A House of Cloaks & Daggers (The Gift War #1)

35. Land-Dragons

Chapter thirty-five

Land-Dragons

T he High Lady of the Court of Light obliged.

The High King said nothing as we rose to our feet, straightened our skirts, linked our elbows, and fell into step with each other as we strode towards the dining room doors.

I let Morgoya lead the way, hoping she wouldn’t escort me to the library. Wren’s leash on his temper had slipped this time, even in the presence of his High King, and I was in no mood to see how well he would cope if he found himself alone with me again.

The magic was a humming presence at my side, following me like a lost puppy as I tugged my attention away from it. I didn’t want to see how far I could slip, either. Since the swarm of darkness in the bathroom, something had changed. It wasn’t asking to be let in anymore. It was asking to be let out.

My willpower strengthened considerably after the caenim attack in the clearing when I’d proved to myself for what might have been the very first time that I didn’t need magic to do terrible things.

The magic was separate; I was a problem in my own right. Oddly enough, coming to terms with that helped me to keep its poison smoke locked away in a far corner of my mind ever since.

See no evil and hear no evil—and stay the bloody hell away from Wren, so I would speak no evil.

For now.

Morgoya led me down to the ground floor, through a doorway behind the staircase to where a large and luxurious rectangular sitting room opened out onto the courtyard. I didn’t have a word for it, other than to call it a canoodling room .

Long, wide lounges and cushioned armchairs were positioned around the edge of the room, and small tables adorned with coloured glass smoking pipes and jewel-encrusted cases filled the empty spaces in between. The lingering smell of sweet smoke filled my nose, infused with sweat and potent liquids and the remnants of the inner circle finding pleasure with each other, so I held my breath and tried to avert my eyes from the slightly elevated dais sitting in the centre of the room, fixing a large gold dancing pole against the ceiling.

Morgoya released my arm, elegantly weaving between tables and couches as she sauntered over to the French doors. “Would you like to talk about it?” she offered, holding the door open for me.

I took a quick gasp of fresh air as soon as I stumbled out into the courtyard. “Talk about what?”

“Whatever is on your mind.”

It had been magic, but then it was the things that happened in that room.

“No.”

She shrugged. “Okay.”

The courtyard was empty, sun lounges and side tables bare and gloomy in the grey light, and we crossed it quickly. I’d donned a pair of ballet slippers before leaving my room, which had been the only available option aside from ridiculously high and narrow stilettos. Every choice I’d made since arriving in Faerie, all the way down to what I wore, was based on maximising my chances of survival.

Except the dress.

As the wind stirred, lifting my skirts, I realised that I didn’t know why I’d chosen to wear the dress. Especially when the House was still denying me underwear.

Clenching my fists around the billowing fabric, I held the skirt down against my sides as Morgoya began to walk across the flat expanse of green and turquoise grass in the direction of the ocean. We were both silent, listening to the soft song of the wind as it danced over the land like it was trying to bleed colour back into the light sky.

The closer we got to the ocean, the more nervous I became. Water as dark as molten iron glimmered and swished between two towering hills, rising up around it like a cage as the land jutted out towards the approaching horizon on both sides. Bone-coloured rocks grew into the sky, larger than life despite their ageing discolouration and clear signs of wear from the weather.

Not rocks , I realised with a jolt as we began to walk beyond a few of the smaller ones.

Bones.

An enormous skull lay discarded on the earth, weeds curling around it and flowers poking out from its eye sockets. It was bigger than anything I had ever seen before, most certainly not belonging to any creature that existed in the human world.

“Dinosauria,” Morgoya said, gesturing to the skeletal remains strewn across the land with a flippant wave of her slim-fingered hand.

From a distance, I had assumed the rock formations had been small and plentiful, and I was horribly wrong. There were actually very few bones, but each of them were impossibly huge. One in particular caught my attention—an enormous spine, half sunken into the soil, with a wide tailbone and broken ribs.

“Dinosaurs?” I repeated incredulously.

“Whatever you want to call them. We called them land-dragons.”

My breath thinned in my lungs. “So they were …real ? And they’re extinct here, too?”

“Everything is real, Aura.” She gave me a sharp look. “People don’t just make things up. The sky-dragons hunted them into extinction.”

Land-dragons.

Sky-dragons.

Dinosaurs.

It would have sent me into a panic if I hadn’t already seen stranger things.

Morgoya continued down to the sand, making her way precariously close to the water as I paused at the edge of the grass, studying the remains of a skeleton almost as large as a car. It had horns and an enormous plate of bone fanning out around its skull, and I was mesmerised by—

“Do you want to hear about the Gift War, or do you have an interest in palaeontology that takes precedence over current affairs?” the High Lady sang out to me, her voice as sweet as the wind.

Rolling my eyes, I gave the dinosaur bones another moment of awe before I turned and trudged down the slope towards the small beach.

