20. You’d Look Good with Duct Tape Over Your Mouth
twenty
You’d Look Good with Duct Tape Over Your Mouth
E verybody was staring at us. I felt exposed and fragile, like I was standing in a display cabinet with all of my ugly truths sketched into the wall behind me for the world to bear witness.
Killed a faerie. Abandoned her family. Lied about being slapped by her teacher in the second grade.
A familiar heat grazed the back of my neck before trailing down my spine in a playful caress, and I glanced towards the High King.
I was far too deep in my own inner monologue to reprimand him for prodding me with his magic in public, but the words were washed away—one by one scrubbed clean off the walls of my mind like Lucais’s attention was a splash of water on fresh ink.
I studied his side profile, watching his awareness of my gaze tilt one side of his mouth upwards.
Thank you.
He ignored me, but his lips twitched.
The collapsing palace had a great hall carved into the northern wing.
It was a hollow, cavernous space—a ceiling so high I couldn’t discern the colour of it with absolute certainty, large white pillars lining the outskirts of the room, and arch windows of stained glass high up on the otherwise bare stone.
No wall sconces. No rugs lining the hard, cold floor.
No chairs, save for the enormous throne placed in the centre of the dais at the far west end of the room.
Lucais lounged in it, the seat crafted from a substance that mimicked the aesthetic of glass.
As far as I was concerned, he had a poor track record with furniture—particularly chairs—and yet the throne was so delicately transparent.
After we entered with Morgoya and Wrenlock, he assumed his position at the forefront of the room, and the entire frame lit up with a blazing gold as his light filled the spaces around him.
He was the King of Light. It made perfect sense that he would perch upon a Throne of Light.
Absently, I wondered if it was the same for all of Faerie’s rulers.
I pictured thrones of darkness, fire, water, earth, and wind—mostly to distract myself from the hundreds of eyes that hadn’t left my face even to blink since I’d walked in through the enormous double doors.
But for a fleeting moment, I was curious about what sort of throne I might be given if I was to accept the mating bond with Lucais and become his High Queen…
The concept was repulsive from any angle, so it very quickly wilted away and died.
I didn’t want a throne. I didn’t want a mate. I didn’t want a crown.
Lucais wasn’t even wearing his crown. Like me, he’d cleaned up after the locust attack and quite possibly taken a power nap, but he’d made a promise to me that the first time I saw him in his crown, he would be wearing absolutely nothing else.
He couldn’t very well keep to that promise in a situation where so many other faeries had flocked to stare at me while they listened to him speak.
As we stood and waited for the High King to address the room, a niggling sense of pride wormed its way into my chest because I was able to recognise so many different races of faeries.
I spied Eldrick standing near the front of the crowd with a handful of other Hobgoblins. He inclined his head to me deferentially, but I watched his tongue slide out of his mouth to lick his lips when he did, and I cringed inwardly.
Behind him, there was a small group of Vampyrs with skin painted in various tones of death and ebony hair that looked like torn pieces of shadow pulled from the night sky. When I met their reproachful gazes, they bared their extra-long fangs at me and hissed.
Lucais silenced them with a single look, but hurt still pooled in my belly when I remembered their sister had been accidentally impaled by one of Enyd’s soldiers in the House. Their grief had been a tangible substance that exploded across the room, coating everyone’s skin in its ashes.
Many of the High Fae were present, and their gazes were somehow the harshest to bear.
Some resembled the familiar humanoid form with accentuated features and elongated ears, but others seemed to have adopted scales, tails, horns, and additional eyes, fingers, or even limbs.
Their skin tones embodied every colour of the rainbow in varying pigments.
Elera was standing by the door with two other unicorns, and while I decided not to question it, I did spend a moment wondering what her group’s political investment was in Faerie—if they had one.
A group of translucent figures lingered by the door on the opposite side, coming in and out of focus. Instinctively, I thought of them as ghosts, but then I remembered that Lucais had referred to them as Spectres when I’d accidentally killed the maroon-skinned faerie.
