18. Chapter 18
18
Casimiro
A lba’s idea of employing this new mortal as a spy occupied my mind as I scared a pair of dryads away from the base of our mountain, where I’d been reconstructing a weakened part of the magical barrier that hid our mountain from fae and mortal eyes alike. As one of only a few fae in my court with concealment powers and the one with the strongest ability to cast a spell that would last for months untended, this job fell to me when Father was absent. It felt like grunt work, but I was grateful for the fresh air and the moment away from Alba’s prying eyes and Felipe's knowing looks. Between the two of them, there was little I could hide, and I didn’t want anyone knowing I’d decided to invest a mortal’s help to uncover the traitors in my own court.
There was no sense speaking to Zara until I’d replenished the supply of herbs necessary to mix the antidote, but I’d kept an eye on her. For the remainder of the week, she haunted the paths outside the palace like some demented mountain goat, wrapped in everything from a blanket to a fur cape—an addition I wasn’t expecting her wardrobe to supply. Every time I pushed magic through the court to find her, she was scampering around on the narrow, crisscrossing outdoor pathways that were built at the behest of the Sun Sovereign back when this place was nothing more than a prince’s home, not the seat of our court. Back when day and night courted each other like lovers. When sunlight wasn’t the shackles it had become to my kind.
A different time. My father’s predecessor, King Caligo, was born of the marriage between the Sun Queen and a Prince of Night. Caligo took the power of his mother and father and established this court, starting the war that tore our court from the rest of Rivenmark, banishing us to this mountain between worlds. But Caligo’s reign was not to last.
My father was the one who killed Caligo, weakened as he was after the war.
And that was the legacy I had to live up to. A three-thousand-year reign of complete, tyrannical supremacy.
From my bedroom balcony, I studied the horizon as two dragons raced each other in the growing twilight. The beasts moved with more grace and speed than any other living creatures, but their fire and their hatred of our magic kept us from admiring them up close. Only the ones we stole as eggs and kept in cages were ours to admire. But even they eventually outgrew our confines and our magic.
They were tolerant enough to let us share their mountain, only because we gifted them with jewels mined as we tunneled deep underground. But our stores of jewels were long depleted, and the dragons would tire of us when the magic of the stones they loved was finally all spent. A dragon could smell magic in the blood, in the air, and quite possibly in someone’s intentions, but the only magic they liked was the inherent magic woven into the world at its creation, magic that was mostly gone now.
My fingers rolled a tiny ruby back and forth, back and forth, as my eyes moved from the racing dragons to the curly-haired woman darting along a distant path high above. If she was looking for an escape route up there, she would be sorely disappointed.
One side of my mouth twitched. The woman never stopped moving. Like a tree forced to grow on a windswept hillside, she remained in constant motion. I didn’t know what she was searching for, but the ferocity with which she hunted instilled admiration inside me. Most mortals succumbed to despair soon after arriving in these halls. But not her. If anything, she burned even brighter now than she had the night I’d danced with her in her ballroom.
“Burn, little spark.” My words were sucked away by the howling wind. I curled my fist around the ruby, angry at the pain shooting up my veins that accompanied my shifting thoughts about this woman.
My father always hated my curiosity about mortals. Curiosity, he’d said, was only useful when it uncovered secrets. I chuckled to myself. At the present moment, the secret I most wanted to uncover was what Zara Valencia was hunting.
Before the trial in two days’ time, I would speak with her. Until then, I’d make sure she didn’t do anything foolish, like accept anyone else’s help.
In my shadow form, beneath a concealment spell, Zara couldn’t see me. I slinked silently through the dark passage behind her, indistinguishable from the black stone walls and chilly air that bled through these halls. The trial would take place in two days, and I still hadn’t spoken with her. She’d refused Alba’s attempts to recruit her as a dueling partner, which only cemented the notion that Zara Valencia wasn’t going to say yes to a request from a fae without ample reason to.
