14. Mirrored
K ael lurked in the dim corridor, awaiting Methild’s exit from Aisling’s room. He’d returned twice more before tonight, each time with a stack of books, but she hadn’t been at all interested in the choices. He supposed that his own tastes were dissimilar to hers: he preferred dense tomes detailing ancient histories. Books on war, on strategy. It was unlikely that she would be entertained by such things.
“She is better,” Methild’s croaking voice sounded even before she had fully closed the door. She dragged behind her a basket of damp rags. “Stronger.”
The king pushed himself off of the wall where he’d been leaning. “Has she asked you to unchain her again?”
Methild shook her head. “Stubborn, though. Won’t hardly let me do anything for her anymore.”
Kael hummed. He could have guessed that she would be—stubborn. She’d seemed it from the very first time they’d met, even beneath the heavy glamour.
“How much longer do you wish me to tend to her, Your Highness?” The old faerie pushed her sleeves up over her bony elbows and re-situated her grip on the heavy basket.
“Until I tell you that you may cease.” Kael observed her haughtily, vaguely annoyed by the impatience in her tone. When he’d ordered Aisling into Methild’s care, she’d agreed to do so without complaint. As she should. Now, it seemed that she was displeased with the ongoing task.
Methild ducked her head. “Yes, Your Highness.” She skittered off into the darkness, her basket grating loudly against the rough stone floor.
“Such insolence from your own handservant.” The High Prelate swept into view. He was still hunched and bearing his weight on a cane after the injury during the battle, and all the more petulant for it. He’d been bedridden for three days. Three merciful days that had allowed Kael enough distance to quiet his rage. Now, he only considered plunging a blade into the male’s sunken chest. If he’d have seen him up and about sooner, he’d have done so without hesitation.
“You have no right to speak of insolence to me, Prelate,” Kael snapped. Werryn’s willful defiance of the king’s orders on the battlefield should have been grounds for execution, had there been another prepared to take his place as High Prelate. As it was, none of the Lesser Prelates were far enough along in their studies to step into the role. By design, Kael was sure. Werryn was no fool.
“Checking on your pretty pet again, are we?” he sneered.
Kael bristled at the implication. Since the uncontrolled eruption of his magic, and the deaths of nine of his own warriors, insidious whispers had begun to spread through the Undercastle like wildfire—no doubt fanned by the High Prelate himself. The tether had survived, yet again, while his own subjects had not. A tether that, when it came down to it, he hadn’t wanted to use at all, but that had captured his shadows all the same.
“You forget your place in this court.” The words were carried on a low growl as Kael’s hand dropped to his side. He wasn’t wearing his dagger there, but his fingers curled into a fist where its hilt would have rested. In the span of a breath, he could let his shadows free to finish what they’d started when they’d driven through Werryn’s gut. In this moment, nothing would have brought Kael greater pleasure.
“My place is at the foot of the Low One. I serve him before I serve you.”
“If your place is at His feet, then mine is at His left hand.” Kael drew up to his full height before the High Prelate, straightening his broad shoulders, and hissed, “You serve me. ”
The only acknowledgement Werryn gave was a tight nod that made the hood of his robe slide back onto his shoulders. “I’ve gathered several members of the assembly in your study to discuss the girl, if you would care to join.”
“My prisoner is not yours to discuss.” Kael was nearly trembling with rage now, unaccustomed to such blatant impudence, even from Werryn.
“Be that as it may,” the High Prelate said over his shoulder as he turned to proceed up the corridor, “your display at the Nyctara front concerns us all. Your conviction after we completed the Nocturne ritual that you hadn’t needed a tether was clearly false. You’re weaker than ever.”
Werryn continued speaking as he hobbled away, leaving Kael with little choice but to trail after him, seething. In his mind, he was a small child again, following after a much younger Werryn and listening to the same lecture. I was chosen, he repeated again and again in a bid to block out those memories. The Low One chose me.
