39. Never Eleven #3
“What?” I spat, surprise sharpening my tone. Wrenlock had mentioned that Lucais was the youngest High King in Faerie’s history, but he hadn’t given me an exact age. “When was your coronation?”
“Oh, that’s a damning question.” He forced a humourless laugh.
“Auralie, I can tell you with complete certainty that you are not responsible for the tragedy that took your brother’s life—magically or otherwise—because I am responsible for the tragedy that took the life of the High King before me.
I know what it looks like to be the guilty party and you are not it. ”
“Wrenlock mentioned you were a boy when you came into your full power.”
Lucais snickered. “A boy, sure. I was born the day that my predecessor was crowned High King—I believe it was during the ceremony, in fact—and the thing about our hierarchy is that the existing ruler feels the moment that their successor is born.” His tone was scathing, a rollercoaster of animation and cynicism wrapped in a velvet voice.
“We’re supposed to know, like some kind of psychic link triggers a countdown to your approaching expiry date.
The minute the poor bastard was crowned, he felt my presence and knew that his time in power was severely limited.
He spent his entire year ruling Faerie marking off the hours until I was ready to take his place. ”
“So you really have been pissing people off since birth,” I muttered.
He bit my hip bone playfully. “Rulers in Faerie generally die at the end of their reign, which makes it so much worse. It’s a pride thing as much as anything, but the severance of our connection to the land is said to be so intense that it strips us of the will to live.
There are not many ancient rulers left, if the myths are true and any survived at all, because they either died in extenuating circumstances or they were dethroned and decided to fade away in some distant corner of the world. ”
“So what happened to the last High King?”
He hummed against my waist, and the vibrations warmed me from head to toe, warding off the chill that had numbed the better part of my body since we’d stormed out into the courtyard.
“Well, he spent his year in power keeping us out of the Dragon War, so I inherited a realm of peace and prosperity—at least, on the surface—but he only made it until I was about eighteen months old. I was a baby when my parents had to move us into the palace in Caeludor because the pull of the crown was so strong.”
“Like me and the Court of Darkness?” I questioned, cringing as I tried to refrain from picturing the crown luring a child into an open fireplace.
“Very much so,” he agreed. “The problem is that you can’t publicly crown a fucking toddler as the High King of Faerie, so my parents and the old High King conspired to hide it until I was deemed old enough.
Apparently, the crown didn’t like that idea.
It started to reject him, and no matter where they hid it, or how they guarded it, or what they did to keep me away from it—I guess they thought it was for my safety, because an infant High King is a very vulnerable High King—they never succeeded in keeping us apart.
Every time they lost sight of me, they knew they would find me in the same room as the crown, playing with it like a fucking toy. ”
“So then what happened?” I pressed, intrigued and a little bit terrified.
“Well, bookworm, I suppose that you could say I killed him.”
I rolled my eyes. “You did not.”
“At the very least, I drove him to suicide,” he insisted.
“The three of them worked extremely hard to keep up appearances in front of the realm, but they suffered through years of lies and secrecy and near misses. The whole time, the old High King was being actively rejected by a power that my people believe comes directly from the High Mother herself, and he was fighting the natural urge to give up. I was barely able to walk when he died. Then, it was all over.”
“That’s it?” I asked, squinting into the mist. “He dropped dead?”
“He hanged himself from the chandelier in the palace entryway,” Lucais informed me.
A chill snaked down my spine, vicious and slippery.
“He did his best for as long as he could, but then he left me on my own when it became too much, giving everyone who knew the truth no choice but to reveal it to the rest of Faerie and face the consequences without him. Even though the circumstances were very different, I suppose I was never eleven either.”
“That is so morbid…” I felt the splatters of his confession the same way he had felt mine, a sticky and dark residue that may never wash off once it had been shared. “Who was the old High King? Was he from the Court of Light, too?”
Lucais shook his head, burrowing his nose beneath my shirt and brushing it against my skin. “No. Last rule belonged to the Court of Fire. His name was Hugo. There’s a portrait of him somewhere in the palace, along with all of the others.”
I frowned. “Is that why all of the candles in the palace have had their wicks pulled out?”
“They have?” The High King’s head reared back, and he gave me an eccentric look as he rose to stand, keeping his hands on my hips.
“I didn’t realise. I never need to look at them.
” Lucais shrugged one shoulder, gaze drifting beyond me as he mulled it over.
“Maybe it was one of the staff marking his death or my transition to power.” He pushed his lower lip out, thoughtful. “Maybe Hugo did it before he died.”
“It’s only the ones that were left behind in each room,” I clarified. “Because the candles you used last night from the storage room were perfectly normal.”
Lucais arched one golden eyebrow skeptically. “In that case, it was probably my mother,” he muttered. “She was overprotective like that. You know, before she became a deranged killer.”
Snaking my arms around his waist, I leaned into him, resting my head against his chest and letting a breath of calm wash over me in his embrace.
Lucais adjusted his arms so he was cradling my head with one hand and firmly pressing my torso against his with the other.
We stayed like that for a long time, surrendering to each other in the courtyard, hidden within the fog.
Eventually, I spoke again. “What are we going to do about your mother?”
I felt him smile against my hair as he pressed a kiss to the top of my head. “What are we going to do about that block in your head?”
I groaned into his chest. “I have to kill it, don’t I?”
He hummed his agreement against my hair, and I realised that he’d figure it out on his own. I wanted to ask if he’d sifted through my memories to find it, but I decided that it wasn’t worth offending him with the question when I preferred not to know the answer.
“Fine,” I grumbled. “I’ll do it.”
I’ll kill the loudest voice inside of my head.
The High King made a low, satisfied sound in the back of his throat and peppered the top of my head with kisses. “That’s my perfect girl.”
When we disentangled our arms from each other and he stepped back from me, the devilish grin on his face could have sent me to my knees. His eyes were positively glowing with pride and I became aware that I wasn’t getting through it without some of his theatrics.
As if on cue, Lucais bowed, and the fog began to clear away from the courtyard, revealing a grand design of silvery grey stonework with carvings of gargoyles and sharp turrets.
I squinted at the sky and found little flags with the Court of Light’s insignia flapping in the breeze high above us, too far up to be witnessed through the usual settlement of fog.
The post Lucais had leaned up against was a flagpole, but the flag hadn’t been raised.
I surveyed the courtyard as a whole, open space, and found that it was larger than I’d initially thought.
We were dwarfed by the palace heights, encompassed by a curtain wall with high-placed windows.
Turning around in a slow circle, I watched Lucais’s power chase the last of the fog away from the corners of our space, like we were in the middle of a snowglobe.
The white clouds met along the outskirts, remaining in place a few metres above our heads and the rest of the palace.
“Why do you—” I started to ask, but my question snapped in half when my eyes fell upon the last of the retreating clouds.
The mist cleared around my father, bound and gagged, on his knees in the middle of the bailey.