11. What Shadows?
eleven
What Shadows?
I attempted a scream, but the High King twisted our arms and covered my mouth with his free hand again.
Stunned, my chest heaved as I registered the shape of his body pressed against mine from my shoulders down to my knees.
His arms were around me, one across my chest and one looped over my waist. The heat from his skin was a searing touch, the vile thing between his legs growing thicker and harder with every passing second pressed into my lower back, gently pulsing with need.
His full, insistent proximity stirred a flurry of butterflies between my legs—tingles that travelled up and down my spine like unwanted passengers on a broken elevator with one blissful, inevitable fate.
My head lolled back against his shoulder, and Lucais’s breath was a honey-sweet pant in my ear, the sound of a sinful promise that might condemn me simply for listening.
To break the spell—and I really had to break the spell—I surveyed our new surroundings.
The portal had transported us into a small room.
A cottage kitchen with herbs and spices lined up on the windowsill, pots and pans hanging from the ceiling, and a round table carved from heavy wood sat in the middle of the space.
Through the lace curtains, I glimpsed the paradisiacal expanse of an open forest bursting with coloured flowers, filled to the brim with particles of light and accompanied by a rushing crystalline stream.
“What is this place?” I whispered.
Lucais let me go, and the removal of his arms from my body felt like he had stripped me bare of my clothing and the first layer of my skin. “The Map.”
Shivering, I gritted my teeth and scowled. The Map was quite obviously sitting in the centre of the table, but that’s not what I had asked him. The place we were in was not the Map; it was the part of the world in which Lucais had chosen to store the Map, and I wanted to know why.
“It belonged to my family,” he explained curtly.
“They lived here during the Gift War. We’re not…
” He sighed and waved a hand around the room.
“We’re not actually here . This is all decoration to colour the rip between worlds so it tricks our minds into remaining calm while we’re in a state of existing and not existing between everywhere and nowhere.
The real cottage burned to cinders and ash during the Gift War. ”
Flames licking the walls, thirst of fire so greedy and gluttonous.
Screaming, voices boiling in a cauldron of death and destruction.
The chokehold of smoke and ash. Falling, falling.
One by one, the walls come tumbling down.
Heat rolling, crashing in waves. A spray of ashes and sparks crackling in the air of destiny’s undoing.
Empty spaces, clean slates, cleansed by the fires burning, burning.
Too late. Darkness, for now and eternity—
A cupboard door banged, violently wresting me from the scene playing out in my head like a waking nightmare in broad daylight. Lucais was oblivious, rummaging through the kitchen cupboards and drawers by the window across the room.
I shuddered to dispel the illusion and faced the Map head-on instead. “So this is it?”
“Yes,” the High King replied absently, crouching down to reach one of the lower shelves.
The Map of Faerie was an old drawing on discoloured parchment paper, dotted with lines and embellished with swirls. Its edges were curled in, smooth but not straight. Approaching it, I examined the depiction of Faerie.
My eyes narrowed. Vaguely resembling the outline of a live human heart in its shape, the land was cut halfway down the middle by a grim depiction of the Metal Mountains—portrayed like stitches woven through flesh on the page.
Six sections were carved out to represent each Court, with a seventh expanse of land left undefined around the border.
It rolled in like a dark sea, covered with shadows and sparse outcroppings of dead flora—the Ruins.
The six Faerie Courts were stacked unevenly, sliced into two rows of three. To the east, from north to south, there was the Court of Darkness, the Court of Earth, and the Court of Light. To the west, from north to south, there was the Court of Fire, the Court of Water, and the Court of Wind.
The Metal Mountains were sharp, jagged peaks that ran from the northernmost point between the Court of Fire and the Court of Darkness directly down to Caeludor—which sat roughly in the middle of the map, a tiny borderline triangular shape with its flattest base facing west—cutting a line of separation on the east, between the citadel and the Court of Earth.
The jagged outline continued down the page on an angle, further serving to divide the Court of Earth from the Court of Light.
In Lucais’s Court, I saw the scribbling whorls depicting the Forest of Eyes and Ears stretching from the far outer corner through the centre of the land.
Bordering but not quite touching the Metal Mountains and the Ruins, it bloomed in a long, twisty line down the perimeter.
I spotted the Goblin Village and Sthiara leading the way up the coastline to the House, sitting against the little inlet protected from the Underworld by heavy iron nets.
Enyd’s Court of Wind was home to the Opiate Desert, which spanned across the north-western corner against the Court of Water and her slice of the Ruins.
Similar townships and villages were marked, as was her portal into the human world, but none of it looked familiar to me.
No corner of her land touched the coastline directly; all possibilities were consumed by the Ruins.
Other landmarks were considerably harder to discern, portrayed by smudges and circles with swirling underlines or small, partially incomplete shapes and dotted lines.
I could almost make out something in the far north above the City of Light that could have resembled the Temple of All because it was shaped like a religious cross, but it might have simply been an outcropping of trees near the Metal Mountains.
The Court of Water had the only other open inlet allowing faeries to access the beaches along the coastline.
Bodies of water took up much of the space, annexing a large portion of the land and flowing back into the ocean.
It was the only Court in all of Faerie with direct access to Caeludor, unrestricted by the brutal mountain range encasing the city on all other sides, but the pathway must have relied on bridges due to the amount of water gathered around the border.
It made me wonder if we’d travelled through Enyd’s Court from Sthiara in order to get into the city by carriage—or if we had taken tunnels beneath the Mountains, the way that Morgoya and Wrenlock had suggested was being done by the caenim with help from the High Lord of the Court of Earth.
