30. Wrathful Sorrow
thirty
Wrathful Sorrow
I stared up at the Court of Darkness in a fit of silent rage.
Hatred filled my lungs with every breath. I was so angry with it for being incorporeal. For not being something I could punch or hit with things.
Feverish gasps filled my lungs with the smell of dusty red clay and the moisture gathering in the atmosphere from the electrical storm raging on above me.
The dark maze had gone back to the way it was when we first arrived, the wisps of shadow sticking to the boundary line of the Court, a solid wall swaying only gently in the light, frosty breeze.
I wanted to kill the shadows. I wanted to chase them and hold them down while I beat the living fuck out of them for what they’d shown me, for what they’d put me through, for even dragging me in there in the first place—
Before I knew what I was doing, I released an almighty scream at the Court of Darkness, pouring my rage out into the space between us.
When my lungs ran out of air, the sound turned into a quiet sob that wracked my chest with sharp, tight flashes of pain as my body called out for oxygen again.
I hauled a gasp of air into my mouth and swallowed it down painfully, my shoulders rocking with each silent cry of wrathful sorrow.
I let it run its course, the shadows watching me from afar like they would deny everything and take their sins to their graves, and then I turned my back on them.
Blythe and the Court of Darkness can burn in hell.
Lucais and Wrenlock were executing caenim. Their movements were less urgent and more routine as they combed through the Ruins a mile or so away from us.
Chunks of black and grey littered the ground—a graveyard of dead beasts. There were so many carcasses heaped on top of one another in piles, reminding me of the grisly visions I’d been forced to watch of the world dying against my will.
The smell was putrid, but faint, dwindling as life was violently wrested out of the very last of their kin. I couldn’t count how many were left, let alone how many had been killed, but my estimate was high.
I felt a pinch in my stomach when I thought of Lucais being forced into committing so much violence on the same day. He must have been exhausted.
“Are you hurt?”
Gazing up into the High Lady’s malachite-splattered face, I tried to search for my voice to reply, but it had shredded my throat, and I couldn’t get the words out. I simply shook my head at her instead.
Morgoya tucked a strand of her dark hair behind one ear, dripping with fresh red blood from where her earlobe had been sliced in half.
There was a deep cut across the side of her neck that extended down to her collarbone.
It was already clotting, but dark bruises had formed on her ghostly white skin across her throat and on her temple.
Indentations like human bite marks were present as if the creature had bitten her with the teeth in its eyes.
She was missing an earring; her hair was matted to the top of her head and the sides of her face with dirt and gore.
Noticing the panic flaring in my eyes, she shrugged delicately—and then winced as if the movement hurt her.
“Close call,” she told me softly. “Batre pulled it off me before it could do any real damage. I’ll see a healer, and they’ll put me back to rights.”
In a daze, I looked around for Batre and found that she was lying on her side near me. She was awake, alert, and appeared to be unharmed, but visibly exhausted.
Panting wildly, her chest heaved, her cleavage nearly spilling out of her dress with each breath.
While the High Lady had worn a set of fighting leathers, her girlfriend hadn’t changed out of her usual green velvet dress, complete with a petticoat beneath her skirt and a waist trainer around her bodice.
Accentuating her large, round curves, it matched both the colour of Morgoya’s eyes and the ribbons in the long twin braids that Batre wore in her hair.
But it was even more ill-fitted for battling caenim than my simple loose pants, shirt, and overcoat.
“Are you alright?” I mouthed to her. My lips felt dry and cracked, my tongue and the roof of my mouth like cotton.
She nodded. Dirt was smeared all across her face. “You?” she mouthed back.
I hesitated.
If Batre was okay after fighting the caenim head-on and rescuing the love of her life before a missing earlobe became a missing head, then it didn’t seem fair for me to be anything other than fine myself.
Except that I wasn’t okay. I wasn’t even close to being okay.
After what I had just been through, I didn’t think I’d ever truly be okay again.
All going well, I’d die long before the world was brought to its knees and executed by the end of everything, but I didn’t know how I could be expected to survive the sight of it.
The knowledge . The blame .
