25. Auralie Starfire
twenty-five
Auralie Starfire
W e stepped out of the portal into pouring rain.
Cringing, I ducked my head beneath my hand and flicked my gaze towards the sky.
Freezing cold droplets of heavy rain pelted against my shoulders and the top of my head, seeping into my scalp and trickling down the back of my neck.
In an instant, my dress was saturated, clinging to my body like plastic wrap.
There wasn’t a huge difference between the swarms of fog and the clusters of rainclouds—bar the excessive precipitation—and the typical sounds of a storm were absent.
No warning thunder, no incandescent lightning.
It hadn’t been raining when we slipped through the portal, which meant it wasn’t a normal storm.
Something cold and slippery dropped from my chest down into my stomach, triggering a ripple effect of disquiet to scatter across my insides. His mood swings.
Searching for a place in the muddied earth, I staggered a few steps forward while gravity settled around me like a second skin. The portal’s magic felt tacky and dirty, but the rain couldn’t wash it away.
It couldn’t cleanse the touch or the lingering taste of the Malum who had created it by syphoning evanescent power from the gateways into Faerie—not the haunted glint in her shallow eyes, not the imprint of her words upon my brain.
Give her to me, or Faerie will burn.
A full-body shudder was halfway through assaulting my skeleton when Lucais tossed his coat over the top of my head, startling me into stillness.
The interior lining was slightly damp, but the outer layer of his coat was resistant to the torrential rain and provided some degree of shelter, allowing me to fully open my eyes without raindrops blurring my vision.
Parting my lips to speak, I twisted towards him, but all I accomplished was to obtain a mouth half-full of the water slipping down my cheeks from my soaked hair.
The High King put one of his hands on each of my arms and abruptly walked me backwards by three steps before shoving me away from him—
—and straight into Wrenlock’s waiting arms.
The force he used was armed with purposeful restraint and care, but the action was so unexpected and completed with such speed that my heart took a swan dive inside my chest. I almost choked on my next gasp of air as the breath lodged in my throat like a stone.
Wrenlock was already turning me around to face him, fingers gripping me tightly, but I scrambled back, spinning like a top as I pushed him away and searched for Lucais’s luminescent hair in the darkness and pouring rain.
Hands reaching for him, the coat he’d given me slipped from my head as I skipped a few clumsy steps forward, and I barely caught the last trace of him in a glance as he evanesced from the hillside in a fit of tumultuous, heartbroken shadow and fog.
Lucais!
My call was futile, even mind-to-mind.
He was gone.
Coat in hand, Wrenlock stepped towards me. The material was soaked through and covered in mud, but I took it from him regardless and clutched the garment to my chest as the Hand to the High King wrapped me in his burning hot embrace and whisked me out of the unrelenting downpour.
I didn’t know why, but I had expected—no, I had hoped —to find Lucais in the palace when we arrived back there.
Even so, part of me was not surprised at all to discover that he was nowhere to be found.
Morgoya and Batre were waiting for us by the fireplace in the dining room. It wasn’t until I noticed their damp hair that I realised they had been standing on the hillside with Wrenlock when Lucais and I exited the portal.
Concern was slathered over their features. Morgoya locked eyes with me; the green of her irises shone like a coral reef beneath tears she hadn’t blinked free yet.
A sob hitched in my throat, finally breaking away from my chest when I rushed into her open arms. She squeezed me tightly, very softly patting the back of my rain-flattened hair as tears spilled down my cheeks.
“He’s at the bank,” she murmured.
Choking down my escalating horror, I forced my mind into the present. “The bank?”
“The Memory Bank,” she clarified for me.
Jerking my head back, I frowned and muttered, “What?”
Batre appeared at our side with a fluffy white towel in hand.
Smiling sympathetically, she gestured to my hair and began dabbing at the ends, which were curling around my collarbone and leaking rainwater like a faucet that hadn’t been turned off properly.
Angling my head for her, I quickly realised that I had run straight to Morgoya as if all was forgiven.
And she’d let me.
I chewed on my lower lip.
Maybe it is forgiven. Can it be that simple?
“You’ll notice that faeries don’t trade in currency the way that you’re used to doing in the human world,” Batre explained.
