12. The Lapsus
twelve
The Lapsus
H ow many fractions of a broken kingdom make a High King? One High King. One thousand pieces of him scattered through time and space. Light. Darkness. Water. Fire. Earth. Wind.
Ruins. Caeludor. Fog. House. Palace.
Humans. Soulmate. Land-dragons. Slaves. Gift War. Secret-Keepers. Prophecy. Forest of Eyes and Ears. Portals. Keys.
Mind. Body. Soul.
Kingdom. Crown.
Caenim. Curses. Mother. Father. Friend. Witches. Banshees.
Malum.
Me.
The most powerful man in all of Faerie was crumpled up at my feet like an unwanted love letter.
Time stood still while I teetered on the brink of something finite, my mind reeling as it played flashbacks of the day in the field outside of Sthiara when the caenim snapped and drooled all over the beautiful blond man I had believed to be named Wren.
I had made a split-second decision not to save him back in that moment because I had been absolutely convinced he was working against the High King of Faerie.
Aura, my love.
Will you please pick up the dagger at your feet and kill it?
I’m so in love with you, it’s made me sick.
But he was the High King of Faerie.
And I didn’t want to make that mistake again—even if he insisted upon repeating his own blunders.
“Lucais,” I murmured, delicately lowering myself to the ground in front of him. I sat on my knees, one hand in a fist, touching my knuckles to the cool floor for balance.
The High King was coiled up, his head hung low between his legs, his hands knotted in his thick, golden locks.
I laced the fingers of my free hand with his, softly untangling each thread like I was handling sunbeams in physical form, and slipped my hand beneath his chin to coax his head up until I found his eyes.
They were haunted, bled of their colour and power. The one thousand pieces of a High King were sharp and jagged, slicing into Lucais as they orbited his mind, trying to return home to complete the picture in a frame that something had shattered once upon a very different time.
The light in the room began to dim ever so slightly. I didn’t risk tearing my eyes from him to check if the sun was setting outside in the make-believe sky. Even if it was, there was nothing I could do to save it.
“Your truth is safe with me,” I whispered. It was my final effort—the only idea left in my arsenal. All I could do was hope that he would believe me.
He has no reason not to.
One step forward.
The High King shook his head, nuzzling his cheek into my palm, a solid and harmless warmth. “Aura…”
I waited, watching him expectantly. Lucais’s hand came up to grip my wrist, holding it firmly as he dragged it down until my palm was sitting directly over his heart.
Thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk.
Faerie hearts beat in threes, I’d learned in the House’s library, but I counted five echoes inside of the High King’s hollow chest. Over and over again, his heart slammed into my palm with five consecutive beats.
I didn’t question him about it in the moment, choosing instead to hold space for him in my quiet.
At last, he spoke.
“There was something trying to get into the Court of Darkness,” the High King of Faerie revealed in a low voice.
His eyes were closed, his face tilted up towards the ceiling.
“Or maybe it was trying to get out. It created such an intense, chaotic pressure in there that I couldn’t actually be sure which way it was headed when I picked up on it. ”
“In where?” I enquired softly, my hand still resting atop his rebelliously fluttering chest.
“In the lapsus ,” he replied. “It’s what we call the place between one location and the next.
When we travelled through the gateway between your hometown of Belgrave and my empty field”—he slyly opened one eye to gauge my reaction, and then closed it when I poked my tongue out at him rudely—“we had a singular moment in time where we were in the lapsus. Here, there, everywhere, and nowhere. That blink-of-an-eye moment.”
I pursed my lips, observing the homely cottage interior around us. A place between one place and the next. “Like this?” I asked. “The cottage is a lapsus?”
He shook his head, ruffling his blond locks.
“Not quite. You can’t stay long enough in a lapsus to build anything like this,” he explained.
It was funny to watch him talk with his eyes closed.
I found myself smiling at his eyelids. “This is a permanent establishment, built onto an outer corner of tangible existence with a doorway spelled into a key, and it requires a lapsus in order to reach it just like anywhere else you can’t get to through a physical door. ”
“Okay,” I said gently. None of what he was saying made any sense to me whatsoever, but he was so pretty when he was being polite. I didn’t want to risk deterring him from doing it again.