The sand was as soft as silk, giving out beneath my weight, working its way into my shoes and between my toes before I’d even caught up to Morgoya. She removed her heels and sat down with her hands buried in the sand behind her.

“Aren’t you worried about the Merfolk?”

She squinted up at me, though the sky was still a melancholy grey. It made the beach look as white as death, and the ocean almost as deadly as a black hole. The air was warm, however. As warm as the High King of Faerie, and carrying his wild scent of burning pyres and grass fires.

“They don’t come into the lochs,” she assured me, pulling a hand back to pat the space beside her. “We have iron nets to keep them out.”

Lowering myself to sit, I made sure to tuck the skirt of my dress in tightly and keep my legs straight and flat against the sand. “That’s a little barbaric, isn’t it?”

The High Lady snickered. “We learned from the Dragon War not to engage in futile territory battles with others of our kind. The Queen of the Underworld granted us permission to put up iron nets in two inlets—one north and one south—to give us free and safe use of them, in exchange for allowing her people an unrivalled claim to the ocean. That means that any creature who goes out there, beyond the nets, is fair game. And our people can come here, or travel north, if they wish to reacquaint themselves with the sea.”

I picked up a handful of sand and let it fall through my fingers. “Underworld?”

“Under our world,” she clarified simply.

My eyes travelled upwards to the gloomy skies. “Is there an Aboveworld?”

Morgoya followed my gaze. “There was.” Her tone became sad. “We don’t think that it survived the Dragon War.”

Stiffening against a shudder, I looked back towards the loch. The mountainsides were bathed in shadows and fog, with deep purple and green smeared over the ridges like an oil painting. If I squinted into the distance, I could just make out two low-lying ledges on either side of the bend, where it was likely that the nets had been lowered into the ocean.

“You wanted to know about the Gift War,” Morgoya reminded me. “You won’t remember it this way, but it was the birth of your world.”

My world is the human world , I thought, and gave her a snide look.

“It happened about three hundred years ago,” she went on heedlessly. “Faerie had been living in an era of peace and prosperity after the end of the Dragon War, which we’d stayed out of by order of the last High King, and the High King we know now had only recently been crowned. The death of land-dragons weighed heavily on him, and he made an overnight decision within the first year of his reign to outlaw slavery.

“It wasn’t the wrong decision,” she added quickly, “but he went about it the wrong way. He gave no warning and he wasn’t delicate about it either, so many of our kind were quick to anger. They were forced to obey by his power, and the faeries were freed. The term we used—the one starting with the letter L—was then abolished. He hexed it, so even trying to say it scalds our tongues. It left many people disgruntled with him, so when strange things started happening, it didn’t take much for the hysteria to build and blame to be laid.”

“What do you mean by strange things ?” I asked quietly. The whole of Faerie seemed strange to me, so it was hard to imagine what might have happened to unnerve the High Fae.

“Coloured lights dancing in the night sky,” Morgoya replied, gesturing upwards. “Huge balls of fire flying through the atmosphere. We believe it now to be the Aboveworld ending in the wake of the Dragon War because the sky-dragons were their only source of transport and they had brutally hunted their only source of food to extinction. But the conspiracists believed it was the High Mother handing down her wrath after the slaves were freed.

“They thought the world was ending. They considered the High King’s actions and beliefs to be an insult because our history claims that the original-blessed was High Fae, and all of Faerie was built and created from their gifted power. They believed that we were made in the High Mother’s image, put in this world to rule and conquer, and he had used the power she granted him to enforce equality with beings they truly felt were supposed to be enslaved. Not everyone shares their opinions, but it doesn’t tend to take much, you know.”

I nodded. I know that very well indeed.

“So,” she concluded, “they committed an offence against the High Mother of their own, absolutely convinced that it was what she wanted them to do. They gave their magic back to her. And they became human.”

All colour quickly drained from my face.

Morgoya paused, letting it sink in, and then sighed.

“I’m sorry.” I shook my head, digging my fingers into the sand until I could feel it jammed underneath my nails. “What?”

“Humans came from High Fae.” Morgoya’s voice was gentle, barely a whisper of the wind. “You may choose not to believe this, but we once lived in the town you call Belgrave. It was built by the High Lord of the Court of Light, my predecessor.”

“So all humans are part-faerie?” I frowned. This is surely an important piece of information that I should have been given already .

She made a face. “Not really. They became something else when they gave up their gifts, lost their immortality, and reproduced a world full of mortal children. It’s not quite like the Malum,” she mused quietly. “They didn’t breed into another race of faeries. They simply became a version of us without our gifts.”

“But you said this happened three hundred years ago, so it can’t be true. My world dates back for much longer—”

“History sometimes rewrites itself in order to offer the easiest explanation to those who seek answers with fear in their hearts,” she told me softly. “When magic vanished from their veins, it eventually vanished from their memories, too. The High King was able to fill in the blanks when the war ended. Your world is much younger than you think it is, and many of the horrors you experience now are a consequence of the losses your people sustained.”

