Chapter Eight
A network of twisting vines and woody roots pour from my palms like living serpents, coiling themselves around the entirety of the throne room.
Thorns spring up from the marble floor, jutting upwards like jagged teeth, creating a maze of sharp edges between Gray and the king.
The once glimmering moonstone pillars are swallowed by a sea of twining green—the light slowly disappearing as they unfurl their spindly bodies, clogging the glass roof in a gnarly bundle of overlapping flora.
The king’s royal banners tumble from the walls as trailing ivy and tangled threads scale the marble surface, eating everything in their wake.
The walls groan as the weight of the emerald tendrils overtake the space at horrifying speeds.
They shoot for the king, snaking up the dais—twisting around his throne.
Black venomous flowers sprout to life, and when their petals unfurl, a gray vapor is revealed—lazily floating into the air like nothing more than an inconsequential fog.
And the sudden realization that all of this is coming from me is so jarring, I stumble backwards, tipping myself over from shock. I outstretch my hands, but it’s too late—my body plummets to the ground in wide-eyed dismay.
“What is this?” The king shouts, rising from his throne.
Sterling clutches his chest, his breathing ragged. Slowly, on shaky legs, he rises. And then his eyes fall directly onto me—an undeniable worry resting within them .
King Alastair follows his gaze, his eyes narrowing into a sharp dagger of accusation.
Which…the evidence is pretty damning.
I glance down, turning my palms over, inspecting the strange network of silver mingling with gold as it runs beneath my skin. The light is like a glittering river, coursing upstream from the tips of my fingers to the veins in my forearms.
My mouth opens and closes, and as I search for words—any singular syllable—I find that I am utterly speechless.
Could it be…was I a late-bloomer after all? It is rare, but there are known records of wielders acquiring their magic late—something Gray always tried to remind me of while growing up.
I had just given up any hope it would happen to me.
I fervently scan my arms for a wielder’s mark. When magic manifests in a wielder, their wielder’s mark—a unique mark that appears on the wielder denoting their magic type—almost always manifests with it.
Yet I find nothing.
Though it could be somewhere I can’t see. Is it on my back? On my—
The king’s growling threat snaps me back. “Restrain her!”
Before I know it, guards are tugging me up from the ground and twisting my arms behind my back. As they do, like obedient soldiers, all of the winding roots and twisting vines, thorns and flowers—everything—it recedes back to me, disappearing like smoke into my palms.
And like a fool, all I can do is blink.
As if on instinct, I look to Gray. He is entirely hunched over, being held upright only by the shackles confining his wrists and ankles. His back is mutilated—the sight gruesome. But his face has become gaunt and pale, to an alarming degree.
He didn’t look like that before. Has he lost too much blood? Was the glass laced with something?No, that’s not it. I would have noticed such a thing sooner.
My neck tingles, floating with the lightness of clouds yet swaying as though it is supporting bricks. Before I know it, my vision assumes a strobing effect, and my chest feels as though it’s hollowed out—almost like I’ve been kicked.
Tired.
I feel so tired all of a sudden.
I wobble like a shaky branch in a hailstorm, swaying on my feet. And as my eyes roll to the back of my head, bringing a cover of darkness with them, the final thing I see is the row of the king’s royal banners lined along the wall, undisturbed, as if nothing has happened at all.
How strange.
I could have sworn I saw them fall a moment ago.
“Please. There is no one else I can entrust this to.”
The tone of my mother’s voice made me shift on my feet. Hidden within the shadows, tucked away behind a cracked wooden door, I listened in on the conversation as it carried on late into the night.
I’d had a strange dream that woke me from my sleep. Plus, Gray was snoring in bed next to me, which made it next to impossible to return to the dreamland. So, when I heard the adult’s whispering in Gray’s parent’s living chamber, I couldn’t help but to crawl out of bed and eavesdrop.
“Perhaps you could ask…him,” Azalea offered. “You’ve said it yourself that he is a good man—an honorable man. I understand it would not be easy to gain an audience with him, but maybe he could help—”
“Don’t you dare bring him up,” my mother chided in a harsh quiet. I watched her shoulders rise and fall with her emotion-laced breath. She dropped her voice even lower, and I had to strain my ears to hear her murmur, “She must never know about him. You swore to never tell a soul.”
