21. I’m Not Snooping
twenty-one
I’m Not Snooping
T he plans and preparations for the carousal were well and truly underway by the time I slipped out of a palace side door and braved the encroaching fog.
I knew it was impossible—that it should be impossible—for the fog to sense my presence and react to it, but I felt distinctly as though the cloudy mist rushed for me as soon as I stepped onto the damp ground and closed the wooden servant’s door behind me.
In a matter of seconds, I went from being unable to see three feet in front of myself to being unable to see my own hands at my sides, so I turned to the wall and rested my palms against it.
The fog clung to my clothing like smoke as I worked my way around the edge of the palace, using my hands on the wall to guide me.
Dampness clotted in my lungs, each breath coming harder than the last until the texture of the wall finally morphed from smooth to rough.
I had a few hours until dusk, though it made very little difference amongst all the white clouds, and I was determined to use the time wisely.
I had a hunch that my eyes did not betray me when I spied the crumbling exterior of the palace, and I only needed to prove that it was happening once.
In the illusionary cottage, Lucais had revealed that he was in a power struggle with some kind of malevolent force inside of the wards around the Court of Darkness—something wrong, something other .
He was the High King, deemed the most powerful being in all of Faerie, and he certainly possessed enough strength to hold his own in a magic fight.
He’d executed an army of caenim without having to take a single step.
So why is the ward a struggle, and why is the city submerged in fog?
The weather in Faerie was attuned to his moods, and yet for some inexplicable reason, Caeludor was the exception.
The Court of Light remained as clear and sparkling as it had ever been—even when he was fighting and injured—but the moment we arrived back in the City of Light, we were drenched in the obscure mist once again.
Lucais categorically refused to explain why his city was enveloped in a perpetual blanket of cloud, but if I could prove that a crumbling palace was hiding underneath it, perhaps he would start taking my questions seriously.
Or perhaps I would start asking other people.
Logic told me he was overselling his own abilities or he was leaving bits and pieces out of his story because something didn’t add up.
Lucais had a history of lying by omission and painting pretty, counterfeit pictures.
For that reason alone, I couldn’t keep myself from wondering how much of his supposedly unparalleled strength and power had already been expended, and if he was ever able to rest long enough to recoup that energy.
Is magic debt a thing?
Can a High King not have limits?
He does. He must .
I would find them—and soon, because I was running out of time.
A few steps further, and my fingers curled around a chunk of damaged stone. My chest pulled tight, and I hesitated for a single heartbeat, frozen in place against the wall.
When I recovered my hand, dust coated my skin.
Tentatively, I poked it with a finger, then gently swept my palm over it.
The surface felt abrasive, and when I slid my hand further along, I heard the brittle crunch as the part of the wall I was holding broke off and tumbled to the ground behind me with a heavy, dull thud.
Yelping, I jumped backwards, momentarily confused by the sounds and afraid that something was going to land on my head.
It was a reflex born of self-preservation and buried in recklessness.
By the time I realised what had happened, it was too late.
The fog instantaneously filled the space between the palace and my outstretched hands, and I was completely disconcerted.
Did I twist when I moved away from the wall? Which direction should I be facing now?
I took a cautious step forward, bending at the waist to give more reach to my hands, but there was only air slipping through my fingers.
Turning slightly, I repeated the action until I was confident that I’d completed a full circle.
Each time, I stepped into empty space, and my hands found a cool grasp on a big handful of absolutely nothing .
The beat of my heart was a stutter in my chest, the blood flow bordering on painful as I succumbed to an instinctive wave of panic. All of my senses went onto high alert.
With fog so prevalent, I couldn’t study the landscape around the palace.
For all I knew, it could be resting on a cliffside, the cusp of a volcano, or surrounded by a moat filled with crocodiles and sharks.
My steps were loaded with danger, the pressure of my body weight on the ground like a finger on the trigger of a handgun aimed at my head.
Breathe, I instructed myself.
With great trepidation and measured breaths, I lowered myself to my hands and knees.
