Chapter 44
CHAPTER
“Raynie!”
A bright voice greeted me as soon as the darkness dumped us into the middle of the lighthouse cottage.
No sooner had I stood up than Felicity bounded into my arms and wrapped herself around my neck. “I didn’t think you’d be here until Sunday. Come look at what I’ve been learning to make.”
She bounced out of my arms again and tugged on my dress until I stumbled, laughing, toward the kitchen table.
There on the gnarled wooden surface sat a variety of glass jars and containers filled with swirls of different-colored wax and topped with wicks made of twine. I leaned in to smell them, inhaling a mixture of caramel and lavender and vanilla.
“Candles!” Felicity announced proudly. “I made the wax from palm leaves, melted it over the fire, and mixed in all the oils. My favorite is the lotus blossom one, by the way. Did you smell it yet?”
I lifted the jar with the cream-colored wax to my nose.
“I could just eat it up. This is amazing, Felicity.”
And I meant it. The proud smile on the monkey’s face, the fire crackling in the hearth, the soft breeze that floated in from the ocean outside the window—it was all like a pocket of deep calm before an oncoming storm. I wanted to sink into this warmth and never let go.
But there was one last thing lingering on my mind.
I waited until Felicity had busied herself with her candles again to say it.
“Did you know?” I whispered, my back still to Steeler.
“What?”
“Did you know that the Good Council is recruiting people when they’re only students? That Mr. Gleekle is giving them a second brand?”
I couldn’t fathom how else he would have known to give me one, and by the intake of silence behind me…
“Yes,” Steeler said finally, and I rotated to face him.
“When I was a first-year at the Institute, I came to realize that my Mind Manipulating power was… stronger than my peers’—all my peers except for Garvis.
We figured our faerie blood gave us a heightened ability to wield it, but I didn’t realize until I was messing around in an upperclassman’s mind just for the hell of it and saw that he’d been double Branded how dangerous that heightened ability could be.
” Steeler looked down at his hands. “I knew if Mr. Gleekle got ahold of any of us, he’d discover our true identities, so the others and I…
we held ourselves back. That day that you first arrived in the courtyard…
” He looked back up at me. “… it was the first time I ever flexed my power, just to see what it was like. And I regretted it instantly.”
My gaze snapped up to his.
“Why?”
He gave a sad smile.
“Because I got a taste of what I was missing out on and knew it would consume me, if I let it.” He held my gaze. “I never expanded my power again until the end of last year, when I erased everyone’s memory of me at the Institute and found that it was scraping my limit.”
When his face twisted with self-revulsion, I knew he didn’t just think I’d never forgive him; he didn’t think of himself as forgivable.
He didn’t think he was worthy of it.
The words I should have said lumped in my throat as I set my overnight bag down on the floor and watched Felicity absentmindedly set her homemade candles on various surfaces around the room. The coffee table. A side table. The mantle. A windowsill.
Outside that window, the breeze had picked up into a whistle.
I couldn’t exactly blame Steeler for keeping the secret about the second Branding from me—not after witnessing the Good Council’s ruthless hunt for Dazmine. Just like Jagaros, he’d been waiting until I could shield my own mind to give me those pieces, and I…
I could respect that. I had a right to my own mind and information about me, but I didn’t necessarily have a right to information about others.
I could force my shoulders to deflate and breathe out the anger coiling in my chest and come to terms with the fact that my anger wasn’t justified. It was just hiding a deep-rooted pain.
Trying to force cheer into my voice, I got to my knees to dig through my bag for a toothbrush and nightgown.
“Any other stories you want to tell me before we go to bed?”
A blush was already settling, not in my cheeks, but deep into my core at the thought that I’d have to change in the same room as him. Would we sleep in the same bed? Or would he insist on taking the sofa? But that warmth faded instantly when Steeler whispered, “Yes.”
I looked up at him in question.
“Mine.” He cleared his throat. “I’d like to tell you my story. If you want to hear it,” he added.
I dropped my bag again and sat on the edge of the coffee table.
“Of course.”
I’d thought I’d re-discovered everything important about Steeler’s life since he’d stopped erasing my memory—he’d grown up on a pirate ship until the faerie fleet decided to use him and his friends as pawns in a much bigger game.
Then he’d spent his remaining years in Hallow’s Perch until he’d gone to the Esholian Institute for half a decade.