A sharp twinge in my back caused me to whimper as I struggled to right myself and sit up. Morgoya reached out to help me, her thin arms possessing a considerable amount of strength as she supported my spine—which felt like it had been turned to jelly.
Tears sprang to my eyes again, blotting out my vision as I held each of my arms in front of me and pushed back my sleeves to examine my skin for cuts and bite marks left by the sinister forces inside the maze.
“What are you looking at?” Morgoya murmured.
My mouth watered, filled with a sour taste, and my head swam as I tried to choke the words up.
It felt like someone had fixed a lasso around my lungs, and even the slightest effort to bring in and dispel fresh air became a mammoth task with variable success rates. The burn in my throat was horrific.
“Proof,” I said, though I wasn’t sure I’d managed to actually utter a single sound.
Scrubbing the tears away from my eyes with my hands, I glimpsed my clear, pale skin before my arms dropped back to my sides, and my gaze landed on the vines wrapped around my ankles. Before I could react, Morgoya stroked a soothing hand down my back.
“It’s okay,” she whispered. “Batre pulled you out.”
Batre was the one who yanked me out of the maze?
Grunting, she pushed herself up into a sitting position as well, and I turned in time to catch her curl one hand into a fist. In synchrony, the vines unfurled from my ankles before withdrawing into Batre’s sleeves.
“How the fuck did you do that?” I asked, not even caring how rude it sounded. I hadn’t meant to lose my manners, but they were snowed in under the shock on my face. The feeling sizzled beneath my skin, sick and uneasy, because frankly—
How in the fuck had she done that?
“I’m from the Court of Earth,” she admitted in a low voice. Her smile was flat. “I was born there. Most of my family still lives there, actually. I’m one of fifteen children who were born into a long-standing bloodline of earth faeries.”
When my jaw fell open with an audible click, she shrugged.
“My parents are soulmates, and they’re very old. Truthfully, most earth faeries are quite old.” Brushing dust from her palms, she grunted softly, and I couldn’t discern the meaning behind her inflection when she added, “They’re an old, proud nation.”
I blinked in stupefaction, but with a main city called Immorta , I supposed it wasn’t surprising.
“I don’t…” I trailed off, eyes straying to where Lucais and Wrenlock were visible in the distance.
They were disposing of the caenim executioner-style; the latter held the beasts up while the former swiped his sword in a sideways motion that made it look very much like he was slitting their throats.
I had the momentary thought that they had managed to maim all of their attackers during the fight, and since it had calmed down, they were going back and ensuring that all of them were actually dead.
I still felt Lucais’s mental hand around mine, the dial tone beeping quietly again on the phone line between us, waiting for someone to punch in the right numbers.
“You live in the Court of Light.”
“I will live wherever Morgoya lives,” Batre replied simply, and then she smiled in earnest. “You don’t have to live in your own Court. Many High Fae travel, work, and live in different Courts. It’s just not as common as it is in Caeludor, for example.”
“Right.” My head was throbbing, the pulse in my brain enough to drive a psychiatrist insane.
“I didn’t know that.” I cleared my throat, meeting her eyes despite the raw, skull-penetrating ache that was begging me to close my eyelids and allow them to coax me into an eternal sleep.
Or as close to it as I could reasonably get. “Thank you for saving my life.”
Batre’s long, thin lashes fluttered. “I would do it again and again, Aura. I’m just glad that I could pull you out.
Lucais was trying everything.” She looked over to the High King and his Hand.
“I almost thought he would end up tearing into the dark like it was a real, living thing with his bare hands. He rained light down on the shadows like bullets from a machine gun and sent waves of it crashing into the wall. He even sent something like a sky-dragon at it. It was made of light and breathing light like fire. I’ve never seen anything quite like it before, but the shadows predicted every move he made and deflected as if it were light fighting light. It was so…”
“Strange,” Morgoya finished for her, drawing my attention back to her face.
The wound on her ear had clotted, but she’d definitely need to see a healer and take a long, hot bath to clear off the caenim gunk that had coated her from head to toe.
“It’s more than being two sides of the same coin.
That wall is totally resistant to light.
It played with the sky-dragon like it was a puppy. ”
I swallowed. “Which means I’m not a light faerie. Which means that my father definitely isn’t a light faerie, either.”