst into an oasis of pleasure and the rest of my brain shut the fuck down.
High Mother forgive me, but I was blinded by Aura’s humanity—blindsided by it.
I was The High King, and the woman determined by fate to be the love of my miserable life was a fire faerie born in the human world without any magical abilities? Instead, she was keeping the curse alive that had condemned my family and their followers for such a long time. My greatest secret was designed to keep secrets from me, all whilst I was supposed to be the High King of Liars. Even an author couldn’t make that kind of utter nonsense up.
Not to mention the fact that Auralie’s own family had tried to drown her in a vicious dark magic curse since the very point of her conception.
But instead of succumbing to the darkness, she became it.
That was what I’d tasted in her blood the day she saved my life in the House.
That was what everyone had witnessed inside the Oracle before I met her.
It wasn’t a union between light and dark.
It was between something else entirely—something impossible, unnatural.
A fire faerie with dark magic.
The suppression spell rendering Aura’s genetic magic dormant had created a catastrophic opening for something else to take its place, and she had given that piece of herself to the noxaeterna rather than to leave it hollow. When they tried to make her powerless, she took the bomb they put inside her and crafted it into a weapon of her very own. A power that could not be likened to another. An unpredictable, uncontrollable type of magic.
Auralie was the antidote to my family’s curse, the greatest weapon we had against the Malum, and an enigma like nothing Faerie had ever seen before.
She was my undoing.
She was the beginning, the middle, and the end.
After her escape, the soldiers had put my wrists back into iron cuffs while I lay on the ground with my cheek kissing the dirty rock. I’d allowed it to happen, reserving my strength, too busy concentrating on more important things—like the growing distance between us that I tracked using the tether around our souls. My eyes were hazy and unfocussed. Nothing else in the entire realm mattered to me until I felt her land outside the border. It was like an electric shock down my spine, and I’d immediately drawn upon the very last of my strength to reinforce the wards to the point of impenetrability.
Nobody was leaving the Court of Fire. Nobody was pursuing her.
But I would dare them to try.
The silver rings on my fingers hummed quietly, a sound only I could hear as they countered the nausea building in my stomach while I pushed my magic to its limits.
I was exhausted. The iron scorched my wrists, trying to suppress my power entirely, but I pushed through the pain. The necklaces I wore tightened like a noose around me, making it harder to breathe, even as I channelled them to help me remain conscious.
Everything was hot, tight, and narrow as it came crashing down—an avalanche of consequences, payments, and debts owed for past wrongs.
The things my father had done. The things Aura’s father had done.
The things we did.
A tension filtered into my mind as the reinforcements to the ward reached their maximum strength, but it weakened the physical link between us.
She was distraught, but she was safe.
My heart crumbled like a stone statue when Aura made a few final attempts to provoke a response from me through our bond. I wanted to let her know that I was fine—but I couldn’t lie, and I couldn’t think of a clever way to disguise the truth when it was taking everything I had left to keep the barrier up between us.
Fire soldiers were at the border, shooting at the wards. The heat of their flames coasted over the back of my neck in warning.
You will not break through. You will not reach her.
Aura’s touch disappeared.
The sensation was gradual, like a fading sunset on a distant horizon, and part of me clung to it with a desperate fist as I experienced the acute, illusory misery of her slipping away from me. The twinge under my ribs eased, and yet, at the same time, my entire heart fucking shattered.
The truth ran me through like a sword.
I could have stood up.
I could have fought.
And I could have won.
There was no pretending that any of Owain’s men could get the best of me in a fight, even if I was wearing irons. I paid a very high price for the type of magic I possessed.
Light. Healing. I held influence over the Elements, controlled the wards, and took memories that I could change. I was also exceptionally well read.
Whereas the fire faeries wouldn’t last through a decent rainstorm.
The tragedy of it all was that I could have very well caught up with Aura, and the two of us could have run away together.
But where would we go?
What would happen then?
The Fire Army was strong. They had some lethal skillsets amongst their people, and I knew many of them had an ancient score to settle with me, though I was yet to encounter a flame I could not douse. Aura was, perhaps, the one and only. At least, she would have been, if things were different and her grandfather hadn’t already butchered and sterilised the magic she should have inherited from his bloodline.
I couldn’t escape.
The effort spent on incapacitating his soldiers would leave me with nothing by the time I found Auralie again. My magic would be drained to the dregs. I wouldn’t have enough left to reinforce the wards behind me—not like I was able to do from within the volcano while I lay focussed and unmoving—and there would be nothing left to protect her, to prevent us from being hunted down by Owain’s men, or ambushed by the caenim that I’d left in The Ruins.