I picked out a group of men I might have mistaken as human beings were it not for the considerable amount of extra hair on their bodies and claw marks across their faces—the Wolf-Folk, surely—and opposite them were large creatures bearing a striking resemblance to the caenim, taking up as much space with the two of them as an entire family of Centaurs did.
Lucais immediately reassured me that they were Bogeymen when he sensed my alarm through the bond—and explained that when they come to Court, they were always on their best behaviour, but I’d better steer clear of them in dark alleys lest they feel the need to take over my mind and body for sport.
They had eyes and ears where one would expect to find such body parts, but their jaws were much longer and wider, and they had mouths like a baleen whale.
Almost as soon as I looked at them, I averted my gaze.
I recognised a Basilisk—and regretted it—as well as the group of Ogres, a pair of Trolls, a lone Cyclops, the group of Elves, a beautiful creature who might have been a Wood Nymph, and a shorter gentleman who bore a striking resemblance to a Leprechaun.
I even observed Goblins long enough to mark the differences between them and Eldrick’s kinfolk.
Lastly, there were airborne creatures who flew too fast for me to really see them, but I was fairly sure they were the Pixies and the Sprites.
When the doors finally closed at the end of the long walkway between the clusters of faeries, I expected Lucais to begin speaking. Instead, he simply stared ahead at the bare floor between his constituents. My eyes darted back and forth almost a dozen times before I saw them—and recognised them.
The Little Folk.
They were, quite frankly, the smallest creatures I had ever seen before in my life.
As a child, I supposed, it was only natural that they had appeared slightly bigger.
Otherwise, they looked exactly as I recalled—bobbing heads with large, dark eyes, tiny mouths, soft tufts of wispy white hair, some with long, matching beards.
All of them glowed with a bright luminescence that almost surely served as a protective measure.
They carried magical satchels with deep pockets, which was where they used to stow the treasures they brought to me in the backyard of our first house.
As they approached to greet their High King, I wondered if they knew who I was—and found it very surprising, yet equally heart-warming, when they skirted the edge of the dais beneath Lucais’s throne and came to bow before me instead.
A few sharp gasps echoed between the stonework in the hall. On the other side of the dais, Wrenlock’s mouth fell open. But Lucais only smirked with a deep, relaxed, almost feline satisfaction.
I bent down to meet the Little Folk, extending my forefinger for them to climb up onto my hand like they had done when I was a child.
Two of them did, the pearly luminosity around them making my eyes water up so close.
My palm tingled as they walked across it and began to lay down scraps of bark from their pockets, manipulating their position with magic.
Naturally, I couldn’t hear them when they spoke because their lungs were so small and my ears were so large, but treebark messaging was how they had always communicated with me when they wanted to say something they couldn’t tell me in any other way.
I waited patiently for them to assemble their pieces the right way up.
Once they had, they stepped backwards, tickling me again as they bent their heads to their feet in a bow.
Holding my breath, I lifted my hand close enough to read what was scorched into the pieces of bark, mindful not to blow the tiny creatures off my hand with any release of my breath.
Welcome Home, Princess .
It felt like someone had knifed me in the stomach. I nodded my head once, gently returning them to the ground before any surge of emotion had me breathing too forcefully or accidentally drowning them in a falling tear.
I had been a Princess when I was a child.
I’d called myself one, so it never struck me as odd that the Little Folk referred to me in the same way.
I loved it. I wanted everyone to think I was a Princess.
But the idea that they’d known my intended fate the whole time—that I was truly in line for a throne in Faerie through some weird, prophetic twist of fate…
“Auralie,” Lucais murmured. “Are you ready to begin?”
My eyes bulged in their sockets, though it wasn’t exactly like he could draw much more attention to me than I was already receiving.
However, he could have easily spoken the words into my mind, so I had to wonder why he was making a point of checking with me on when to start his meeting in front of all of those faeries.
Unless he was merely trying to embarrass me, to test out how red my cheeks could become before literal sparks started to fly off my flesh.
“Um.” I swallowed, blood thrumming in my ears. “Yes?”