27. You Sound Surprised, Bookworm
twenty-seven
You Sound Surprised, Bookworm
A s if travelling through thin air on the magic of the wind was not discomfiting enough alone, the High Fae simply had to insist upon doing it on horseback, too.
While I had suspected that it was a practice they implemented, it was no less disturbing to experience it for myself.
Elera whinnied gleefully as she evanesced to a completely different section of Faerie, her hooves slamming into the hard dirt with loud clomps, kicking up a small cloud of dust in her wake.
The impact jolted me with such force that I would have gone flying from her back if Lucais didn’t have one arm firmly secured around my waist, holding me against him with the power of an airlock seal.
Gasping for breath, I choked on a mouthful of powdered dirt as the horned horse trotted in a circle, shaking her head and snorting while she waited for the others to join us.
There had been no debate over with whom I’d ride.
Elera had made that decision for us by coming to stand directly at my side at the stables while Lucais and I waited for Wrenlock, Morgoya, and Batre to lead out their own animals.
She had nudged my arm with her soft, furry muzzle in a borderline aggressive manner until Lucais hoisted me onto her back and swung up behind me.
It felt strangely comforting to ride her again, though I trusted her about as much as I did her High Fae companion.
In the human world, I’d spent a lot of time with horses at the farm my grandparents owned.
My mother used to send me there for week-long stays whenever my father came back—at least, before they sold it and moved into a retirement village across the country, closer to my mother’s half-brother—and I’d found comfort in the calm and steady presence of the horses.
Elera and I hadn’t gotten off on the right foot or the right hoof.
Admittedly, her horns had startled me, and the High King’s joke about devouring me didn’t help, either.
Nor did the fact that, while I’d spent a lot of time around horses, learning how to care for them when I was much younger, I’d never spent much time learning to ride them for fear of falling.
But Elera had exchanged a look with me when I tumbled out of the High King’s carriage on the outskirts of the city, and that look was part of the reason I decided to stay.
It was steeped in knowledge and forgiveness, and I didn’t argue at all when Lucais helped me climb onto her back.
Wrenlock and I hadn’t yet found the time—or privacy—to talk about what had happened in the hallway, and Lucais and I had been interrupted by the warning sirens before I had the chance to form a proper response to his demands and that ridiculously emboldened declaration of love.
Truthfully, I didn’t mind waiting to talk about it.
Mostly because I didn’t know what I was going to say or how I was going to phrase it, but also because I knew that neither of them were going to like it no matter what.
One way or another, it was temporary.
My time in Faerie was always going to be short-lived. I tried to rationalise my way around it, but I couldn’t outrun my responsibilities. I was delaying the inevitable the longer I stayed at the palace with Lucais and Wrenlock in Caeludor—and, deep down, I’d known all along that it wouldn’t last.
It couldn’t.
From every possible angle, I still had a feeling tightly woven around my heart, a pressure on my chest reminding me that I was trapped inside an hourglass, and the only way to survive would be to turn everything on its head.
Again and again and again.
Like I had been doing all of my life.
Lucais wouldn’t understand that, but Wrenlock might.
As if on cue, he appeared atop an absolutely beautiful black stallion who met the ground with grace as he landed, holding his head up high as he walked to stand near Elera.
His eyes were wide and bright, and one met mine with a youthful sense of curiosity before he hastily turned his head.
The two restless males were mirror images of one another—large, strong, and darkly handsome.
When Wrenlock reached down to stroke his neck, the stallion’s flesh quivered beneath the touch, and I noticed that he had no horns. None at all.
Morgoya and Batre materialised next, the former riding a palomino mare with two straight horns in the middle of her head, and the latter on a roan stallion with a single horn protruding from his forehead like the depiction of traditional unicorns I had seen pictures of as a child.
His colouring was an ashy blue-grey, but clear patches of pure grey formed around his eyes, horn, and muzzle.
As he walked beside Morgoya’s mare, an eye met mine like the much younger stallion’s had, but his gaze was filled with the wariness of a wise creature rather than the curiosity of a new one.
“What’s his name?” I called to Wrenlock, nodding to the proud black male beneath him.
