23. Obsidian
Chapter twenty-three
Obsidian
T he next morning, I awoke to the sound of knuckles rapping against my bedroom door. Bleary-eyed, I stumbled out from under the tangle of blankets and went to unlock it.
After Wren’s visit, the House had made itself unavailable to me as if I had committed some offence against it, refusing to even provide fresh towelling when I went to wash my face before tucking myself into bed for the night.
The old linen would have sufficed, but it had taken that away.
I didn’t need the House, though.
Barely even wanted it.
Flicking back the lock, I turned the doorknob and yanked back the wooden door. I was half expecting to find Lucais in the hallway because I knew that Wren wouldn’t have bothered to knock, but the person standing there was a young High Fae woman, and she handed me a note before I could scream.
Bookworm—this is Delia. Be nice to her, will you? She’s lovely, and here to help you with whatever you need while we are otherwise engaged. Poor communication skills, though. Pity about that.
Wren’s words were scrawled across a torn-off piece of parchment paper with blotches of ink and other liquid stains I didn’t care to study too closely.
I glanced back at Delia, trying to conceal my expression with a hand over my mouth, but I was well aware that it was a futile attempt and that I was being incredibly rude.
She was beautiful with peach skin and long white hair draped over her shoulder in a braid. Her irises were dark silver, and they glittered like starlight as she stared back at me with a level of patience honed down into an art form after years—or centuries—of practice.
Because her mouth, as white as bone, had been sewn shut with thick metallic-grey thread.
Poor communication skills? The bastard brothers have sent me a maid who can’t speak!
A maid who could not be forced to tell me the truth if I was clever enough to ask the right questions.
“I am so sorry,” I whispered, taking a quick step backwards to allow her into the room. “Have you read this note?”
Delia gave me a knowing look as she strode past me and set down a breakfast tray at the end of my bed. It told me all I needed to know—that she had indeed read the note, she was well acquainted with Wren, and that we would, in fact, get along very well.
When her hands were free, she gestured to the stitching across her mouth and shrugged as if to say that she was used to it. I decided not to do her the dishonour of apologising again, and instead focussed my attention on the food.
Thanking her for bringing the tray up for me, I settled in the middle of the bed with my legs crossed and began to dig in. I’d eaten about three meals worth of food at breakfast the previous morning, which was fortunate, considering the House was shunning me, but the early sense of hunger was already stirring in my belly again.
Delia left the room, but she didn’t close the door. A moment later, she returned carrying fresh linen and clothes, which she placed beyond the sheer curtain in the bathroom, and then kicked the bedroom door shut behind her when she came back once more with a large wooden bucket.
I froze with a porcelain cup of coffee halfway to my mouth.
The wooden bucket was familiar—a dark, stained walnut plated with iron rims. Delia’s hands were placed strategically against the wood, and I’d seen the burn marks on Lucais’s throat when they’d shoved his head into it…
She paused before the curtain, looking at me over her shoulder like my growing fear had taken physical form and struck her over the back of her head.
She gave me a pointed look and nodded, and then glanced down at herself with the same expression and shook her head gently.
I put my cup down before I dropped it and asked, “It won’t hurt me because I’m human?”
A reassuring nod.
“But why do you even have it?”
Delia filled her cheeks with air to emphasise the stitches sealing her mouth, and I winced at the way they tugged at her skin. When she continued her walk into the bathroom, I could have sworn her shoulders were moving with silent laughter.
I could not imagine being able to laugh at all after someone did that to my mouth. I could not imagine why Lucais hadn’t done anything about it, or why Delia had remained in his service if he was refusing to help her—or worse, if he had done it.
And I couldn’t ask her, either.
But I had no time to consider these things any further, because as soon as Delia began her work in the bathroom, I realised that the House truly was trying to oust me.
She’d brought the bucket in for the purpose of filling the bath with hot water because the marble tub had no taps or drain, and the House was being obstinate.
Delia began hauling the bucket back and forth from the sink, and I discarded my breakfast to offer her some help. I tried to tell her not to bother because the idea of manually emptying it out afterwards seemed exhausting, but she wouldn’t hear it. Waving me off, she continued moving with graceful ease between the marble tub and sink until the enormous bath was nearly half-filled with steaming water.
She motioned for me to undress and climb in while she retrieved a comb from the counter. I obeyed if only to avoid causing her any more grief than she was already receiving on a regular basis from Wren.
