16. A Traitorous Heart
“ F ireflies?” Aisling asked curiously.
Instead of taking her to the library, when Kael came to her door that evening he said cryptically that he had something else he wanted to show her. He led her down and down a narrow, winding passage that opened up into a damp cavern. Lichen covered the ground and crept up the stalagmites towards rivulets of water that dripped from the ceiling. Ahead of them, tiny glowing balls of light drifted lazily. Some alighted near pools of water, while others danced through the still cavern air.
He looked down at her, one eyebrow raised slightly. “Those are wisps.”
Aisling peered closer at the floating orbs. She couldn’t discern any form beneath their glow. “They’re faeries? ”
“They are the echoes of faeries, the part of them that is left behind when they move on.” As one ventured nearer to the pair, Kael stepped lightly forward and caught it in his hand. Aisling winced, sure he’d crushed it. When he made his way back, he grasped her wrist and drew it towards him then cupped his hand against hers. Aisling saw the faint glow move between their fingers as the wisp passed from Kael’s palm into her own.
“Methild will fetch you a jar if you’d like. You can use it to light your room.” His hand lingered there for a beat, his skin cool against hers, before he closed her fingers around the orb and let go. It struck her just how gentle the whole exchange had been—she wouldn’t have imagined his hands to be so careful, or to be capable of something so delicate. She ignored the way it made something flutter in her chest.
Aisling raised her fist to eye-level and peeked in. The wisp rested on her palm, though she couldn’t feel it there at all. The light it produced was warm and golden. She stretched out her arm and uncurled her fingers one by one, until the wisp floated from her grasp and drifted back toward the others.
“They cannot tell the difference, you know. They’re not entirely sentient,” Kael said from behind her where he was leaning against the wall. “They’re little more than remnants of magic.”
Aisling watched them for a moment longer before turning back to Kael. “How do you know there’s nothing left of the faeries they were before?”
Kael cocked his head slightly to the side, his eyes shifting between Aisling and the wisps. “I suppose there is no way of knowing. ”
“Then you shouldn’t keep them. Living things shouldn’t be held captive,” she said pointedly.
He smirked, amused. “Are we still discussing the wisps?”
“Partly.”
“Did you truly expect to deceive me without consequence?” Kael pushed off of the wall with his shoulder and watched Aisling closely as she carefully stepped over the loose stones.
She ignored his question; she had no good answer for it. Instead, she considered how to redirect the conversation towards something more productive. The first time she’d seen anything other than ice in Kael’s eyes, however briefly, was when she told him about her mother. She’d opened up, and he’d let his guard slip a bit. She could do so again, now, while they were alone and she had his attention.
“I used to feel captive on my island,” she said. “When I was young, thinking of my mother being able to escape to someplace beautiful. The stories she’d tell me when she came back, the pages and pages of sketches she made of the Fae she encountered...I was jealous of her. Then when I stopped believing, and she died, it felt like even more of a prison.”
“Did you leave it?” he asked thoughtfully.
Aisling nodded. “For a while. I was angry and bitter, but I was lonelier in the city. As much as I didn’t want to believe in magic, I couldn’t help looking for it. I never found any there.”
Kael hummed. “Is that why you returned?”
“No. My father got sick; I came back to care for him until he passed. Being back made me wonder whether I should have left in the first place.” Aisling looked back once more at the wisps lighting the cavern. She missed her home desperately; talking about it now made her heart ache.
“You cannot grow without leaving behind what is comfortable.” There was kindness in his words, a softness to his voice. Hearing it there was satisfying, almost comforting. It warmed her to him. After a moment, Kael began walking again. He kept his pace slow until Aisling caught up.
“Do you ever leave here?” she asked.
Kael nodded once. “On occasion.”
“Where do you go?”
“To battlefronts, mostly. To our borders.” As though imagining it as he spoke, Kael’s fingers toyed with the dagger he carried sheathed at his hip.
His curt, non-committal answers frustrated Aisling. She wanted more from him. She asked a little more forcefully now, “That’s how you grow then? War?”
His only response was a darkly grim smile. Aisling didn’t look to see whether it reached his eyes. She wished she was better at this—at the game—like Rodney. He’d have come up with ten different ways to drive the conversation in the direction he wanted, and likely at least nine of them would have worked. But Kael hadn’t yet hardened to her, so she pressed on.
“Why are you giving me this freedom?” she demanded finally.
Kael glanced at her then cast his gaze back ahead. “You are far from free.”
“I’m not in the dungeon, and I’m not chained to a bed or locked in a room.” He was right, though. Aisling was a prisoner—of Kael, of the Undercastle. Of the prophecy that had sent her here in the first place.
“Indeed you are not. And yet you’ve made no attempt to run,” Kael observed.
Aisling bristled at the unspoken challenge in his words. He thought her complacent; weak, even. But it was resolve keeping her in the Undercastle, not weakness. If she’d been so weak as he assumed, she’d have fled that very first night he left the door unlocked. She couldn’t leave here empty handed, not after everything she’d been through and not with the threat to her home growing with each passing day.
Though, she considered, it may be to her benefit to let him think of her as the frail human he’d seen in his dungeon. As a curiosity, rather than a challenge. Na?ve, as he’d called her in the night garden.
“I’m not so stupid as to think I could navigate my way out of there and find the Thin Place without being caught,” she lied. “You never answered my question.”
“Didn’t I?” he said dismissively.
She snapped then, both unwilling and unable to continue to play. She couldn’t take one more ambiguous, teasing response. “You answer very few of my questions, actually, though you expect me to answer all of yours. If my company and conversation is so intolerable, why bother wasting your time on me at all? Why don’t you just tell me what it is you want and get it over with?”
