52. Please Choose Wisely
fifty-two
Please Choose Wisely
E lera was waiting near the stables as the three of us snuck out of our own palace like fugitives under the cover of nightfall and fog. I questioned the decision to take her—I was questioning absolutely everything at that point—but I was given mixed answers.
“She hates to miss out on the fun,” Lucais informed me with a playful wink.
“She’ll get you out of there fast if things go wrong,” Wrenlock added, raising a brow at the High King.
The unicorn nuzzled her soft, furry muzzle against the crook of my neck as I approached, so I gave her snout a quick peck before Lucais helped me onto her back and climbed up behind me.
Elera broke into a canter before she launched into the thin mist. I held my breath the whole time we were evanescing to stifle the rising sickness in my stomach, and found my lungs were burning by the time we landed on solid ground.
For whatever reason, Wrenlock chose not to bring his own mount and travelled alone behind us.
We landed in a strange forest, dark but not quite nighttime. Without the fog to suppress any light, the evening sky peeked through the canopy of overhanging trees in a mixture of ashy greys and deep oranges, like the sunset was a fire in the sky.
On the ground, the trees were so close together that they barely allowed Elera the space she required to slow to a stop.
After a near miss with a giant log, she turned in a tight circle inside of a very small clearing, and then doubled back to exact vengeance by ripping at the bark on a nearby tree.
“The caenim will go straight for you if given the chance, so stay alert and wait for me,” Lucais instructed as he helped me down.
“If we do get approached, there is a good chance that my title and standing will be respected, but if it looks like it’s going the other way, I’m going to need you to bolt for this clearing. Elera will take you back to Morgoya.”
My stomach twisted at the thought of there being such an uncertain assortment of allies and enemies in Faerie, even amongst those who didn’t know about the Malum.
But the fact that Lucais mentioned it eased some of my worries.
He knew about the rumours and the unrest, so I prayed he was factoring it into his decisions.
Logic told me that he was Lucais, so he definitely wasn’t, but the mating bond seemed to have dulled some of my logic in favour of lust.
Wrenlock appeared on the ground nearby with the grace and silence of a cat, his footsteps nothing more than whispers against the forest floor as he approached.
Lucais pressed a finger to his mouth when he looked at me, bestowed a gentle pat upon Elera as she gave the tree bark a piece of her mind, and then motioned for us to follow him into the trees.
All three of us tried to keep our steps silent, avoiding branches that might snap underfoot or piles of rustling leaves because there wasn’t another sound for miles.
My ears strained to pick up something. The silence was unnerving. There weren’t birds in the trees or insects flying through the air, let alone the sound of voices or activity, and the atmosphere was so dry that my skin immediately felt the impact.
The forest was perfectly average at first glance, but every second or third tree had been cut down to a stump, and there were stacks of kindling all over the floor, which was covered in little twigs, pine needles, and trace amounts of ash and charcoal.
After only a couple of minutes, we came out of the thickest part of the trees to the very edge.
Immediately, I smelled smoke, like someone had a bonfire burning nearby—but it was the entire Court that was on fire.
Owain’s Court was exactly as Lucais had described it; like a meteor had crash-landed in a red desert and the civilisation of fire faeries had been built on top of it.
As far as my mortal eyes could see, there were small fires burning through stacks of wood, lighting the entire landscape up in a warm, orange glow.
The atmosphere was a haze of smoke spread thin across the roads into town, almost like Lucais’s fog if it was diluted to allow for normal visibility levels, but the smoke curled into thicker wisps as it rose into the sky and took the place of rain clouds.
“I’m going to lower the ward long enough to slip the caenim through,” the High King informed us quietly.
He came to stand behind me, leaning down so he was at eye level with me, and pointed ahead at a small building with a tin roof.
“Do you see that little hut in the distance? That marks the furthest corner of the first town. Once the caenim are loose, they tend to go for the nearest source of food, but these ones have been programmed to follow you.”
I stared at the little tin rooftop—and then the penny dropped.
