55. Insignia
fifty-five
Insignia
“ J ohn Dante is in custody under suspicion of treason. The sacred insignia on his privately owned establishment in the mortal realm was vandalised, and John failed to take the appropriate measures to correct the situation,” the High Lord recited, answering my question.
“Furthermore, he has been accused of aiding and abetting known rebels acting against the interests of this Court, using a second privately owned establishment in the mortal realm for the purposes of conducting meetings, facilitating unauthorised inter-realm transport of prohibited persons and prohibited goods, and he has refused to give up the locations or identities of his accomplices.”
I glanced at Lucais. The Court of Light insignia had been scratched off the rosewood on Dante’s Bookstore, but—
He warned me not to look at it for too long, lest ye see the flame start to flicker and ye lose yer wits.
“Belgrave’s insignia was flame,” I whispered, glaring at John with tears burning my eyes. The slight shift of his head was my only clue that he heard me. “It really was enchanted to deter people from looking, wasn’t it?”
“The day ye asked me about it ‘twas the day it stopped appearing to ye as flame, lass.” John Dante’s dark eyes lifted to my face, sorrowful and wide. “Flip the Court o’ Fire around, and it willna take much to convince ye that it’s Light.”
An image flashed across my mind, blurred with static.
Dante’s Bookstore looms high above me as I stand outside the front door waiting for the Closed sign to turn over to Open.
The polished rosewood carving is striking, a larger-than-life depiction of a single flame curling towards the west. A breeze stirs, and the outline of the etching shudders and bends.
“What are ye standing out in the cold for, ye wee lass? Yer early today.”
“How long has it been doing that?” I ask the old man in the doorway.
He steps over the threshold with a grunt, craning his neck so he can look up at the insignia’s carving, too.
Our breath clouds in front of us in the bitter morning air as we stand out the front of the bookstore, and I’m sure that he can see the way it’s moving, but all he does is let out a really long sigh.
“Been like that since I was a boy. And my father before me…”
“That’s it!” Lucais exclaimed, yanking me out of my reverie.
He stalked into the middle of the platform and started to pace in a small circle.
“That is fucking it. They’re always confusing our two Courts, and I’ve had it.
” Pivoting, his golden eyes landed on the High Lord with perfect aim.
He dipped his head, a serious crease forming between his brows as he pointed to him with both manacled hands and declared, “You’re changing your insignia. ”
Owain snorted. “Why us?”
“Because I don’t want to change mine,” Lucais replied, a snarky emphasis on each word.
“But yours is the one everyone thinks is a flame,” Owain protested in a voice that made the whole thing sound utterly ridiculous.
“Yes, and yours is an actual flame,” the High King argued, “but nobody really seems to know that, do they? So it can’t be that good a depiction of flame!
They’re constantly mistaking it for something else, and they think mine belongs to this hellscape.
Why is that, huh?” He twirled in a circle, scanning the small crowd of faces. “Who works in advertising here?”
“Lucais,” Wrenlock began, raising one hand in the air. “We have more important—”
“No.” Lucais spun to face his friend. “No, we will get to those life and death matters in due course,” he avowed with a deadly look, “but right now, Owain and I need to settle this vexing ordeal about the insignias once and for all.”
“Lucais,” he tried again. “You’re being ridiculous.”
The High King looped around in another circle, throwing his head back with his eyes squeezed tightly shut as he groaned at the ash-tainted sky. “Am I?” he rebuked. “Don’t you see how much trouble this fucking thing has caused us?”
“I can settle this for you,” Owain offered casually.
He was deeply tanned, tall, and broad-shouldered—though not as toned as the other men—and his face was lined with a greater number of years.
His clothing was plain and black, though embroidered with red flames along the collar, and it shifted as he strode over to the throne and settled into the seat, flicking his hands up.
“It’s not happening,” he announced, utterly blasé. “I’ve seen the future, Boy King, and there is no Court of Light in it.”
Lucais had the nerve to roll his eyes. “Forget your iron-thread, did you? When did you become a Secret-Keeper, Owain?”
The High Lord shook his head and signalled to one of his men. “Not me,” he replied, and then he glanced up. “ Her. ”
We followed his upturned gaze and found an enormous bird cage being lowered to the floor.
It appeared from within the clouds of smoke high above us, the metal chains anchored to something obscured way up in the sky.
To my horror, a girl was curled up inside of the cage, bony and frail, with dull strawberry blonde hair and worn features.
She was older than me, but much smaller, like the growth of her bones had been stunted.
There was something that reminded me of an archaic torture device on her head; it was metal, tightly fitted around her temples and beneath her jaw, and rose in spires over her scalp in the shape of an old crown.
Small flickers of purple light swirled between the metal rods, like she was wearing a static electricity ball on her head for sport.
Her eyes were as blue as mine, but lacking cognisance. Despite the recognition in her gaze as she looked towards us, there wasn’t even a spark of hopefulness left in them, and she couldn’t speak even if she wanted to because her mouth was sewn shut with rusted iron-thread.
She was a Secret-Keeper.
“My little Oracle,” the High Lord stated with a lot of pride and no apparent regret. “I’ve seen it all, Lucais. From the start of the world to the end of it—and I know how this goes. Your insignia really is the least of your problems.” He gestured to the cage. “Take it from Siah.”
Lucais glanced between them, understanding crawling its way over his face.
“Siah…” He took a step closer to the girl, peering at her through the bars.
“She’s your daughter,” he said, a lilt in his voice.
“I remember now.” Crouching down a careful distance away, he looked over his shoulder at Owain.
