20. You’d Look Good with Duct Tape Over Your Mouth #2
Lucais inclined his head to me before turning his gaze onto the assembly, the faces of whom all looked rightfully perplexed by the display.
“Greetings,” he said, and his voice boomed through the room with a ferocity I had never heard before.
It wasn’t angry; it was just powerful . “I appreciate that all of you have made the effort to present yourselves here today. Please take note that we have representatives from five out of six Courts. Blythe’s Court of Darkness is an apology. Again.”
I raised a brow at that but held my tongue—both physically and mentally.
On the walk down after I’d quickly showered and changed my clothes, Morgoya had briefed me on the developments with the Court of Earth.
It appeared that Gregor had gone dark, but his people behaved as if they were unaware, and everything was stuck on a business-as-usual cycle until the High King’s spies could obtain sufficient evidence to determine which approach would be wisest.
“I come bearing good news and bad news,” the High King went on. “Which would you like to hear first?”
Did he seriously ask them to pick and choose the order in which he delivers updates like pieces of gossip? Who is running this show?
“Bad,” someone called out.
“Good,” someone else said only a millisecond later.
“Bad was faster,” Lucais declared. “So here it is. The caenim are out of control. There have been numerous sightings of them across the realm, which I’m sure you’ve all heard about.
They savaged Sthiara. Multiple casualties and missing faeries.
I don’t know what their endgame is, but I do know they are probably starving from so many years spent scavenging the Ruins, and they are relentless. ”
My confusion simmered like a cauldron filled with poisons and potions. He knew their endgame was to retrieve me—to kill me and bring my body to the Malum. At least, that was part of it. He wasn’t lying, but he was twisting things again.
What is he doing?
“I did not count how many attacks the Court of Light sustained over the last few months, but it’s more than enough to piss me off.
I do not expect the number to reduce in the near future,” Lucais disclosed.
“I advise everyone to exercise caution when travelling in the more regional areas within any of the five accessible Courts. Do not let your guard down even inside the more heavily populated areas. I have secure wards up, and Caeludor is always safe. You are welcome to seek shelter here until the threat is neutralised. Please, tell your friends and family the offer extends to everyone. Unless you’re a Banshee or a caenim yourself, Caeludor will welcome you. ”
“What’s the good news, then?” someone asked.
The High King grinned, winking at the crowd as he straightened in his seat.
“The good news is that we’re having a party.
These miserly beasts defy logic, but I have a plan to eradicate the threat that is not reliant on dialectics.
So, we may as well celebrate now because we all know my plans are marvellous and usually always work. ”
He nodded with conviction, like he believed what he was telling them—as if he, Lucais Starfire, the High King of Faerie and King of Light, was manifesting the outcome he desired.
And maybe he did. Maybe he was right. Maybe he needed to appeal to a higher sense of power, above even his own, simply to keep himself in some sort of check.
There were a few questioning murmurs bouncing around the room.
Some feet shuffled and hooves clopped. An Ogre coughed, the sound low and throaty.
But overall, the crowd remained calm and impassive.
I wondered if it had been his plan all along to let them believe a lesser version of the truth so they wouldn’t freak out.
Lucais had told me the people in Caeludor would panic if they learned about what happened in the Court of Light, and he wasn’t there to calm their fears. I assumed he meant by his words and actions, but rather, it seemed like his very presence was all they required to remain unbothered.
I could have sworn he was going to tell them about the Malum, though. Or was that simply what he wanted me to believe?
Faerie was no stranger to the caenim, but the residents did not know to whom they belonged.
As far as I could tell, all of Faerie believed the caenim were a lonesome, outcast species—like the Banshees, but the Banshees were a people.
Lucais treated the caenim as if they were the faerie equivalent of dogs.
The new development with his plan to capture caenim—the result of absolute insanity cogs turning in his deranged mind—was another matter entirely. It was hinged on secrecy to protect his dark truths…
Oh. And I suppose this is, too.
My face fell, the thought dropping from my mind like a star. It landed in the pit of my stomach, a crater burned into the crust of the earth from an alien spaceship of unfortunate realisations.
Lucais was never going to tell them the truth.
He couldn’t .
They would hate him—
“The carousal begins tonight!” the High King proclaimed, surging to his feet with arms thrown out to the sides proudly. The illumination of his throne went dark as soon as he was no longer upon it, but flares of light and sunbeams shot from his fingertips, igniting the room like a dawn sky.
Everyone in the throne room burst into cheers and applause—the sound musical, a chorus of neighing and growling and chirruping against a symphony of human-like voices. At that exact moment, I knew they loved him.
At least, they had loved him once. Before the Gift War.
Before the death of land-dragons. Before he made choices that changed everything—decisions powerful enough to end old worlds and create new ones.
And as all of it transpired before my widened eyes, it became glaringly apparent that Lucais wanted to get back to that love more than he wanted anything else in the world.
He wanted to be the man who told a group of faeries they were all likely to die soon and have them cheer and chant his name in reply.
Lu-cais! Lu-cais! Lu-cais!
I heard the ghost of that ancient crowd resounding in his mind as he watched on, hopeful for an encore—a memory I was viewing in his head, whether he intended to share it with me through the bond or not.
“One more thing before you go,” he called out, holding a finger up in the air.
The crowd instantly settled and hushed. “The Court of Light malfunctioned for a split second there. I’m sure you’ve all heard about it and would like some explanation.
Well”—he lazily extended an arm, directing the point of that finger at me—“you see that redhead over there?”
Collectively, the eyes in the room swung from Lucais’s face back to mine. My cheeks burned the colour of beetroot.