“When we use a gateway in or out of Faerie, or we open a portal from one place to the next, or even when we evanesce, we encounter a lapsus,” he informed me, seeming to sense my confusion.
“But there is also one within the wards—which is how people are able to get through them—and there are wards up between every single Faerie Court. There have been ever since the Gift War, but they don’t extend to the tunnels beneath them.
If someone wants to get into the Court through the tunnels instead, they have to be let in by someone on the other side of an iron door.
” Lucais lowered his head back down and opened his eyes, staring at the fingers I still had splayed over his heart.
I quickly withdrew my touch.
Lucais grabbed my hand and made a prisoner of it in the cage of his long fingers. And I let him.
“The wards serve to function as protection more so than they do in the capacity of teleportation. We never needed them for travel before the Gift War, and I control them all now, which means that I can see who is entering and escaping from each Court,” he admitted.
“I don’t use them to track the comings and goings of regular faeries—or even the interesting ones, really—but if creatures like caenim or Banshees try to gain entrance into one of the six Courts, I can very quickly and easily reinforce that ward’s protections and shut them out.
Or, as it so happened with Blythe’s Court, I can trap them inside of the lapsus, too. ”
“How so?” My brow creased. “If you can’t stay long enough to build anything…”
“The passage of time in the lapsus is not continuous,” he replied.
“At best, it’s singular, and at worst, it’s repetitive.
They are not stacking moments in time on top of one another like building blocks to move forward like we do.
The lapsus is climbing and falling all over the same, single block.
” He sighed deeply. “I imagine… I don’t think it would be pleasant if there is anything sentient trapped inside of it.
It would be like reliving the same, single split second of time again and again.
The lapsus is filled with electricity. Whatever is living inside of it now must be feeling like it’s being electrocuted continuously—zapped back in time by a split second every single time it tries to move forward. ”
The hairs on my arms raised, even beneath the warmth from the long sleeves of my shirt and coat.
“It all started years ago,” Lucais went on softly.
“Blythe hadn’t shown up to any of our normal events for a while, and she hadn’t been spotted outside of her own land, which was also a little bit darker and quieter, according to reports from neighbouring towns.
To be fair, though, this wasn’t totally out of character for her or anyone who lives in the Court of Darkness.
That’s why we didn’t think anything of it—which means that nobody knows exactly when she first went missing or when the shadows overtook her place on the Map.
” He shook his head, staring past me at the wall.
“I last saw her seven years ago across the room at a party, so my guess is that things went awry shortly after that. But I didn’t start investigating what happened until the first human body showed up beside the gateway in the Court of Light two years later—when I realised Blythe might actually be missing, and her Court was vanishing, too. ”
“You said it was a Malum infestation,” I reminded him.
He’d started to explain it to me on our first day at the House, but he hadn’t been forthcoming with information, and we’d gotten off track about the Gift War and my family history.
Then Lucais—Fake Lucais—had walked up the stairs, and the lies swept all of us away.
The Real Lucais nodded, meeting my gaze with hooded eyes.
“I thought it was at the time.” Worrying his lower lip, he bent his head to the side, cracking his neck.
“Because the Court of Darkness is shadowed by default, I had to guess. I couldn’t actually see any of those insidious little balls of angry black ink that represent the different hordes of Malum on the Map.
They weren’t out in the Ruins like they always are, so I assumed they had infiltrated the Court of Darkness.
I thought maybe there were just so many of them that it created an entire wave of shadow that spread over her land, but I was wrong.
I think I was very wrong. I realise now that they were probably hidden inside the tunnels, and Gregor was already helping them. ”
Glancing down at our hands, I rubbed the pad of my thumb over one of his knuckles.
Even for hands so slender, one of his could still completely engulf both of mine.
“So the northeast corner of the Map went dark, the Malum vanished inside of the underground tunnels…” I clicked my tongue.
“I am not understanding how the Court of Darkness was sent into exile.”