7. Chapter 7
Chapter 7
Binding any of the Fae in iron or steel will prevent their magic from working unless they are very powerful, with the exception of the House of Steel. The magic from that House is unaffected by steel as the power never leaves their body.
~Sir Alistair Hawking, Magical Combat for Humans
Cole
An entire room made of steel. Floors, ceiling, walls, and door. Every inch from top to bottom is covered in it. I attempt to summon flames to my fingers, and the power is drained from me almost instantly. Only the slightest spark appears.
This is what the House of Steel uses for its prison cells for good reason. It will be enough to keep my father secured here.
“This is excellent work,” I say, my altered voice reverberating through the cell.
King Aric looks at the room, his eyes going over the details. “How thick do the walls need to be?” he asks. “To hold the strongest of High Fae, I mean.”
“It doesn’t need to be very thick. The same thickness as a breastplate is sufficient. The thickness is not as important as the coverage. Even a small, two-inch long segment that isn’t covered in steel will reduce the effectiveness drastically. Iron works as well, but I’m not sure of the specifics on that. We never use it since it rusts too easily, and who wants to oil prison cells?”
Aric’s eyes sharpen at my less than formal tone. I’ve never spent this much time as the Shade before, and I slipped for a moment. “We’ll be back sometime today or tomorrow. When we leave this room, no one should enter this cell for any reason. The prisoner we’ll be bringing back is one of the most dangerous High Fae alive, and no human will be safe even in a completely steel covered room.”
King Aric nods to me. “I have no desire to have a High Fae loose in my castle, much less one that doesn’t want to be here. We’ll leave the door locked.”
I move to the door where Darian, Lee, and Maeve stand, and King Aric follows me. “It will do,” I say. “Now it’s time that we go back to Draenyth.”
Maeve nods, completely calm and collected, while Darian and Lee look more than a little nervous. It’s for a good reason. We’re the most wanted people in the world, and there won’t be any real safe houses in Draenyth.
That doesn’t matter. We have to get my father away from Gethin. Shadows pool at my feet, and I grip Darian and Lee’s hands. Maeve holds onto my sleeve, not nervous at all. Why would she be?
I glance at Aric, who’s watching us intently, and then we’re falling through the floor as the shadows bring us to the void between worlds. Immediately, the pressure of this place presses against me. Darian and Lee’s hands tighten on mine, their fear rolling through them like a wildfire burning through a forest in summer.
I imagine one of the few safe houses that I trust to still be hidden. Right there in the Keep of Flames, it’s a secret passage that even my father didn’t know about. It’s hidden in the western guard tower. I connect myself to the shadows that cling to the red marble that was my world for my entire childhood.
This was the place I went to when I was hurt and couldn’t let my father see. It’s different now, though. Forgotten. Unused. Abandoned.
I draw us out of the void and into my safe house. Pain shoots through my chest at the amount of power it takes to haul all of us through the void. It will take more than a day to recover from that. I… I don’t know if I’ll be able to get us home tomorrow. I’d built up so much excess power from deals that it surprises me just how draining that long of a shadow walk can be.
A gasp escapes my lips, and I crumple to the floor. Darian and Lee kneel beside me, their worry overcoming their fear of the void. Maeve knows what happened, and she isn’t worried at all.
She moves to the wall and puts her hand against it. This is the first time since she’s had control of her House of Earth powers, and when she presses her fingers against the red marble, she laughs.
“Did you know that the other guardhouses have secret rooms like this?” she asks. My vision is blurry, and I’m having trouble catching my breath, so I don’t answer. It doesn’t seem to matter to her. “I bet that the House of Earth is full of secret places. I wonder if the House of Shadows is…”
At first, Maeve sounds excited at the thought of secrets to discover, but at the mention of her mother’s House, her voice wavers. Then she turns to me, and I meet her eyes. Thin streams of shadows trail from her fingertips.
Her heart is pounding faster than normal, but only for a few seconds as she stares at me. Then she shakes her head and turns back around to face the wall where the hidden door lies. “I need to rest for a few minutes,” I say. I slowly stand up and move to a chair that I put here all those centuries ago. A thick layer of dust covers everything in the room, from the wooden chairs to the small bed to the long forgotten empty clay jugs I’d kept water in. A small collection of books lies on a table, and it seems to be nearly as much a part of the room as the furniture and just as coated in dust.
“Don’t rush,” Lee says. “There’s no need to hurry. The last thing we need to do is go in and make a mistake because you’re too tired for shadow walking.”
She glances at Darian, who looks sick to his stomach. He’s never done as well with shadow walking, especially after Maeve almost let them both be taken by the void.
“Why don’t you and Darian find out where Jasper is?” I say. “You’ll be able to blend in, and I’ll be able to shadow walk directly to where he is rather than risk being caught out in the open.”
