Chapter 30
thirty
The fae danced like they’d practiced these movements since the day they were born.
I always thought I was a good dancer—when I danced alone in my room or with Betty.
I could absolutely move, but these people?
Oh, they humbled me really quickly with their graceful spins and those moves that had you considering whether gravity applied to them the way it did to you.
I couldn’t move like that if it killed me, wouldn’t know how, and I was relieved when Lyall asked me if I wanted to stop and walk around for a bit a few minutes in.
Hell, yes, I did. The music was indeed wonderful, and it sometimes felt like the melody was chasing the movement of the dancers, not the other way around. This was everything I pictured in my head when I thought of the word magical— but I most certainly did not belong here.
Rune. Fuck, I needed Rune to feel grounded, to feel like I wasn’t in way over my head here, which I was. He would take my mind off it, make me comfortable in my own skin, except Rune was nowhere to be seen.
Doors had opened in the walls as I went with Lyall, and the people whispered in each other’s ears—just walked over to others and said things nobody else could hear—and moved on.
We walked past the first doors, and it wasn’t what I expected at all. I thought they would be extensions of the Whispering Ball, but this one was full of mirrors that reflected light everywhere, and I walked closer to it without even realizing it.
Lyall’s lips were right next to my ear and he whispered, “The Chamber of Dreams. Do you want to see?”
That definitely sounded like something I wanted to see, so I said yes .
Or tried to.
Every drop of blood in my veins turned to stone when I realized that no voice was coming out of me. I was trying to say yes, moving my lips, pushing my vocal cords, and yet I couldn’t make a single sound.
Meanwhile, Lyall was smiling as he came closer to my ear again. “Speaking out loud isn’t allowed in the Whispering Ball.”
Well, fuck.
My mouth opened again to tell him how absolutely absurd that was, but I caught myself before I tried, relieved that it wasn’t me. Relieved that it was this place that had apparently taken my voice away, not something I did.
The prince pulled me toward what he called the Chamber of Dreams, and I forgot all about the fact that I couldn’t speak out loud when I saw the inside better.
It was a circular room with a domed ceiling and mirrored walls that reflected colors only, not shapes.
The people walked around, some dancing, some whispering, some standing with drinks in hands, and the mirrors only picked up the colors on them, their masks and their dresses and their drinks, and reflected it back.
It was…overwhelming to see bursts of colors moving about with no shapes.
Fuck, that room looked so wrong , but I couldn’t even tell you why. I stopped in my tracks right by the threshold, couldn’t make myself go in at all. Whatever it was about these mirrors, I was wrong—I didn’t want to see it. Not from closer up, at least.
So, I pulled back, and when Lyall looked at me, I only shook my head. There was no way I was going inside that room right now.
Thankfully, he didn’t question it. With a nod, he stepped back, too, and we continued to walk around the ballroom again, away from the Chamber of Dreams.
As we went, people stopped and whispered in Lyall’s ear, and I continued to search for Rune.
I couldn’t find him, and part of me was sure that he’d already left.
This was not his scene at all. He didn’t even like dressing up in velvet like the rest of the fae.
He probably left before they even closed the doors.
And that made any bit of good mood I’d had left for this night vanish into thin air. After days of being all by myself, of wishing for some company with other people, I wanted nothing more than to leave this ball behind.
“The Room of Whispers,” Lyall whispered in my ear before I realized we’d arrived at the second set of doors that had simply appeared in the walls of the ballroom.
This one had no mirrors in it. It wasn’t half as overwhelming as the Chamber of Dreams. Two tall velvet curtains pulled apart to reveal a softly lit atrium filled with hanging silks that swayed to the sides gently despite there being zero wind.
The air was thicker once we stepped inside, though, and it tasted like perfume—like flowers and old parchment combined.
The silk draped from the ceiling to the floor in layered curtains shimmered faintly with glyphs, like they had been stitched from sound rather than thread.
I couldn’t even begin to understand what any of it meant, though.
The light, too, was different. Dim but soft, casting no shadows. It was scary, but not as scary as mirrors reflecting colors without shapes.