Or Wrenlock.
I prayed to the High Mother that he would protect her and keep them both alive so that I could deal with him at a later date.
For the foreseeable future, I wasn’t leaving the Court of Fire.
Aura could’ve stabbed our mating bond with her fingertip until we both bruised; it would have made no difference.
It was her or me, and I chose her.
Always. Unequivocally. Hopelessly.
I was choosing her over my family, over my life, over my crown.
That was who and what I chose, whether the Oracle had anything to say about it or not. The bond. The snippy little redhead from a Hobgoblin’s bookstore in Belgrave who had terrible taste in novels, loved to be kissed in the hollows beneath her ears and all over the back of her neck, and couldn’t learn to speak another language if she tried. After all, I’d spent months warning her about the twists in ours, and she never did fully grasp it.
Neither did her sister.
Amelia’s words haunted me as I inhaled the dust and ash from the ground while I contemplated my inevitable demise at the hands of women.
“You should really be more concerned about what she said to me.”
I had a dreadful, sinking feeling that I knew exactly what she had meant.
It was going to be extremely difficult to strangle Amelia to death from inside the dungeons beneath Owain’s magma chambers, but that wouldn’t stop me. If my suspicions were ever confirmed, I would find a way to make her suffer for what she had done. Like Wrenlock. And Owain himself. By the Elements, my list of people to kill was longer than ever.
Throwing Amelia off a cliff might be the last thing I could ever do to show Aura that I loved her. Loved her with the truth—all of it, and all of me.
I grimaced at the thought.
There was a scuffle somewhere nearby. Heavy footsteps resounded as someone approached me, but it did nothing to distract me from my disconsolate contemplations.
The sudden, overwhelming burst of agony when a boot collided with the side of my face did a much better job of that, though. The force knocked me onto my back, winding me, and I spluttered as I instinctively tried to right myself against gravity.
Owain’s foot came down hard on my chest, forcing me to slam back against the ash-coated rock, and knocked some sense into my head.
I grinned up at him around a mouthful of blood.
“Where is the nihil?” the unchivalrous brute demanded, voice strained with anger.
For a moment, I was struck positively dumb with surprise, and my expression went wholly blank. When my senses returned to me a few seconds later and I checked to ensure the wards were still secure, I had to put a great deal of effort into concealing the rush of joy that came flooding into my head.
We were all still alive and kicking each other when Wrenlock betrayed me to the Court of Fire, so I’d suspected there was more to his motives. I’d known him since I was a boy. He wasn’t the type to lick the ash from Owain’s boots or fall prey to vacant promises, and he had previously resigned from a high ranking position in the Fire Army. Those factors were enough to give me the confidence to at least entrust Aura’s escape to him.
And then Owain confirmed the rest of it.
If he was asking about the nihil, then it meant the Court of Fire didn’t have it. And if they didn’t have it, then Wrenlock probably hadn’t been the one to tell them about it. Which meant that he didn’t know what it really was, and that he had—
“You took the tomes,” I realised aloud. My eyes went wide while Owain’s beady little irises shrank. “You fucking ingrate. You stole his materials before you burned the cottage—”
The High Lord spat on the ground beside my head, causing my stomach to roil with disgust. “Of course I took them,” he seethed. He spoke like I should have been a better mind-reader than I was. “Your father was a genius, Lucais. I preserved his work because I respected it, but I couldn’t do anything about his sanity. Otherwise, I would have bottled his brain, too.”
The nausea rose up my throat, sharp as a knife. My father was a bad man with good intentions who had lost his mind. He couldn’t be trusted to make a couple of boiled paperdove eggs for breakfast, let alone to aid a High Lord in politics and war. I should have banished him from the Court decades ago.
Even so, the relief that Owain didn’t know the location of the nihil was a balm to the throbbing pain radiating through my skull and the acidic sickness burning my throat.
“Tell me where it is,” he repeated.
I barked out a bitter laugh and smiled like a snake. “No.”
At least I understood his motives better.
A man who killed his son, imprisoned his daughter, and had his granddaughter hunted by an army of soldiers and caenim certainly wasn’t going to all the trouble to avenge his wife.
He would regret asking about the nihil, though.
Regret going to such lengths for it.
It was suicide. A terrible way to go—
“I’m going to find her,” he threatened, his tone suddenly darker than before. The heat in the chamber rose to suffocating levels as lava bubbled up around us, causing shadows on the walls to shift with the changing light. “You are going to tell me where the nihil is once I have your little fuck doll in that cage. I can be patient, Lucais. I’ve already been so very patient. But if you choose to tell me now, then I’ll give her a headstart, so you can let those wards down a little and get some rest.”
