57. Dreams
fifty-seven
Dreams
“ B ethanne,” Lucais crooned, moving towards her. “Oh, I am so sorry. I am so, so sorry. What happened to Blythe?”
“She’s dead, Your Highness.” The dark faerie tried to swallow, but the motion made her throat flex against the iron, so she let the saliva trickle out of the side of her mouth instead.
I noticed that it was tainted with blood.
“I was taken a long time ago—long before Blythe knew that I was destined to be her successor, and I’m afraid she did not react well when she finally discovered me here. She gave her life trying to save me.”
Lucais tilted his head to the side. “She was murdered?”
“Yes, Your Highness.”
He blew out a long breath, taking it like a hit to the face. “Oh, the sneaky bitch…” He shook off the news and glanced at me over his shoulder before turning back to Bethanne and asking, “You’re the reason the Court is covered in shadows, then?”
“Yes,” Bethanne agreed. “I am afraid there is very little that can be done about them while I am here. The shadows persist while the Court is forcefully separated from its leader, but nobody can take my place while I am still alive.”
Lucais retreated a few steps closer to me, and two of the guards followed him. “And I never would have suspected this Court with the former General of the Fire Army acting as Hand to the High King for so many years.” He fixed Wrenlock with a hard look. “How long have you been a spy?”
The other man stared at him impassively, giving nothing away in his depthless brown eyes.
“He almost failed in his task,” Owain remarked.
“What do you mean?” The High King kept his eyes on his former friend’s face.
“He was supposed to bring the two of you together much sooner than he did. Even in Siah’s visions, it was hard to tell which way you’d go in the end.
So, when Aura was old enough to see the Oracle’s prophecy in her dreams, Wrenlock was meant to find her and bring her into Faerie, but he delayed it by months. ”
“Owain,” Lucais chastised. “Why don’t you speak less in riddles and more in words that might actually make you seem clever?”
“I’m talking about the decision you need to make, Lucais.” Owain tutted under his breath. “Now that you understand the reason you couldn’t fix what your parents did, what will it be? You can save your family, or permanently condemn them to the noxaeterna .”
Lucais stared at the High Lord, panic and confusion flaring in his eyes. My heart thundered.
“Who are you going to kill?”
The High King shook his head feverishly.
“Her, or them?”
Before the noxaeterna was named, I might have been surprised to learn the cost of breaking it, but deep down, I’d already known what it would take.
It was buried at the bottom of a still lake in my mind alongside everything else the curse suppressed—including the fire in my veins that the dark voice around my wrist had snuffed out.
I couldn’t speak through the curse. I couldn’t even think through it.
But I knew—I had always known in one way or another—that I carried life and death inside of me.
That I was destined to do something so impossible it didn’t matter if it was good or evil.
And that Lucais would love me enough to choose me and damn the millions of consequences trapped in flesh and bone, living within houses, greeting the sun and bidding goodnight to the moon as if a selfish, redheaded girl from a bookstore didn’t stand with a pair of scissors hovering over the thread that tethered their souls to the realm.
The thread that gave them a right to life, the thread that would one day snap beneath her razor-sharp edges whether she meant for it to happen or not.
Like the vision the Court of Darkness had shown me.
The Little Folk had known, too.
The trinkets they used to bring me as a child were bribes.
I remembered with sudden clarity the pleading of their little eyes as they approached me with caution in the backyard of my first home, beseeching me to find fantasy in books so that I might never go searching for it in the real world.
So that the bomb inside of me may never be activated.
But I never liked fantasy books. I never liked them much at all.
There was always a beginning, a middle, and an end.
There was always a problem that required a resolution, and a team of characters would work together to figure it out in some kind of impossible scenario.
It was tense. There were close calls. Sometimes, there were heavy losses, and I followed different plot points around in a maze until I reached the one inevitable conclusion—
That it was going to end.
That not even magic could make things last forever.
I didn’t want to read about that, so I closed those books, and I moved on to contemporary romances and thrillers—
Until fantasy found me.
Like it was always going to.
Because the page could not be turned over unless it did.
The mask of defiance on Lucais’s face melted away. “No,” he whispered, and his eyes were pleading as they bored into Wrenlock’s. “No,” he repeated desperately. “Tell me he’s wrong, Elumos. Tell me right now that he is fucking wrong—”
“It’s true.” Wrenlock’s throat bobbed, and he averted his gaze from both of us, tucking his hands behind his back. “The only way to break the curse on the Malum is for Auralie to die, and they are aware of it.”
That’s why they killed all those girls.
Lucais laughed bitterly. “So all of that was for nothing , then?” he yelled at his former Hand’s side profile, pointing at me with his bound hands as he stalked Wrenlock’s guilt-ridden eyes.
“Everything you ever said to me about loving her and wanting to protect her—that all gets thrown out the window now? For what? For Margot ? Answer me!” he bellowed, and the very ground beneath our feet shook.
“Guards!” Owain called. “Restrain him!”
“Unhand me, you crispy slices of mutton!” Lucais shouted, shrugging them off with his shoulders.
His eyes were blazing with power, but he lifted his arms, shaking his bound hands in the air for emphasis.
“The only threat I pose is to your fucking egos! I’m in irons, for the love of the Elements! Stand down .”
The guards halted their attempts to force him to his knees, exchanging a fleeting glance.
Lucais gazed at me with such burning desire and intensity that I thought it might kill me.