I wondered who they were talking about.
Azalea reached out and took my mother’s hands, cupping them between her own. “Railiana, I would never. I swore the unbreakable oath to you, and even if I hadn’t, I would never betray my Sister in Ahlai like that.”
My mother’s shoulders drooped, and she was silent for a long moment.
“I have told you what I’ve seen in the fog.
The Veil…it is a distorted place of hazy imagery.
Most times, all a Veilreader can hope to do is interpret patterns or catch a fleeting glimpse of things to come.
” She lifted her head, and she locked eyes with Azalea, and then Sterling.
“But I saw it in full color, clear as the channels flowing through Keziah.”
Sterling’s back was to me, so I could not see his expression—though, I didn’t particularly need to see it. I had spent so much time with him and Azalea, I could practically replicate any of their expressions to near perfection.
His voice was soft and filled with a gentle optimism as he supplied, “The act of Veilreading is anything but concrete, Rai, and impressions are subject to change. Perhaps what you saw is not what you’ve interpreted it to be.”
My mother shook her head, as if resigning herself to something.
It was strange seeing her make such a foreign gesture.
“You know a Veilreader cannot control how precise the vision is. Tell me, Sterling, do you think I wished to see that in the fog? Don’t you think if I could have interpreted what I saw as anything else, I would? ”
He did not answer right away. “I do not doubt you, Rai. But please understand that I am a man of reason and logic, and what you have just told us defies any semblance of either.”
My mother sighed, long and deep. “I know…I do not take burdening the both of you with this lightly. But…when I was last in the Veil, I saw something else as well. Something I will not share. I just…I had to tell someone, and you two are the only people I trust with my family’s life.”
Azalea’s brows furrowed as her mouth fell into a frown. “The way you speak… You’re scaring me, Rai.”
My mother only glanced at Azalea before she again locked eyes with Sterling.
“Somewhere, there is a record of everything, and it will confirm what I have told you—what has mostly been lost to neglect and time. I have good reason to believe it is in the king’s restricted section of his library, in the archival records. Promise me you’ll search for it.”
I could see the bob of Sterling’s head. “You have my word.”
A long-legged spider tip-toed along the skin of my exposed leg, and my immediate reaction was to stomp it away. I kicked out my leg in an attempt to shake it off, somehow finding the self-control to stifle my rising shout .
But I wasn’t nearly as quiet as I thought. My mother stood up abruptly and called out my name. “Lyra?”
Before I could get busted, I scurried back into bed, throwing the covers over my head, pretending to be as sound as asleep as Gray—who was still snoring.
When I come to, my hair is bunched in a guard’s fist, and there is a dagger at my throat.
“How gracious of you to finally wake from your slumber.” The king towers over me—which isn’t saying much considering I’m being forced to my knees—and leans down, his lip curling with rage. “What did you do to my advisor, and how long have you been hiding your magic from me?”
I feel like a fish out of water, unable to function—to breathe —properly. There is a pounding headache expanding behind my eyes. My muscles are fatigued for reasons I am entirely unsure of, and I must have just collapsed onto my raw, bleeding back, because it burns .
“Answer me, girl!” the king snarls.
“I–I…I don’t know. I—”
He glares at me as though I’ve grown another head. “You don’t know? You don’t know? ” His voice elevates with anger. “You just turned my whole throne room into a gods-damn jungle, and you expect me to believe that you don’t know ?”
Yes?
The guard yanks my hair, tugging my head back, forcing my chin to lift toward the king. “I swear, My King. I don’t know.”
“ Liar! ” he seethes. He lifts a hand and slaps my face, the bitter sound echoing. “If you will not tell me the truth, perhaps a few nights spent in the dungeons will loosen your tongue.”
A panic seizes me, and in a moment of weakness, that panic reveals itself with the twists of my features.
The king smiles, delighted to have glimpsed my displeasure. “Oh, yes. The dungeon is exactly what you need. Perhaps I’ll put you in a cell with the other bastards, and you can offer them some entertainment.”
I open my mouth to protest—to lie, to do anything to prevent myself from being placed in the mildewy dungeons, but the sound of Sterling clearing his throat has me quickly snapping my mouth shut.
“If I may, Your Majesty.”
King Alastair turns on his heels, sweeping his eyes along Sterling. “You may speak.”