40. The Mad High King #2
A memory tugged at the corners of my mind, but I couldn’t grasp it. Every time I extended my mental hand, it darted out of my reach like a kite caught in the winds of a cyclone. I shook my head, forcing myself back into the present moment.
“It’s only a matter of days or weeks now before my people realise that it’s been a ruse the entire time and they start to panic in earnest,” Lucais pointed out.
“I have no intention of relinquishing the enchantment over the city, but I’d say mass hysteria might pose a bit of an issue on that front. ”
I pressed the heel of my palms into my eyes, dagger pointing towards the heavens, and began to pace, dodging the legs of my father, who was still lying on the ground with his hands and feet bound, probably hoping that we’d forgotten about him.
“Why did you do it then?” I demanded, spiralling through pitfalls in my head.
Lucais had kept the secret from everyone—his best friends, his Hand and High Lady, and me—at great personal risk for months, only to blow the lid off the primary cover on a whim one afternoon.
“Why take the glamour off me when you knew it would destroy the illusion you’ve been fighting so hard to keep?
When you knew your city might fall into ruin? ”
He held my stare in his unflinching gaze and spoke very slowly when he gave his reply. “Because you wanted to be seen.”
Although my stomach couldn’t help but flutter with the endearment, my head was still spinning.
I never would have asked him to do that if I’d known what was really going on.
I never would have complained about it in the first place.
I never would have asked him to put my feelings above the lives of his people.
“Are you mad?”
“I might be.” Lucais shrugged nonchalantly. “The Mad High King has a nice ring to it.”
“It does not.”
A crushing smile bloomed over his mouth.
“Bookworm,” he purred, stepping towards me.
He touched my cheekbone and chin with gentle fingertips—a steady calm in a sea of chaos.
“You’ll have to forgive the clumsiness in my handling of our relationship.
I’m sick with obsession. It’s been extremely inconvenient, actually. ”
I shook my head, trying to shake free of the infatuation that his words were going to pull me into.
His sweetness was a vortex, and those revelations were proof that avoiding the acknowledgement of any feelings was the right decision, though I was afraid we’d already taken it too far.
His eyes simmered as his gaze fell into mine, enveloping me in an entrancement that felt unyielding and forever—even if it cost him the world.
“At what point do you decide it doesn’t matter anymore?” I whispered, trying to inject some acidity back into our dialogue. It was too soft, too sweet for all the damage we were doing. “What’s your tipping point? Where do you draw the line?”
Lucais gazed at me for a long moment before he answered. His eyes traced the features of my face as if he were memorising the lines of a poem. “I don’t,” he said at last. “You draw all of the lines, Auralie. I merely enforce them.”
Feeling the blade in my hand again through the haze of my emotions, I inhaled deeply and turned back towards my father.
I was heartbreakingly aware that I had to put an end to it once and for all because Lucais needed to know that I was capable.
He needed to see the line being drawn in the sand, though it zig-zagged in an awful pattern between right and wrong and the undefined spaces in between.
There was no other way.
If his eyes were on me, everyone’s lives were in danger.
His death would kill the enchantment holding the city together like it would the House and Forest—and my death might kill him.
By the time new leaders emerged from the Court of Darkness and Caeludor, there was every chance it would be too late, and the heart of Faerie would have already been condemned.
The Oracle prophecy would come to pass, and the Courts of Light and Darkness would be unified at the cost of everything I had witnessed inside of the lapsus—a total eclipse of silence and erasure.
Staring down at my father, I signalled for Lucais to pull him back up to his knees, and then I lifted the blade in the air, examining the glint of steel in the gloomy light.
My hands knew what they wanted to do, but the magic wasn’t speaking to me.
It hadn’t returned since I’d left the House, but I pushed back against the self-doubt and pulled on my focus.
I was going to draw the line with or without magic.
I was going to be brave. I was going to kill the loudest voice inside my head.
The voice of my father.
Angling the blade above his chest, I walked around in a half-circle to stand behind him. Closing my eyes, I felt the pull between the blade’s razor-sharp point and the dead space inside him where a heart might have once rented out a room.
There was nothing there, and I didn’t have the upper body strength to try to find it, so I moved the cool kiss of the blade to his throat.
I felt completely human as I pressed the tip of the dagger against his skin, wondering if Lucais’s power was preventing him from squirming as the blade pierced through the first layer of my father’s flesh, and a trickle of blood spilled onto his stained, ripped shirt.