“You are, without a doubt, the worst thing that ever happened to me,” he said.
Then he paused, his eyes ablaze. “But if anyone tried to change it, and they tried to take you back from the absolute train wreck that catapulted you into my life, I would hunt them to the end of the world. I would hold their hearts in my bare hands and squeeze until they threw you back to me, little beast.”
“What are you saying?” I hissed. “What are you doing ?”
He shook his head gently, smiling at me like he was in love. “Even knowing how this ends now, bookworm, I swear to you that it is the truth this time.”
“Lucais,” I said, panicked. “Lucais, stop—”
“I tried to avoid it.” He sighed. “I tried to avoid you for the most agonising weeks of my life so I could be the High King my people deserve, but it’s not working either way, Aura.
” His golden eyes darted to Wrenlock. “They can’t kill me because someone else will just take my place, so they’re going to keep you here in order to control me.
That is how this will work. They will force us apart, and I will not be able to stop the things they do to you, even if I do everything he says.
They might cease the torture sooner. They might make it a little bit less gruesome.
I will be able to keep you alive, but you will never be safe. ”
By the time I realised what he was planning to do, it was too late for me to think of a way around it.
I tried to summon the parts of the curse I controlled—like I had done when Wrenlock obscured my view of Lucais—but it required a level of anger and concentration I couldn’t access while my eyes were glued to Lucais’s face and my heart was splintering into pieces.
“This is the only way,” he told me.
It hit me like a punch to the gut. “No,” I protested. “No, you don’t know that—”
But I had seen it in my dreams. The prisoner in the dungeon who was being tortured while I stood there, powerless to save him. And I had shown him those visions, so he knew it, too.
“I do.”
“I saw Wrenlock, too,” I blurted, my hands and teeth trembling violently.
I had. I’d seen Wrenlock in the dark first, but I’d called Lucais’s name.
“I know it doesn’t make any sense. In the dungeon with you when we kissed, I showed you the dreams I’d had in the human world of you, but the night we came to Faerie, I swear, I dreamed of Wrenlock instead.
You both had the same injuries.” I deliberately left out the part about them having the same tattoos because the reality distortion hex was falling apart at the seams like I’d been warned, but I was desperately clutching at straws.
“You don’t know that this is the only way, okay? You can’t possibly know—”
“Aura. Bookworm .” His voice was going to break my heart. “Those dreams you were having?”
“Yes, exactly—”
“I was having them, too.”
All the hope gathering in my chest deflated like a balloon, replaced by sadness—and fear.
“What?” I breathed. The cracks in my reality were irreparable. “Why didn’t you say anything? You knew the whole time that this was going to happen, and yet you brushed me off when I tried to warn you? You let me keep going like we even had a future—”
“Aura, my sweet girl.” He did it. He broke my heart with his mouth. “I am not the prisoner in the vision,” he whispered gently. “I never was.”
Frantically, I glanced at Wrenlock, but he was staring at a fixed spot on the volcanic floor.
“It’s you,” Lucais murmured. “It’s always been you.”
“No,” I pleaded, but as the tears fell down my face and I shook my head to disprove it all, the memory rose up. It was as clear as anything I had ever seen.
The picture of the dreams morphed from a male body to my own as the magic fuelling the illusion fell away like pixels on a screen in my mind, and I realised the curse was embedded so deeply inside of my identity that there were still layers to it I hadn’t even touched.
“The dungeons in Faerie are reinforced with iron,” Lucais explained.
“They’re designed to suppress magic. The only reason you were able to show me your memories of the dreams down there was because the iron weakened the magic of the curse just enough to let it slip through, but the reality distortion hex on it was too strong, so you were never able to see for yourself who was really pictured in the vision.
But you see it now, don’t you, bookworm? ”
Sadness branded my cheeks. My lips trembled.
“The noxaeterna made her forget the visions once the prophecy’s lifespan ended.
But the reality distortion hex was still required as a safeguard because she never would have come to Faerie if she so much as suspected what would happen to her when she did,” Owain explained.
“But you complicated it unnecessarily when you refused to give her your real name.”
Lucais didn’t move his eyes from my face. “I know,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry.”
And then he rushed at me.
The High King of Faerie broke free of the iron manacles, and for a fleeting moment in time, I really believed that we might be okay—
Until his hands closed around my arms in a familiar embrace that smelled like the rain and the muddy portal outside of Caeludor.
His body against mine was like a jolt of adrenaline straight to my heart as we collided, and I screamed for him to stop.
To find another way. To give me another chance.
But once again, he pushed me into Wrenlock’s waiting arms, and the man who betrayed us locked his hands around me like a python, and then my heels were being dragged along the floor as he spun us around.
Shouts rang out from all sides.
Orders were fired left, right, and centre, and I wanted so desperately to chime in and agree—
“Stop them!”
Stop us.
They were too slow for the men who didn’t have to share words or thoughts to understand each other, even in the trenches of a devastating betrayal.
Lucais turned back, a flare of his light magic buying us time as Wrenlock lunged out of the reach of a nearby guard, tackling me over the edge of the platform.
I screamed as we fell into the heart of the volcano, headfirst into bubbling lava that growled at us like a hungry beast, and rose up as if to break our fall—
We landed back in the kindling forest on the outskirts of the Court of Fire, and the last thing I felt through my bond with Lucais was the sensation of his body collapsing on the platform in relief before the string around my rib cage went slack.