My physical body remained in my suite, and when the door to my room burst open and Felipe stomped in, my shadow form flickered briefly at the disturbance in my concentration.
Felipe glanced at a gray-haired mortal woman sprawled on the floor, swept his hair back, and shut the door behind him. He stepped over her body and set a small vial on the desk beside my arm. My veins ran black and thick, raised under my skin like little moles bored through my flesh.
Once again avoiding the mortal like she was nothing other than a piece of furniture to step around, Felipe edged back, his brows lifted. He clasped his hands at his waist and waited for me to speak, to thank him for the replenished supply of ingredients I needed to make my antidote.
In another part of the castle, my shadow form watched as Zara marched obediently toward the arena for her final day of training. If I was to employ her, I must speak with her tonight.
While hearing and seeing in both forms had become easy enough, talking in both forms at the same time was extraordinarily tricky magic. In my physical body, my eyes remained fixed on the vial, its murky contents enough to make my stomach sour, remembering how goosenettle stuck to my throat like drying paint and forced me to endure its lingering taste.
Felipe cleared his throat.
I looked up at him, mind focused elsewhere. The mortal on the floor groaned, and Felipe sidestepped, his lip curling in disgust.
“She’s alive,” he announced, surprised. “So, it worked.”
“Of course she’s alive,” I said, ripping my awareness away from Zara’s bouncing curls two hallways away. My shadow form would have to wait. No one could know I was trailing a mortal or why. I nudged the prostrate woman’s shoulder with my bare toes. She jerked a little, and her eyes popped open.
I yanked my foot back. Felipe laughed.
The woman rolled and pushed herself backward toward the door, her face pale as a wrinkled sheet. “What—what did you do to me?”
Pure loathing rolled off of her. I smiled, grateful for her prejudices at the moment.
“You were a test subject. I thank you for your willing compliance.” I leaned forward in a mock bow, sweeping an arm across my chest and not taking my eyes off her. Her gaze noted the black veins on my outstretched arm and something in her expression flickered with fear and then glee.
She thought I was cursed, and she was delighted about it.
Good.
She was right about that, but she was wrong about what I’d done to her. If the mortals hated me, all the better. My eyes flickered to the secret compartment that concealed the journal outlining the antidote’s ingredients and properties. My great knowledge of herbs and remedies had come from that book, not the countless others I’d studied.
Felipe watched the woman over his massive, crossed arms. She cowered at the sight of him then scrambled to her feet, grasping for the door handle. Her body, weakened from the poison, was pathetic to watch. But when she finally hauled her age-spotted self through the door, I hid my relieved exhale as a chuckle.
Felipe clapped me on the back, which would have sent me tumbling in my own weakened state, had I not seen it coming and grabbed the desk for support.
“You all right?” Felipe asked, noting my hand on the desk.
I nodded. “Just ready for the antidote. Thanks,” I added, tapping the vial with a fingernail.
Two halls away, Zara had stopped walking at the door that led outside to the arena. Blinding irreverent sunlight poured in from the small window in the door, and my shadow self recoiled from the light. The tendrils of my magical form, not contained by limbs and veins, curled toward her briefly, then the balcony door slammed shut and I was left floating in the dark.
I dropped my fist on the desk with a hard clunk.
“Something the matter?” Felipe asked. His eyes searched me, and I was thankful his magic did not include empathy. My father’s did, and that was more than any living soul should have to endure.
“The brittlenut powder worked well against snake venom,” I said, rubbing at a small drool spot on the floor with the ball of my foot. “Worked well, don’t you think?”
“Any luck discovering who’s behind this?” asked Felipe.
I shrugged. “Alba found her. The woman, of course, didn’t remember anything that had happened right before.”
“The poisonings are becoming frequent.”
“I know. But it will be a while before they find anything I don’t have a remedy for.”
