40. The Mad High King
forty
The Mad High King
M y violent fantasies used to make me question myself.
Is this psychopathy? What if nobody can fix what’s broken inside of my head?
I would argue against my own anger until I felt guilty for being angry in the first place, until I was torn in half between feeling righteous and sinful on any given day, and until I was the perfect canvas for a man like my father to play pretend at being powerful.
He wasn’t powerful anymore.
And yet, I still wanted to kill him.
The man on his knees before me lifted his head as if summoned by my train of thought.
His face was creased with frown lines, smeared with dirt and grime, but his blue eyes were as cool and clear as I’d always remembered.
I had spent weeks of my childhood staring into them with fabricated love, desperately trying to convince myself that we were the same, that I saw something alive in them when he stared back at me.
I hadn’t. I never did, I never would, and part of me had always known it wasn’t my fault—but that part of me had been hanging on by a thread for a very long time.
“He’s weakened and unarmed,” I said, looking up at Lucais.
The High King was leaning against the flagpole, casually watching on as I circled my father like a shark and weighed up my options. When I spoke, he arched one brow and replied, “So?”
“So isn’t it a little redundant now? He can’t hurt me anymore.”
Catching on to the situation he was in at long last, my father began to squirm, and a series of alarmed noises came from his mouth, muffled by the gag. I glanced down to shush him harshly and caught the flash of hatred in his eyes when I did—which didn’t help his case.
Lucais pushed off the flagpole and sauntered over to us, completely ignoring my father and his pointless, incoherent pleas for assistance.
Placing his hands on either side of my head with his fingertips on my temples, he bent down until we were eye to eye.
“Can’t he?” he disputed. “Isn’t it harder to heal the damage when the bastard who caused it is still alive and actively kicking you? ”
My father screamed into the gag.
“For the love of—” I broke off with a sigh and tore my eyes away from the High King, reaching down to undo the dirty fabric that was stuffed into my father’s mouth and tied tightly around the back of his head.
“What could you possibly have to say right now?” I demanded, wincing as I helped him spit out the rest of the linen, wet with his saliva.
“You fucking bitch —”
In a split second, my father’s head smacked into the cobblestone with a sound that made my stomach somersault. Blood trickled from his temple inside of a large, red welt as he lay on his back with Lucais’s boot pressing down on his throat, though I’d hardly caught the flash of his movements.
“That was the wrong thing to say,” the High King snarled.
He must have increased the pressure of his foot because my father’s face began to turn bright red all over, and a hissing sound escaped from his otherwise silent, open mouth.
“Mind your fucking manners when you speak to her, or the next thing that comes out of your mouth will be the laces of the boot I jam down your throat.”
My father remained deathly quiet, and Lucais glanced towards me for permission to let him go.
Head spinning, I nodded slowly.
My father coughed and spluttered, rolling onto his side as if that would help clear his airways.
Wheezing, he gazed up at me, and the hatred in his eyes was replaced by something I’d never seen before.
I would have liked it to have looked more like regret, but that wasn’t even close, and I was so disappointed that my shoulders slumped.
Even disarmed on the ground before me, the man who had raised me to withdraw into myself and cower from him still had the power to leech all the feeling and strength from my bones with a single word or a look. I shook my head, stumbling backwards.
“I can’t do it.”
“Yes, you can.”
“I can’t.”
“Are you weak, too?” Lucais’s voice was soft in my ear as he moved to stand behind me.
“Weak men make it their mission to force you into feeling small so they can feel powerful. They confuse being bigger with being better. Do you want this world to keep happening to you, or do you want to start happening to it ?” He held me firmly in place with his chest pressed into my back and his chin resting over my shoulder.
“You can do it, Aura. You can do anything you want.” His lips grazed the shell of my ear.
“You happened to me without even trying. You’ve destroyed me without so much as a conscious thought, and I’ll never get over it.
I haven’t been the same since the day I learned your name, since you branded yourself on me and I became your possession. ”
A shiver skittered down my nape as Lucais tucked a loose strand of my hair behind my ear and slipped his free hand into mine, dangling limply at my side.
I felt the outline of something cool and hard like steel warming between our fingers, but I was too mesmerised by my father’s snakelike gaze to look down and see what it was.
