Chapter Six
Briar and I take shifts by the bedside, where Kassandra moans and writhes as muscles and tendons and bones contort and sew together beneath pale skin. There is no time to stash the extra food from the dinner. Briar sends it down to the kitchens to be tossed.
Because faeries rarely can afford Healers, we are taught a myriad of herbal remedies, salves, and tinctures. I use the techniques my mother did to tend my father after a bad fight in the pits, the same ones she needed after their own fights when my hands wouldn’t stop shaking. They don’t shake now.
When my mistress cries out in agony, I mix a ginger-turmeric remedy to slip into her mouth alongside water. When her eyes flutter open, I give her chamomile tea. While she rests, I dab lavender oil across her forehead with a damp cloth. With my magic, I keep her pillow cool.
It is not enough.
Dawn breaks. When the new Day Crest knocks on the door, I dismiss them. The faerie passes a silver tray into my hands. Toast and grapes and coffee and cream. A simple breakfast—one that I delighted in stealing when my mistress turned down her meals. Now I know why Kassandra so often refuses to eat.
As I take the tray into the room, I stare at the reclined figure. Her pale face peeks above the duvet, a yellowing bruise on her cheek, lips chapped, silver hair falling to her shoulders. Neither of us says a word.
I set the tray on the serving table to the left of her bed and mix another tincture. “This will help with the pain.”
“Go away.”
“After you take this medicine.” With downcast eyes, she opens her mouth. Just slightly. When I lean forward, Kassandra winces. I pull back. “I’ll need to be near your face to give this to you. When you’re ready.”
My voice comes out soft and deep, a tone I’ve never used with her before.
She has heard my fear, pain, forced respect, and apathy.
Until last night, I did not think this High Fae, the Heart of Illusion, ever needed anything from a faerie other than obedience.
Kassandra licks her wounds in a canopy bed while I must tend to mine in a cot.
Yet despite her privilege, I would not want to trade places.
Silver hair swishes as she gives a curt nod. Leaning over her, I catch the faintest tug of magic. The smallest trickle of the plane that wraps around her pinky.
“How are you doing that?” I ask before I can stop myself. “You’re still siphoning power? Even while healing?”
She shrugs. I tip the vial into her mouth, and she swallows.
“You tried to stop him,” she croaks.
“I am sorry for failing.”
“I…I leveled a complaint, though.”
I wince. I know, I want to say, but understand she’s asking something else. Why help her?
“No one deserves that,” I reply.
She watches me for a few moments, frowning. Then the sheets rustle as she sinks lower into the bed, face once again hidden. In a moment come the soft sounds of her sleeping. I do not feel relieved.
I have seen many shades of my mistress, from taunting to dismissive to downright cruel. This numb, silent shell of a creature may be the most disturbing of them all.
—
Wind rips at my clothes, stings my skin; I am in a tempest. I lurch from sleep, gasping, fumbling for a candle in the dark—but it is daytime. The plane whips around, the room spinning and swirling. Someone is screaming.
Kassandra. I stumble toward the bed, her body thrashing, kicking. Phantom nails rake across the sheets, shredding the fabric. The linen canopy rips on one side.
“My lady!” I yank the rest of the sheets off her twisting body, tears and spittle running down her anguished face. Do I wake her? Will that worsen this pain?
She wails louder.
“Kassandra!” I scream.
Her eyes fly open. She surges forward over the mattress, and I catch her, her body slamming us onto the ground. She shivers on top of me, gasping, then scrambles off and bares her canines.
I don’t move, my heart seizing. Her pupils dilate, her teeth glinting. She is a predator once more. Then recognition dawns, and her face loses its tension.
“Leave,” she seethes, rubbing her thin, bruised arms.
“My lady—”
“Get out!” Her voice cracks.
“Yes, my lady.”
I brush off my skirts, climb to my feet, and exit to the parlor.
A disheveled faerie catches my eye.
I jump at the reflection in the glass hung on the wall. My chestnut hair tangles in matted waves past my shoulders, brown eyes hollow. A tight set to my jaw. That isn’t all.
It’s as if someone dipped a paintbrush into a storm cloud and smudged purple and black across my collarbone.
The bruises streak under the simple scoop of my plain cotton dress.
If I were to lift the garment up, I know what I would find underneath; the aching in my body tells me.
This was only from a few invisible slaps. Nothing compared to—
The mattress creaks with her weight once more, the sound of broken sobs filling the space.
