6. Dungeon
six
Dungeon
W aiting for the High King’s fury to surface was like waiting for the walls to start talking back.
Aside from the short outburst immediately preceding the manslaughter—or rather, the faerieslaughter, I supposed—Lucais didn’t seem to be upset with me.
As we walked in a bland silence, I began to wonder if maybe he disliked that particular employee and I’d done him a favour.
Then I wondered if I’d committed a crime that perhaps would result in a noose being placed around my neck, effectively bringing his prophecy to life if I wasn’t more careful.
He may be the High King, but is he powerful enough to prevent a witch hunt—or was it a human hunt?
—led by an angry mob if he’s been hiding from his own people in the remote, heavily protected House for a century or so?
That train of thought delivered me right back to the station of the original problem, which was the fact that he was a dirty rotten liar, and I was sick of it.
“Are you mad at me?” I asked him plainly.
Would you still love me if I were a worm?
Would you still love me if I butchered your butler?
But he hadn’t loved me in the first place—not really, not in a way that was safe for me to accept—so, instead of that, I added, “About the staff member back there.”
Lucais eyed me sideways, continuing to take long strides down the hall. “No,” he said, tone clipped. “I am not mad at you about the staff member back there.”
I grimaced because for some reason that made me feel even worse. “Shouldn’t you be?”
Stopping in his tracks, he whirled on me with a huff, eyes blazing like a summer sun.
“I should be a lot of fucking things since I met you,” Lucais snapped.
He began listing them off on his fingers.
“A neurosurgeon, a coroner, a cauldron-worshipping death-wielder—which would come in handy right about now, ironically—a water faerie, a doctor…” He scowled down at his hand, which had run out of fingers to lift, and then raised his head to narrow his gaze on me like a laser beam from a sniper as he took a step forward. “Have I missed anything?”
I shook my head. “I…I don’t know.”
“Right,” the High King barked, and in the same breath, he exhaled a humourless laugh.
“Of course you don’t. I’m the one keeping all the tabs.
I’m your fucking executive assistant now, too.
” He swiped the back of his hand through the air between us, causing a burst of cold to rush over me.
“Do you realise that you’ve hardly left me a moment to be the High King since you quite literally crashed into me like some sort of faulty vehicle or wayward bird? ”
Heat clouded my head, curling like smoke in my nostrils. Lucais could be right about many things, but he didn’t have to be so rude .
“Like it makes a difference!” I shouted, throwing up my hands. The way my voice echoed against the walls bolstered my confidence. “When you’ve been hiding out in a safe house from your own people for a century, I can’t imagine you’d have many better things to do!”
Lucais’s eyes flashed. He leaned towards me, raising a hand between us with his pointer finger extended, and opened his mouth to speak—but then he shut it, eyes crinkling at the corners, and pressed his lips together in a tight line.
Stepping back, he very forcefully pointed towards the end of the hallway and the door to which we had been en route.
My lashes touched my eyebrows as I glared up at him.
Lucais held my stare for long moments with the same rigid control he used to keep his arm and pointer finger firmly in place.
He took deep, measured breaths that filled his chest and stirred the curls of my hair as each exhale swept over me with the scent of ink, musk, and the heat of a midday sun.
Oh, fine. I see how it is.
I couldn’t be sure which one of us relaxed first, but that was all it took. Somewhere between the two of us, a singular muscle twitched, giving in, and then the tension of our stand-off collapsed into the space between us like a fallen house of playing cards.
“The High King of Liars ,” I muttered, sullenly folding my arms over my chest as I began to walk again.
“The High Queen of Beasts ,” he returned, pinching me on one of those arms.
I ignored the sting of his cruelly playful touch. Ignored the way it lingered far longer than it should have.
As our silence bloomed once more, so did my discomfort.
The palace expanded, the ceilings getting further away and the windows rising higher up the walls with the growing distance we put between ourselves and the scene of the crime.
Every corridor we turned down was empty, as though I’d killed the only staff member in the whole palace.
I killed him. I killed someone.
“Where are you taking me?” I questioned, breaking the quiet spell of guilt as Lucais walked with purposeful strides.
