Chapter 55
The poison doesn’t affect her immediately. I can barely breathe in fear that this might go wrong somehow, but I must pretend that we are having the time of our lives. So I take her by the waist and lift her straight off her feet, twirling her in the air and laughing. All the while closely watching her face for signs the teeny-tiny dose of poison I gave her is taking its toll.
It’s fast acting, but not especially painful. It’s one of the poisons I take daily, one of the poisons that, since the blood transfusion when she was ill, she should have some immunity to.
Someimmunity.
I didn’t give her much. Not enough to kill her, but enough to make the next few hours unpleasant. Enough that my test for Faradir should go undetected.
Stella, still holding on to her glass, smiles at me and lets me whirl her around the crowd as music dances through the air. Nerves edge her smile, but I can only tell because I know her so well. She’s a good little actress, a surprisingly good one considering that her temperament doesn’t naturally lend itself to it.
“Don’t make me dance until my feet bleed like those other fae,” she says abruptly, as though feeling the intoxicating pull of the music, the waiting entrapment for unsuspecting humans.
I pull her a little closer at the mention of that night, when Rahk and I found her in Listhra’s chambers. “I will keep you from the enchantments,” I promise her. “If you dance with me, you will be safe.”
That’s when she suddenly staggers.
“Stella!” I cry, and the alarm in my voice is completely real, completely raw. Even causing it, expecting it, I cannot help how it hits me when she falls against my chest.
Her skin turns gray in a matter of seconds. I sink to my knees, holding her in my arms as her eyes roll back, as the strength in her neck gives way and her head falls to my elbow. Her long silver hair pools on the ground with her glorious skirts.
“Stella? Stella!” Supporting her suddenly weak frame in one arm, I catch her face with my other hand. She’s so gray, so suddenly. Rationally, I knew this was going to happen. This is part of the plan. This doesn’t mean I measured the dosage incorrectly. This doesn’t mean she might not have the immunity I thought she would.
But the thrum in my veins is entirely real.
It’s like I look at her in my arms, at her gray skin and the blue tint of her lips, and I see my worst nightmare. Around us, the dance and music has stopped. Hundreds of curious eyes burn into my awareness, but I don’t look up.
My fingers clench into her hair. “Stella!” It’s a choked cry, a raw scrape of sound from my throat. “Stella, open your eyes. Open your eyes!”
She opens them slowly, meeting mine. Her lashes flutter weakly. Soft brown irises fill my vision.
And then they turn vacant.
Empty.
Her chest stops moving.
“Stella—no!” I scream. My grip in her hair turns frantic, sharp, and no matter how many times I try to tell myself that this is only the exact glamour I told Stella to wear, that she’s not dead, I cannot breathe around the stabbing pain in my own chest.
She’s gone. She’s gone.
She’s not gone, I snarl to myself. But my rational mind doesn’t care.
I bow my head over Stella’s silver one, clutching her to my chest as tears pour in rivers down my cheeks. I wish I was acting. I wish this were a fa?ade.
“Well, isn’t this an interesting tableau?” says a voice as deep as midnight.
The entire air of the celebration shifts in that instant. Curiosity switches at once to tension, even fear, perhaps a thrilling sort of anticipation.
Because the voice belongs to the tall figure, standing hardly a few feet from where I am collapsed on the ground with my seemingly dead wife. A figure wreathed in shadows like a whirlwind of soot and dead embers.
The Neverseen King.
He approaches me, his shadows pulling back from his hooded face long enough for me to make out the smirk tugging at his lips. “I see you played with fire and got burned, my dear cousin.”
And, strangely, it is his arrival that makes my heart remember this is only a ruse. A ruse that will give me valuable information about whether Faradir can see through Stella’s glamours like he can see through any fae’s.
“Did you do this?” I snarl, clutching Stella’s body to my breast. “Did you poison her?”
The Neverseen King only chuckles darkly and turns away—toward where Faradir sits on his throne, pale in the darkness. “It is a good thing I didn’t poison your only heir. That would have made for some thrilling court dynamics.”
“You should be at the Bridge,” Faradir snaps. “It’s almost Lulythinar.”
“I thought I would pay a visit. Part of me misses these celebrations. It’s been a long time since I’ve enjoyed a Lulythinar.” He spreads his hands wide, and when I look up from Stella, I’m just in time to catch Faradir give the barest flinch.
Because we all know that the only fae with comparable power on this side of the Veil to the High King is the one who has spent the last three hundred years keeping the doors between worlds. The one who can beckon armies with a single drop of his blood.
Faradir clearly feels what we are all thinking: that if the Neverseen King attacked him this instant, the High King might not win. So he stands, his long robes of dark blue a contrast to his golden skin and hair. “I still remember when you were such a young boy. I remember my sister’s pride when she told me she was with child. When I loved you nearly as much as if you were my own.”
“Thank the Great Kings you didn’t,” the Neverseen King says with a wry chuckle and a pointed look at me as I hold my glamour-dead bride.
“Did you do this?” I snarl once more at him, pitting myself against him so the High King doesn’t realize I’m behind this, too. When he doesn’t answer, I throw back my head and bellow through my raw throat: “Who poisoned my wife?”
That is when Faradir finally looks our way. Truly looks.
And then it’s as though he completely forgets about his greatest threat standing before him. His bright gaze latches onto Stella in my arms, her gray skin and wide-open, sightless eyes.
He turns white as the Lulythinar moon above us.
He reaches back, grabs hold of the armrest of his throne, stabilizing himself. One shaking hand lifts, points at Stella.
My heart goes to my throat.
The Neverseen King, and everyone else, has gone silent as death.
“What is that?” Faradir growls. His tone rises in panic. “What is that?”
At first, it takes me a moment to understand his reaction. Then it hits me.
He can see that she’s glamoured. But he cannot see through that glamour.
That is the information I needed tonight.
And . . . it’s not what I hoped for.
I cup the back of Stella’s lolling head, tuck it against my heart, and my voice echoes through the silent crowds, through the shadows the Neverseen King wears, through the lumiral globes strung through tree branches: “Whoever did this, I will make them pay.”
Then I scoop my wife up in my arms, and get halfway back to the palace before the High King’s furious voice cuts through the confused din behind me.
“Guards! Bring back to me what he carries! The human is not dead!”
I curse under my breath. “Sorry, darling,” I mumble to Stella as I sling her over my shoulder and break into the fastest run of my life. Rushing air dries my wet cheeks, and my grief from a few minutes ago is entirely forgotten, transformed into pure determination that I will get my wife back to my chambers whole.