9. Low Blood Sugar
nine
Low Blood Sugar
“ O h, High Mother.” Morgoya’s lilting voice carried across the room. “Wrenlock,” she chastised. “Tell me she is not with faeling.”
The sound of a glass shattering pierced my ears, and I managed to lift my head high enough out of the pot plant to find that Lucais was sitting at the head of the breakfast table with a pile of broken glass at his feet.
He had one hand in a fist before him, his wet skin and shirt sleeve stained pink with the contents of his former glass mug, and the other pinching the bridge of his nose.
The High King’s eyes were tightly closed.
Are you okay?
His voice in my mind was composed, but I felt the thunderous echoes restrained by sheer willpower behind it. It was obvious to me that a mental conversation was all he had the capacity to hold at that moment in time. I, on the other hand, did not have the strength to even reply in my mind.
Another empty wave of nausea rose up, pausing at the halfway mark behind my sternum and wreaking havoc on my ability to breathe properly, and I ducked my head back into the pot plant. My mouth watered as my stomach heaved, and my throat tightened rhythmically.
If I can just force it out for good, I’ll be fine—
“No,” Wrenlock replied, speaking through his teeth. “She killed someone yesterday.”
“Oh,” Morgoya quipped. “Well, that’s alright, then.”
“Though,” Wrenlock pushed on, “I am glad to see where your priorities lie, Your Majesty.”
I groaned into the bottom of the pot at the inference, and the sound echoed around the gap between the decorative ceramic and the plastic container housing the actual roots.
The suggestion that Lucais was more annoyed with the idea of Wrenlock and me creating a life together than he was at the fact that I had taken a life the previous day was preposterous but probably very accurate.
Even so, both things were equally horrifying in my personal opinion—especially considering that Wrenlock and I were not mates.
The laws of soulmates and procreation in Faerie were very ambiguous.
I had been informed that conception between a pair of non-soulmate High Fae was believed to be strictly impossible, but that left me with a plethora of questions about how a human woman could carry a half-faerie child without conforming to the soulmate rituals of the High Fae.
I knew my mother certainly hadn’t accepted a bond with my biological father because he had left her.
Perhaps they didn’t know. Or perhaps I was wrong, and they weren’t really soulmates. In any case, it certainly wasn’t common enough to have been studied properly yet—if it actually ever happened at all.
But that was the least of our worries because, fated mate tropes aside, there was also the whole practical side of things.
“I am not pregnant,” I mumbled, bracing my hands on the ceramic rim to push myself back onto my feet. “It is not possible.” I straightened and paused, my eyes darting around the room, feverish and unseeing as I wondered at the most absurd possibilities. “Unless…faeries don’t…”
Wrenlock raised an eyebrow at me when my gaze crash-landed on his face. He understood where my train of thought was headed. “No, Aura. It’s not possible.” His eyes flicked to the High King. “Unless—”
“Oh, by the Elements, will you listen to yourselves?” someone said. I jerked, tracking the sound of the voice to Batre’s face, and was genuinely pleased to see her sitting at the table beside the High Lady of the Court of Light. “This is—”
Morgoya’s emerald-green eyes widened as she lowered a teacup from her mouth, and she elbowed her girlfriend in the ribs. “Stop it, this is delicious,” she demanded under her breath, nodding her head towards us with a meaningful look.
Batre rolled her eyes but said no more.
“No,” I answered Wrenlock, as I walked over to the rectangular table in search of water or tea to wash down the acrid taste in my mouth. He had essentially confirmed that faeries conceived the same way humans did, so I was confident. And relieved . “It is not possible.”
The High King kept his head in his hand, thumb and forefinger on either side of his nose, pinching the space between his eyebrows.
He relaxed his other fist and reached for the dainty glass teapot in front of him.
Without a word or an upwards glance, he poured a steaming cup of purple tea into a porcelain cup printed with dandelions and sunbeams, stirred in two cubes of sugar, finished it with a splash of milk from a pitcher labelled with painted almonds, and lifted it by the saucer.
It took me a moment longer than it should have to realise Lucais was offering it to me. As I reached for it, he moved his head almost imperceptibly and looked up at me from beneath furrowed brows.
The sight of his face from that angle—from any angle, honestly—made my heart flutter and stomach flip.