“To the dungeon,” he replied stoically.
I skidded to an abrupt halt in front of a closed wooden door, the colour draining from my face.
Lucais tossed a smirk at me over his shoulder. “Not to throw you in there, you insufferable woman,” he promised, completely misunderstanding the source of my panic.
Even if he did try to lock me up in a dungeon, I would simply scream until he got so sick of hearing my voice that he let me out again. Or, in the worst-case scenario, I was fairly confident that Wrenlock would come to my rescue.
No, it’s not me that I’m worried about.
It was the image of Lucais in the dungeon that crossed my mind, sending a storm of sickness to the pit of my stomach, wreaking havoc against all of my internal organs like a battered ship fighting to stay afloat against the wrath of the water gods.
The sound of his voice when he screamed—which had happened in the months that he was bruised by iron weapons and drowned in buckets of icy water—indicated that an insurmountable amount of pain had been inflicted upon potentially the most powerful man in the world.
I hadn’t had a nightmare about it since my first night in Faerie.
I’d actually started to convince myself it was merely a conjuring of my imagination and had nothing at all to do with the suspiciously timed Oracle’s prophecy, the disappearance of the Court of Darkness from a Map I was yet to see for myself, and general tomfoolery of faeries and their war-central politics. But if it was—
“Tell me what that look on your face is for,” Lucais said, the demand long and drawn out with languid trepidation.
I could have sworn I detected a whisper of concern for someone other than himself in his voice, but it was surely a symptom of post-murder trauma on my part.
“It’s nothing,” I muttered, dropping my gaze to the floor.
Even if I wanted to tell him—and I didn’t —I couldn’t.
I’d never been able to talk to anyone about my dreams because something beyond my control always stopped me.
I’d experienced it often enough at the House to realise what it was—a big step from my tormented winter nights alone in my room—and I could recognise it as magic.
I’d felt it myself in the House and even tasted it inside Wrenlock’s mouth.
Some kind of magic had been threaded into my dreams, and while my presence in Faerie had lifted the spell far enough for me to remember what they were about again, I didn’t think I could say it out loud.
My tongue tingled with the threat of going numb even when I did nothing more than consider it.
“Little beast,” Lucais purred, stepping towards me with a note of warning in his voice. He donned the skin of a predator effortlessly, his eyes taking on a feline glow. “If we are to be honest with each other, you need to realise there’s some work to be done there on your end of our bargain.”
I rolled my eyes. “You are such a hypocrite.”
He scoffed. “Hardly. As a matter of fact, I think what I’m about to show you will go a long way in my favour where you’re concerned.”
“Oh, like you care what I think.”
The plain wooden door clicked open as Lucais placed one palm flat against it, the other hand patting the space on his chest above his heart. His eyes captured mine, sparkling like stolen gold.
“You wound me,” he lamented.
“I wish,” I mumbled in reply.
Climbing down the stairs with my hands firmly pressed against my sides, we cleared a few flights before we arrived at another door.
A chill crept along my arms, the tiny pinpricks like those of a rat skittering up to find a perch on my shoulder.
The second door was bound by iron, and when Lucais extended an arm towards it, I couldn’t reign in my reaction in time.
I couldn’t even control it. I grabbed his wrist with an unyielding grip, pulling his hard, heavily muscled forearm against my chest.
His brow furrowed as he cast me a downwards look, head tilted to the side. Without trying to recover his arm, he turned his body and used his free shoulder to push the door open, keeping between the reach of the iron reinforcements.
The air rushed out of my lungs all at once when it swung open and, using the arm I was still fiercely holding onto, Lucais pulled me through the doorway.
I let go of him, and he placed his hand on the small of my back, the puzzled look remaining fixed in place until he closed the door, and his face was consumed by the immediate onslaught of shadows.
The dungeon was cold and pitch-black.
For a moment, all of my anger and apathy left me for dead. I was paralysed by fear for the man at my side as liquid dread rose up my throat.
This is it. The moment my most wicked dreams come true, born of selfishness and greed. I couldn’t let him go, and now I’ll pay the price.