Chapter 4 #2
I looked at the fae—the queen of the Ice fae, more curious than ever. I’d never needed to hear more words coming out of a person than I did now, but Mother said it was important not to be rude to strangers, so I didn’t try to rush her.
“Yes, that was the deal we made.” Her eyes were down now, on her hands.
She touched her knuckles and looked at her long fingernails polished with color that made them look like she had ice over them.
“Just as we agreed, he killed all of his sons as they came…” Her voice trailed off as she looked up at me. “Except one.”
How strange. We all knew that no male heir had survived a full day after birth, but I still believed this Ice fae right away. “Who?” I asked despite myself.
“I am looking at him,” the Ice Queen said.
And she was looking at me.
Secret, secret, always a secret. All I did and where I went and what I thought—it must always remain a secret, Mother said.
So many times I asked her why. So many.
“Take your time. Breathe through it,” said the queen. “Because I have yet to tell you the most important part of this story…”
I could have been floating.
The memories came and went, sometimes vivid enough that I felt like I was there, sitting in that storage room, looking at Queen Veyra, and sometimes I felt like I was just moving about in a never-ending darkness, never to wake up again.
Queen Veyra.
The burning under my skin had calmed now—or maybe it had just been waiting for me to recognize what it was before it could—magic.
Midnight magic, more than I ever thought possible.
Midnight magic that was so intense it was like charges of electricity inside me, in my every cell, in my flesh and bones, in even the air that left my lips when I exhaled.
The power of a fae royal. The power of the Midnight King, making its home in my body.
By Reme, Lyall had not been kidding when he talked about it. He hadn’t been kidding when he said it would change everything when he took the Seelie throne. This was incredible.
And then there was the dead queen.
Her words whispered in my ear still, sometimes slurred together, sometimes clear.
The memory that had been taken away from me—all of it since the moment I woke up that morning, was now mine again.
It existed inside me, and even though it felt so foreign, like it didn’t belong inside my head, it did.
I was me back then, too. Just like I was now.
I’d sat with the Ice Queen before her death, and she’d been the one to tell me the truth about who I was, and what my role would be in her life, in the fate of the entire Verenthia.
I was born to kill her, and I would.
Otherwise, the realm was going to fall.
“Rune.”
Cold on my cheeks.
My eyes refused to open the first few times I tried, but eventually they gave. It was Raja’s voice calling my name, and now that I was able to think straight, I remembered she’d been calling me for a while now.
“There you are.”
A ceiling made of shadows. I raised my head as much as my body allowed, expecting to feel pain, but there was none.
In fact, all the places I’d been cut and bruised and hit with magic seemed to be fine—like the right side of my waist. I’d felt the king’s shadows when he hit me there, consuming my flesh, squeezing my ribcage.
The old king’s shadows.
Now, they were mine.
I sat up with much more ease than I expected, to find that I was lying on a bed.
A bed that was in a room I had never seen before, a room with a ceiling made of shadows waiting to be used by me.
They were sources that Midnight kings and queens had created and had left behind when they moved on to the afterlife.
The protection magic that existed in the throne room, too.
The Midnight Palace made sure the shadows were perfectly preserved and ready.
I was in the king’s bedroom, which was part of the original palace that Emer and Reme created together with Verenthia.
The original palace that served to ensure that the royal bloodline remained in power to keep the balance of magic in the entire realm.
The original palace that, together with the other three, served as anchors of magic, and of the stars of creation themselves.
Now I knew that this balance had been disrupted a long time ago.
“Rune. Look at me.” Raja was in front of me, on the bed. “Take this. Drink it. It will clear your head.”
A cup was in her hand and she offered it to me. A cup made of silver metal, heavy, half-filled with clear liquid that smelled of sorcerer magic.
Suddenly I realized that I was parched. I didn’t like the smell, but I drank the whole cup anyway. Raja knew sorcerer potions and she would have my mind cleared in no time.
“Good. Now get up. Get dressed. Let’s talk.”
