13. Inter-Realm Travel
thirteen
Inter-Realm Travel
L ucais’s power scared me, but the idea that it could be challenged terrified me even more.
That was why I asked him to stop the carriage and throw a glamour back over us before we reached the palace gates on our return from the faerie bookstore and the secret portal to the Map.
“Are you quite well?” he demanded, one eyebrow arching sharp as a right angle as he regarded me in the low lighting of the carriage’s interior. “Have we not already had this fight? And did you not already win it?”
Taking a breath of air in through my nose, I let my eyes fall closed for a moment while I unjumbled my response.
For once, I could admit that the High King’s reaction was compatible with the situation, but I still needed to make my request of him.
And I had to do it in a way he would not find insulting.
The sudden dip in my confidence wasn’t personal, and the timing of the favour I required was merely strategic.
It had been lingering in the back of my mind beneath a pile of other matters, and the visit to the Map had illuminated the urgency.
I simply needed to convince Lucais to do it before he was no longer capable of doing it—before his attention was dragged away to fight with the lapsus or squash an uprising or make a determination on the fate of the Malum once and for all.
Lucais had disappeared for weeks at a time when we were at the House, so there was no telling how long he’d stick around the palace. The idea that he was required to expend so much of his magic on fighting invisible adversaries made me extremely nervous.
Truth be told, the faerie bookstore had also made me dizzy and disconsolate with homesickness. Perhaps I hadn’t felt it before, or I suppressed it, but the ache to be amongst familiar surroundings and see that leaving was the best decision for everyone involved hit me like a kick to the stomach.
Even though I wasn’t in love with Faerie, I didn’t think I wanted to go home for good, either.
The Forest was out of the question according to the High King of Exceedingly Questionable Morals, and neither of us had the energy to spare on bickering about it.
A visit to the human world wasn’t entirely selfish, despite the fact that my heart was being pulled between two places, a phantom pain needling me between my breasts.
“I’d like to take a trip back to Belgrave.”
The High King’s expression was as baffled as I’d expected it would be. “Auralie,” he chastised. “I hardly think now is the right time to go on vacation.”
“It’s not a vacation,” I argued, fisting the cuffs of my coat to reinforce the calmness I promised myself I’d display.
“I left in a rush that night to escape the caenim, thinking my family would forget me, but you gave me a loophole for a reason. You spelled it so I could lead the caenim away from my home, but return if I desired it in the future, didn’t you?
” Inhaling deeply, I stared into his eyes with conviction, travelling so far into their colour I could have fallen through a portal into a new world.
“I need to go home, Lucais, and I need you to come with me.”
He stared back, resolve wavering like a white flag in the wind. “Why?”
“Because I imagine that you’re about to get very busy, and I want to ask a favour before we get to the point where it’s asking too much from you.”
The look he gave me suggested that we might already be at that point, but he cast his gaze to the slit between velvet curtains and nonchalantly waved a hand in the air.
We came to a sudden stop, and for once, I could almost feel the glamour falling over us.
It was like a sense of inexplicable déjà vu.
“What is it?” he demanded softly. I felt his refusal to look directly in my eyes like a hand reaching for me through the darkness.
My mind flashed back to the afternoon I’d spent with Morgoya on one of the only beaches in all of Faerie that were safe for the High Fae to visit.
She’d told me about the Gift War and remarked on the history of land-dragons and sky-dragons, overwhelming me with good intentions and an intricate history of things that crashed together to create the world in which we lived.
One of the comments she’d made had circled around the ability of magic to serve its wielder as required—even to the extent of altering their physical forms. The idea might have sounded superficial to some, but I had immediately thought of my sister, Brynn, and her best friend.
“Brynn has a friend.” I swallowed the ball of concrete in my throat and straightened my spine so I didn’t feel so much like I was begging him for help.
“Morgoya told me about the High Fae’s ability to change anything about themselves to suit their needs.
Brynn’s friend was born into the wrong body, and she would…
” The words were tangled together on the tip of my tongue.
“I don’t fully understand half of what you can do,” I confessed, “but I thought that you might be able to help her feel safer and more comfortable to be who she is, given your power.”
Lucais turned his eyes on me with the scrutiny of a hawk.
“We cannot alter other people,” he told me, his tone a little gentler than it had been a moment ago.
“It can be done with dark magic and sacrifice, but it’s not something I’m prepared to dabble in, and I don’t think you’d want me to do that because the consequences are often quite ghastly. ”
I clenched my teeth together, breathing in deeply and evenly.
“No, I just wondered if you could give something back to counteract the consequences of humans losing their magic. Like maybe a protection spell. Morgoya said…” I trailed off with a sigh, realising I was asking him for the impossible.
If he could have given the humans their magic back, I’d have bet he would have done so by the end of the war. “Never mind.”
“Bookworm…” Lucais leaned forward, elbows braced on his knees, and ran both hands through his hair while hanging his head.
“If we go back to the human world, there’s a good chance the Malum will follow us.
There are probably still caenim sniffing around the borders, though they’ve at least stopped murdering your lookalikes.
I don’t know how long we’ll be able to stay before it becomes too dangerous. ”
“I don’t need long,” I whispered, hope sparking in my chest. Tears of conflict welled in my eyes despite my best efforts to hold them at bay. “We can be there and back in an instant.”
He rolled his golden eyes at me. “Obviously.”
There was no time for me to question Lucais’s reply because the instant I touched the hand he extended towards me, I was swept up in a gust of air warm as a summer breeze, and his arms were around me like my favourite blanket.
My stomach rose and fell with a sensation of being pulled against gravity by forces outside of the bounds of nature.
I buried my face in Lucais’s chest as the carriage fell away from us and we evanesced across Faerie.
Caeludor became a distant feeling, the cool air and biting fog dispelled like smoke in the breeze, and the soft tinkling of windchimes grew louder and louder as we approached the Court of Light.
Surrounded by an empty field, I landed with the High King of Faerie on solid ground only a few heartbeats later. Swapping all of the fog-drenched, miserly sky in the city for the magnificent kaleidoscope of light once more warmed something deep in my bones, though I tried to conceal it.
The gateway rose up in front of us like a wall of glass, and Lucais’s hands gently and meticulously brushed the hair back from my face when I turned towards him, a memory of my nightmares coasting over the forefront of my mind.
The depth of his eyes distracted me beneath the light of his homeland, scintillating sunsets chasing sunrises around the midnight of his pupils, and I lost my train of thought.
“We cannot stay long,” he informed me sternly.
“I wish I could give you more time, but it’s not only for us.
The longer we stay outside of Caeludor’s wards, the more attention we’ll draw from the Malum if they’re monitoring inter-realm travel, and the greater the risk to the people who live in Belgrave.
” Lucais’s fingertips scraped against my scalp with a gentle pressure as he threaded his hands through my hair again.
“I put a pliant shield up around the town when we left the first time, but there are limitations to it, and you need to understand that I don’t care what happens or what you say to me while we’re there. ”
I was tempted to make a snide remark about how Belgrave wasn’t the only place in the world where my opinions and demands meant very little to him, but since he was doing me a favour, I refrained.
“Are we clear, Aura? You’re my one and only priority.”
A concoction of pleasure and dread mixed with his words in my mind, and I could only nod with vague enthusiasm because it felt like a deal-breaker for him if I tried to argue the point. “I know. It’s okay.”
“Alright.” The High King of Faerie gripped my hand, his touch like a safety net beneath my skin as I stepped through the gateway, but—
I was wrong. It wasn’t okay at all because when Lucais and I stepped through the wall of glass, the world we walked into was not the same one I had left behind.