“You own me, Aura.” The High King’s voice was low and rough, stoking a fire in places that had never felt warmth.
“Mind.” He trailed his lips up the side of my neck.
“Body.” He kissed the corner of my jaw. “Soul.” His nose brushed the hollow beneath my ear.
“Kingdom.” He pressed his mouth against my temple. “Crown.”
Be still my beating heart.
My fingers curled around the item between our hands involuntarily as Lucais urged me to take possession of it, and I felt some of my strength returning as I clutched the weapon like a liferope.
“I will never be rid of the imprint of you,” he went on in a husky murmur.
“You think you can do that to the most powerful man in the entire world—to the High King of Faerie—but not the spineless, pathetic louse who bullied you for your entire life?” Lucais gently lifted my arm, placing his mouth against the bare skin of my wrist. He angled the hand I was using to clutch the dagger into position to stab the blade in a downwards thrust over my shoulder.
I was clay in his hands, totally under his spell as he moulded me into a weapon, but I started to tremble as he guided my body through the action, moving us in slow motion with his hand over mine.
“Open your eyes, bookworm. Your nightmares are over. You never need to hold back or hide again.”
A half-laugh, half-sob tumbled out of my chest as we paused with the dagger pointed down at my father’s body, lying stiffly on the ground, glaring up at us.
I’d shown Lucais all of my weaknesses, and he was still standing behind me. He was still seeking out my touch, stroking his fingers up and down my free arm, the fabric of his shirt on my body soft and thin between us. He wasn’t ashamed or scared—
“Wait.” I swallowed, trying to suppress the unsteadiness in my voice. “I need you to clear something up once and for all, please.”
His voice was a whisper, his breath sweet and heady. “Anything.”
“The fog.”
“I already told you about the fog.”
“It’s concealing the damage to the palace, I know.” Twisting around in his arms until he released me, I stepped away, the weapon in a tentative grasp at my side. “But you cleared it away from the courtyard, so you’re obviously in control of it. Why submerge the entire city?”
Lucais’s mouth pulled to one side as he debated, little creases forming around the corners of his eyes. He clicked his tongue. “You remember when I told you that the thing in the lapsus was using me as some kind of conduit?”
“Yes.”
He pulled a sheepish face and scratched the back of his neck. “Well, it’s been poisoning the city in its free time. I’m not a willing participant, but I can’t seem to stop it, either. The most I’ve been able to do is to reduce the severity of the impact and slow the progression.”
“The palace is dying?” I gasped, glancing ruefully towards the grey stonework and towering spires behind him.
“Not the palace.” The High King’s throat bobbed. “It’s the whole of Caeludor. I’m masking it with a very strong glamour at the moment, redirecting the worst of the damage back into the palace, which is…why the fog has to be all-consuming.”
I blinked into the empty space between us. “What if you stopped masking it? How much of the palace would be left?”
“I won’t.”
“But if you did?”
Lucais grimaced, wrestling with his natural urge to conceal the truth.
I wasn’t sure if he was being more open with his expressions around me or if I was getting better at reading them.
“The entire city would fall to pieces,” he admitted in a hollow voice, waving at it half-heartedly.
“Buildings would collapse. Homes and businesses would disappear. Playgrounds would crumble. That sort of thing.”
My eyebrows shoved together. I’d been through the city multiple times, and it was always full of faeries living, working, and playing.
The palace, on the other hand, was devoid of life more often than not, so it made sense that nobody had really noticed the crumbling wing. But for the city to be disintegrating…
“How do they not know something is wrong?”
“Oh, they do. Everyone thinks that the fog is part of the Oracle’s prophecy,” he revealed, dropping his eyes to the ground between us. “They think that it’s mood related, that I’ve been pining for you since I first glimpsed you inside of the Oracle.”
The puzzle pieces came crashing down in front of me like bricks falling from a disintegrating wall, and my stomach dropped with them. “ That’s why you glamoured me?”
“Yes, so you’d best get a wriggle on with dismantling your block.” Lucais gave me a pointed look, nodding his head towards his prisoner, and then chased it with a handsome grin.
“How long has the city been submerged in fog?”
“Mmm. What is it, like, four or five months now?”