15. A Handmade Crown
fifteen
A Handmade Crown
T he years of practice I’d had of trying to conceal my pain and tears from my mother to prevent worsening the condition of her own state of mind should have served me well when she appeared in the doorway. But they did not.
The sight of my mother with more grey in her hair than strawberry blonde, wrinkles and sunspots decorating her complexion, and the loss of so many missing years in her light blue eyes cracked something permanently in my soul.
The High King must have felt it coming on.
Before the scream left my dampened lips, the whole world came to a grinding halt.
Everything around us froze. The roaring sound of traffic on busy nearby roads, the hum of tourists talking and laughing down at the docks, and the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hallway behind my mother that hadn’t been there during any of the years I’d spent living with her.
The chirping of birds in overhanging tree branches, and the barking of the neighbour’s dog behind the gate next door.
The blinking of my mother’s eyes. The way her mouth had automatically begun to curve up into a grin, and the way her hands had already started to reach out to pull me into a hug.
All of it stopped, paralysed in time and space.
Paused so that nobody except for the High King himself could witness me breaking into pieces.
In the very back of my mind, I felt stupid.
The shame burned like a branding. As if I’d been tricked again—as if I’d let myself get tricked again.
But there were layers of other emotion piled thickly on top of that feeling—all-consuming films of rage, betrayal, desolation—and I couldn’t wade through it to find my own foolishness, cradling that feeling of naivety so the edges didn’t turn sharp and begin to slice me into ribbons from the inside out.
Buckling under the pain, I folded myself in half, clutching my stomach as my head grew heavy and hot with fast-rising congestion.
“Take me back,” I wailed, slamming my fist into the brick wall beside me.
Pain shot through my knuckles, radiating across my wrist and up through my elbow to my shoulder.
My skin scraped against the rough surface, but it only made me smash my hand harder against it as I hiccuped sobs and wild, animalistic sounds of sorrow and desperation.
“Take me back! Take me back! Take me back— ”
“Aura, I’m sorry.” Lucais’s presence was a distant warmth, a sun orbiting the void. I felt the sincerity in his apology and found the sensation strange. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, but I can’t. I’m not a—”
Time traveller.
Through the bond, I completed the sentence. The ache in my wrist became so profound that I had to stop hitting the wall, so I turned, barely managing to locate his face through the blur of tears in my eyes as a violent sob wracked my shoulders, and slid to the ground.
When the fibres of my coat caught and pulled against the rough surface of the bricks, making an unbearable scraping sound on my way down, I shrugged out of the sleeves.
I didn’t care that it was freezing cold outside.
I curled up, crestfallen, on the concrete slab that made up the front porch of my family’s home.
My chest was on fire.
Pain so intense it felt like a heart attack coursed through me, rolling out across my body in flares of sadness and regret from where my heart was splintering into a million different pieces.
I didn’t need him to say it out loud. Lucais was many things, and he lay claim to many different powers, but we’d walked into the one thing he couldn’t do. The one gift he couldn’t give me.
It was the limitation of a man who could do anything—
Anything but give the Malum their High Fae powers back. Anything but give the humans their connection to the High Mother back. Anything but give his soulmate the years she’d missed from her little sister’s childhood back.
“I thought you knew,” he said into the eerie quiet of the new world, sounding shell-shocked himself.
Shaking my head, I replied with a croaky, “No.” My throat felt swollen and raw from the hysterics, and there was a pounding bass drum in my head.
“A part of me suspected it was why you asked me to make them forget you,” he went on. “When you agreed to come with me without hesitation, I assumed you didn’t exactly plan on returning.”
“No,” I said again, my voice flat, dead.
I glanced up at my mother’s body standing like a wax figure in the doorway—a person I knew well, yet at the same time the face of someone I’d never met.
“I didn’t know what I was doing,” I admitted, so low he wouldn’t have heard if my confession wasn’t literally the only sound left in the entire world.
“I still don’t. But I’ve seen this on television.
” I choked down another miserable sob that was nearly a laugh and lifted my head back to rest against the brick wall.