Felipe rubbed his chin absently as he nodded in agreement. “But as soon as they find a poison that you can’t cure, they’ll strike. Which, judging by all this”—he indicated the shelves of vials—“will be a while. The curse has its benefits, I guess.”
My brows shot up. “Oh, yes, blistering pain in my veins has been a childhood dream of mine.”
“I only meant that you have so many poison remedies already on hand. You’re not only the second-most powerful fae in the court, but you’re poison-proof.” He let out a dry chuckle. “Hard to usurp a throne from under your rear end.”
I wanted to laugh, but all that came out was a raspy huff. “If it weren’t for Alba, I might not care. But I can’t let her die.”
Felipe offered a tight smile. “I know.”
My sister had found the latest poison victim in the seldom-used tunnels that led to the dragon’s lairs. Those tunnels were used for disposing of things the fae wanted forgotten, and someone had dumped this mortal servant’s body for the dragons to find, hoping, perhaps, to cover up the use of a poison known to disarm a fae from his magic for a short time. A deadly poison, in a roundabout way, and one tightly controlled by the few owners of the particular snake breed whose venom formed its base ingredient. Whoever was testing out the poisons on the mortals had hoped to keep this one hidden from me. Fortunately, Alba had been wandering that way, hunting the glowing lizards that lurked in the quietest corners of our underground palace.
“Ironic that I’m keeping these mortals alive while trying to kill the others,” I said.
As I recalled Zara’s words about me being the type to have enemies, my stomach tightened. If she had chosen to be a servant, I wouldn’t have to kill her before Father returned. But if she had, I would never have spared her a second thought. My eyes lingered on the door where the servant woman had departed, surprised at how oddly tight my muscles had grown when thinking of Zara.
“Not ironic,” Felipe corrected. “Ironic would be if you died in your attempts to kill the humans.”
“I really don’t like your sense of humor,” I said to my friend, crossing my arms.
Felipe sighed, finally relaxing a little. “Are you ready for the trial?”
I raked both hands through my hair, pausing with my hands cupped around the back of my head. Ever since Augustín’s murder, I had stopped watching the mortal games with rapt excitement, as so many of my kind did. But the others in my court didn’t carry a curse that would strip them of life in a short time. For me, death had lost its foreign gleam and now lurked within my very blood—blood that was made to be immortal.
“Ready as ever,” I answered.
The deaths of the mortals couldn’t matter to me. I saved the ones I could, and it had to be enough. My top priority was protecting Alba from the plot of the usurpers and from the curse that would pass to her, should I die. No entertainer’s death could possibly weigh heavier than hers would.
“Don’t worry,” Felipe said, his chin tilted up in that way soldiers employed when speaking boldly to their captain. “Between your research and my magic, the antidote will keep getting stronger.”
The books on the desk mocked me with their proven remedies, time-tested formulas for beating all known poisons and curses. The one inside of me was not among them. And no antidote yet existed that could remove it entirely. The Shadow King had been thorough when he’d crafted the spell.
I nodded firmly, dismissing my friend. An uncomfortable feeling of gratitude had welled up within me. Instantly, pain prickled again in my veins.
Father had never actually left. Not really.
“See you at breakfast,” Felipe called as he strode toward the door.
As Felipe closed the door behind him, my physical body dropped into my chair once again. Hallways away, my shadow form peered out a small window onto the balcony at the windswept girl standing in the sunlight like some star-descended saint. My jaw clenched as pain lanced through my veins, warning me that my thoughts were drifting somewhere my father would disapprove of. But I only planned to use this woman as a tool before she died—a shovel to uncover whatever murderous plot was afoot in my court. And that was something Father would approve of.
I stood there, watching her from the shadows, temporarily forgetting that she would die in a matter of months. Curse the light. She was a spark, and I was a moth, drawn toward the fire that mocked my existence. But like every other spark that wandered into the darkness, she too would snuff out.
Pity. For what a thing it would be to watch her spark catch fire.
Pain like lightning surged in my veins.