12. The Lapsus #3
My heart, a thunderous stampede of wild horses trapped within the flesh cage of my chest, was on the verge of stopping.
If not for the fact that it simply could not keep up with the heart of a man who beat five times for every pump instead of two, then for the fact that it looked like he wanted to kiss me until he could learn to tolerate it well enough to do it as part of his morning routine every day for the rest of an exceptionally long life. And I couldn’t .
I felt the pull of his mouth like a hand cupped around the back of my head. I could feel the mating bond stretched across my body, intertwining with every cell and flowing through my veins. The answer was right there within my reach. Yes, yes, yes.
But I couldn’t take it. I knew I couldn’t take it—at the very least, not until he gave me answers.
All my other concerns and grievances aside, I knew that kissing him again would wipe my memories.
If I allowed myself to fall, I’d fall so hard I’d give myself a concussion.
I’d stop caring about anything else but him—the beautiful blond man with eyes like the molten core of decaying stars and hands that could shelter my entire heart in a house of skin and bone.
I would get tunnel vision through a secret pathway that led straight from my heart into his, following a string that fate had woven between his rib cage and knotted inside of mine.
I couldn’t let that happen.
I couldn’t see that tie made, that bond formed, that fate signed and sealed away like the faeries in the Court of Darkness.
Because what had he done to me? What had he done to his own people? Everything he revealed to me was recent, but he locked himself away inside of the House long before then. Why?
All I’d wanted when I trashed the palace was for him to tell me the truth, but he would rather watch me destroy priceless heirlooms than open up to me.
If enough pressure was applied in the right way, he might be inclined to respond with honesty.
But if I was his mate, his intended High Queen, I deserved to know things for no other reason than that .
I should not be held solely responsible for seeking out answers using faerie-friendly phrasing.
Not with him—not with anyone, but never with him.
It was like asking me to move across the world for him and then leaving me alone to speak in broken French to strangers.
Lucais had riddles of his own to solve, and I suspected that he planned to play me in his games like a pawn while keeping me in the dark so I didn’t give his position away.
Finding my father in the Court of Darkness? Is that idea even real, or another ruse? What else is he planning that is so important he has to chain me to his carriage to ensure his schemes are protected?
He would never tell me.
I wasn’t worth it to him.
This is futile.
“Are they still alive?” I broke the silence with a metaphorical dagger jammed straight into the heart of the conversation and waited for the blood to leak out around us. When nothing happened, I probed. “Can you tell by looking at the Map?”
Lucais’s gaze had settled comfortably on my face. “I am unsure.”
My eyes flickered between the High King and the table. “Why…is…that?”
“Because presently,” he began concisely, his voice a velvet-smooth purr, “I am too busy looking at you.”
Oh, the insufferable fool.
Inhaling a deep breath through my nose, I climbed to my feet and walked over to the other side of the table, leaning over the Map to examine the Court of Darkness in greater detail.
The shadows had returned, misting over the space allocated to Blythe’s land without imposing upon the other Courts.
An enigma, a great temptation. With considerable strength, I resolved not to touch it again.
Why did my hand scare them away?
“If there are faeries still alive in there,” I mused, as Lucais adjusted his position on the floor so he could see me, “does that mean the thing isn’t as malevolent as we assumed?”
I heard the surprise in his voice when he repeated, “We?”
“You.” I blushed at my faux pas and hoped he couldn’t see the tinge to my cheeks. “It’s your fault. I don’t know why I said we .”
“And you say you don’t want to be High Queen,” Lucais muttered. Begrudgingly, he climbed to his feet. “You terrify me, little beast. I cannot turn my back on you within striking distance lest you try to behead me for my crown.”
“You’re not wearing a crown—” I broke off as I glanced up at him. My eyes narrowed. “In fact, I’ve never seen you wear a crown. Why is that? Is your head too large?”
Lucais gave me a withering look and came to stand opposite me against the table. “I’m saving it for a special occasion, whereupon I shall wear my crown and absolutely nothing else.”
“Am I in this daytime fantasy of yours?” I questioned with a long-suffering sigh.