“You need me to lead them towards the town,” I realised, unsurprised. I should have known there would be a price to pay for wanting to come with him.
“I would have done it alone, but they won’t follow me if they know you’re here, so we’ll have to do it together.”
I twisted my neck to look up at him, unimpressed, but he simply placed a kiss on the tip of my nose and grinned at me like a fiend before he strode off towards the tree line.
He left me battling a deeply rooted sense of distrust with a new, more potent sense of infatuation and lust, and I was afraid the mating bond would always win.
While Lucais worked, I tried to distract myself in some productive fashion by attempting to make sense of the magic he was wielding.
The Ruins were a deadzone, which meant that the forest we had entered must have been part of the very outskirts of the Court of Fire.
And if that was the case, we were already inside of the wards.
Wrenlock hung back, leaning against a tree in the shadows provided by the canopy overhead.
I turned my back on him so I could watch Lucais.
His hair was so gold it was nearly red beneath the fiery skies.
Adorned with so many weapons glinting in the waning light, he looked like a High King and a God of War enchanted into the body of a single man who was simply trying to do the right thing the only way he knew how.
I felt a pinch in my chest, stretching all the way down to my rib cage and stomach as I watched him standing completely still except for the slow, deliberate movements of his hands as if he were moulding invisible clay into the shape of a key.
The air around him shimmered like the distortion of heat.
Summoning, perhaps.
He hadn’t explained the finer details to me, so it was all I could do to assume that Lucais had the caenim cloaked inside of a spell somewhere, and he was going to use summoning magic once he’d manipulated the wards to allow them to enter.
As far as I knew, the individual leaders of each Court weren’t attuned to the wards, so it wouldn’t alert anyone to the threat—
I felt movement behind me, shifting the pine needles on the ground, but my gasp was muffled as a large hand cupped my mouth at the same time as the sharp edge of a blade kissed my throat.
Warm lips pressed a kiss to my temple, and smoky breath whispered against my ear as a male voice said, “I’m sorry.”
Wrenlock.
Lucais whirled on us half a heartbeat later, the shifting of the wards falling away as he completely dropped his hold on it, and his eyes burned like the molten core of the sun as they settled on us.
I held perfectly still, refusing to even breathe.
His glare would have torn my captor to ribbons if he were literally anyone else in the world, yet his voice was menacing and cold as ice.
“What. The. Fuck . Are. You. Doing.”
The blade was steady against the delicate skin of my throat, even as I felt a shudder ripple through Wrenlock’s chest with my back pressed into him.
“I will do this if I have to,” he warned, his tone severe.
“It would hurt me to lose her, but not as much as it would hurt you.” He swallowed, and it was audible.
“Take all of your weapons off and put them on the ground.”
Lucais was shaking his head even as he obeyed. His eyes locked onto mine, a whirlpool of emotion swirling inside them, and I found myself struggling to breathe with the hand over my mouth as fear stuffed itself down the back of my throat and made everything feel swollen.
“Take your fucking hand off her mouth,” the High King swore viciously, unbuckling his weapons belt and casting it aside. “She cannot breathe.”
Wrenlock hesitated, but his hand retreated a moment later.
The blade remained against my neck, and I winced as it made a tiny slice into my skin, caused only because my throat expanded to accommodate a huge gasp of air.
Lucais’s eyes raged, and he took a step forward, but Wrenlock responded by moving the blade to the centre of my throat, poised ready to slash it clean across, so the High King’s steps faltered to a clumsy halt.
“I’m going to kill you,” Lucais promised.
His voice was calm and still as undisturbed water, yet lethal as the monster hiding beneath the surface.
“I’m going to feed those hands to the caenim, finger by finger and bone by bone, and then I’m going to cut off that soft cock and wrinkly ball sack and jam them down your throat until you choke on your own semen. ”
The imagery made me blanch, but I held still, knowing my focus needed to remain on minimising the breaths I took while a blade was angled against my throat.
