23. Chapter 23
Chapter twenty-three
The circular birdcage frame stood proud of any walls. And Kaed was in the centre of it.
He was in the same clothes he’d been taken in just last night, his hair now falling a little more limply down over his brow.
His wrists were still chained, but they hung in front of him instead of behind.
I couldn’t read the expression on his face when he saw me. I could hardly read my own emotions at seeing him like that still.
To do that to anyone. Leave them bound overnight, suffering in the heat of the new day. To do it to anyone … but to do it to a prince. The Prince of Hayden and the Northern Corner. The Four Corners.
My blood rushed through me like I’d had too much spiced wine but I forced myself to move into the room.
The tides had turned now, with him captured instead of me. Perhaps now he’d understand what it felt like to be forced into submission and have your plans torn asunder.
It was stifling in here. Had he stayed here the entire night, chained and caged? My gut twisted at the sight, and suddenly my feelings were mottled and opaque.
I cleared my throat against the dry sensation scratching at it. The heat beamed down on the ornate cage, and it felt like a deliberate cruelty.
“Not pleasant, is it?” he finally said.
“What?”
“The air.” He could feel that too? “Fae witch magic was cast to mute and suppress all magical ability when in this room.”
My eyes strained in their sockets. Fae witch magic? Fae witches were real?
“It’s ancient. From before my time,” he said, looking up at the structure that held him.
My shoulders deflated. Oh. They had been real.
“They call it barren air,” he finished.
That’s how it felt. Barren. Dead. Like all the particles in it were just dust and decay. Frozen and suspended without the possibility of being more than “there.” Existing.
I looked at his wrists. “Why are you still bound then if this place won’t allow you to use your magic?”
He gave a sort of laugh at that. “I guess they must really be afraid of me.” A wicked grin graced those lips. They looked a little swollen. I didn’t see water in the cage with him. “At least they got something right about me.” He laughed to himself.
“Did they question you?” My voice was guarded. It felt strange speaking to him now as a prince. It felt strange, but nothing changed in me. He was still just the male who had taken me. That’s all.
The council members had been civil with me. Looking at how Kaed was confined now, I doubted he had had the same experience with the council.
“They did.” He shrugged, and his leather groaned as it clung to him. “They just didn’t care about the answers.”
I moved closer to the cage. It was like approaching a dangerous animal with the way he looked behind bars. Even though there was a wall of iron and manacles between us and I held the key for both, there was something truly terrifying about seeing him caged.
“They asked me—Ouch!” I yanked my hand back after resting it on one of the bars. A faint mauve mark painted my palm where it had made contact.
Kaed was nearly pressed to the cage limits the next second. “You’re hurt.” It wasn’t a question. He sounded angry, in fact.
I hissed at the pain. “What is that?”
“It burned you?” he asked steadily, as if it took him great effort not to be more annoyed with me.
“Yes! What in the hells was that?”
“You’re more fae than you give yourself credit for, peach.” Confusion blatant across my face, he continued, “The Cage has been imbued with faebane. The manacles too. They’re taking no chances by having me in here.”
I flicked my head to Kaed as I cradled my hand. “Why isn’t it affecting you, then, with the manacles?”
“It is,” he said simply.
My throat went dry. “They’re burning you right now?”
But he was so reserved? So calm?
“Who does it serve to show my pain? To show my weaknesses?”
I flinched, but maybe I could relate a little to that.
Masking how you truly felt could be a sort of defence, I supposed.
It was something I had mastered over the years.
Maybe he was right? What did it help, who did it serve, to show how you felt?
When the people of Shadowfall had seen me cry or thought they’d broken through my carefully constructed walls, they only tried to hurt me more.
They didn’t move on when they’d broken me.
That was the cruelty of people. Best to shatter something else rather than face their own pitiful lives, their own shortcomings.
I pushed past that with a hard swallow. “What about the raw crystals? They don’t burn me.”
“It requires fae witch magic and processing to activate the properties of the crystals.”
Despite his earlier claim of masking the pain, I saw a pulse in his temple just where his scar carved downwards. It throbbed even as he forced composure across his features. It had seared my skin, and I’d only touched it for a second.
“We should get those off you.”