“Indeed, you are.”
“Well.” I slapped my palms on the wood and beamed up at him. The sting was worth it for the dramatic effect. “At least if you’re wearing a crown, I’ll have something to hold my interest.”
“Vicious wretch,” he grumbled, bracing his hands on the table as he hovered over the Map and stared daggers down at it.
The humour in his expression quickly faded.
“If the Court of Darkness truly survived the absence of their High Lady and the presence of this blight in her place, they may very well try to kill me for what I did to them.”
I felt as if he might have been saying that more to himself than to me, but I responded nonetheless. “You don’t know that anything bad actually happened to them, though, right?”
“No, I don’t. It’s still in there, angrily prodding me, zapping flickers of magic. Maybe it left them alone, or maybe they’re all dead.” He turned on his heels, pushing away from the table with a little too much force. “But I have to find out.”
“How do we do that?”
Cocking his head to the side, Lucais threw an amused glance at me over his shoulder.
“How do you do that, I mean?” I cleared my throat with some degree of discomfort. “Because, like I said, this is completely and utterly your own fault.”
“ I will have to let the ward down again, but on the outside this time.” He strode to the kitchen window and began collecting books and pages that had been thrown into disarray upon our arrival.
“There is no one-way travel through these wards. That kind of magic has been outlawed since the Gift War. So, if something can enter, then something can escape at the same time. Which means—”
“Wait,” I interrupted, circling the table. “Why is it outlawed?”
Lucais stopped what he was doing but didn’t face me.
“It’s a safeguard.” His voice took on a dark edge.
“The wards were made in a time of warfare you could not imagine, a little beast though you might be. Faeries used to lure humans—their own kin, who had only just been rendered powerless—into portals to entrap them. And then they sent through hideous creatures to torment them to death. They’d place bets on how long the human would last before they screamed, bled, begged for their mother, or died. ”
Something in my stomach flipped over, cold and slimy. I covered my grimace with one hand as I stepped up to his side. “That’s horrible.”
“I’m sorry.” Lucais glanced down at me with a wry smile, not looking like he’d ever been sorry for anything before in his life. “I thought you expected that sort of thing from us.”
“From you, maybe.”
He pulled a face at the window. The sun was, in fact, setting in that imaginary world between places. I watched it paint his features in beautiful colours and brutal shadows as our reflections stood together in the glass.
“I’ve never done something like that,” he stated. “If I wanted to kill a human, I’d do it myself with my bare hands. I’m not lazy .”
“How reassuring.” The space between my shoulder blades tingled as I tried and failed to stop myself from imagining him doing a lot of other things with his bare hands. “How exactly do you plan to protect the rest of Faerie when you let down the ward?”
“Two ways,” he replied matter-of-factly.
“I’ll create another lapsus outside of the border.
Balancing them up against each other like that is precarious, though, so if that fails to contain it, the thing will probably take the opportunity to escape into Faerie rather than hide in the Court of Darkness any longer. Which means…we need to shrink Faerie.”
“ Shrink Faerie?” I repeated, disbelief widening my eyes. “How do you intend to do that ?”
“Not by scale,” Lucais clarified, turning to me at last. He folded his arms across his chest and looked down his nose at me with a mixture of apprehension and remorse warring on his features.
“I’ll have to reduce the size of the ward around the outskirts of the six Courts—the one that stands guard between us and the Ruins.
That will allow me to approach the Court of Darkness from the far northeast, hopefully luring that thing to the outskirts. ”
“What about outlying towns? Are there none?”
“They’ll need to evacuate.”
I frowned. “So you’re going to tell them—”
“No,” he interjected, finality resounding in the air between us. I was suddenly struck with a feeling of impending doom. “They’re going to decide to move further in towards Caeludor by themselves.”
I groaned. My suspicions that he was not headed somewhere I’d like were correct. I could already taste the ire budding on the tip of my tongue. “And you’re going to orchestrate that by…?”
Lucais grinned handsomely. “Well, bookworm. We need to find some more of those pesky caenim.”