Chapter Fifteen
When the dinner finally ends and the males depart, Lila and I push the cart of dirty dishes down the servants’ hallway.
We reach the Mouth, warm light leaking out onto the dark stones.
The door swings outward, revealing a blond male with only four debt rings on each arm.
He is my height, and we both tower half a foot over Lila.
Behind him, the clamor of the kitchens washes over us, smells of butter and onion filling the air.
“How was dinner?” His crooked half smile snatches my breath, so strongly does the expression remind me of Jeremee.
“Oh, you know.” Lila shrugs. “The same as always.”
“Self-important and full of the advisor’s open-mouthed chewing?”
“Shh!”
They laugh until his attention finds me.
“Oh, hello,” he says.
“This is Carter, the king’s personal valet,” Lila chimes in. “Carter, this is Avery.”
“Night Crest for Illusion,” I start. “And, well—Reign, too.”
“Ah, so you were the one…gifted at the coronation. My condolences.”
“Well, I’m grateful she’s here,” Lila says. “We’ll have to show her that being in the Pith isn’t so bad.”
“The Pith?” I ask.
“What we call House Reign. Something the older faeries used to call it, and now it’s tradition.”
“How tolerable it is being in the Pith depends entirely on what the king had for dessert,” Carter says. “I’m heading to his chambers now to prep the nightly routine.”
Lila grimaces. “He chose the custard.”
Carter groans, knocking his head back against the open door, then shouts, “Fern, my love!”
From the clatter of the Mouth comes a boisterous voice. “I’ve got a knife in my hand, little shit!”
“Chef Fern!” he corrects, sapphire eyes flashing with mirth. “Why do you continue making these dairy desserts?”
“To torture you, of course!” A wave of laughter from the Mouth.
“You know he picks them every time,” Carter says, facing us. “Even at the cost of the bathing chamber and the nose of his personal valet.”
Lila covers her mouth. Something in my mind shifts another degree, just as it did with the smell of the king, that no matter how powerful and beautiful, he still has a body. And all bodies bleed.
“Well, I should get going,” he says.
“Do you want to come in for a snack?” Lila asks me. “There should be leftover custard.”
I look between them. “Is that…allowed? We can eat their food?”
“Food is food, of course. Well, we have to wait until they’re done, but Fern always keeps extra of everything so that there’s leftovers.”
This is how I could start a network of my own. This is the answer, and yet I cannot stomach it now, when it’s right before me. The more I learn about other practices in the palace, the less my upbringing makes sense. How small was my world before? How small is my perspective still?
Suddenly, it is all too much. Lila’s eager face and Carter’s grin, the slippery gold silk on my skin, the heat of the ovens on my neck, the aroma of tomorrow’s bread that will never be broken and shared with my oldest friend.
“I think I’ll just wash the dishes and head back home,” I reply, my voice faltering on the last word.
“We have someone to wash them,” she says. “But I can help lace you back?”
I step back. “It’s okay. Thank you, though.”
“Are you sure? Lacing can be complicated. You have to perfectly picture where you want to go, a path to get there.”
“I understand.”
“Are you feeling all right?” the male asks. “You look like you’re going to be sick.”
“This is just how I look.”
If they are taken aback, they say nothing.
“Thank you again for training me today,” I say to Lila. “Sorry, I just—I need…sleep.”
“Of course.” Her wide mahogany eyes roam over my face, and my throat thickens because it is so nice.
She seems nice, and Carter seems fun and even Chef Fern makes others laugh, and it is all so bright and loud and joyful and smothering like gorging on a feast after starving, and I cannot breathe, I cannot think, it hurts unbelievably so.
“I’ll see you tomorrow night,” Lila says as I turn.
“Nice meeting you,” Carter adds.
“You too.” I hurry away, wondering if I have ruined this, too, like a reeking creature whose touch spreads rot across everything good.
My genius collides with the golden ring, and the metal warms and warms and warms, a tingling back up my arm, across my chest, like insects buzzing in my bones, rattling my teeth, and it hurts, this confluence of my root energy and Reign, but it is a good hurt, a powerful one, like the bellyache after all that sickness, a magical fever that vibrates everywhere until the two energies connect with the plane of magic.
I disintegrate into nothing.
I sigh into it, spooling out into the blankness of being as my consciousness zips along the plane, picturing, as Lila said, home. The smell and taste, the feel, the aching for what never was.
I sprawl out onto stone, limbs snapping back into place, mouth tasting blood, ears ringing. Cracking my eyes open, I am not greeted with my empty chamber.
