Chapter Thirty-Nine
For the next few days, I am the opposite of untouchable.
When the Healer visits—a short fae with curly black hair—he places cold hands on my bruised stomach and closes his eyes.
A ticklish warmth flows through me, spreading to my limbs.
After each Healing session, he and I are both drained.
He informs me that I had internal bleeding, numerous cuts, and a depleted genius. It is nothing compared to Lila.
She clings to life. Eli and his team slowly rewarm her, monitoring her heart and fluids. The few times she’s awoken, she cannot comprehend what she hears.
Kassandra refuses to take her bed back, opting for a servant’s cot rolled into the bedroom.
Briar does not comment, though I know she wants to.
The day servants leave supplies and meals in the dining room but do not venture further.
Once, I wake to see Benji by my bedside, pale and tired, but it feels like a dream.
After four days, Eli visits, scrubbing a hand over his face as he enters. Briar closes the door behind him, while Kassandra rises from her desk chair to the left of the bed where I lay.
“Lord Eli,” she acknowledges. “How does Lila fare?”
“She is stable now, but there will be some long-term damage. He laced near-frozen water, most likely from the Arctic River north of Cont in the mountains.”
“What type of damage?” I manage.
He and Kass share a look.
Tell me, I could demand, but do not. There have already been so many lines crossed between High Fae and faeries these past few days.
“Her heart failed because of the cold,” Kassandra replies. “But they were able to revive her.”
“There is long-term scarring around the heart and lungs,” Eli adds.
“She died?”
“Temporarily.”
“She died and you didn’t think to tell me?”
“You were busy dying, too,” Kassandra spits. “For all we know, you two waved at each other during your stint in the celestial plane!”
Quiet settles around us for a moment. Eli takes a breath. “We couldn’t save her left hand.”
My mind stutters to a stop. “But…you’re the best Healing fae…”
“I can only Heal what is still alive.”
“But she’s an artist! She needs her hand.”
“Our first priority was her heart.”
“And you didn’t seem to do that, either,” I whisper.
Eli flinches, and I almost feel guilty for forgetting how good their hearing is. The cool touch of Illusion magic brushes against my forearm. I swat it away. They will keep more from me—because I am not one of them. I never will be, even when I sleep in their beds.
“We will know more when she wakes,” Eli says. “But for now, I want you to know that there are faeries and fae out there who are born without or lose a limb, and they go on to live and experience and love. It will be difficult, but she is not alone. We are all here, waiting to support her.”
“When may I see her?”
“When she is awake.”
“Why?” I croak. “Why can’t I see her?”
Eli watches me with a detached curiosity. “Your injuries were also severe, and yet you’re practically healed.”
“Your Healer came.”
“To Heal is to know, and I do not know you, Avery. And you are not willing to share.”
“Eli.” Kassandra crosses her arms. “I don’t know if that’s fair.”
“Isn’t it? Ever since Avery showed up to Reign, there has been much violence. Lila has served Maxian for decades and she’s never been on the receiving end of—”
“Do not pretend to care for her!” I snarl. “How dare you—”
“Quiet, both of you.” Kassandra rubs her temples.
Face and eyes burning, I grumble an apology.
“It’s been a long few days,” Eli mutters. “I’m grateful you got her out.”
“I’m grateful you took her in.” I pause, thinking of the white bird that visited me in my dream, the same bird that built nests in the boughs of the chestnut tree. I clear my throat. “It was not just your Healer.”
“Who visited you?”
“We would’ve known if someone else were here,” Briar says.
I exhale. “It was while I slept. A white bird in my dreams drew the illness out of me and into itself. We spoke. It…spoke to me.”
Eli’s arms drop by his sides. “You were visited by the calabris.”
“The calabris?”
“The bird of House Healing. A myth, practically, for it only visits the dying in their dreams.”
“She had a very high fever,” Kassandra says flatly.
He turns. “We have reports of the calabris going back thousands of years. The same visions of the same bird, Healing a select few, helping them return to the earthly plane.” Eli faces me again.