“I take it that I’m not going to crumble into dust now or something? ”
Lucais was already shaking his head. “You’re part-faerie,” he reminded me gently.
“But if you were completely human, it would depend on how much time had elapsed. Time operates differently in Faerie than it does in the human world because the lack of magic here means that what could be days for us ends up being months for them. Their lives can end in the blink of an eye—and so can their childhoods, their youths, their years.”
He tipped his head towards my mother, his brow furrowing.
“They know it too. Talk about it endlessly. Magic sustains the High Fae through the ages, and appeals to the humans who find out about the real world and travel into it to live with us. With the limitations removed, we can theoretically live forever, whereas human beings are bound to short bursts of consciousness while they remain on this plane of existence.”
I nodded because different threads of faerie lore showed up in all sorts of books and movies, and I’d heard about it.
Of course I’d heard about the humans who were lured into Faerie for what felt like a few weeks, only to return to their own realm and find that they’d overstayed their own lifespans.
But even though the faeries in those tales had looked and acted differently from the ones I’d met myself, it was my own fault for not questioning it.
For not seeking answers to the queries I was probably too afraid to ask for too many good reasons.
“How long?” I mumbled, swallowing down a gulp of what felt and tasted like a ball of snot. “I’ve been gone for, what? A couple of months at the most? How long is that in human years?”
Lucais made a small noise in the back of his throat. “That’s the problem. I don’t…” He trailed off, peering around my mother’s motionless frame as if he was searching for a calendar on the wall.
I knew he wouldn’t find one. She was never interested in remembering the day of the week—although she’d never been interested in checking the time, either.
And yet, suddenly she was the proud owner of an antique grandfather clock.
Huge, wooden, and loud, it clashed with almost everything else in her house. The reason why it might suddenly be there circled my mind, but I pushed it away. I could not bear to think about that.
“I’m not sure,” Lucais confessed, raking a hand through his light gold hair haphazardly. “Something isn’t adding up here. We should hardly be a year into their future, but Brynn was a little girl when we left, and now she looks like—”
“An adult,” I finished for him.
Brynn looked like she was fast approaching her eighteenth birthday—if she hadn’t already had it. Tears sprang to my eyes again, my face crumpling. I bent to hide my expression against my knees so he couldn’t see it while I heaved over a silent sob.
“We’ll find out,” Lucais promised, crouching down in front of me. “I swear to you that I’ll find out what happened.” He tugged my hands free from where they were fiercely tangled in my hair and tried to coax my head up.
I sucked down a gasp of fresh air, wiping my wet, sticky nose in the crook of my elbow before I obeyed, and then I dragged a hand over my cheeks and upper lip to swipe away the last of the moisture before I met his gaze.
“I am so sorry, Aura. Please believe that this was never my intention.”
Even if I wanted to be furious with Lucais, I couldn’t find the strength within me to do it right at that moment, so I let him haul me to my feet.
He proceeded to explain what would happen when he lifted the spell he’d placed upon the world to freeze time—which apparently wasn’t placed upon the whole world, though it felt very much like it was—and I refrained from sharing any of the mean comments that were in my head about what good it did him to be able to freeze time but not travel through it.
Precariously ducking his head and twisting his torso to fit through the space between my mother and the doorframe, Lucais showed me that we’d need to place ourselves in the right positions to catch up with the passage of time when the spell expired, or else we risked fracturing the veil of reality he’d placed upon the human world in order to make it sustainable without magic.
With the townhouse and my family members essentially in suspended animation, I felt like I was walking through a haunted house.
We made our way through the low-lit hallway, beneath a globe that used to flicker but was suddenly bright as a star, and into the dead quiet of the kitchen, where not even the hum of a refrigerator brought the room to life.
“At this point, we’d already be inside and finished with the initial greetings,” Lucais mused, pulling a chair out for me at the old wooden table I remembered so well.
It was possibly the only thing I still remembered well in the house. He pushed me down into it with his large, slender hands on my shoulders.