“Money—at least, the way that you know it—is a concept that was created after the Gift War as a way for humans to continue trading without their access to magic. Here, in Faerie, we use memories.”
Blinking rapidly, I reached up to take ownership of the towel and continued to dry certain parts of my hair and dress that were creating puddles on the floor around my feet.
Wrenlock knelt in front of the roaring hearth, the fire crackling and spitting at him like it recognised his proximity, and warmed his hands by it. He shook off the excess water in his curly hair before he looked up at me, bracing a forearm across one knee.
“A memory in its purest form is too much for a human to bear,” he began.
There was a grave, foreboding edge to his voice that disturbed something deep inside of me.
He took a long breath. “You can tolerate magic in very small doses—mostly in myth, legend, stories—but it is not compatible with your minds and bodies by default.” His mouth twisted in a grimace, and he quickly added, “No offence. I know it wasn’t you specifically who relinquished your claim to magic during the war, but the consequences remain the same.
You reject magic, and magic starts to reject you. ”
Iron in the blood, I thought as I nodded to convey my understanding.
Morgoya took the damp towel from my hands and offered me a thick, woollen blanket in its place. I accepted it, wrapping the length around myself as Batre nudged me towards a plush armchair near the fire.
“The faces on your financial notes are a glamour of your Kings and Queens to cover up the faces you are really trading in,” Morgoya elaborated. “Memories hold a great deal of power, so with each transaction, that is the true value being exchanged.”
My eyebrows, still slightly damp, rose towards the ceiling. “I don’t think I understand a word of what you just said. You cannot possibly deal in memories. We cannot possibly deal in memories. They’re memories .”
The High Lady gave a blasé shrug. “Where do all the memories go, Aura? The ones you can’t recall but surely must have because you lived a life full of infinite moments. Once you forget about them, where do they go?”
“I…” My lips parted, closed, and then split apart again.
“They disappear, don’t they?” I glanced between the three High Fae, trying to discern the likelihood of the conversation being a joke or some new type of faerie trick.
Their expressions were dispassionate—and, worse than that, they were patient as they waited for me to process and accept what was surely a fable.
“Impossible,” Batre informed me softly. “They don’t disappear. They don’t die. Haven’t you ever remembered something that someone else forgot? Or misremembered something?”
My mouth twisted. “Like the Mandela Effect?”
“That’s a good example.” Morgoya perched on the arm of the couch directly opposite the fireplace. “It’s the phenomenon created when a person accidentally trades with their own memory more than once, or when a widely remembered event is traded off by too many people, effectively distorting it.”
“You can trade in other people’s memories?” I started to shake my head. “That’s insane. Isn’t that unethical—”
“People share memories of things all the time, Aura,” the High Lady interjected.
“We do so quite harmlessly in passing, which in turn creates duplicates, and once we run out of space in our own heads—and when we’ve inevitably created new memories upon which we place a greater value—the other memories are deposited in the Memory Bank.
“You might call it forgetting because humans no longer have access to the magical properties required to trade in these things with mindful intent and purpose,” she went on, “but the High Fae retain a sense of awareness that certain moments have been stored away in the Memory Bank. Perhaps we recall the time of the event, but the details have been banked. As High Fae, we rarely need to complete trades like this because we have magic where you require money, but if we do so happen to require the use of a particularly powerful memory, we can make a withdrawal.”
“What about people who forget? Amnesia? Alzheimer’s? You can’t tell me they do that on purpose.”
Morgoya winced. “No. They don’t. In cases like that, the memories are stolen—but how and by whom is a whole other conversation entirely.”
My head was spinning.
It wasn’t simply the cold chill from becoming soaked with rainwater under a sudden downpour—or even the harrowing threats from conversing with Lucais’s mother inside of a portal trying to break through the High King’s wards—that made me begin to shiver.
The revelation that we traded in memories without realising it was perplexing, scary, and almost comprehendible.
Children always seemed to remember things adults had forgotten.
Brynn constantly reminded me of promises I’d made that I hadn’t yet fulfilled, and sometimes, it frustrated me to no end because she delivered her reminders with absolutely no consideration for the burden of monetary value and adult responsibilities.