“It would not even visit my father, no matter how much I prayed at his side. No matter how many fae he Healed over his many centuries. So I suppose I am confused as to why it would visit you.”
The room falls silent, the air thin, the plane warming.
As the two fae watch me, I should claim confusion, or perhaps confess that my genius now connects to consciousnesses that others do not know exist in the wood of a door, in the screaming beneath the palace, in the darkness of the king’s mind. But then, Briar speaks, low and gentle.
“Avery is a faerie,” she says. “We are nature, like soil and the roots that grow in it. Creatures of the earth, it’s where our magic excels.”
The fae miss her implication, a compliment I cling to—not that faeries can only perform root magic, but that we are better with root magic than they are.
Eli slowly nods. “I shall be back in two days to take you to Healing, but only if you swear the oath to the House. I cannot have you revealing our protections and methods.”
Kassandra starts. “She already has two—”
“The Healing oath is not violent like the others.”
“I’ll do it,” I say.
“How are you sleeping?”
“Fine.”
“She’s not. Can we get a tonic?”
I glare at Kassandra as Eli produces a vial from his pocket. He hands it to me. No one says a word as I uncork the bottle and drink the entire tincture.
—
When morning comes and I wake once more, head aching, despair and guilt greet me. Briar throws open the blinds, sunlight pouring in, while Kassandra does her makeup, plopping down vials and bottles loudly, as if the pair are determined to disrupt me. She quips that I look treacherous.
“Thanks,” I say.
“Hungry?” Briar asks, bustling around the bed.
I shake my head.
“You should eat anyway.”
Reluctantly, I do, and I feel better. I can’t go to the House of Healing yet, or Reign, but I can’t sit in bed anymore. I drag my feet over the edge of the mattress. Kassandra dabs cream under her eyes while seated before the vanity.
She turns. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Tending to some business.” I peel away the covers. “You can have your bed back.”
“Who are you to order me around?”
“Do you not miss your silk sheets and queen-size mattress?”
Then Kassandra does something I’ve never seen her do. She blushes.
“Well, I—” she sputters. “I mean, who wouldn’t miss those things?”
Briar snickers from her corner, now dusting a bookshelf. Kassandra whips around.
“You have something to say, Briar?”
“Absolutely not, mistress.”
“You’re awfully interested in that bookshelf.”
“Very interesting titles, mistress.”
“Anything else?”
“I think you may do well with some beauty sleep before your guests come tomorrow.” Briar bites her lip. “You’re awfully cranky.”
Kassandra gasps and the faerie laughs. It strikes me now that perhaps the two of them are always like this in private together, having spent two centuries side by side, and it is their relationship to me that’s changed. As if I am included in their private lives now.
“It’s hard work taking care of someone, day in and day out.” Kassandra sighs, combing knots from her hair with her fingers. This time, I laugh. My mistress glares. “Especially when the patient is so stubborn.”
“I’m not stubborn.”
“Yes, you are,” Briar and Kassandra say.
“Well, I’m better now thanks to your care.” I reach for the robe at the foot of the bed and slip it on over my nightgown. Kassandra wrinkles her nose.
“You may want to bathe.”
“I did yesterday.”
“You sweat in your sleep.”
Briar lets out a giggle. I shoot her a look. “Whose side are you on?”
My friend raises her hands. “The side of truth.”
I roll my eyes while Kassandra snorts, turning back to face her reflection in the glass. She scoops out cream from a glass pot and rubs her hands together.
“You invited guests over?” I ask, my mind finally catching up.
“Just for dinner.” She doesn’t look at me. “Are you well enough to walk?”
So she doesn’t want to answer questions, only ask. Perhaps it’s the advisor’s wife again, or another lady of the court. Perhaps Kassandra is finally open to making friends.
“I’ll lean on the railings,” I tell her. “I just can’t sit here and do nothing anymore.”
“Avery, you aren’t doing nothing. You’re Healing.”
“It’s not enough.”
“Perhaps it should be.”
“Before the coronation, you were siphoning from the plane. Even with two broken arms, you were layering its power along your skin.”