Meeting his golden gaze left me with a nonsensical feeling of accomplishment, like earning his attention was worthy of a prize.
It was such a foolish schoolgirl feeling, but it made me giddy nonetheless.
“Thank you,” I murmured, sinking into the chair beside him. A muscle in my core flexed and tightened at the proximity, at the ease of taking up space next to him. The conflict of my emotions provided precious little assistance to settle the nervous ache in my belly.
The High King had an empty seat on his other side, straight across from me. Morgoya and Batre took up the two seats down from it, clearly wanting to sit beside each other and anticipating that Wrenlock and I would be joining Lucais on the left and right.
Though it was steaming, I took a sip of tea straightaway. It was sweet and woodsy, the taste like nothing I’d ever experienced.
“The sugar was a lucky guess,” I commented, noting that he had made it to my exact tastes, but he had never seen me make a cup of tea before in his entire life.
“No, it wasn’t,” Lucais replied, lifting his head entirely from his hand at last. He looked exhausted. “You need all the sweet things you can get.”
And there it is. The reverse compliment. The pointy ends of his teeth showing through a smile.
Spine straightening, my free hand curled into a fist, though I didn’t have the energy to bang it on the table or shake it at him.
“For once in your life, can you not be so unpleasant and cruel to me?” I whinged.
“Just for the first hour of the morning, please. Two hours on the days when I am unwell.”
He screwed his beautiful face up at me. “What are you talking about, you deranged creature? You have low blood sugar. I tasted it last night—”
Morgoya spat her mouthful of tea all over Wrenlock, who had made a poor choice in taking the seat next to me—directly across from her—instead of the spot they had purposefully left for him on the High King’s other side.
Batre shouted in alarm, though it sounded as if it might have begun as a laugh, and I closed my eyes, covering my face with a hand as I sank down further in my seat.
I wished the floor would open up and swallow me whole.
Do they have sinkholes in Faerie?
I made a mental note to look into it.
The High King tossed a cloth napkin at his indeterminate friend.
Wrenlock accepted it with a nod of acknowledgement and began to wipe the tea from his face with a stoic expression, his eyes trained on the High Lady, who sat in front of him with a slim-fingered, perfectly manicured hand splayed across her open mouth.
His dark, tea-dampened curls stuck to his forehead, and his brow creased as he glowered up at the strands and tried to push them back into place with the napkin.
“I am so sorry,” Morgoya apologised. She immediately switched her attention back to Lucais. “What did you say about last night?”
The High King let out a long-suffering sigh. “Nothing.”
“He bit me,” I interjected, because something had to be said about it since the mention had already been made. I think I actually bit him, too, but that’s not important. “There was an accident with one of the staff here. I had a—”
“A tantrum,” Lucais muttered at the same time as Wrenlock offered, “A crisis of mental health?”
“More like a breakdown,” I amended, side-eyeing them one after the other, “mentally speaking, and—”
“Glad your illness has come with a newfound sense of self-awareness,” the High King said under his breath.
“—I accidentally lost control of a sword,” I continued, completely ignoring his jibe. “One of the staff caught it.” I paused, gnawing on my lip, then added, “In his chest.” The unease in my stomach rose again, but I managed to hold it down. “Lucais and I had some things to work out afterwards.”
Morgoya’s eyes flickered back and forth between us, a thin eyebrow reaching for her dark hairline. “But you haven’t—”
“No,” Lucais repeated firmly, for what was starting to feel like the hundredth time that very morning.
I ground my back teeth together.
For High Mother’s sake. Nobody is having sex.
I wanted to ask why it even mattered, although I technically wasn’t speaking to her. We weren’t actively avoiding each other; I simply hadn’t seen her since the House, and I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t ready, so I fixed my gaze on Batre instead and smiled.
“I’m glad to see you again,” I told her honestly, marking the hurt that flashed across her girlfriend’s face in my peripheral vision. My stomach twisted, but I didn’t know what to do with the feeling. I had no room for it.
“You too, Aura,” Batre replied. Her gaze darted to the side, aware of Morgoya’s reaction.
It may not have been the nicest thing for me to do—especially if it would pit the two lovers against one another—but I genuinely liked Batre.
She was the only person who hadn’t lied or kept any secrets from me while I was living in the House.
In fact, she very nearly gave it away, played a significant part in making me realise the truth, and had actually been the one to confirm it in the end.