This will not do. None of this will do.
Just because I’m blood sworn to keep these secrets in doesn’t mean I can’t act out.
It is time to make a plan.
—
I knock on Briar’s door. After a few moments, my superior answers in a cotton nightdress, dark hair in a loose bun.
I hold up a bag of stale bread rolls offered to the faeries this morning.
Sometimes we get scraps right before they fully turn to supplement the gruel they give us.
Sometimes I’d rather have just the pasty porridge.
Before I left the kitchens, I warmed the rock-hard bread with butter.
“Here.”
She rubs her face. “What time is it?”
“Late morning.”
“So we have a day until we need to start prepping her for the coronation. Her arms should only need a few more hours to fully mend.”
I grimace. “How often does this happen?”
Briar steps back, opening her door for me to enter. Inside looks exactly like my new room, skinny but with a small window and cot. As we settle on the mattress, I take out a roll and hand it to her.
She sniffs. “How’d you convince the cooks to part with fae butter?”
“Told them a guest of Kassandra has a dog.”
She smirks, biting into the roll. I tear at mine with my teeth, chewing. After a few moments, Briar says, “There were several years when I would intervene and he would break my arms, too.”
Cringing, I say, “I am sorry.”
She shrugs. “As faeries heal slower than fae, I couldn’t be there to tend to her, and Dominik refused to allow any day servant in.
She was left alone, and I was left broken for weeks.
Then I spent some time begging the guards for help, but forgot whose orders they must follow in the House.
We can only speak of it now because we are both blood sworn. ”
My stomach tightens. “This is a nightmare.”
“My point is—redirect. I’ve found this is the best way to reduce harm overall.”
“How can you say this?”
“I’ve been doing this for a long time, Avery.
” Her eyes go misty. “When Kassandra was a baby, she had the loudest howl I ever heard. She could scream for hours upon hours upon days. Back then, I changed the soiled sheets and her clothes, bathed her, and did other nightly duties. But no matter what I did, she would just wail. She wouldn’t stop because…
well, she was hungry.” Briar frowns and continues, “It’s custom for High Fae lords and ladies to only be fed by their mothers.
I’ve heard in the countryside they allow wet nurses and goat’s milk, but not here.
When I slipped Kassie sheep’s milk, she immediately spit it up.
I thought it had something to do with being a High Fae babe.
Something different that their genius needed. She was hungry, and I felt helpless.”
“And the late Lady of Illusion?” I ask.
Briar shakes her head. “She would rarely nurse. She only visited when Kassie was too weak to cry. It was torture—for Kassandra, and for me. My whole body would ache. I couldn’t stand it anymore. And then one day, it happened. My breasts produced milk.”
I gasp. “How?”
Briar looks down at her empty hands. “I always wanted a child. I still do. But Kassandra found me just as much as I found her. I can’t explain it other than that.
Sometimes, I wonder if she’s so frail because of me—my faerie milk.
Other times, I feel like keeping her alive has been my greatest challenge and accomplishment.
” She clears her throat, dropping her voice.
“Do not make an enemy of any of the Morellas. They are strange, unfeeling fae. They are not like the royal bloodline; they fought, fucked, and fabricated their way into the Upper Court.”
My mouth dries out, my palms slick with sweat.
“I know,” I tell her. “I know.”
But I did not understand. Not until now, when two of them despise me.
“Briar, what if there’s a way we can save Kassandra?” I finally ask. “More than just redirecting.”
—
A towering, lithe male lingers by my door. The image of Dominik flickers back to me, vicious and lethal. I stop short in the dark hallway, my genius flickering to awareness.
“Avery?” Jeremee asks.
I sag against the wall in relief. In a moment, he’s in front of me.
“I heard the servants were dismissed for the day. Did something happen?”
Images of the night tumble through my mind. “I—”
It’s as if glass marbles roll up my esophagus, blocking the sentence until it dies in the back of my throat. I swallow and try again. “It—”
I gag.
Jeremee steps back. “The fucking blood oath.”
My eyes sting as I wait for the magic to subside, a hint of metallic blood in the air. With all the secrets I keep these days, lying has become easier than breathing. Yet this blood oath makes me bear the truth in sullen silence.
“Are those bruises?” There it is again, that angry glint in his gaze I’ve seen twice this week, but rarely before. The blood oath means I cannot tell him anything, and a newfound fear grips me. A deadly force lives inside me—and it is not my own.
“Please,” I manage.