I moved to the door of the cage but hesitated as I reached for the lock with the key.
Kaed was as still as a predator seconds away from prey. What was I thinking?
But before I could answer myself, I slid the key into the mechanism. The lock turned with an echoing click in the chamber.
I stepped in before he could step out. “So humans can’t use faebane against fae, then? If they can’t magically process it?”
“You do realise that’s the way out,” he said as I closed the door behind me.
“Answer me first.”
His lips twitched into a sort of smile as he regarded me, now in the cage with him. “I suppose, a particularly pointed shaft could do some damage.”
His ability to throw around humour while still bound and in pain was impressive. Or was it disturbing?
“How does it work? What’s it doing to you now?” My voice softened. I felt cruel asking these questions when he was suffering. But this was the only chance I was going to have to learn anything about the faebane he so desperately wanted from me.
I knew what it was to suffer at the hands of others, but I couldn’t let him out. Not yet. Not until he gave me some answers.
I stared straight at him. And Kaed stared straight back.
Kaed winced as he clinked the metal of his cuffs and showed them to me. “Think of it like a dampener,” he finally said. “The faebane binds magic to it.”
He’d said as much when he’d taken me but seeing the faebane actually do it, suppress his magic.
I had no idea that’s what it was used for when I traded it to merchants.
The thought of it falling into the hands of people who would rob someone of magic.
Take a part of someone as they took their freedom too.
If the wrong people ever got hold of something as powerful as faebane …
I considered the chamber I was in. The members of this city who currently held that power. And I shuddered to think what people without rules and morals would use it for.
“If we push against it too hard, fight the suppression, it will do more than just take our magic.”
Unease etched across my face.
“Don’t worry.” He shrugged as if he wasn’t currently being tortured. “There isn’t enough in these to do more than sting.”
Flexing my hand open and closed, I examined my burn. Sting? His understanding of pain was far different from mine.
There was something odd about knowing I had some element of fae in me. I became lost in my own thoughts.
Kaed moved so fast I didn’t have time to process it.
I looked up from the mark on my hand directly into Kaed’s face, which was now only inches from mine.
I blinked at the sudden nearness of him crowding me.
The chains that bound his wrists now encircled me, the links pressing into my back.
They didn’t burn through the fabric, but I felt the searing heat of being chained to Kaed regardless.
“Care to let me out now?”
Stuttered half sounds, barely words, tumbled from me. I tried to push away from his grip, but he caged me as surely as the iron around us.
“Going to let go of me?” I tried to steady my heartbeat as I quirked a brow up at him.
In response, he gripped me tighter.
Breathe.
His body up against mine felt like a roaring furnace. My breaths came quick and shallow, and I struggled to control the erratic rhythm of my heart. There was a heat and intensity I couldn’t deny when I was close to him. Maybe he felt it too.
His hair fell over his eyes as they focused on my lips, watching the smallest movements I made, everything.
I was pressed close to him. It had been different when he’d held me under the fae lights of the party. His eyes had been hard, unmoving, like ice. Now they blazed with blue fire as they pinned me.
My mind urged me to look away, to tear my gaze from his. To quell the heat that poured from his body as it pressed into mine, the bite of the chains around my waist.
But I didn’t look away.
Instead, I squared my jaw and steadied my stare as I looked right back at him. I would let him out after I got what I needed. There was no point lying to myself … His body felt good where it was right now.
“I might have you at a disadvantage in here.” I allowed the tendrils of heat I’d felt deep in my core slip into my voice.
Despite being trapped between Kaed’s chest and the chains that held him, the power dynamic had shifted between us. He no longer had the status, the strength, the magic. He didn’t even have his freedom.
And I was pressed to him, caged with the animal I could see scratching at the surface to be let out.
I held the key between my fingers. He could have taken it from me by force instead of wrapping his arms around me, pinning me to him.
But he hadn’t. He wouldn’t. A tiny thread of something spun through me, and the truth of it stitched into me.
He could have hurt me, taken the key from me, but he hadn’t.
I held the key under his chin like I had with the dagger when we’d first met.
“Not the first time I’ve felt at your mercy.” A wolfish grin spread across his lips, and I had a very strong and sudden urge to trace them with my tongue.
“Feel familiar?”