“So you’ve found a way to circumvent the restrictions of the Temple? ”
Owain shook his head, grinning like a madman with eyes alight and wicked. “Not me,” he corrected. “Your father.”
Lucais’s brows flicked up. “My father?” he repeated, incredulous. “You don’t say…” He cocked his head towards the girl again. “And it really works? She’s able to feed you the future?”
“Yes, she is.” The tone the High Lord adopted made my stomach churn, as if the girl were a machine and not a person, and it worsened as he approached the cage, pointing to the metal band on her head as if he were identifying the selling points.
“See that? It’s your father’s invention, Lucais.
He was a very talented memory-scraper, that man, but the price his magic demanded of him was too high.
So, he found a way to create a machine that could do the work for him.
There’s a loophole in everything if you look hard enough, and Gage dedicated his life to this.
By taking the memories from Siah, we overrode the agreement she made inside the Temple of All to keep her knowledge to herself. She doesn’t have to consent—”
“Because she never would,” Lucais muttered.
“—and she doesn’t have to do anything. It’s brilliant!
The Temple of All ensures that no living creature can access the knowledge by force, but this invention is artificial.
It can do what your father couldn’t by taking his magic and developing an artificial intelligence.
This is a scanner, pulling everything she knows out of her head and feeding it into a separate device that stores it for me to look through whenever I wish. Like an Oracle of my own.”
The High King’s expression was as granite-hard as his voice. “What’s the catch?”
“Gage couldn’t make it permanent,” Owain admitted, tilting his head from side to side as if he were trying to reckon with the moral consequences.
“In order to truly beat the safeguards of the Temple, Siah has to wear the device at all times so it can continuously scan her memories. Otherwise, the visions completely disappear from my orb and the memories of anyone who has ever peered into it.”
Lucais’s expression softened before he faced the girl again. “Siah,” he crooned, a delicate croak in his velvet voice. “You must be in an immeasurable amount of pain.”
Siah was incapable of speaking through the iron-thread, but a single tear slipped from the corner of one eye and rolled down her cheek. The sight caused my heart to flare with a long, poignant ache.
With a profound sigh, Lucais stood, pivoting towards the High Lord with his fists clenched beneath the iron manacles. “How could you do it?” he implored, an acidic bite to his tone. “How could you do this to your own child? She’s your daughter .”
Owain was unaffected. With a deep laugh, he said, “What do you mean, how could I do this to my own child?” His dark eyes were scrutinising, and I detected a sliver of authentic perplexion inside them.
“Don’t you remember that I had two children, Lucais?
Has it really been so long that you’ve forgotten my son? ”
An itch crawled over my skin like ants and spiders in the silence that befell the room as Lucais churned through the words.
The quiet in my mind was intolerable, but I didn’t risk reaching for the bond, even though my agony magnified the moment the High King figured something out before I did, and I had to watch it dawn on his face in isolation.
“No,” he whispered.
“What?” I hissed.
“Yes,” Owain affirmed, utterly unbothered by the fury simmering in Lucais’s golden eyes. “Siah is the lucky one. Not only does she get to play a pivotal role in this, but she gets to be the one who lives to see it all play out.”
“How did Alaric really die, Owain?”
The High Lord smiled cruelly. “He died during a training exercise with the caenim.”
Lucais brought his hands, still cuffed together at the wrists, up to his face and started banging the knuckles of his thumbs against his forehead. “Why? Why? Why would you do that?” he beseeched, voice edged with hysteria. “Why would you kill your own son?”
Owain rolled his eyes, amusement replaced by a sudden surge of anger.
“Because he fell in love with the bitch, didn’t he?
” he returned, thrusting a hand into the air as he spun on his heels and stalked over to the wooden throne.
The High Lord’s voice became mocking, his hands moving in wild motions.
“He wanted to stay with her in the human world. And, worse than that, he developed grand plans to steal her away from that pig of a mortal husband she had so they could raise their faeling together here in Faerie. That was certainly never going to happen because that would have ruined everything .” He shook his head, heaving a harsh breath as he sat down. “He would have ruined everything.”
“How?” the High King demanded.
“Because the child was the perfect hiding spot so long as it remained in the mortal world,” he snarled, slamming his fist down onto the arm of the throne. “The baby being conceived was the whole point .”
Visions sliced across my mind like broken windows into the reality that Lucais had uncovered, fleshing out the inflections in the High Lord’s words, but none of them made any sense.
I scanned the faces in the room for clues, though nobody was looking at me.
Wrenlock stood behind me wearing a mask of stoicism, John hung his head so low I would have had to lie down flat on the floor to be able to glimpse it, Amelia was oblivious as she filed her nails down with a pocket knife, Siah was unable to move, and both the High King and the High Lord were staring each other down.
I stumbled a step forward. “Can someone please tell me what is going on?” I begged, and everyone turned to look at me as if they had forgotten I was ever there.
Irritation nipped at the corners of my mouth.
“I get that John and Amelia were spies, but which baby are we talking about? What happened to it?”
Brynn? My brother?
Fear and hope battled to the death in my heart.
Owain examined me, looking at me properly for the first time since he had strolled into the crater of the volcano.
There was a calculating darkness around the corners of his eyes that seemed so familiar to me, like I’d glimpsed it before in the reflection of the mirror, and I could have sworn I saw the shadows recede for a moment.
In the next second, they came flooding back, and he broke our stare with a bitter chuckle.
“What baby do you think we’re talking about? And what do you think happened to it? Are you telling me you have no idea who I am?”
I blinked once, the battle abandoned. “Why would I have any idea who you are?”
“Really, Auralie?” The High Lord of the Court of Fire put on a look of mock offence. “You don’t recognise your own grandfather?”