As Delia began to pull the comb through my hair, twisting and twirling it until my curls were more pronounced than ever before, I quietly mused on Wren’s behaviour from the previous night. Not only the things he’d told me, but the way he’d spoken to me, the way he’d looked…
The way he’d looked at me.
I wish things were different.
After he’d left, I had spent the rest of the day perched on the window seat, reading the book he’d given me. It was a story about star-crossed lovers that felt far too soft for his tastes, detailing a time in Faerie’s history when Lesser Fae was still a commonplace term.
The main character was a young High Fae man called Micael who came from a noble house, and he was falling in love with a Swapling—which I realised was the word being used to describe a Shapeshifter—called Livia, who had been enslaved to his family.
Despite the author’s insinuations that their relationship bordered on the unnatural and blasphemous, it hit all the right spots for a romantic tragedy and had me completely entranced. I’d read until my eyes started to sting, and then I’d carried it back to the bed with me and left it at my side while I curled up beneath the covers and thought about the enormous, brutish High Fae who’d given it to me reading it himself through every storm.
The thought was somehow warm, if thoughts could be considered by temperature, and I had drifted off to sleep feeling less lonely than I had in years.
I didn’t like Wren. He didn’t like me, either. But we didn’t have to like each other in order to understand.
Except before I had a chance to finish processing our newfound understanding, he’d proceeded to send me a snarky message the very next morning, accompanied by a poorly written note.
His mood swings were like the strikes of a whip. Sharp, grating pain between brief moments of solace. And honestly, I preferred to just take the lashings until he’d seen so much of my flesh and blood that he got sick of it.
But no, he continued to offer those little pieces of himself to me—tiny, insufficient splinters of humanity that I grappled for like a life rope—because he wanted to manipulate the tides so he could pick when and where I washed ashore.
Anger started to take shape in my mind, like a cobra ready to strike.
He had used Delia to send me a message. A warning. Delia—who was a person, who deserved more respect, and who probably didn’t agree to being used like a pawn in his wicked games.
And the games! The games made me furious .
Wren was as hot as a summer with no shelter, and then he was as cold as the blizzard that tore through Faerie the morning before. He was dark as night and bright as day, a protector and a predator. He couldn’t seem to make up his mind because he wanted it all. He wanted it all, and he—
I wish things were different.
Everything went dark.
Like a thick curtain of midnight velvet had fallen across the room, blocking out all of the light. Panic seized my throat, my heart slamming into my chest, and it was only Delia’s hands on my head, halting in the middle of gathering hair for another braid, that allowed me to remember where I was.
Who I was.
What I was.
Because something inside of me had caught on fire. My hands burned, palms pressed against my stomach, and there was something leaking out of me like blood. I couldn’t hear it dripping down into the bath water around my hips, but I could feel it…
“Something is wrong,” I whispered to Delia frantically. “Stand back—get help—”
She moved just in time.
Her lightning-fast faerie speed might very well have saved her life.
Because the wound inside of me, the burning hole of which my lifeblood was pouring out, exploded.
It was silent, but I screamed.
The sound tore out of me like someone was ripping out my fingernails as a whoosh of wind and midnight and ribbons of ebony rippled across the room. Glass doors rattled, the steam on the stone walls hissed, and the tins lined up on the counter clinked to the ground and echoed as they rolled.
Delia was silent, but I felt it.
The sudden emptiness. The finality of darkness enveloping me and everything surrounding me, maybe even the whole House.
Breathing heavily, I waited with my head tucked between my knees for the water in the tub to stop swishing from one side to the other. Until the vibrations of that silent impact stopped. And then I lifted my head. Slowly.
And gasped.
Colour had been drained from the bathroom. Its jade green stone had been washed out by greyscale shadows, like the ink on a black-and-white photograph. The marble tub and countertop were now obsidian, depthless in their appearance. And on the ground in the corner of the room, a small figure with dark hair was curled up in a ball.
She lifted her head and—
“Delia?” My voice was hoarse.
The young woman was familiar with silver eyes and metallic thread sewn across her mouth, but her hair was as black as night.
It was supposed to be white. It had been white.
“What have I done?”
Delia’s eyes softened, moisture making the silver glisten, and inclined her head to me in clear confirmation of my very worst fears.
Perhaps you found your magic.
“No, no. I’m so sorry.” My hands slipped against the marble as I pulled myself out of the bathtub and went straight to the clothes that were on the floor.