There is a pause. Then, quietly, Kassandra says, “I am fae.”
“I know.” I clutch the bedpost. “How could I forget?”
“Avery,” Briar admonishes. “Watch your tongue.”
But my vision wavers, my mind flooding with an unrelenting rage.
A moment ago, we were jesting with each other like peers, almost like friends.
Yet I am not allowed to challenge Kassandra as one?
So the High Fae can indulge in familiarity when they are lonely, but slip back into superiority when uncomfortable?
They cannot have both—yet that is what they seek.
That is what Maxian sought—to feel the love of friendship without earning it.
To have ultimate obedience with the visage of choice.
I am in the library, being cradled by the king.
I am in the lounge, being torn open by Dominik.
Perhaps I am performing complex magic, just as Maxian did that day, splitting my consciousness.
Lila would find a way to paper together this collage of memories, and find a greater image, a larger meaning, from this experience.
But I can only feel the jagged lines, the pieces of me that remain in Reign, and the longing is stretched far, as if I am a trunk severed from its roots; I exist in both places, I am both the chestnut door and the decaying stump in the meadow.
“Avery!” Kassandra shouts.
I blink, the images dissolving before my eyes. My good hand grips the bedpost, knuckles white. My body leans against it. I reach for my genius, requesting it to seek out the tree that made this furniture. But my genius is depleted, and the bed is not enchanted. The wood is dead.
“Why don’t you sit?” Briar says.
Lifting my head, I take in Briar clutching her duster, Kassandra gripping the back of her chair. The pair watch me as if I am an animal about to bolt. Their attention makes me want to hide.
“You saw me naked,” I say.
Briar furrows her brow. “We had to in order to—”
“It was the only way to save you,” Kassandra says.
“I didn’t want that.”
My mistress cocks her head. “You didn’t want to be saved? Or you didn’t want us to do the saving?”
“Both.” I straighten, releasing the bedpost. “I don’t know.”
“Tend to your business, if you must,” she says. “But do not speak to Briar with such disrespect. She has tended to you every hour since you arrived dying in that hallway. You’ve always been prideful, Avery, but do not be cruel.”
“I’m not—I don’t have—”
But was it not my pride that spiraled this entire situation out of control? Kassandra returns to brushing her hair while Briar looks at me with a fatigue that makes me wince. She points to the floor near me.
“I gathered them yesterday from your room,” she says.
My pair of tan slippers, worn and molded from years of use. I haven’t put them on in months, and the sight is odd, like finding a well-loved recipe I don’t remember cooking.
“Thank you,” I say, voice cracking, as I slip them on. She places a hand on my forearm, guiding me toward the servants’ exit. When we are out of my mistress’s earshot, I speak again. “I’m sorry for everything.”
“Kassandra has been at your bedside even more than I have. She has been relentless.”
“As she is with everything.”
Briar squeezes my hand. “Saving your life is not a balance you must repay, but if you can only think in those terms, I will remind you that you saved both her life and mine in different ways.”
My bitterness slides away. In its bedrock remains something unnamable until now.
Unworthiness.
“I will make it up to you,” I insist.
“You don’t need to.” Briar nods to her forearms with only three rings total. “Besides, I wouldn’t have hesitated to help. I care for you.”
I am a child again, confused. “Why?”
“Oh, Avery.” She touches my face, and I feel my mother’s cool palm against my cheek, a ghost of the past, a promise in the future. “Because you’re you. And I like that person very much.”
I am speechless.
“You are not alone in this,” she says, her tone final.
An echo of another voice. You are not alone, little moth, the bird had said.
But I’ve made mistakes. I keep making mistakes.
And yet they still wait for you.
I thought the bird meant my mother and Jeremee, but now I am not so sure. Now I wonder if Kassandra and Briar had been waiting for me to wake.
Then a new thought blooms, a radiant, enveloping thought, and with it, the sweetest pain growing in my chest.
How wonderful it is—how lucky am I—to have family waiting for me on every plane, in every existence. How beautiful it is to be loved, then and now, and in the next. I will never bargain it for anything.