I rolled my eyes. Fat fucking chance of—
He kicked me in the face.
Pain so absolute consumed me, devouring my nerve endings until I couldn’t tell which parts of my body were hurting and which parts were still whole. It was so intense that it rivalled the ache in my heart at the loss of Aura, the distance that attacked our bond, trying to force us back together.
The crunch of breaking bone echoed in my ears. I felt it all the way up to the crown of my head, and all the way down to my stomach.
Blood poured out of my mouth, down my face, into my eyes, and through my nose.
Flashbacks shot across my vision before I could stop them—memories of the violent battle raging beneath me, occurring only moments before I was shot out of the sky. A phantom pain seized my shoulder blades. The spell on my wings was the first thing to break beneath the insurmountable pressure. I felt the disfigurement all over again, the lingering agony as they were crushed beneath me and the digits snapped—
“Open the wards,” the High Lord of the Court of Fire ordered. “Do it or I swear to the High Mother that I’ll—”
I twisted onto my side and was violently ill beside his boots. On a better day, I wouldn’t have missed, but the pain in my wings was too much for me to bear alone, and I had to keep the wards secure. Blood and sickness drizzled out of my mouth, dripping from the corners.
“You can’t kill me,” I reminded him slowly.
It was borderline impossible to kill a High King or High Queen. We were the home for too much magic, and usually possessed healing powers in spades. Owain would need a much better army—or a sky-dragon, which was a weapon I sincerely hoped he did not have.
But it was more than that.
Slowly, I tipped my head back and lifted my gaze to meet his. The blood rushed down the back of my throat. My nose was broken, blocked. I tasted nothing but ash and poison on my tongue. Still, I forced a derisive laugh. “Imagine going to all that trouble only to start over again with the next ruler.”
He kicked me in the stomach so hard that I felt a rib fracture.
It wasn’t the one with auburn-coloured thread wrapped around it, though, so I could live with that.
“I don’t want to kill you,” Owain snarled, surprising me. “But if that’s what it takes to bring those wards down and get my men out of here, then I’ll fucking do it. Don’t test me, boy.”
I coughed out a mouthful of blood, my throat tense as I pointed out, “You don’t know that killing me will bring down the wards.”
He was silent. I didn’t bother to look up at him. I didn’t need to see his face to know that it was red, pinched, and reshaped by the horror of not having thought about that before.
Bleeding, swollen, aching, and smug, I repressed the satisfied snicker that tickled the tip of my tongue and kept my head down while he considered the consequences.
The problem with the wards all over Faerie was that they hadn’t existed prior to the Gift War. I had created them as a way to monitor the Malum, after I’d exiled the humans, rewritten their memories, and established a portal between realms in each Court. I didn’t know what would happen to them when I was no longer in charge. I assumed they would probably stay in place, but I’d hoped that my successor would recreate them if the system failed upon my death—or that perhaps my death would nullify the need for them altogether.
However, there was every chance that they would be permanently locked in the state in which they were whenever I died.
A few moments later, Owain came to the same conclusion. He made a low, throaty sound of annoyance before he kicked me again. I squeezed my eyes shut, doubling over, and reminded myself that it was much smarter for me to keep the Fire Army separated from Auralie than it was for me to let them go while I killed her grandfather.
By the time I reached her, there was no telling what they would have done.
Some of them would kill her simply to get back at me for the war.
“The wards are holding, sir,” one such traitor announced to the High Lord.
“Keep working on it,” Owain growled. He paced a few steps away from me. “Break them down! Throw everything we have at them! I want my granddaughter back here—and I want her alive!”
His voice was a roar, echoing through the volcano. With it, I watched nervously as the lava rose until it was level with the edge of the platform while Owain’s back was turned. Careful not to irritate my sensitive wings, I pushed myself into a sitting position on my knees, breathing deeply through the vertigo as pain coursed through me and blood trickled out of my nose. The irons on my wrists, coupled with my magic’s focus being on the wards, meant that my self-healing was drastically slowed.
“And what about General Elumos?” the soldier enquired. He was a tall man, thin and lanky, with dark hair and a scar across one side of his face. I didn’t recognise him.
Owain spat on the ground again, but it was further away from me. “Kill him if he resists arrest, but I want to question him if at all possible.” In slow motion, the High Lord turned to face me, his eyes narrowed and his mouth pulled into a hateful sneer. “I want to know why he abandoned his post and took the girl with him.”