Lee and Darian look at each other, and for the first time in a long time, I don’t know what they’re asking each other in that strange twin speak.
“That’s a good idea,” Darian says. “Give me a mark, and I’ll call for you when we’ve found him.”
He puts out his forearm to me, and I see Maeve watching intently as I press my nail to Darian’s skin. He grimaces as I infuse my flames into his skin. It’s a debt, but it’s not one he’ll ever have to pay off.
Darian and Lee both begin to change in front of us. Their features slowly shift into something different, into someone different. Darian’s nose grows along with his ears, his messy brown hair becoming flecked with gray. The skin along his eyes and lips become puckered and wrinkled, and his eyebrows become drastically longer. Barely noticeable hair sprouts from inside his ears, nose, and the back of his neck and shoulders.
He stoops, his back rounding as he ages in front of me, and I’m jealous of his Steel abilities. This isn’t something I could ever do. My abilities with Steel are purely for battle. Healing, strength, speed, and armored skin. I could never become someone else.
Lee’s transformation is just as impressive. Instead of growing older, every bit of maturity from her features seems to evaporate. Her brown hair has become a lustrous black. Her eyes seem to have gotten just a little larger, and her lips curl into a smile.
She may wear the same royal clothing that she’d worn in Aric’s court, but now she looks like she’s barely older than a youth. Darian and Lee have become an old man and his granddaughter. They’ll blend in well enough.
I nod to them, and they grin at each other. “It’s good to be back,” Lee says, her voice that of a girl hundreds of years younger. Then they turn and run their hand over the imperceptible blemish in the wall and a door slides open to let them through.
Then they’re gone, and I’m left alone with Maeve again. I stare at her, not entirely sure what I should expect from her. She hasn’t wanted to talk to me beyond giving me orders since the Painted Crown appeared on her forehead.
The stone armor she wears shifts and moves in a way that normal plate armor can’t. It’s silent where steel would squeak and rub. It’s perfect. No edges touch, and the stone is so smooth that there’s no friction. Tiny hexagonal plates the size of my thumbnail that are connected so perfectly that even the world’s best blacksmith could never replicate it.
Yet, Maeve doesn’t move like it fits her. It’s nothing like when she wore her midnight armor. Her shadows fit her, and even though she was walking around with nothing physical between her and the rest of the world, she was confident in it. This armor, though… It’s not right. Or maybe she’s not right for it.
“Tell me, Shade, what goes through that mind of yours while you sit so silently? Are you plotting? Are you thinking of the way things used to be between us? Or are you closer to a monk than a man, and your mind is simply blank?”
I blink. This isn’t how she normally talks to me. There’s so much confidence that it’s like she’s hiding something behind it. She’s not confident in this plan. She can’t be. We don’t know enough. So why’s she acting like this?
Then I see the shadows trailing from her fingertips again. Not enough that I think she’s regained her powers, but she desires something. Or there’s a hint of desire, at least.
“I was considering your armor,” I say. “You seem uncomfortable in it.”
A truth with no judgement. She moves toward me, and the shadows leaking from her fingertips thicken. “Why do you say that? I’m the Queen of Earth. Isn’t this fitting?”
“Your midnight armor fit you better. You seemed more comfortable in it. This is beautiful, but you don’t move as fluidly as you did in shadows.”
She walks closer to me, and she raises her hand into the air, a foot away from my face. Shadows slowly trail down the stone that lines her arms. Little wisps of it, like when she wore the Forgotten Ring. “I don’t think the Queen of Earth can wear that armor. I can’t seem to create shadows like I used to.”
She says it like she’s far away, as if losing her Shadow powers isn’t a tragedy. “All you have to do is desire, my Queen,” I say. “Just as I taught you. Nothing has changed.”
“I don’t know if I can desire anything anymore, Shade,” she responds in that far off voice. “I tried when we were at our camp. It didn’t work.”
A shiver runs through me. She hasn’t talked to me like this since she didn’t know my identity. I’d thought she was breaking, but then she seemed more put together after we came to Stormhaven.
But why is she calling me Shade? I blink again as the answer comes to me. She knows that I’m Cole, but she doesn’t think of us as the same person. She feels safe with “the Shade”.
Shadows rise from the ground to encircle Maeve, so similar to the way they did before. I have a harder time controlling them as I once did because the past three months have pushed me to the breaking point, but I remember my years of training. Control your damn emotions.
Desire flows through me like a dark river, and my shadows flow underneath Maeve’s armor. It’s so similar to the way I’d teased her and manipulated her body when she was learning about her shadow powers.
I smell the lust in the air. Maeve’s scent only gets stronger as she looks into the shadows under my hood. “You enjoy touching me like this?” she asks.
“Yes. Do you?” I move closer to her, pressing into her personal space, and unlike the few times I’ve done it in the past three months, she doesn’t push away. She accepts the Shade into that space.
