9. Chapter 9
“Where am I? And who the fuck are you?”
The woman standing over me is wearing a gown that is both soft and delicate, contrasting starkly against her severe features, yet blending in with her blush-toned skin.
Her purple-tinged eyes remind me of Dreamshade, a poisonous plant that hypnotizes its victims before killing them—which explains why meeting her gaze feels so tantalizing.
She reaches out to touch me, and her blonde hair, streaked in strips of pink, tumbles in a disarray around her shoulders.
I flinch away out of instinct. She swipes at me again with her cold hand, this time grabbing hold of my bound wrists and yanking me to a stand.
Without breaking a beat, she whips out a little key from her pocket and uses it to unlock my handcuffs.
I throw a quick glance over my shoulder at the guards, only to realize they’ve disappeared down the corridor, leaving me with her.
“Wait. Come back,” I squeak.
“Nullifiers,” she explains in a bored drawl, flinging the shackles across the room.
They land with a clatter on a soft pink rug behind her.
“They inhibit magic. Ideally, they should be reserved for the most hardened of criminals, of which you clearly are not.” She scrutinizes me with distaste before adding, “You look devastating. Did you roll through mud on the way here?”
I toss a quick glance down at my somber attire and wince at the memory. “I tripped. Multiple times. Back in the forest.”
“So you’re clumsy then,” she deduces, clearly cataloguing this precocious trait of mine into the back of her mind for safekeeping.
“No, that’s not—” I sputter out.
Gods, she’s even more terrifying than the guards are.
“You have a name, I assume?” she cuts me off.
“Shadow,” I reply in haphazard confusion. “But you can call me Shay for short.” Who is this woman, and why does she want to know my name?
“Shadow. Hmm. Did your mother give you that name?” she asks, her eyebrows knitting together in cast-iron judgment.
“I never had a mother.” I rub the raw skin of my wrists.
A beat of silence passes, as if she’s considering this. Then she says, “The nullifiers have acidic properties. Ice helps. At least, it did for me.”
“Wait, really?”
She looks at me like I’m daft. “Yes, really.” Then she proceeds to hold out her wrists as evidence, drawing my attention toward the pink rings of rawness encircling them.
“The acidic properties eat away at the skin. It’ll take days to heal.
Maybe a week. My name is Lily, by the way. Welcome to the castle Atrium.”
“Nice to meet you, Lily,” I say, my lie getting stuck in my throat. The truth is, there’s nothing nice about meeting her. My only saving grace is that Lily is clearly not the Goddess of Love, or else she would’ve lobbed my head off already. Although I have to admit, she certainly looks the part.
“How did you find the key to unlock the nullifiers?” I ask her.
“One of the servants dropped it in the hallway.” Lily shrugs. “I imagine they did so on purpose, considering they’ve yet to come looking for it. Perhaps they were too scared to take the cuffs off me themselves. Not that I can blame them. I’m sure they’ve heard what I’m capable of.”
My stomach twists in a double knot.
Of course they were too scared to take off Lily’s nullifiers. She probably has enough bloodmagic to incinerate them all with a single touch. What else would she be doing in a castle this magnificent, waltzing around like she owns the place? The gods must want something from her. Her blood, perhaps?
“Well,” I exhale with a snort, “at least you aren’t lacking in confidence.”
Or in appearance. Seriously, some people get all the luck.
Lily’s returning smile is a velvet ribbon with teeth.
Pretty, but not for touching. Just like her gown hewn from gentle chiffon, which is decorated in an intricate embroidery of lilacs that form together to accentuate her ample cleavage.
“From what I’ve gathered thus far,” she says under her breath, “we’re guests here, not prisoners.
The cuffs are simply strategic to ensure that we made it to the Atrium in one piece without killing anyone on our way up.
A necessary precaution, considering how the queen’s army has been dwindling in number lately. ”
I stare at her in awkward silence. Her violet eyes flicker back at me.
“I overheard the servants chatting through the walls,” she adds.
“According to their musings, I was chosen by the Goddess of Love.” She steps out of my direct line of sight and into my peripheral vision to give me a better view of the Atrium behind her.