My throat felt tight. I worked it, wrestling down a gulp of saliva, before I spoke again. “Horrors…such as?”

“You’re trapped in one body. Some are forced to undergo expensive and lengthy and invasive procedures in order to feel like themselves.” The High Lady frowned as if she couldn’t quite imagine it. “Or you’re in love, but you can’t have a child together. You die if you become too old or too sick. Lose weight and muscle mass if you don’t eat—”

“I don’t understand,” I cut in. “You’re saying these things don’t exist here?”

Morgoya pursed her lips. “No,” she answered, sounding as if she was somewhere far away from where we sat together on the sand. “They don’t, not really. We’re fluid beings, submerged in power. If we do not feel suited to our current body, or our current body does not suit our long-term desires, we simply change it or summon what it requires. We don’t get sick, don’t require food—”

“Wait.” I held my hand up, fingers splayed in the air. “If a faerie is assigned male at birth, but they’re a girl, you just— what? Change your entire body with magic?”

The High Lady blinked at me. “Yes. We are magic, you know. We can do as we please. The price we pay for balance is an allergy to iron, but we implemented strategies to conquer that a very long time ago.”

Chewing on my lower lip, I asked, “Is there any way for you to give that to someone—a human?”

Morgoya arched one perfect brow. “Why? Is there something you need?”

“No.” I shook my head. “But Amelia has a younger sister. It would—it would mean the world to her. She’s Brynn’s best friend at school. Her only friend, actually.”

“Hmmm.” She scraped her nail along her lip, considering. “We’ll ask Lucais. I don’t tend to meddle in human affairs, and I doubt it’s been done before, but if there’s a way, he’ll find it for you.”

The way she said for you sent a ripple of excitement skittering across my skin, but I shook it off. I had to focus and retain all of that information if there was even the slightest chance it was true.

I stuck my bottom lip out and sighed through my nose. “Okay, you’re all fancy magical beings with insane power and privilege. Got it, maybe. But you still haven’t explained why there was a war. A bunch of High Fae gave up magic, and humans were made. Where did the conflict arise?”

“Well, they continued to live among us at first, but strange things kept happening, so then they tried to force everyone to give back their magic.” The High Lady’s sweet, lilting voice turned dark and lethally quiet. “We didn’t want to. But we didn’t want to slaughter them, either. The battles were brutal and long. Mortal weapons against our gifts, which were kept on a tight leash to prevent bloodshed and were only intended to be used as a defence until they gave up. It sent some of the soldiers mad.”

“But they did give up?”

“No.” She shook her head, staring out at the horizon. “Eventually, the High King decided to divide the land. We lured them out to the borders we know now and fought the last battles—a final, desperate attempt to convince them to stop, to come back to us—and lost. The High King glamoured what was left of Faerie and created the gateways in case anyone wanted to change their minds.

“We lost so much that the survival of our race alone isn’t considered a victory by most. Every so often, we go back there to the land that used to be ours and the descendants of the people we used to know. They’ve forgotten us, and the land is barren, but call it a morbid curiosity. Some of us have obviously gotten involved,” she added, gesturing to me, “and produced what you refer to as part-faerie. More like half-faerie, I suppose. Though, we don’t know how it happens because usually one parent is absent before the birth, so it’s unclear if there is still a lingering trace of us in humans or if it’s something else.” She paused. “Well, actually, I suppose you prove that there is—with the mating bond.”

My mouth fell open. “Because I’m human—”

And faelings are usually conceived by mates. Half-faerie children, too. For my mate to be one of the High Fae, even though I was born into a hopelessly human family, that suggests there are mating bonds between the parents of people like me.

My father—my real father—was my mother’s mate.

“So, if they find their human mates, why do they leave them?” I exclaimed, much louder than I had intended.

Morgoya gave me a puzzled look. “Your mother would have been given a choice, Aura. To stay with us or return to the human world. Most of the time, it is the human’s choice. They carry with them either the fascination or the fear of magic, handed down through the dilution of their bloodlines, but they almost always want to go home in the end.”

My mother.

In Faerie .

I didn’t want to believe it and didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

The life she could have given me instead…

“So, it was a war over your gifted magic,” I stated, to distract myself from everything else. From the anger I couldn’t justify, and therefore couldn’t acknowledge. “That’s why the rebels wanted to harvest the essence of the Witch Covens and ended up turning into Malum. But can you explain to me then why nobody told the rest of Faerie what had actually happened?”

Morgoya sat forward, drawing a pattern of lines and swirls in the sand. “We were in mourning,” she murmured. “The High King— he was in mourning. His father was the leader of the rebellion, the architect of the spell intended to harvest the essence of the Witches. The spell that bred them into Malum instead.”

“Oh, no.” My heart… cracked . Moisture blurred my eyes, and my hands were too weak to wipe it away. “And I said all those awful things to him.”

The High Lady sighed morosely, looking at me over her shoulder. “It gets worse. The intended Malum bride is—or was —Wren’s sister.”