I blinked up at him, my expression carefully blank. “Once a traitor,” I mused, wincing as I lifted one shoulder into a delicate shrug. “Always a traitor, I suppose.”
Owain’s eyes shuttered. He waved a dismissive hand at me, and said, “Take him into the dungeon. Gag him if you please. He likes the sound of his own voice too much.”
Stalking over to me, the lanky soldier put his hands on my shoulders, but didn’t bother hoisting me to my feet before we evanesced into the dungeon beneath the volcano.
My knees slammed into a slab of rock with a loud crack. The force sent pain splintering through my entire body, exacerbating the ache of my existing injuries, and reminding me of the dreams I used to share with Aura. The premonition of the future, sent to us by the Oracle, where I watched her being tortured by the Malum every night for months. At the same time, the curses placed on her soul distorted the images in her mind, showing me or Wrenlock in her place to subdue her fear responses, so as not to interfere with the natural course of events that would bring her into Faerie with me.
Her dreams were both a warning and an invitation.
Mine had only ever been a warning.
The air in the dungeon was permeated with a stale odour and a bitter chill. Moisture dripped from the ceiling into buckets partially filled with dirty water. Everything was dark—dark like a curse was placed on it, like something wicked dwelled within, chasing away the light.
The soldier hesitated for a heartbeat before he removed the iron shackles from my arms, and a smirk tipped up the corners of my mouth as I observed him. He fumbled with the second cuff, and I rolled my eyes at the audacity. He was terrified of me—as though he expected me to reach up and snap his neck the second my hands were freed.
I was his High King, for fuck’s sake.
What has Owain been telling them?
The soldier blinked out of sight as soon as the shackles were unlocked. He reappeared a moment later, outside the cell, where he checked to make sure the lock was secured before taking a deep breath and vanishing again.
He shouldn’t be able to evanesce in the dungeon.
The walls were meant to be reinforced with iron.
But something was different about this one.
It was the same as the cell that had appeared in my dreams. A long, slightly narrow space with an iron gate and a small window above my head. There was no light beyond it, but the space between the iron bars was not an illusion—the window led somewhere. A large bucket with an iron rim sat beside my lodgings for the evening, composed entirely of straw so thin and brittle that Elera would snort at it.
Groaning, I clambered to my feet and stretched my arms above my head. My wings ached at the motion, but I’d have to get used to that again. Glamouring their appearance and their pain was a privilege I’d lost.
I had a splitting headache on top of everything else, so I trudged over to the straw bed, dragging my feet across the stones. It echoed roughly throughout the empty tomb.
The soldiers were still firebombing the wards.
“Lucais?” a croaky voice called out to me.
I halted, my entire body freezing in place.
I know that voice.
“Lucais?” it asked again.
My mind reacted so quickly that it made me dizzy. My physical body had no hope of catching up. I lost all sense of sight and sound as I burrowed down into myself, towards that sacred rib, clasping the link between me and my soulmate that had gone quiet since we put it down.
I picked up the thread tying me to Aura and followed it until I found her. She was—
Fuck, she was still in the forest.
She was too close to me. The Ruins. The caenim. I—
“Lucais, why did they put you in here?”
FUCK.
Forcing my eyes shut, gritting my teeth, and suppressing a rabid scream of frustration, I used my mental hands to seize the mating bond’s thread and tug on it with all of my strength. The wards buckled for a heartbeat—only a heartbeat—but I had to get her attention, yanking on the link between us like it was a liferope bringing her back to me from a spell lost at sea. I pulled, and pulled, and tugged on the thread until I was scared it might snap. Both hands on the mating bond. One eye on the wards. The other—
A violent flicker pulsed beneath my left rib.
I snatched it so ferociously that I fell to my knees again.
Auralie tugged on the thread, and I leaned into it. I leaned into the brief, faraway touch until I fell flat on my face on the damp stonework, and then I leaned into it some more.
She was there.
She was too close, but she was listening.
Fuck, I hoped she could hear me.
I was on the brink of losing my hold long enough for the soldiers to break through a weak spot in the wards, shattering the last sliver of control I possessed, and taking the only thing I had left to give. The only thing that really mattered.
But I had to warn her—to tell her that we were wrong.
For one final, selfish moment, I held onto her presence before I was forced to let her go forever. I whispered through the bond, through the connection, through the dreams and the wicked twists of fate that had irrevocably tied us together.
The wards flickered again, and I knew I had to let her go.
Run, bookworm.
