Chapter Thirty-One
Lila and I tread toward the Salon of Stars, the darkness cold but living. I listen for it now, between the buzz of the kitchen, the list of chores; when I press a palm to the stone and slow my breathing, I hear it. Shifting, beneath the palace. Disturbances. Screams.
Something is down there.
“You mastered that quickly,” Lila whispers over my shoulder, to the flame blossoming from my hand.
“My genius seems…transformed.”
“Can sex impact our genius?”
I stop short, the flame flickering. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know.”
“Because of last week.”
“I don’t know what happened last week.”
“I don’t owe you that.” The flame flares. “I don’t owe you anything.”
The words ricochet along the stones, slinging back to me like slaps. The fire crackles, dampens.
“I’m sorry,” I rush. “That was—”
“You assume parts of me as well.”
“I…” The flame dissipates. Darkness curtains us. I want to ask what she means again, but instead let space unfold between us.
“I do not enjoy sex,” she finally says.
Comforting words, reassurances, rise like heat, but I do not know her years just because I fill her days now, do not know what she’s been through and how it’s made her feel.
“Okay,” I say instead.
“I really do not enjoy sex,” she whispers. “But it’s always been that way. Even before the king.”
I search for the right words, to recall another in my life who feels such as this. But I’m not sure. Sex—and sometimes its accompanying violence—is so prevalent at Versara that I do not know what the absence of it would look and feel like.
“That’s okay,” I say again.
“I’m not innocent or childish. It’s just that I don’t think I experience attraction in the ways others describe. I feel other things—love, affection. Just not lust.”
“That makes sense.”
“And it’s not like I haven’t had sex,” Lila adds. “I’ve had it with males I thought I liked, ones who were kind.”
“Have you experienced desire with females?”
“I don’t experience it with anyone. It’s not the other creatures—it’s me. There is something…missing in me. Perhaps I’m not even a faerie—I’m some unfeeling accident.”
My knuckles brush against hers. “Just because your desires differ from someone else’s does not make you less than. I know we haven’t known each other long, but you’re the most creative and intelligent faerie I’ve ever met.”
“Avery…”
“Listen. The fact that you are also the kindest, most loving faerie, too, is a privilege I get to experience every day. You have—”
My throat tightens. You have changed me already, irrevocably. But that is too much, I am being too much. Suddenly, I am grateful for the darkness, too. Lila squeezes my hand, and I squeeze back.
Then her arm finds my shoulder, pulls me into an embrace. A dam has been broken, and the emotions of the past weeks, the past month, flood through me, and I tremble. We still cannot see each other but I tremble—not for what has been said in the dark, but for what Lila has made me feel in the light.
“You’re my friend and I am yours,” she says, rubbing my back. “The first day you started, we laced to the Pith together. Do you remember what you said when you realized the rings let us borrow Reign magic?”
I rack my brain. Though it was just over a moon ago, it feels like much longer—so much has happened in that time, so much has changed.
“What did I say?” I ask.
“You said, ‘How lonely it must be to carry this knowledge around, unable to share it with anyone.’ Every faerie before you commented on feeling powerful, scared, excited, confused. But you…you saw me. Even when you didn’t know me, even when you were lost, you saw me.”
“I see you now, too,” I say, then pause. “Well, not truly because it’s so dark in here.”
Lila laughs and so do I. It strikes me then that if I had perished after Jeremee’s death, by my own hand or another’s, I would not get to experience this.
I would not have stumbled into the warmth of Lila’s friendship, the kindness of her character.
The waters of my grief subside, revealing more solid ground to stand on.
Rather than replacing Jeremee as I feared, my heart has expanded to hold them both.
“Well,” Lila says. “Shall we wander under the stars once more?”
“Where you wander, I will follow.”
“No, you’re going first into the strange, abandoned bedchambers.”
I roll my eyes, smiling. My smile doesn’t last long.
The bathing chamber is silent and cold when we enter, a primordial stillness like a grave despite the moonlight pouring through the glass ceiling.
Lila grabs my arm. “Look!”
Something small and shiny flickers across the far wall. A glint of metal, of brass. We creep forward, the glow of my flame falling on a door. How did we miss it before?
“This must be a door to the second Salon of Stars,” she says.
“Did you ever venture into it with your father?”
She shakes her head. “There was no need to clean fireplaces that were never lit. Perhaps, if Maxian had had a sibling, it would’ve eventually been used.”
Lila places a hand on the brass and tries each key. Nothing clicks—until the last one, a small, rusted thing.
“Etoles,” she whispers.
Nothing.
“Etoles.” She takes a breath. “Etoles.”
“Maybe the issue isn’t the word, but the key?” I suggest.
“The key definitely fits.”
She tries Solil and Lune to no avail. Finally my friend steps back, wiping her forehead. “It’s no use.”