I didn’t ask because it seemed far too dangerous a choice for Lucais to use tunnels that were being exploited by his arch nemesis and their sick, vicious little pets. That meant I must have slept through my time in the only other two Faerie Courts I had technically visited.
As I studied the Map a little closer, I found that each Court had some kind of magical illusion placed upon it.
Beneath the surface of the Court of Fire, there was a crackle of sparks and flare of heat rising from the paper without leaving a single burn mark, though the increased temperature created refractions in the air above it.
The Court of Water rippled as if there was a pool of water beneath the page, but while the area felt cool when my fingers hovered above it, the paper remained dry and flat on the surface.
Wind whipped between the edges of Enyd’s Court, blowing the lines of ink and depictions of towns or landmarks like trees bowing in the breeze. I could see it coasting across the page like the exhale of breath.
Lucais’s Court glowed with an unparalleled luminescence, appearing on the Map as if someone had been digging into Faerie and struck gold on the way down.
The Court of Earth rose up from the page as if piled high with dirt and rock, though the paper remained smooth and unblemished.
And, as Lucais had once told me—back when he still had me believing that he was Wren—the Court of Darkness was completely swamped by shadows.
All the other Courts had different smudges of ink and drawings on them, and there were clear blotches of darkness moving about within the Ruins like living tumbleweeds of wickedness and spite, but pure shadow and oblivion swallowed up Blythe’s Court.
Consuming it.
A bitter, callous chill traced the outline of my spine. There was an unscented reek of nothingness wafting from the northeastern corner of Faerie, as if the shadows over the Court of Darkness were eating it alive.
No—more like feasting on its corpse.
Unthinking, I reached out to touch the Map.
The urge was instant and indescribable. I had to see if any of it was real—the Elements, each using the Map like a playground to demonstrate the powers that made their home in each respective Court—and the pads of my fingers grazed the old parchment paper before I could stop them.
My hand went nowhere near the northeast, but the shadows ran for their lives and simply vanished along the edge of the paper like I was a drop of oil in inky water.
I hummed, tilting my head to one side. “Lucais,” I called softly, keeping my eyes on the page.
Beneath the shadows, the Court of Darkness looked like all the others, albeit murkier and with more of those evil tumbleweeds rolling about.
“How long does it take the shadows to come back? And what do you think it means?”
“What’s that, my love?” he murmured vaguely. His voice was muffled, his nose buried in a book on the other side of the room.
“I said… ” I swallowed the ball of nerves threatening to affect my voice and turned to look at him. “When do the shadows come back?”
“What shadows?” he questioned, slowly dragging his gaze up from the pages. He lowered the book from his face like it was a pair of reading glasses and he was deep in a completely different train of thought.
“The ones covering the Court of Darkness.”
“No,” he remarked, already turning back to his book. “They’ve been there for years and never move. They won’t budge.”
“Well,” I huffed, shrugging one shoulder that felt like it had spiders crawling all over it. I glanced back down at the Map to double-check I wasn’t just seeing things. My mouth twisted, and I clicked my tongue before telling him, “They literally just did.”
He slouched against the counter, slapped the book against his thigh, and rubbed his temple with his free hand. “Come again?”
I gave him a beseeching look. “They’re gone . The shadows over Blythe’s Court have exited stage left, evacuated the building. They’re on vacation, gone fishing—”
Faster than lightning, the High King leapt to his feet.
A light bulb moment must have exploded on top of his head at last. His book was discarded, thrown over his shoulder with such force that it crashed against a shelf and sent preserving jars clattering into the sink below.
One jar landed on the bench, the high pitch of heavy glass rolling across the marble countertop all I could hear for the longest moment in history as Lucais dove across the room like I’d tossed a grenade into the sink.
His eyeballs scraped the Map, registered the absence of the shadows, and grew to twice their normal size.
And then his arms were around me, yanking me back from the table while his hands pinched my arms in a death grip.
Frantic, he searched me from head-to-toe as if checking for the entry and exit wounds of a gun that hadn’t been fired outside his own mind.
When he found nothing except the quizzical look on my face, he returned to the Map, tugging me with him. The colour drained from his skin until there was nothing but a deathly pale hue where the golden glow of pure light belonged.
His fingers were still burrowing into my flesh.
“Lucais,” I said, loudly. “What is it?”
He met my gaze again, his face stricken, and we stared into each other’s eyes, swapping anxious dread with brutal understanding. We stood as still as statues for devastatingly prolonged moments.
I clocked weakness in him for the very first time.
Finally. Finally.
The High King’s golden eyes had dimmed to a barely-there yellow—it was the colour of the final straw, the one that would snap and break the faerie’s back if I so much as breathed upon it.
His face hovered in front of mine; close enough to kiss, close enough to blow out the candle burning in his eyes if I wasn’t careful.
But I could not hold my breath for long.
After all, much like the High King himself, I was not a water faerie.
“What the fuck have you done?” I hissed.
One step forward. Come on.
His eyes shut as my words hit him, and his grip on my arms slackened. When he spoke, his voice was hollow. An echo. “I was wrong.”
He was wrong?
I frowned. “What does that mean?”
“It means I was wrong, Aura. That’s what it fucking means.
” His long fingers flexed around my arms, and something inside his throat tensed and bobbed like he was trying to choke it back up.
“The Court of Darkness never disappeared at all. It’s there, and they’re in there.
Alive. They’re still alive,” he whispered.
“And they have been all this time. For sev—for seven years.”
My heart was thumping against my chest painfully, coated with the dread oozing from him like blood from an open wound. Still, I had to ask. “Is it not a good thing that they’re alive?”
“ In exile. ”
Then, he let me go.
He was sinking.
I could not think of moving my arms fast enough to catch him, and suddenly, it was too late.
The High King of Faerie was on his knees before me.