Several familiar male faeries stare down at me, all with tattoos up to their shoulders. The hairs on the nape of my neck rise.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” one of them sneers.
“How’d you do that?”
I scramble to my feet, adjusting my Reign clothes, surveying the bunkroom.
Jeremee’s room.
My heart plummets as the males cringe back, and through their torsos, I spot Glenn. He stands straight, shirt rumpled, arm blocking the bunk behind him. His blue eyes widen.
“Avery,” he breathes.
A whimper behind him in the lower bunk, like a little animal’s.
My chest cracks open as he shifts, and there is the small, waxen face of Benji, poking above the covers.
The child watches me with empty eyes, drawing up a too-long sleeve to wipe his nose, the neck of the tunic too wide for such a small body because it was never meant to be worn by a child.
Because it is one of Jeremee’s tunics. Tears burn my world.
Standing between us, Glenn watches, attention on the boy despite the muscle clenching in his jaw.
“What can I do for you, Bee?” he asks softly, the whole room hushed now.
The child does not blink. He does not shrug or cry or scream, and suddenly I wish he would. Instead, he rolls over, his back to us. My heart sinks, and I feel the weight of many gazes on me once more. Glenn steps forward.
“How did you get in?”
“I—” My mouth fills with pebbles. The oath. Slipping the ring inside my pocket, I try again. “I wasn’t trying to—”
“But you did,” a roommate says.
“It was an accident.”
“Is this some sort of forbidden magic?”
“Get out,” another growls.
Keeping my eyes on Glenn, I swallow. “Please, I didn’t mean—I will leave. I promise. I didn’t intend to—”
“There are a lot of things you did not intend to happen,” he says. “But they happened anyway.”
Tears roll down my cheeks and when I turn, I notice the coiled body language of those around me, the poses of creatures ready to pounce. I need to get out. I need to get out before their anger spirals deeper. Yet I remain in the circle of the males, no one moving.
A male points a tattooed finger. “Don’t think I’ve ever heard of a double-sworn faerie before, have any of you? No, it’s odd. Odd, unless you’re a spy for the fae. A spy disguised as a Crest.”
A murmur goes through the males.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Glenn snaps. His hand clamps around my elbow as he forces his roommates to part.
But they must know, they have to, that I did not do this on purpose, that I am grieving just as much as they are, that fighting among ourselves isn’t helping anyone but the High Fae.
So as Glenn opens the door, I look back at the males who obscure the silent child in an adult’s tunic.
I start. “I am so, so sorry that—”
Something wet smacks into my face.
“Hey!” Glenn shouts. “Enough of that.”
Someone spit on me. Someone I used to eat meals with, laugh with as we were all brought together by my friend’s magnetism. But he is gone, and so is that shared connection.
The door slams shut.
The ripping of fabric, and a cloth is pressed into my hands. I wipe my face with the scrap of Glenn’s shirt.
“Thanks,” I murmur, eyes stinging.
He leans against the door, arms crossed, as we stand in a hallway. He gestures to the band of Reign silk around my breasts, the pants that start above my hips, the exposed stomach.
“You don’t have sleeves to…”
“It’s quite ridiculous, I know,” I say, forcing a smile.
He does not return it. “What was that? You appeared out of the air like…well, like a fae.”
I shake my head, pointing to my throat. “It was a mistake,” I finally say.
He sighs. “Aren’t you supposed to be in Reign?”
“I haven’t gotten—”
The sentence is choked out by magic.
I don’t have a room there yet.
“I will be paid in a few days,” I say. “I’m setting aside money for Benji and you.”
“He’s suffered enough,” he says. “I’m sure Jeremee would appreciate any help for his brother.”
“What are you truly saying?”
He sighs, running a hand through his hair, blinking bloodshot eyes. “Benji does not want to see you, so you will not see him.”
“It may take time.”
“What if he never changes his mind? Will you accept that?”
I can’t lose another person, especially not him. The child I love like my own, a part of Jeremee that’s still here. My family. My family. My mother and Jeremee and now Benji.
“We will let the boy decide,” I finally say.
“We will.” He nods. “But in the meantime, I understand if you don’t want to share your coin with someone who won’t see you.”
“You think me so shallow that I would buy my way into the child’s life and if he refuses, would refuse him, too?”
Glenn just watches me with a drawn expression. “I don’t know what to believe.”
Pain, like love, seems to always plummet to a new depth I did not know existed until I hit it.
“You know me. We know each other,” I say desperately.
“Do we? Besides Jeremee, what else do we have in common?”
Not this. Anything but this.
“Benji. We have Benji in common now.”