The ground was so soft my knees sank into it, moisture seeping through my clothes from the grass blades and biting into my skin with an ice-cold touch.
Dirt stuffed itself beneath my fingernails as I gripped the ground for stability and began to crawl, feeling ahead with my hands for any hazards.
I imagined that, if the fog miraculously cleared, I would have looked quite the fool.
The fog didn’t clear, though.
By the time the ground fell away from my extended hand, I had probably been crawling around for at least ten minutes, and my fingertips were numbed by the icy mud.
It threw my judgement well off base. The fear of falling, as my outstretched hands missed the ground, jolted me forwards until suddenly the grass and mud were ripped out from under me like a magic carpet that tipped me down a treacherous rabbit hole.
My stomach flipped and squealed and roiled as I fell, and then—
“ Oof! ”
I landed with a hard thud on an unwelcoming floor, and the breath whooshed out of my lungs with a short, hoarse, unintelligible cry of surprise.
Even more surprising than my harsh, abrupt landing was the lack of fog when I opened my eyes.
Raising my head to check my surroundings, my eyebrows shot skywards at finding the air clear—although it was dark and flecked with transparent clouds of dust, stirred by my inelegant arrival.
I was inside the palace again, and everything was broken.
Where I sat, the room had been destroyed, its remnants spanning around me like the interior of a crater in the earth.
It was as if the hand of the divine had reached down from the sky and scooped everything out—floors, ceilings, walls, and doorways from the ground to the rooftop.
Furniture and paintings and broken mirrors lay discarded in uneven pieces around me, coated in dust and cobwebs.
About a floor above me, there was a gaping hole in the wall. It was positioned where a new landing should have been on the remnants of a decomposing staircase. The fog reappeared, plugging the gap as if a doorway had taken physical form out of the clouds lingering outside.
I fell from there.
Some of the mist wafted within the boundary of the damage, a faint whisper of vapour shaped like exceptionally long, wandering fingers gripping onto the roughened stonework collapsing in that part of the palace.
As a deep feeling of dread settled in my belly, my eyes skated across the edges of the decrepit wing, searching for another way out. The entire section was corroded, all entry and exit points sealed off as far as my widened eyes could see.
Columns and pillars had collapsed on each other, criss-crossing over the chasm between walls as the cavernous space cascaded up in ruin towards the heavens.
The bone-white stonework was holding each empty floor at bay—a skeleton serving to prevent further disintegration against gravity.
I couldn’t even tell if there was a ceiling left at the very top or simply another makeshift reparation born of fog.
Nothing was secured.
At any moment, part of the structure could come tumbling down, even where I sat stranded in the middle of the floor with chunks and slabs of stone littered around me.
If I didn’t know any better, I’d have thought perhaps I was in a construction zone, but Lucais wasn’t renovating.
The entire area was so fragile that it had been cordoned off and condemned.
And guarded.
“The fog is an enchantment,” I realised out loud. I was right, but it had never felt so wrong. “ That’s why the palace doesn’t have one. It’s in the fog!”
“You’re not supposed to be down here.”
Clamping my hand over my mouth to suppress a scream, I spun around, flipping my position so I was sitting on my knees. “Lucais,” I gasped.
He emerged from the shadows and dust like a creature of nightmares.
Lucais’s blond hair shone nearly white in the grey light, his skin radiating an ethereal glow that put holy artefacts to shame, and the look on his face was one of pure, uninspired devastation. Hands in his pockets, he didn’t smile at me—not even with his eyes. I bit back the desire to cringe.
“Are you happy now?”
Carefully, I climbed to my feet, transferring the thick layer of dirt and powder from my hands to the fabric of my pants. “I don’t understand what you mean.”
He gestured to the damaged space around us as he moved closer, his presence alone enough to cause an atmospheric shift.
Debris clattered to the ground somewhere in the hollowed-out chamber, and a fierce shudder gripped the skin between my shoulder blades.
I tried to steel myself against it, but it was no use; it rippled through me while Lucais stalked over.
I caught the slight narrowing of his gaze as he watched.