With the empty cup in her hand, she turned and went to the other side of the bedroom, which was possibly over twice the size of mine in the Seelie Court.
It was dark, with black and silver walls, the Midnight crest engraved and embossed everywhere, even the polished marble floors and pillars.
The bed was huge, the sheets a deep grey, and I was not dressed in the same clothes as the last time I was conscious.
Instead, I wore silk bottoms only, and my skin was clean.
Not only from dirt and blood—but from shadows and ink, too. From the mark.
No sign of the traitor’s mark or the seal I’d had my entire life anywhere on me. No sign of any wound.
I sat up, barefoot, breathing in deeply to calm the racing of my thoughts. Memories from the distant past and from the last time I was awake wreaked havoc in my mind. It was a bloody battle and it tried to slow me down. It tried to weaken me, but my body…refused.
It took me a moment to gather myself, to look around, to really see the room I was in.
The black stone walls didn’t just absorb light—they devoured it, smooth as glass.
There weren’t many things in it, not like in the throne room, which would be for show.
Here, the wood of the bed frame was painted a glossy black, with a table and a desk made in the same spirit, the same design, the wood carved by the same hand.
Two racks of weapons on opposite walls, and a bookshelf with black tomes only.
It smelled like shadows here. Three large windows were opposite the bed, as tall as the entire wall, the frames made of dark metal full of sharp edges.
Near them was a low silver table surrounded by black recliners and three smaller shelves holding books.
That’s where Raja waited, a book in hand, looking out the last window into the everlasting night sky of the Midnight Court.
I was here.
I was really here, in the Midnight Court.
Fae lights trapped in glass spheres, and torches lit with white, smokeless flames were all around us. I saw everything in much more detail every new time I blinked, and it felt like even the air was listening to my near-silent footsteps.
It wasn’t the air, though. Just the palace.
I didn’t bother to search for clothes—the bottoms would have to do for now. I had no time for trivial things when Nilah was gone, stuck in her own world, unable to make it to me if she tried.
Because she would try. I knew it as certainly as I knew that I would never rest until she was beside me again.
“She said you’d have your memory when you woke up.
” Raja’s voice was ice-cold when I stopped near her by the window.
She was clean, too, her hair sleeked back like always, her dress black and made of velvet and lace.
Color on her cheeks, and her eyes were bright and alive.
“She said the death of the king would release it, and that the magic that belongs to you will have settled inside you by now.” She looked down at my naked torso. “Has it?”
I looked down at my hand, at the shadows on my fingertips that I hadn’t even felt there, that were leaking out of me without my even knowing about it.
“Yes.” The magic was definitely settled inside me. It had felt like flames under my skin before, but now that I knew, it was just…heavy. Adjusting.
“And the memory?”
Her voice seemed to echo to eternity in the endless ceiling.
I looked outside the window, at the Midnight Court. From here, I could see not only the wall of the palace but the border of the kingdom far in the distance, too.
Maybe not see it because it was too dark, but I knew where it was. I just…knew.
“I have it.”
Raja turned to me. “And? What was it? What was the reason, boy? Why did the Ice Queen split her soul?”
I looked into her wide curious eyes. “To save us all.”
She thought about it for a moment. “I am not surprised.” She didn’t look like it, either. “Tell me, Your Highness. Tell me, now.”
“Do not call me that, Raja.” Whatever it was about those words, that title—it didn’t sit well with me.
“But I will, Your Highness.” A ghost of a smile touched her lips, which so rarely happened. “You are a king now, my boy. Get used to it.” Her hand was under my chin. She raised up my head and said, “Speak.”
“It was the Seelie Queen,” I said. “The moment she found out that she was pregnant with King Trogen’s son, she killed him. She poisoned him. She blamed a fake resistance movement and had seven fae beheaded.”
A hand over her mouth. This terrified Raja, as it had terrified me when the Ice Queen talked to me about it.
By Reme, how had I not remembered when it was the most intense hour of my entire life?