The look on his face couldn’t have been clearer, though: there was more to it. So, so much more.
“Do you want anything to drink?” he asked suddenly.
“Oh… um… sure.”
“What would you like?”
He was stalling, I knew, but I humored him anyway. “Do you have any wine?”
“Ha!” Felicity called from a corner of the room where she’d just lit the lotus blossom-scented candle. “Do we have wine? What kind of question is that, Raynie?”
“Wine, then,” I repeated to Steeler, who removed two dusty glasses from a cabinet before wiping them with a cloth and digging out a bottle that definitely looked like it had been stolen from one of the neighboring villages.
He handed me a glass just as Felicity inhaled deeply and pressed her padded palms together with a smile.
“Ah, that’s perfect, isn’t it?”
She’d lit two other candles—the vanilla and what smelled like a sandalwood one. The result was a mix of intoxicating scents that flowed throughout the room in defiance of the increasing wind outside.
“You’re very talented, Felicity,” I said after taking a sip of my wine. “You’re the best cook, hairdresser, and candlemaker I’ve ever met.”
“Oh, and I plan on being good at so much more.” A determined glint lit up Felicity’s eyes as she bounded forward to give me another hug. “I’m going to hit the rafters now. Tell Coco sweet dreams for me.”
“I will.”
“And don’t worry about making too much noise, by the way,” she added over her shoulder, shooting me a wink that I definitely felt was way too inappropriate for such a young monkey. “I’m a heavy sleeper.”
We both watched her jump her way to that bedroom in the hallway and close the door behind her, leaving Steeler and me very much alone with only two glasses of wine between us.
Steeler sat next to me on the sofa, his body angled forward.
My heart galloping in my throat, I dared to rest my free hand on his knee for the smallest space of time before I removed it again.
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. As long as it doesn’t involve me or my life…”
He shook his head, inhaled through his nose, and sighed out, “It does, in a way. As much as I know you hate to hear it, our lives are very much intertwined. And with your mother being the lost princess…”
He fingered his glass as a look of memory clouded over his face. I kept my blockade firmly locked up—to let him tell it at his own pace.
“I told you about my own mother,” he said finally. “That she died before I could remember her.”
“Yes,” I said somberly.
“Well…” His jaw twitched, his whole face hardening. “She died because the queen of Sorronia murdered her. I’m almost sure of it.”
“What?”
My hand clenched in my lap. I’d always sensed some deeper animal rear its head inside me whenever he mentioned this so-called faerie queen.
My biological aunt, apparently. But if I was going to be honest with myself, I’d always feared it was jealousy at the way he said her name.
How he served her. How I had to share him with this faceless ruler across the sea.
Now, the animal in me understood what it really was. The way Steeler’s whole body had just tensed up, hatred pouring from him in waves…
I wanted to protect him from the queen. I wanted to shield him away from whatever she had done to him in a fierce, desperate kind of way I’d never even felt regarding Dyonisia or Lexington.
“How do you know she killed your mother?” I put my hand on his knee again. Whether we were friends or enemies or something in between, he obviously needed the pressure of a touch to keep him grounded.
Steeler’s body softened ever so slightly. He turned toward me.
“For the most part, Sorronia is a glamorous realm. The queen’s palace is a glittering spread of spires surrounded by gardens, and the inner cities are just as breathtaking.
But the outer cities… they’re crammed with faeries who get by in squalor.
Faeries with lower powers or who never matured and don’t have any powers at all. ”
He rested his spare hand over mine, and his heat sunk through my skin. Or maybe that was just the heat of the flames in the fireplace that licked the air, the logs crackling and the sparks popping.
“I was just a bastard born of a homeless whore, they told me,” Steeler breathed out. “And the queen so generously swept me off the streets and took me in when some disease claimed her. The only thing I got to keep of my real mother was that pendant.”
His eyes shifted briefly to the back of my neck.
“Oh my God. I’m so sorry.”
My heart was sinking for him, even as new thoughts and revelations rocked this way and that in my mind. I wanted to tell him to never think of himself as a bastard or his mother as a whore, but I knew my voice wouldn’t stand a chance against the many voices who had told him this in his past.
So instead, I opted to ask him a question that would propel him forward.
“Did she raise you, then? The queen?”