“I think so,” she whispers. My shadows glide against the bare skin under her armor, sliding over it as barely more than a damp wind, but she can sense that it’s me. She’s not a Wyrdling anymore. She’s just as much a High Fae as I am.
But she doesn’t push back as she has every time I’ve tried to touch her inner landscape. The betrothal bond between us is still there, still just as strong as it was when I was willing to break my vow to Brenna and die. She just refuses to open it.
My shadows tighten against her body, and a soft gasp escapes Maeve’s lips, yet her shadows don’t flood the room. This is a physical response, not an emotional one. “You feel different now, Shade,” she says. “You seem… tired. Or are you weaker? Am I just that much stronger?”
I didn’t know she was breaking this much. At first, I’d really thought that she just felt more comfortable looking at me while I was wearing the cloak. Now, though, it feels like her mind is fragmenting. Like her inner landscape is breaking.
I’ve heard of Immortals’ minds and souls shattering from intense trauma. Experiencing their spouse’s death or rape are the two examples that come to mind. Maeve hasn’t actually shattered yet, but she’s close. Her mind and soul are fragile. Losing Hazel was close to losing a spouse. She was the only person who Maeve ever cared about.
“I’m tired, my Queen,” I say. “And I do not know where I stand with you.” I tell her the truth. I swore to myself that I’d never manipulate her again, and I won’t back out of that promise to either of us.
She cocks her head, confusion on her face. “You don’t know where you stand? You’ve sworn yourself to me, Shade. But you…” She smiles and lifts her wrist. “I still owe you a debt.”
What a strange idea. I’m silent for a few moments as she stares into the darkness under my hood. What could I require of her? She’s my Queen. My life is hers to do with as she wishes; so how could I ever force her to do anything?
A shiver runs through her body, so strong it’s visible, and the shadows trailing from her fingertips multiply in strength and number. “Did you enjoy collecting debts, Shade?” she asks. “Did you like being able to force people to do what you wanted? I remember the way you forced me to want you. The way you tricked me and manipulated my body to be so desperate for you.”
The darkness thickens even more, but I don’t think she even realizes it. Her mind is so focused on the past, on what I can only assume are memories of us together. “You played my body against me,” she whispers. “And I liked it. I dreamed of it. I would wake up terrified my shadows would give me away because I was so desperate for you. Your nails against my skin and your shadows… everywhere. For a long while, you wouldn’t have needed to force me. You could have simply asked, and you could have had anything you wanted.”
I remember those moments. I was desperate for her as well. My shadows have never been stronger than those days when I was teaching Maeve to use her powers. I’d wanted her in ways that went against every grain of logic.
I lift my hand and the shadows encircling her body solidify just enough to intensify the feelings she’s experiencing, and she gasps again. I can feel every inch of her through them. The softness of her skin. The outline of her muscles as she tenses her body. The dampness between her legs that’s not coming from my shadows.
That’s when she looks down at her hand and notices the darkness flowing from her fingertips. A look of confusion crosses her face. “I didn’t think this was possible anymore,” she mutters.
“You simply need to desire,” I whisper, moving closer to her, and she looks up at me. My fingers move to her cheek, my nails slowly scraping over her skin as they did in the past. “Once upon a time, I told you that anger and shadows don’t mix. Peace is just as bad for them.”
She leans into my hand. Shadows coat my fingers, not letting my touch ruin anything. I don’t know what is happening, but she wants the Shade, not Cole. She wants what we had when she didn’t know I was the one who donned the Shadowed Cloak.
So I make sure that I do nothing that will force her to remember.
“I miss this,” she whispers. “Do you remember when you asked if I’d wear a shadowed crown? That day that you showed me how to shadow walk?”
I nod to her. “I remember.”
“I should have said yes. Everything would have worked out so much better if I’d just chosen you instead of Cole.”
There’s so much regret in her voice. There have to be cracks in her mind and soul, but I can’t help her heal them since she won’t let me in. “You’d still be the Queen of Earth.”
“Maybe,” she whispers back.
And then I feel the one thing that I desperately want to ignore: a calling for me over a debt. Darian has found Jasper.
I take a deep breath and let it out slowly. Maeve looks up at me, and the shadows that are flowing from her fingertips disappear. “What’s wrong?”
“They’ve found him. It’s time to interrogate Jasper, and then we can steal Casimir away from Gethin and the House of Steel.”
Maeve pauses for a moment before nodding. “Yes. Take me to Jasper, but Shade?”
“My Queen?” There’s a pause in the air. A soft tension that I am desperate to end.
“I mean it. I should have taken your offer. I wouldn’t feel… I think I could use shadows then.”
I nod to her. “I think you would have as well.” Then she wraps her fingers around mine and nods to me.
“Let’s go.”