I pictured the end result in my mind’s eye—my father’s body, blue eyes alien and lifeless, as the end was dealt to a lifetime of misery and suffering through which I’d begged for answers that could be given but never would.
If I had been different, would it have made a difference?
Why couldn’t you love me anyway?
Did you ever want me at all?
Were you sorry?
Why?
“You wouldn’t.” The dark voice of the man on his knees sent wicked chills down my spine, though it was no more than a hoarse whisper. “You wouldn’t kill your own father.”
I laughed once without humour. “I’m well aware by now that you are not my real father.”
Surprise lit his eyes for a brief moment. “No,” he declared, not even pretending to sound disappointed. “But I am Brynn’s father.” He coughed, the sound a wet rasp. “You wouldn’t do that to her.”
At the mention of my sister, guilt crawled over my skin like ants, and I hung my head. “No,” I breathed, fighting back the onslaught of emotion. Eight years. “But I would do it for her. For my brother, too.”
From a few paces away, Lucais posed a quiet question. “What was his name?”
“I don’t know. They never told me, and I was too scared to ask.
” I gripped a fistful of my father’s hair and forced his head back to look him in the eye, though he refused to meet my gaze.
My hands were shaking, and I knew he could feel it.
Disgust rose up in my throat with demands that I stopped touching him and moved far away. “What was his name? Do you remember?”
“I’m never telling you.” He hacked up a ball of spit and phlegm. “Because you don’t deserve to know, Auralie. You weren’t even his real sister. You’re the brat of some dumb fuck who used your bitch mother as a cumrag—”
I couldn’t name the feeling that came over me, but I snapped back at him. For the last time in my life, I bit him back, and it was fatal.
The wet heat of tears rolling down my face matched the sticky warmth I felt sliding between my fingers as I held the blade over the open wound in his throat, closing my eyes as if that could block out the gurgling sounds he made as he bled out on the cobblestone.
He’d killed my brother. He’d tried to kill me . He’d abused my mother and Brynn. I could have spent the rest of my life trying to understand, but not anymore.
Not anymore.
He had finally answered for the things he’d done, for the cruelty he had placed on me when I was too young to know the difference from love, for the torment he inflicted upon me, and all of that useless shame. He answered in the only way he ever could, the only way he understood—
With violence.
The body slumped over, hitting the ground with a dull thump.
“Bring me Hanson,” I breathed, the exhale of air clouding in wisps in front of my face.
I was so hot, positively burning up from the inside out, but I couldn’t move. I was paralysed, glued to the spot with a death grip on the hilt of the blade, and I knew that I needed to seize the moment of clarity before the wind changed directions and I became lost inside the smoke again.
Through the bond, I could sense Lucais’s uncertainty, but he did exactly as I asked without question, and a moment later, Hanson appeared in the courtyard beside my father’s lifeless body.
Hanson was in as poor condition as I recalled.
Worse, even. Far worse than my father had been, likely due to some kind of spell suppressing his cognitive functions, based on what I’d witnessed when he was in the dungeon.
Hanson was given no such privileges—his lack of awareness was due to pure exhaustion.
Swaying on his knees, he struggled to remain upright, and his eyes were barely able to split open wide enough to look at his surroundings.
I had a feeling that he was too far gone to register anything even if he had.
My throat immediately tightened up, but I pushed through the encroaching panic attack and stepped towards him with the blade in my hand.
Blood from my father’s corpse leaked across the stones, red as a rose.
It soaked into the fabric of Hanson’s pants and trickled beneath my shoes—the only colour I could see in the gloomy morning.
I didn’t hesitate, though my stomach churned, and a pinch in my chest squeezed a small sound of abhorrence from my mouth as I placed the blade against the paper-thin skin of Hanson’s pallid throat and ripped it across from left to right.
When he collapsed, it barely made a sound because the impact was so light.
Even the overflow of his lifeblood rushing out of the new opening in his throat was weak compared to my father’s.
Hanson had been left to slowly leak magic and blood in the dungeon for months, malnourished and atrophied—until the moment I’d ended it for him.
I sucked in a ragged breath and dropped the blade with a clang, staggering a few steps back.
Willing my racing heart to quiet, I turned and found Lucais’s golden eyes trained on me in a curious, evaluating stare.
Swallowing tightly, I nodded and started to make my way back towards the palace, wrapping the blanket tightly around myself.
Lucais lingered behind without a word, either to piece the picture together or to clean up the mess.
Either way, I knew he could see it— the line .
Killing my father was justice.
Killing Hanson was mercy.