“We could try breaking the door in, but…”
“We aren’t destroying anything.”
My genius twitches with a pulsing energy that is not my own, exuding from the door itself.
“Perhaps we can speak to the wood in the door and request it to move,” I wonder.
“Once the tree was cut down, it would’ve died.”
“Let me try something,” I say, pressing my palms to the grain.
A ripple of energy.
My genius sparks, rising through my mind, down my arms, contacting the plane. Magic crackles around me, a tapestry of nerves and feelings, currents of life that weave throughout the entire space, brushing against the stones, the door, down the drain behind us.
My genius works against the current of magic under the pads of my fingers, pushing, pushing into the door. Then a rush of information, a flood that washes back into me, overtaking my senses in return.
Chestnut wood. The door used to be a chestnut tree, eight hundred years old, blooming full and tall and lush in a grassy meadow.
Columns of cream flowers sprout from branches, clusters of spiky spheres holding sweet nuts.
The drop of leaves, then snow, the burst of new life and warmth.
White, slender birds building nests in its crooks.
The sound of a child laughing. The feel of little hands, pulling on branches, a chubby cheek against the trunk.
What is your name? the child asks.
Baffling, I have none. I do not need one; I am many things, I am a leaf and a forest.
Will you be my friend? the little creature requests.
What is a friend? I wonder. What are you?
A faerie, the child says. A friend.
The child remains in the shade, collects nuts, insists on planting along the meadow. Saplings spring up from the grass. A growing network, a family, someone with whom to share roots.
The creature and I grow together, expand. One time, the child brings water in a dry summer; another time, it cries in my boughs. The child brings its child and so do the birds. A circle of little lives, woven around me, through me, spawning outward—
Pain. A visceral, deep cutting. Dragging, stripping of the skin. Pressing, grinding, sawing, sanding, harnessing together, nails driven into nerves. Screaming.
So much screaming. But no other creature to hear. No other life to feel, to harbor, to speak to along roots that rot under a meadow, an old faerie, an old friend weeping over stumps.
Slamming.
Pounding.
Strange magic pushed under the grain, burrowing and sprouting like fungus. The others shove a word in me to command, a word that does not ask, a word that cannot be refused.
It spreads its spores through me.
The strangers slap me, feeding the fungal magic, letting it fester each time they command. I become infection more than life, and still, I cannot die. The magic has intertwined with my essence, a parasite keeping a host alive so that it can always feed.
Creaking when opened, and still, they ignore the last of my protests. Generation after generation, that word, the hated word, a violation each time they conjure it, the blight twisting around remaining nerves. Then silence.
Years of silence.
Darkness.
Never peace, as the blight remains and so do I. Never the birds and chestnuts sprouting, the earth cradling and connecting. Never my friend again.
Silence, until the touch of magic once more.
Now, a wiggling insect, worming into the grain, grasping for what the others hooked into my pith. It pokes at the darker magic, the word clamped to my core.
Don’t say it, I beg. Please.
The little creature, the moth, wraps small, fuzzy legs around the dark magic. It tugs. The last of me rips. I scream for it to stop—screaming, screaming once more.
And it does. The moth moves back, waits. It sends a message along the threads, but not like the others. It is a gentle ask, a quiet one. A request, instead of a demand.
How should I help you?
A spark of light in this night. Help? Why would this flittering thing want to help?
What are you? I ask.
A faerie, the moth says.
A faerie. A friend once, who built my family and hers. A creature that I had forgotten ever loved me, it has been so long, and I no longer look like something to love.
Take it, I say of the festering magic.
That will harm you, the moth replies.
I am already harmed.
You will die.
I will be free.
The moth beats its wings. I will think of this in the years to come. Your story has shaped mine.
It is an acknowledgment, an invitation back into the tapestry of woven lives. I no longer have chestnuts to grow or shade to offer, but I can speak this, as they give me my ending.
Everything has a voice, I say. You must learn to listen.
The moth flutters, landing on the last of my living fibers, forever squeezed by the dark magic. It brushes a leg against me—me, not the disease I’ve become. It is startling and gentle. It is a goodbye. The moth waits as I gather myself. Finally, I send my last message.
I am ready, faerie.
The moth flares with brightness, with warmth. As it flies toward the fungus, it transforms into a fiery creature. Then it descends. The parasite recoils, shrieks. The moth descends and descends, scorching off the disease, burning through the fever that’s ravished me for a millennium.
As the dark magic squeals and putrefies, it falls from my being and I am growing, expanding. I am floating, wandering, breathing, tall and lush and full again; I am life. As I waft away on a celestial wind, like a seed in a spring breeze, I say goodbye to this new friend.
And then I am cupped, held, in the familiar hands of my oldest friend once more, and we are together and we are content.