5. The Locust and the Love Declaration #2
Smiling at him with all of the false pretence I could muster, I reached for the closest item—a glass carving of a unicorn, slender with a long mane and a single, straight horn.
Gingerly, I picked it up and sidestepped off the gold-tasselled hall runner so I was standing on the granite-hard stonework.
And then I dropped it.
The unicorn smashed into a thousand pieces of glass, like hail on the ground.
Lucais lifted a brow. “I’ll think of something else, then.”
“So thoughtful of you,” I murmured absently, stepping around the mess I’d made. “Tell me why you don’t want the people of Caeludor to see me.”
“I never said that.”
My cheeks filled with air before the breath escaped through my lips in a whoosh.
I stopped in front of a small mirror, edged with an elaborate design of frosted-glass flowers, hanging in the centre of the wall.
When I reached for it, I caught a flash of movement in my peripheral vision and glanced back to see that Wrenlock had stepped forward as if to intervene. Lucais held his hand out, halting him.
“Now, now, Wrenlock.” Lucais’s golden eyes were piercing as they locked with mine. “If my future High Queen feels the need to dispose of items in this palace that are not to her personal taste, I will caution any man against trying to interrupt her creative process.”
My stomach flipped—and then dove behind my rib cage when I tried to kill the feeling with my mental tenacity. I have to do this .
Not only was he still playing with me, but he was the greatest half-liar and total brute in all of Faerie.
If he wouldn’t answer a question plainly and of his own free will, there had to be something that would force his hand or trip his feet.
It was simply a matter of finding it, and then figuring out not only what he was hiding from me, but from what he was hiding me .
Taking a deep breath, I held the mirror in one hand as I traced the other across my reflection. Aside from the darkening circles beneath my eyes—which had not been so purple since I’d been plagued with relentless nightmares—I did not look any different.
My cheekbones had hollowed out somewhat, but my hair was still the colour of paprika and had barely grown in length, a waterfall of bloody curls spilling over my shoulders. My freckles were soft and splattered over my nose and cheeks, and my eyes were as blue as the day I was born.
Worse than any symptoms of sleep deprivation or malnourishment, though, was the rounded curve on both of my plain old human ears.
No. Magic. No. Power.
I had nothing but the desire to set fire to things because I was fucking pissed.
“This is nice,” I remarked, glancing up at my intended soulmate. “Is it expensive?”
He rubbed the stubble on his chin with one hand, his expression unreadable. “Yes.”
“Hmm.” Nodding agreeably, I peered at myself again.
The birthmark painted onto my skin through one eyebrow matched the colour of my lips, which were dry.
I wet them with my tongue before I threw the mirror onto the ground with all of my might, where the flowers imploded and my reflection cracked.
As I sighed sharply, my chest seared with heat and trembled with galloping beats. “Shame.”
Wasting no time, I snatched a crystal lamp and sent it flying into the glass door of the display cabinet behind me. The sound of glass shattering was so loud it almost caused me to wince, so I filled the corridor with the sound of damaged and broken things to help me acclimate.
As the volume increased with echoes of damage, the palace atmosphere began to match the way my world sounded inside my own head.
Flinging open the doors on the next cabinet, I reached in and gathered items between my wrist and elbow without even checking to see what they were.
Using my forearm, I swiped them off the shelves.
Bang. Crash. Clink. I tipped vases from their resting places on the walls, yanked tapestries from their hooks until they tore, and flicked glass figurines onto the stonework. Bang. Crash. Clink.
Lucais didn’t speak, didn’t try to stop me. He was waiting me out—testing me to see if I’d cave first.
So, I gritted my teeth and kept going.
Pausing in front of a suit of armour halfway down the hall, I tilted my head to the side, and a heavy silence fell upon me as I examined it, quieting the other voices in my head.
I pushed the whole suit of armour over because I had to keep up the commotion, keep mimicking the sound in my mind.
If nothing else, at least it was cathartic.
The suit shattered another cabinet on its way down, sending broken pieces of glass and ceramic spilling across the floor like a flood of treasure out of a pirate’s chest.
“You do realise that you are destroying your own alimony?”
I faked a laugh to cover the sound of my relief that the High King was still standing there, at least interested in what I was doing, if not perturbed. “Aren’t you listening?” I hissed. “I don’t want it.”
“Fine.” His tone was clipped.
Good.
Reaching out blindly, I seized something else from the wall and sent it careening against another cabinet. Bang. Crash. Clink. Bang. Crash. Clink—
“I swear to the High Mother,” Lucais grumbled at last, and I whirled, glaring at him to disguise my investment in what he had to say.
All I needed was one truth—a single, solitary, straightforward answer.
But his eyebrows shot skyward, and he flung out a hand towards me, looking pointedly down at the suit of armour.
“You’re as destructive as a pet wolf and about as friendly as one, too. ”
My eyes rolled back into my head. “Wrong answer,” I seethed.
“Is there a right answer?” he shot back, flinging both of his arms out to the sides with a desperate, pleading look in his golden eyes.
I shook my head in disappointment, bending to pick up the sword from the fallen suit of armour.
To my surprise, both Lucais and Wrenlock flinched, the latter ducking behind a painting I hadn’t fully knocked off the wall while the former took cover behind a nearby cabinet.