Four Lesser Prelates were waiting on the arrival of the High Prelate and their king just inside the door of Kael’s study. Having already been put in a foul mood, Kael’s teeth gnashed together at the sight of them uninvited in his space. He shoved through their tight group to take a seat behind his desk. These were the four furthest along in their studies and, incidentally, the four that Werryn kept closest. In their plain black robes, they traveled the halls of the Undercastle like a flock of ravens. They were as sharp and cunning as the bird, too. Lyre, in particular, seemed always to have the High Prelate’s ear. It was Lyre who had alerted Werryn to Aisling’s state in the dungeon upon his return. Between the two of them, conspiring from Werryn’s sick bed, they had arranged her move to the chamber she now occupied .
Installing Methild as her attendant was the simplest way Kael could think of to monitor the situation. She had nursed him back from near-death several times over, surely not with as much tenderness as she now showed the girl, but she was skilled in her caregiving.
Kael tuned out their droning voices, propping his chin on his palm and moving his fingers in idle circles against his scalp. When one grazed his lobe, a slight chill danced across his skin. The girl had been the last one to touch him there. It had been a small kindness—hardly one at all, really—but it had stuck in his mind all the same: the two fingers she’d pressed to his jaw to turn his head to the side. The cool brush of her hands against his hot ear. How gentle she’d been with him.
No one had ever been so gentle with him.
His eyes drifted to the jar on his desk, where the Luna moth lay lifeless and faded at the bottom. It had died by the time he’d ridden back from Nyctara, but he hadn’t been able to bring himself to throw it out. Even in death, it was beautiful.
“You’ve lost control.” The accusation directed at the king so flippantly by one of the Lesser Prelates ripped Kael out of his head.
He straightened up in his seat. “I’ve not lost control.” His practiced impassive tone now barely concealed a sharp edge of fury.
“No, he hasn’t—he never had control to begin with. Not really.” The High Prelate spoke as though Kael wasn’t in the room at all. Just as Kael made to protest, he was interrupted.
“Might the girl be the key to his finding it?” Lyre suggested from where he leaned casually against the back of a plush velvet armchair. “ He may wish—”
“You will not speak of me as though I am not present, and you will not imply again that a human has any influence over my god-given magic!” In one swift motion, Kael rose and swept his arm out angrily over his desk. The glass jar flew across the room and shattered against a bookshelf. The sudden noise quieted the assembly at once. “You do not know the toll it takes to wield this magic. And yet, here you sit and speak of control as though it’s a simple matter.” His voice was laced with a bitterness that he’d never quite been able to rid himself of.
The room watched cautiously as a paper-thin filament of darkness curled out of Kael’s fist. Shuddering, he withdrew it before it could grow larger.
“You cannot deny that there is something that sets her apart, being that she has tethered you twice now and lived, while your own soldiers fell around you.” Werryn raised his hands as he tried to placate Kael, who dropped back down into the chair. “We could just try again, if only to be sure. What would be the harm in that?”
“Or perhaps,” another Prelate suggested, “it’s not control you need, but release.”
A derisive, humorless laugh fell from Kael’s lips. “Release ? You were not in Nyctara, nor have you been present for any other release before that. This magic is insatiable. It takes what it wants, and you would have me give it all that remains of myself.” His silver eyes slid to Werryn. “Is that how you intend to take my crown?”
“Your Highness, forgive me.” Werryn’s tone had gone from placating to pleading. “None of us wish to see you lose the throne. Only to fully reach the potential of your power. Is that not what you want, too? I know how hard you’ve chased it, and what that chase has cost you.”
Kael winced slightly. It was true that he had sacrificed almost every bit of himself, but it had never been entirely of his own volition—not when the encouragement of the Prelates bordered on coercion. He may have walked this path on his own, but they had pushed him to its beginning.
It shouldn’t have been possible that the presence of a human girl could so easily disrupt the careful balance of chaos Kael maintained. He could end this, as he had intended to on the battlefield: either with her death, or his own success. Given the price her body had paid after two encounters with his shadows, it would likely be the former. The thought twisted something unreachable in Kael’s stomach, such that one of his hands moved unconsciously to grip it.
“We need every advantage we can get in this war,” Lyre posited.
A muscle ticked in Kael’s jaw. The male was right, and he would try again. But not in their presence. This was his riddle alone to solve. “I am still recovering, and so is she. This is a discussion for a later date,” he said with cool finality.
Slowly, Werryn nodded and gestured for the Lesser Prelates to disperse. “Very well, Your Grace.”