A set of silk pants and matching shirt that had been red when she brought them in were now as black as her hair. I donned them regardless, letting them soak up the water droplets on my body and stick to my freezing skin.
“Please, please don’t tell anyone,” I begged, completely ignoring my inconsiderate phrasing. She couldn’t vocalise it to anyone, but she could nod, and she could probably write things down. “I swear it won’t ever—” I broke off, glancing over my shoulder and finding Delia rising to her feet. She reached one hand out to stop me as I raced for the archway into the bedroom, towards the door to the hall. “I’m so sorry,” I told her again.
And then I ran for my mortal life.
There was no one in the hallways to stop me.
The House was perpetually empty, and with its enchantment effectively giving me the cold shoulder, I was left to stumble down dark and twisted stairways and corridors, searching for a door to the outside. Glass cabinets filled with ancient relics and suits of armour turned my own fear-stricken reflection on me as I sprinted past them, avoiding eye contact and any recognition of that whispering hum as it followed me down the hall, throwing questions at me like spears in my back.
Will you let me in, let me in, let me in now?
Every door in the House was closed, and I did not dare try to open them for fear of what might be hidden on the other side. Torture chambers filled with iron-rimmed buckets, women with their mouths sewn shut, or weapons like the blades Wren carried on his belt. Or something worse.
I knew there was something worse because Wren was planning it. He told me he wished things were different, and then he sent me a message—to keep my mouth closed, to stop asking questions.
Why else would he have brought me back to Faerie with him?
It wasn’t for the High King, who had shown very little interest in me after his initial shock and the reluctant revelation about a prophecy. No—I was a decoy of some sort, an excuse to have Malum track us through an unnecessarily long trip back from the border, or something else sinister.
I had to be. I was a blight, not a bride. And Wren was in the dungeon with Lucais in my dreams, but he was not a prisoner.
I burst out through the first exit I could find—a glass door into the garden—and its frame rattled as it swung closed behind me.
Strong perfume filled my nose, the delicate scent of wisteria mixed with roses and thyme, as I cut through the lines of flowerbeds spanning a mile away from the House. The soil was damp, the ground muddy beneath my bare feet, and some of the large, vibrant petals looked weatherbeaten and ice blue with frost as they drank in the warmth from the light sky and recovered from the blizzard.
I almost told them not to bother, almost warned them that the real storm was still to come, but the plants could fend for themselves. Even if they did have faces outlined by seeds in their cores, and I could’ve sworn they turned to blink after me sleepily as I fled.
Flowers with faces and monsters with teeth for eyes and a girl with her mouth sewn shut, whose hair had gone from white to black in the blink of an eye.
The injury I’d felt earlier was gone, like the blast of night had been a bullet fired from a gun, and I was left to steady myself against the reverberations and pray to the gods that I was not reloaded.
Racing for the distant line of trees, obscuring the dirt road towards the little town called Sthiara, I went over my knowledge in my head.
Magic was temperamental. I’d read about half-faeries and changelings before, and it was a common conception that emotions fuelled their powers. If the High King’s emotions could summon a storm, then it must be true—and it had happened to me when I’d let myself feel my own. It started to rise up again, provoked by the memory of how I’d felt in the bath. The idea that Wren was a traitor to everyone and everything that ever mattered—
No.
I shoved it down. Beat it back. Boxed it up.
Never again.
I would not accept it, would not consent to it, would not acknowledge it.
Wren was wrong.
I was not power. I had no choice, I had no control, and I was mortal.
The line of trees parted as if to embrace me, and I dove into the shadows they cast on the ground, almost falling to my knees as I skidded to a stop and pressed myself against a rough trunk to catch my breath.
Magic halted with me.
Is it time, is it time, is it time yet?
“Never,” I breathed, sweat dripping from my brow. My chest burned; my throat was on fire. I swore at the presence that had stalked me into the woodland and kicked at the stones and fallen leaves on its floor. “You’re about ten fucking years too late.”
It recoiled, letting fresh and clean air reclaim space around me, but then it growled. A deep, wet sound that came from a copse of trees a few feet ahead.
That was odd .
The magic had never made a sound before, not outside of my own head.
Not me, not me, not me, it sang.
I willed it to go away and leave me alone, but the warning gave me a moment’s notice. Time enough to throw myself out of the way as the wind changed direction and the smell of rotting death filled my nose, barrelling straight towards me as the caenim lunged from the shadows.