“Have a look around for yourself if you don’t believe me. ”
I survey the room, which isn’t a room, but a labyrinth. The sweeping chamber is as tall as it is wide, born of arched ceilings and timeless walls, which form a maze that sections the room off into four corners, just like the castle itself. This isn’t a prison cell. This is a guesthouse.
Augustine, why did you drag me here?
In the nearest corner of this section of the room, passionflower vines dangle from crystalized chandeliers over a frilly pink bed, which Lily drops down onto, smirking like a Cheshire cat.
“Personally, I think we’ve been hand-selected by the gods for a specific purpose.
” She plucks a chocolate-covered strawberry from a nearby silver platter and pops it into her mouth, muttering between bites, “And I have a feeling that whatever that purpose is, we’ll never have to worry about spending our bloodmagic on frivolous things, ever again. ”
“You’re sure they haven’t brought us here to butter us up?” I whisper in horror, glancing around at all the bubbly troves of champagne. “Like pigs before a slaughter?”
Lily slips off the bed and saunters toward the diamond-studded mirror in the corner of the room, surveying her dress with a spin.
After a long moment, she throws a glance over her shoulder and grins.
“You have little faith, Shadow. The gods have decided to favor us because we’re special.
It’s about time, too. I was beginning to wonder if they’d ever notice how much bloodmagic I possess. ”
I look down at my magicless hands and gulp.
Lily spins again. This time, a sliver of gold catches my eye, drawing my attention toward the spellmark canvasing her right arm.
It’s a golden tree with roots interweaving down each of her fingers, and leafy branches curling around her forearm.
She follows my gaze and plants her heels, a smile blooming over her lips.
“You appreciate my spellmark,” she says with a soft tilt of her head, flipping her forearm back and forth to give me a closer look at it.
I nod. It’s rumored that the Tree of Life connects all the realm’s energy fields together and is the source from which all auras derive.
From it, Lily has received the power of Heartshaper—a person who manipulates emotions and feelings.
According to legend, Heartshapers have the innate ability to turn friends into foes and enemies into lovers.
And according to the town crier, Heartshapers have caused all sorts of ruckus in the local tavern, coaxing men to stab their own friends through the guts with butter knives.
A Heartshaper’s magic involves drawing out emotions that already exist within one’s heart and amplifying those emotions into an overwhelming tidal wave that can’t be ignored.
Which, naturally, often results in people murdering each other.
Thankfully, like all mortal magic, the powers of Heartshapers are fleeting and limited.
Their strength is entirely dependent on how viscous their bloodmagic is and whether or not they’ve recently drained it.
Although why the Heartshaper’s spellmark is the Tree of Life, I have yet to discern.
Perhaps because they sense auras—the place where all emotions derive—and the Tree of Life assigns those auras upon one’s planetary arrival.
Lily reaches out and grabs my hand. I swallow down the taste of dread.
“I sense that you are… different,” she says, closing her eyes and inhaling deeply.
“A dark force surrounds you in a net of protection. Perhaps that’s why you’ve been chosen by the gods.
” She releases my hand and steps away, as though she fears my inner darkness might seep into her lovely dress and decay it.
“What does your spellmark look like?” she asks, sounding genuinely curious.
A flashbang of a memory ricochets through my mind.
It’s a vision of Augustine’s dire warning, and the terror that’d brimmed behind his wild eyes.
“Never show anyone your spellmark, do you understand me?” That memory peels away as another takes its place.
This time, it’s of Grandmaster Grimwell, who’d nearly slipped on stone as he’d strode across his office and grabbed me by the shoulders with a violent shake.
“Hide the spellmark. Never let another soul see it. You must leave here at once.”
I’d initially coped with my exile by convincing myself that the brilliant man had gone senile, which had worked well enough at first. That is, until I’d found a stack of the queen’s royal decrees in Eric’s drawer, which had demanded: People of Aurora.
Deliver me the raven in exchange for a gallon of bloodmagic.
The fate of our realm rests in your hands.
After that, I’d decided that perhaps Grandmaster Grimwell wasn’t so senile after all.