“Ace,” he sang back, beaming as he patted the stallion’s neck again. He gestured to Morgoya’s horse as she came up beside him. “That’s Shande, and that old trooper is Lucky.”
The roan stallion beneath Batre snorted at the word old .
“When will Ace’s horns come in?” I wondered. He was obviously the youngest of all the horses. Unless… “Is he a unicorn too?”
I could have sworn Elera sighed. A heavy silence fell over our group. The mood plummeted like a boulder down a cliffside, and I was quite obviously the person who had pushed it.
“There are no horses in Faerie,” Lucais informed me in a soft voice. He clicked his tongue in a signal to Elera, and she began to walk.
Glancing back, I saw the others fall into step behind us in single file, their heads hanging heavy with dolorous expressions. I faced the front and wracked my brain to determine what I’d said or done wrong.
Bookworm. The High King’s voice was in my mind as we rode on, his tone gentle and brimming with warmth.
I immediately felt him all over me, from my head to my toes, and from the inside out.
Here’s another textbook history lesson for you.
Faerie only has unicorns, but Acey boy won’t grow any horns because he was born after the end of the Gift War.
Why? I dared to ask, though as soon as he had mentioned the war, I felt a sudden pinch in my stomach, suggesting it was better not to know.
Unicorn means one horn in the old language, he said .
The horn of a unicorn is filled with an extremely potent type of magic.
It has healing and regeneration properties, amongst other things, but they cannot be transferred.
A unicorn cannot use the power within their horn to heal others, only themselves—or whoever has possession of the horn.
So, during the Gift War, the humans realised they could harness those powers organically if they baked them into pills and stirred them into potions.
It allowed them to continue fighting against us, to take bold risks and chances, knowing they could heal their own if they made any fatal mistakes.
But they had to saw off the horns from the unicorns to do so. And so that’s exactly what they did.
My gaze became unseeing, locked in a straight line ahead of us. I felt the blood draining from my cheeks, and I clamped my lips together firmly as a mouthful of bile shot up the back of my throat. No.
They killed very few of them, considering the numbers, he went on.
The unicorns were kept awake and alert, restrained with ropes and chains because the horns had to be taken without any type of anesthetic, and then they were usually left alive.
Those who survived eventually grew their horns back.
As a defence mechanism, we think, the unicorns who were captured and maimed grew back an extra horn.
And then again, when those were stolen, until some became so deformed that there is no telling where one horn begins and another ends.
Sickly glimpses of the six unicorns pulling the High King’s carriage flashed before my eyes, their wildly tangled horns growing like sets of brambles.
Sharp blinks of pain stabbed at my stomach as my mind cycled through the numbers, trying to reconcile with how many times each of those horses—those unicorns —must have been tortured for their horns to grow back in such a state.
And Elera…
We cut her horns off twice ? The thought was out of my head and burrowing into Lucais’s mind through the bond before I could stop it.
Not you, but yes. You sound surprised, bookworm. But that was only the beginning for human beings, wasn’t it?
The truth was a cruel mistress.
I cringed, but the action only pressed me further back into the hard and unforgiving planes of the High King’s chest. Anger blazed beneath the surface of my skin, disgust as thick as ipecac, an emotion that became lodged in my throat because my heart did not want to digest it.
A world like mine—a world turned by the cogs of timeless and nescient regret, operated by a group of people who had given up their magic, only to spend the rest of eternity trying to replicate it in barbaric, bloodthirsty ways.
Shaking my head with nearly imperceptible movements, I forced myself to swallow it down. I’d been swallowing it down my whole life, after all. Why stop now?
Lucais stroked a reassuring thumb across my upper thigh, but an intrusive thought bloomed in my mind like a pitcher plant, and I wished that he would put his hand around my throat and squeeze until I blacked out.
Just until I fell into a sleep deep enough to forget the horrific truth I’d uncovered.
“No,” he whispered in my ear. His breath was a heady temptation, a sinful caress. “When I put my hand around your throat, you’re going to remember everything I’m doing to you while it’s there.”
“Get out of my head,” I commanded under my breath, digging my elbows into his arms for emphasis.
“You get out of mine first.”