“The rest of your weapons,” Wrenlock prompted, blatantly ignoring the threat.
Obeying with a poisonous expression, Lucais continued removing the last of his weapons, keeping his eyes on me as he bent to retrieve small blades from his boots, and then he flung his arms out to the sides to display that he was officially unarmed.
“This doesn’t have to go the way you think it does,” the traitor behind me insisted, his voice low but firm. “I need you to trust me.”
“Take your filthy fucking hands off her and we’ll talk.”
“Turn around.”
“The fuck I will.”
Wrenlock shoved me forward, aggression seizing his posture and his voice for the first time since he had turned on us. “ Turn the fuck around. ”
Lucais’s hands were trembling at his sides, but he gave me one last glance before he did as Wrenlock demanded and turned his back to us. His breathing became ragged, and I felt a sharp spike of panic in my mind that wasn’t solely my own.
Is he hurting you?
Not really.
I just need him to lower the blade for a second—
“Stop with the silent conversations,” Wrenlock snapped. “I can sense the way the bond flares up when you talk to each other through it, so cut it out. If you want to say something, say it out loud, or don’t say it at all.”
“I was just telling Aura about all the ways I’m going to make you scream when this is done,” Lucais replied pleasantly, though his voice shook with the same tremors of an earthquake. You have a blade, bookworm.
My eyes flared when I heard the thought and remembered that I did, in fact, have a dagger strapped to the belt at my waist. Fingers twitching towards it, I held my breath carefully as I calculated the distance and time it would take for me to reach it. Then again for what it would take to use it.
“What is this about, Wrenlock?” Lucais questioned, still standing with his back to us.
“Put your hands in the air.”
“What, are you going to shoot me?” He laughed once. “How human of you.”
The insult made Wrenlock stiffen, and I only understood it myself because of a book I’d read at the House.
Faeries didn’t use guns. They were created during the Gift War by the faeries who relinquished their magic, and they were widely considered signs of significant weakness and cowardice by the High Fae.
“You’re not in a position to be making snark—”
I took advantage of the distraction and moved to yank the blade from my belt, twisting it with only a single moment of opportunity to lodge it straight into Wrenlock’s side.
My wrist bent at the wrong angle, resulting in a slight shot of pain, but the worst feeling was in my heart as I felt the blade sink into his flesh all the way down to the hilt.
His shirt brushed the side of my little finger as I drove the dagger in as far as it would go, but the only sound he made was a deep sigh.
“Aura, you’re damn well lucky I didn’t just open your throat by accident.”
I stood there, holding my breath, paralysed when I realised that he hadn’t even flinched, and his own blade was still poised to slice open my neck. From experience executing my father and Hanson, I knew that I should have felt blood leaking from the injury, but I didn’t.
“Baby,” he crooned softly, “I am really sorry. I didn’t mention that the weapon I gave you only works on people who are not me.”
I pulled it away from him with no resistance, and would have dropped it if I didn’t want to check the blade for blood out of sheer, dumbfounded curiosity. It was clean. Wrenlock took it from me before it fell from my loosening grip and secured it back onto my belt.
“No matter,” Lucais said through his teeth.
His head was turned as far to the side as possible in order to look back over his shoulder without technically turning his body around.
“I have a whole arsenal of weapons over there that should work just fine. Be a good sport, Wrenlock, and let her have a second go with one of those.”
“You are failing to see the gravity of the situation once again, Lucais.”
“No, I’m not.” He straightened his head, shrugging his shoulders as if to loosen them. “I’m committing it to memory, actually, so that it doesn’t matter where you go or how long it takes before I get to enforce a punishment fit for your crimes.”
Wrenlock scoffed. “The three of us are going to walk into the Court of Fire. There are dozens of soldiers waiting for us inside this forest, and they’re going to come out as soon as we’re in the open.
They are armed with execution orders if you try to do anything risky, and it’s not placed on your head.
Everything you do from this point on determines what happens to the girl in my arms, so for everyone’s sake, Lucais, please choose wisely. ”