“It was her. And she is mine ,” he declared, his voice an ancient growl.
“I’ve brought you back a High Queen, if she so desires.
If she does not, that’s none of your business.
She is still off - limits to all of you, and you will treat her with the utmost respect at all times or face the penalty of death. ”
Lucais straightened his coat. “Yes, you’ve seen her before.
In the Oracle. Take a good look at her in the flesh now,” he went on, “because she’s even prettier when she dresses properly and actually brushes her hair.
But I’m afraid she may not like the lot of you ogling her for the rest of the night.
And come to think of it…quite frankly, neither do I.
So, get out, go away, off you trot—the lot of you.
” He waved them all away and then grinned like a devil. “I’ll see you at the festivities.”
My hands were shaking. I was glued to my spot on the ground. Deep breaths. Even his quip about my hair and clothes didn’t make a mark because I was numb and trembling from head to toe. I couldn’t decide if I was more angry, scared, thunderstruck—or something else entirely.
I was not his . I never would be his . I didn’t like him .
We had kissed twice, and he thought he could lay claim on me like a parking spot? Not to mention the fact that I resented the threat he lay upon his own people—as if I needed his protection. As if I wanted it.
The pendulum swung again, but the faeries were not fazed.
They offered gestures of goodwill to us before they left. Some looked towards me, others looked at Lucais, but every last one bowed, waved with a flash of their power, inclined their heads, or clapped and whooped one more time before they left the hollow throne room.
When only a few stragglers remained—faeries who, I suspected, were members of the palace staff—I spoke to the High King in my mind and tried to unstick the soles of my shoes from where they’d started to grow invisible roots into the stonework.
Why did you lie to them?
I didn’t lie. You know I can’t lie. He sat back on his throne, the light blazing around him once more. A flicker of exhaustion from our earlier activities scattered across his face once nobody else was looking at him.
You didn’t tell them the truth.
The whole truth, he countered. That’s different.
I thought you were going to tell them about the Malum. And the caenim reports—were you exaggerating the severity or were you keeping things from me in the House?
A beat of hesitation. I was nearly going to tell them about the Malum, but we’ve had a change of plans, haven’t we, little beast?
And the caenim reports were not specific.
I didn’t count them. I couldn’t because I was too busy worrying about you.
So, technically, not a lie. If they want to panic, they are free to panic.
If they want to get blackout drunk tonight and forget everything I ever said, they can do that, too.
I snorted. What sort of a High King are you?
One without a High Queen.
Ew.
You’d look good in a crown.
You’d look good with duct tape over your mouth.
Ooh, kinky. He picked a stray hair—one of mine, I realised with great horror—from his coat sleeve, and held it up to examine the colour against his light. A smirk slowly spread across his mouth.
Go away.
It’s my palace—
Wrenlock appeared at my side, summoned by the look on my face. He stood between us, his tall frame blocking my vision of the High King. “Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” I said back. My feet were free, so I kicked at the floor with the toe of my boot, trying to suppress the twist in my heart. “How was your day?”
He shrugged. “Busy enough. I was thinking about you, though. Are you coming to the celebrations tonight?”
I peered around him at Lucais, who pulled a face and shrugged as if to say he didn’t know what I planned to do, and he didn’t care to find out. Wrenlock ducked his head, reclaiming my eyes.
“I’m not sure.” I sighed. “Are you trying to ask me something?”
His mouth pulled up into a lopsided grin. “Sort of, yes. I thought maybe—” He broke off, holding up a hand. “I have no expectations, but maybe you and I could go to the carousal in Caeludor together and…hang out.”
I couldn’t help myself. I burst out laughing at the suggestion, bottling it only when hurt flashed across his face. “I’m sorry,” I gasped. “It’s only that you said… You want to hang out with me?”
His eyebrows knitted together. “What’s wrong with that?”
“It’s…” I fumbled for the right word. “Such a human notion,” I decided at last, speaking on a light exhale of breath.
The conversation reeked of nostalgia, as if he wasn’t a High Fae man a few hundred years older than me and I wasn’t being held half-a-prisoner in Faerie by an irritating High King.
My mouth curved up at the corners. “You know… Hanging out.”
“You realise humans descended from the High Fae?”
I rolled my eyes. “Yes, Wrenlock. I know. Faeries came before the chickens and the eggs.”
A smile touched his eyes, even as he chewed on his lower lip. “Do you not want to? Hang out, that is.”
Something inside of my chest fluttered, the sensation triggered by my silent laughter. “Yes, that’s fine. We can hang out.”
“Good.” Wrenlock beamed at me, all warmth and openness and trust. “I’ll come by your room at dusk.”
“Okay—”
Lucais strode up to us then, pausing on his way towards a side door out of the room like we were an afterthought. He waved that annoying finger between us, and I wished I had broken a piece of it off in that cottage illusion or bitten it in the human world.
The memory of the way he pressed that hand up against the side of my face to hold me in place while he explored my mouth with his own streaked through my mind. But the way that he used it to poke and prod at me the rest of the time dulled any of the more pleasant associations.
“Whatever the two of you are going to do,” he said, his voice a lazy lilt, “you are not to leave this palace tonight.”
“Fine,” Wrenlock agreed, though his dark chestnut eyes flashed, and his shoulders tensed.
Lucais lifted a brow and pouted at him, as if he’d been expecting a fight. “Fine.”
They turned towards me like they assumed I’d break the tension or referee the back-and-forth idiocy of a situation the two of them had conspired to create all by themselves. Both of them held secrets and promises in their eyes, glimmering with devious intent, settling between us like an invitation.
Shaking my head at them, I simply said, “Fuck off.”