The glass had made an ocean all over the floor, but the gold frame was still intact.
My brows pushed together. Is the sword magical? It looked like any boring old sword, but maybe I wouldn’t know the difference. My gaze bounced between the two men, irritated, as my chest rose and crashed back down with heavy breaths. “What are you hiding from?”
“You, in a minute, by the looks of things,” Lucais retorted, his tone bordering on the edge of hysteria as he peered at me between the shattered shelves. “Will you put that thing down?”
It took everything in me to stop my mouth from falling agape. Recovering quickly, I shot back, “Will you tell me the truth?”
“I have —”
“No!” I screamed, rage taking the reins.
Fuck, this is worse than the silent treatment I used to get as a child!
A frustrated scream built between my collarbones, and I slashed the sword wildly above my head. It cut through a tapestry hanging on the wall like a stick of butter, and the weight of it swinging through the air nearly sent me toppling over and falling into a pool of glass on the ground.
I grunted quietly and sought my balance with a deep breath.
“You have not. You lied to me, Lucais, and you just ”—bracing myself with my feet shoulder-width apart, I raised the sword high above my head with two hands on the hilt—“ keep ”—glass rained down on me as it collided with an empty lantern, which blew apart against the sword’s razor-sharp edge—“ doing it! ”
As I brought the weapon down, aiming for the dramatic finish of the blade striking the floor with a clang, I misjudged the grip required for its weight distribution. The sword slipped from my hands. It flew through the air, turning hilt over end straight down the hallway until it landed—
Oh, no.
Embedded in the chest of a very unfortunately placed man.
He was a pale, maroon-skinned faerie I’d never seen before who had turned the corner and come to a sudden stop in the middle of the hallway.
I didn’t know what race of faerie had three eyes, but he had a third one in the middle of his forehead above an expertly sculpted nose, and they all turned glassy at the same time.
Collapsing, he landed flat on his back, the suit of armour’s sword standing straight up in the air.
My stomach dropped, the impact of its fall sending bile shooting upwards, where it burned a hole in my chest. Everything felt like a live wire, tingling with unhinged electricity. My hands went to my mouth to stifle a scream that never came.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
I had about a millisecond to regain control of my expression before Lucais and Wrenlock, who had turned their heads to track the course of the sword, looked back at me.
Focus, focus, focus.
Clamping my tongue between my back teeth so hard I tasted a metallic tang, I regained ownership of my expression and forced it into a mask carved from stone. Emotion slipped away like a balloon in the breeze, replaced by a masquerade I hadn’t practised since I was eleven years old.
Lucais turned to me first—eyes wide, cheeks flushed, mouth slightly agape.
I was at a standstill, snared on indecision between the urge to run and hide behind his arms or run and hide behind the suit of armour.
His gaze bounced off the ceiling before he pinned me to the spot with a smouldering copper stare and sighed brusquely.
“The staff aren’t part of your alimony , bookworm,” he said through his teeth with a head shake.
He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Spectres defend me, I’ll be Marked for this.
Clean that up before anyone sees,” he ordered Wrenlock, who pulled a face at him behind his back.
“Apparently, the future High Queen and I have a considerable amount of work to do on our communication skills before we’re fit to be seen in public—let alone the privacy of what is supposed to be our own home. ”
Hopelessly, I gaped at the sword protruding from the body and found myself barely able to comprehend a single word the High King had said.
Wrenlock didn’t look at me again; he simply turned and walked in the opposite direction, although I noticed that his silhouette did an excellent job of blocking my view.
I wasn’t sure if it was intentional, but I imagined so.
Lucais roughly pushed a hand through his hair, gesturing to the doorway at the far end of the corridor. His blond locks were mussed, sticking up in places like he’d just risen from a fitful night of sleep. “After you, bookworm.”
I was on fire. My veins were burning with a sensation of soul-deep horror, but I had to force it down. I could not let it rise to the surface where it would very likely consume me.
Oh my god. I’d killed an innocent faerie. Murderer . I killed a faerie. Brynn would be mortified…
No. It was a faerie , for fuck’s sake.
Faeries are cruel and vicious by nature, right?
Besides, I had done much worse things in my short life already than accidentally skewering a faerie on a sword that part of me had thought was a prop when I first picked it up.
I swallowed a painful lump and waited until I felt its leaden weight hit my stomach before I started walking in the direction Lucais was pointing. Surprise slackened my mouth when I realised that I was capable of walking at all.
“I don’t think I like bookworm anymore,” I managed to say, as our steps drove the shrapnel of my explosion deeper into the fibres of the pretty hall runner.
Each movement echoed with a crack over shards of glass, grinding them into the bottoms of our shoes.
It reminded me of the day that Lucais—masquerading as Wren at the time—had been poisoned by a locust. The way the glass had felt slicing into the soles of my bare feet as I hauled his half-conscious body back to my room only minutes before he told me he loved me and insulted me in the same breath.
I’m so in love with you, it’s made me sick.
“Fine by me,” he replied curtly. “You really are a nasty little beast.”
A sigh expanded in my chest and rushed out through my nose.
The day with the locust and the love declaration was well and truly behind us indeed.