4. Pretty Little Neck #3
Wrenlock took my hand and pulled me closer to his side, and for some reason, I let him.
The High King must have seen us because he turned his head, and I heard a few stifled gasps from across the road as onlooking faeries spied the single gold eye glaring out at them.
When the carriage moved on and Elera disappeared with it, the clip-clopping of hooves fading from earshot, Wrenlock and I stood up and tried to brush the dampness from our knees.
“Why?” was all I could ask him. I knew to be specific, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
“I told you,” he began slowly, refusing to meet my questioning gaze. “We haven’t been back here for a while.”
A bitter rush of anger shot up my throat. “Define a while as it pertains to my question of why these faeries are acting so strangely around him,” I demanded. Evidently, we still were not past the language and lying barriers, and I had no choice but to be exceedingly careful about my phrasing.
Lucais was from the Court of Light, and they were acting as though he’d just risen up from the shadows of the netherworld—or whatever their equivalent was that did not involve Merfolk. Is their equivalent the Court of Darkness? No…
“I can’t,” he repeated, vigorously wiping at the fabric on his knees.
With a shaky sigh, he straightened, brow furrowing.
“Honestly, Aura, I cannot remember the last time he was here because he does not tell me everything. Case in point—the fact that he was going to deceive you about his true identity and force me to do the same. I received no warning about that. My best guess is that it would be at least fifty years since Lucais has held court with the public in Caeludor—maybe even a hundred—but if you discover that I am wrong, please do not accuse me of misleading you on purpose.”
“A hundred years?” I pressed my tongue against the roof of my mouth to counteract the sensation of my jaw hitting the ground.
He cleared his throat, shrugging. “Time passes differently in Faerie than it does in the human world. And we’ve had some issues, you know.”
“Oh, I know .” My eyes flashed when they locked with his, and I thought I saw him flinch. “But a whole century? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“It does when you factor in all the things he’s done,” Wrenlock retorted. His voice was tight, a muscle in his jaw flickering.
“Like what?” I scoffed before I could really consider what it would look like. Three hundred years in power—or more, potentially—was a great deal of time to accomplish or ruin a great many things. “Freeing the slaves?”
A beat of hesitation. It was a telltale sign that I was knocking on a door that did not wish to be opened. Morgoya had explained it to me once—that when the High Fae told the truth, they tended to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And they loathed it.
Wrenlock scraped the toe of his boot across the stonework. “Among other things.”
Ugh. I rolled my eyes. No more secrets, we had agreed.
Liar, liar, liar.
It wasn’t really worth me fighting with him over it, but part of me was incensed.
When Lucais had said the House was the High King’s safe house, I’d assumed he meant from the Malum, yet Wrenlock made it seem like Lucais was hiding from his own people—like he had good reason to do that.
Why would a High King need to use a safe house to escape the fear and censorious looks from his own subjects?
Then it occurred to me. Everything he’d said and done indicated he felt a lot of frustration and shame over me, which felt like a good reason to keep me concealed. Perhaps he was hiding me from them for my own protection, after all.
I won’t let them put a noose around that pretty little neck, he’d said.
But why would they want to put a noose around my neck, Lucais?
I tried to reach him down the bond using the strange and unreliable mental telepathy we had been experimenting with both willingly and unwillingly since the day we met, but there was no answer.
Realistically, I was probably too far away from him to even feel the bond properly, and I still wasn’t really sure what the feeling represented.
Annoyance? Yes.
Irritation? In spades.
A connection I can’t shake off? That, too.
The bond I felt with Wrenlock was vaguely similar and yet even stronger, though try as I might, I couldn’t make sense of it.
Nevertheless, I was glad that nobody looked at me, the human mate of the High King of Faerie, and the shirtless man walking down the street beside me.
Morgoya’s words echoed in my head once more— they have a lot of questions we don’t know how to answer yet —because I actually understood what she meant.
For all intents and purposes, the goddamn High King and his inner circle had dragged me into their twisted political disaster and made me an accomplice to their crimes.
Discreetly following the path of the royal carriage, Wrenlock and I navigated our way through streets that became clearer the further into the city we walked.
The fog remained above us, hovering like an ever-present ceiling until, at last, I spied the gates ahead—but I had to strain my eyes to locate any sight of the palace beyond them.
For some reason, the fog fell in much heavier clouds behind the boundary of the half-open, heavy metal gates, though the street we were striding through was almost as clear as a normal day.
I refused to take my eyes off the space before me where Lucais’s palace surely belonged—refused to even blink—and eventually, I spied a few walls and turrets peeking through the mist as it shifted and swirled.
We stepped through the gates, the sentries recognising Wrenlock with a brief nod, and together, we entered the High King of Faerie’s palace.
At least, what was left of it.