The sound of whispers curled around me, like a touch from a ghost or something, and I couldn’t understand a single word as Lyall led me between those silk curtains together with the crowd.
The deeper we went, the more I was sure that the sound wasn’t coming from the people, but from the silk itself.
I passed one that I could have sworn echoed with laughter, and another that moaned softly as someone did when they were in pain.
Another whispered what could have been a poem in that language I was sure was original Veren.
People came toward us from the other side of the room, probably to go back out into the ballroom. We pushed the silks back to leave way for them, and I could have sworn that they were trying to talk to me, these fabrics.
And the people, too.
A man, as he went past, touched a hand to my shoulder and whispered in my ear, “The queen’s reign might be coming to an end, they say. Spread the word.”
And he disappeared behind me so quickly I couldn’t even see what his mask looked like.
Heart in my throat, I kept moving forward, hoping to get rid of the crowd already, but more and more people seemed to be coming from the other end, and they whispered in each other’s ears, and the silk whispered, too—or maybe I’d finally lost my fucking mind for real.
I shouldn’t be here.
This whole place was strange as hell and I didn’t want to spend another second surrounded by these silks and these whispers and these fucking masked fae, either.
A cold hand over my forearms, right where Maera had scratched me.
My entire body froze. I couldn’t move away if I tried as I watched the woman who’d appeared out of nowhere lean into my ear and whisper, “ The last woman who wore that face died screaming .”
The words echoed in my mind.
The woman wearing a green dress and a mask made of emeralds had her golden blonde hair in waves over her shoulders, and she didn’t stop to even look at me after she whispered those words in my ear.
She just turned and continued to walk ahead, and then pulled aside the silk curtain on her right and disappeared behind it.
Every instinct in my body came alive at the same time. I didn’t look, didn’t try to find Lyall or even remember that he’d been there with me. I went after the woman, my ears burning, my hands shaking, my legs barely holding my weight.
But I had to find her. I had to get to her and demand she repeat herself because there was no way she said what I thought she said. First of all, she couldn’t even see my freaking face!
So, I pushed the piece of silk to the side just like she had done, and I slipped into the next row of curtains, eyes wide, heart pounding—but the woman wasn’t there.
I moved back and forth, searching the people coming and going in both directions, then moved farther down another row of curtains, and another—but the woman had disappeared.
She wasn’t there, and none of these fae around me right now wore the same emerald green she was wearing, and my God, I was suffocating on all this magic. It had slipped down my throat and filled my lungs, and now I felt like I couldn’t get enough air inside me to stay alive.
Run, said the voices in my head, and so I did.
I ran through the curtains, elbowing my way between fae who were just coming into the room, and by the time I made it to the doors, my eyes were full of tears, my throat burning, and my hands pulsating with heat.
Black dots in my vision as I breathed in the cooler, cleaner air of the ballroom, pressed my back against the wall right behind the door.
The palms of my hands were burning, and I recognized the energy—the magic, the same one that I had used in that mermaid cavern to make shit float on air.
The same heat I’d used to attack those werewolf men in the woods.
The energy that made things rise in the air and explode—and it was pulsating in the very center of me, rushing down my shoulders and to my hands.
With my eyes squeezed shut, I willed it to go away, willed my heartbeat to slow down the beating, but it didn’t work. On the contrary—I began to feel that cold, too.
Such a strange feeling that it took me a moment to even understand it myself. A burst of cold energy rose against the heat in my chest, and it was impossible to describe it properly, but it felt like I had half my body on fire and the other half covered in ice.
Before the minute was over, ice-cold shivers washed down my back. The heat inside me began to calm down. I was sure that if I looked at my hands, they’d be lit up from within, and the people would see, and then I’d be screwed for real, and…
Nobody knows who you are, said the voices in my head.
Holy shit, they were right .
I had a mask on. A dress that didn’t belong to me. I was just another nobody in this big room full of fae, and nobody knew who I was except for Lyall and Rune. Even if they saw my hands lighting up, nobody would know that they shouldn’t be. Nobody knows.