Just as the girl had appeared before him as a mirror in the aftermath of the battle, he saw it again later that night when he entered her chamber. In her small form, chained to the bedpost, Kael caught a glimpse of his younger self: a figure controlled for the sake of power. And in that same reflection, he found himself no different from the Prelates who had subjected him to a similar fate.
“It snowed today, didn’t it?” she asked.
Kael blinked, and the mirror was gone. The girl was just a girl. “Your pardon?”
“I can smell it.”
It had, indeed, snowed the previous afternoon. Kael smelled it too when he woke, sharp and clean. He’d found a thin layer of it covering the night garden on his evening walk. But that a human could sense it from this deep underground was puzzling.
“I’d love to see it,” she said wistfully, shaking him again from his thoughts.
“You’ve seen snow before,” he said tersely. “It is no different here than it is in your realm.”
She shrugged and the chain rattled softly. “I just miss the outside.”
“You should have considered that before becoming my prisoner.” Kael moved to his chair, which Methild now left in its place for him beside Aisling’s bed.
Aisling huffed a short breath through her nose. “You say that as though this was my choice.”
“You made the choice to willfully deceive me, knowing that there would be consequences when you were found out.” When, not if . Though Kael should have determined her false that very first night, he was drunk and his mind had been clouded by his earlier failure in The Cut. But it was only ever a matter of time .
She turned away from him then to fix her gaze on the opposite wall. Cautiously, he studied her. She did look stronger, albeit still pale and thinner than she had been in the night garden. The abrasions encircling her arms were nearly healed, and her hair was no longer matted with blood where she’d split her head open. He noticed, though, that an angry bruise radiated from where she’d tugged against the shackle, rubbing the skin beneath it red and raw.
Kael sighed. He leaned forward and with deft hands unlocked the cuff and let it fall to the mattress beside her. She froze, still facing the far wall, when his touch lingered just a beat longer than it should have on her pulse. Her irritated skin was warm and her wrist felt small in his hand. Small, but not weak. He wouldn’t be so foolish as to underestimate her again.
When Aisling turned back to him, her eyes were filled with surprise and uncertainty. They were a captivating mosaic of hazel, blue, and brown, each hue blending seamlessly into the next. He hadn’t noticed their color before. She brought her arm to her chest and held her wrist gingerly, as if unsure of how to move it without the weight she’d grown accustomed to feeling there. “Why?”
He ignored her question. “I will have Methild bring something for that.”
Aisling glanced down at her wrist and a lock of her hair fell out of the loose braid that the hob had woven. Reacting almost instinctively, Kael reached out and brushed the errant strand aside. The contact was light; tender, even. A touch that felt like a whisper in the silence of the room. A touch for which he had no explanation.
The girl’s quiet intake of breath shattered the spell they were both held under and at once a sense of normalcy returned to the chamber. Kael withdrew his hand as if the connection had been severed by an invisible blade.
He cleared his throat and his expression regained its usual calculated composure. He needed to retreat from the closeness that had just enveloped them. Quickly, he rose from the chair. “Rest,” he said. His voice betrayed none of the uncertainty that roiled within him. The softness he had allowed himself to reveal was a rare occurrence, and the action left him unsettled as he closed the chamber door behind his back.
“She won’t get better this way, languishing in that dark chamber.” Lyre’s voice came in a sing-song pitch from the alcove where he was perched, waiting for Kael to pass, robes hanging down over the rough cave wall. “She’ll atrophy, along with any power you think she might have.”
“I do not believe she has any power at all,” Kael snapped. He wanted to be alone; he needed to slow the whirlwind of thoughts crowding his mind.
“Perhaps not, but such things are unknowable without exploration,” Lyre said, too casually. “You might at the very least try.”
That unsettled feeling continued to linger long after he’d left Aisling, a haunting reminder of a connection that had felt far too potent for his liking. Kael was disquieted; he had somehow allowed himself to step outside his carefully delineated boundaries, and it left him feeling exposed in a way he was unaccustomed to. It was much the same feeling that had plagued him after Aisling, as a pixie, left him following their encounter during Nocturne. His fingers found his ear again, where the ghost of her touch persisted. Idly, he wondered whether she could still feel his touch, too.