The pair stopped walking and turned to face each other. Kael’s jaw tightened as he regarded Aisling, his eyes once more icy and impenetrable. “If you are so dissatisfied with my responses, then why do you persist?” His tone cut through the air like a blade.
“Because I thought that if I kept trying, I might actually get a real, decent answer out of you instead of more vague, cryptic bullshit!”
Kael’s grip tightened unconsciously on the hilt of his dagger. “And what answers do you seek exactly, Aisling? Do you expect me to lay bare my soul to you, to share my every secret?”
“I expect you to make up your mind,” she shot back. “Either treat me as a person, or as your prisoner. You can’t have this both ways.”
He paused, then said coolly, “Your chamber is in that direction.” He nodded towards a smaller hallway that branched off the corridor. He’d corralled any hint of anger that had colored his feature seconds before, now hiding it under that neutral mask he so often wore. “You can find your way back on your own. Or you may leave. Do whatever you wish.”
Before Aisling could throw a response back at him, he’d turned and stalked off the opposite way, his figure quickly swallowed by the darkness as he retreated. She stood there for a time, staring after him. Wishing she hadn’t let her frustration get the better of her. She’d been so sure they were making progress, and now she thought she may have ruined it.
After their argument, Aisling was surprised when Kael was again at her door the following evening wearing the same stoic expression. “I told you that I’d show you the library,” he said before she could ask. “I keep my word.”
The library’s shelves were carved into the walls of a cavern that glittered, like the throne room, with veins of quartz. It was small, though, and Aisling was dismayed by the selection she found there. Most of the books were similar to those Kael preferred: history lessons, tales of battle and strategy. Mentions of prophecy here and there, but only ones that had transpired centuries before. There had to be more.
When Aisling turned to ask Kael if there were other volumes elsewhere in the castle, she found him leaning his weight on one shoulder against a shelf, absorbed in a book he held open in front of him. With his chin tipped down to read, his moonspun tresses hung like a curtain around his face.
“Find something good?” She almost felt guilty interrupting him, but he hardly looked up. Instead of an answer, he just hummed. To see him this engaged in an activity that seemed so utterly normal brought a hint of a smile to Aisling’s lips unbidden . He wasn’t cold or angry or derisive this way; she might even go so far as to call him unguarded.
That was gone in an instant when the High Prelate entered the library and cleared his throat. It was loud in the quiet cavern. Kael snapped his book shut, already irritated before the male even spoke, and slid it back into its place on the shelf.
“Stay here,” Kael ordered Aisling before following him out into the corridor.
She did, for a moment. Just long enough to let them round the corner ahead and begin a conversation in hushed tones. Removing her slippers to muffle the sound of her footsteps, she crept as close as she dared. In that short amount of time, their voices had already increased from harsh whispers to louder, biting tones.
“You said you’d try again with her once she was well. She appears well enough to me.” The Prelate did not attempt to hide his impatience.
Kael’s response was clipped and unyielding. “You misremember, Werryn. I said only that I would consider it.” Werryn, Aisling pronounced silently. She was mentally cataloging the names of each Fae she encountered there, though she’d yet to learn the full names of any besides Methild.
“How much longer will you toy with her? Taking her for walks as if she were your pet.” He spat the word and Aisling winced when the truth of it lanced through her. “You’re putting off the inevitable.”
“What I do with my prisoner is none of your concern.” Kael would be standing defensively at his full height now, towering over the older male, but the Prelate didn’t sound at all intimidated.
The words Werryn spoke next knocked the breath out of Aisling’s lungs and echoed in her mind like a discordant melody: “She could fundamentally change how you use your magic. Your whole relationship with it. Do you not want that?”
“Of course I want that, but I will explore it my way and in my own time.” Although Kael’s response held a thread of frustration, the hint of longing beneath it resonated far louder. Aisling dug the tips of her fingers into the rough rocks at her back .
“You are blind to your own potential; you always have been.”
“If I have been blind to anything, it’s only ever been your lust for power.” The pair’s harsh exchange concealed layers of subtext that were well beyond Aisling’s grasp, but it made her stomach turn all the same.
“Do not act as if you don’t feel that same hunger,” Werryn challenged.
“And yet I am the only one who bears its consequences. I will use the girl when I see fit and I will inform you after I’m through.” Then came the sound of rocks grinding under boots, and footsteps returning in Aisling’s direction. Kael’s voice, closer now, as if speaking to Werryn over his shoulder: “You are dismissed.”
The ground beneath Aisling’s feet shifted violently when Lyre’s words came back to her: you’re alive, but you shouldn’t be. This was Kael’s purpose for visiting her in her chamber, for allowing her this limited freedom. This was the answer he was seeking to the question he had refused to ask her. Aisling’s own motivations had been but a single thread in the tangled web of their interactions. He was attempting to grow closer to her in the same way that she was him. They were manipulating each other.
But it was the realization that her own feelings had grown deeper than mere manipulation that struck her with force. Her chest tightened; she was drowning in this ocean of unacknowledged emotions, unable to come up for air without another wave crashing over her head. All along, they’d only been using each other, and once again, she felt like a fool for thinking she could have possibly held the upper hand. She’d not only lost it to Kael, but to her own traitorous heart.
She should run; she needed to run. She could make it back to the library before she was caught. But from somewhere within that choking wash of emotions, anger rose unbidden. Instead of turning to run, Aisling stepped out from the shadows into the king’s path.