Page 24

He was a being of shadows, darkness, and steel as he led me away from home, his hair gleaming like quicksilver beneath the moon, the weapons along his belt shifting with each long stride. I knew he had adjusted the length of his steps so I could keep up, but I had no intention of quickening my pace for him.

We must have walked for hours before I decided to say something; it was only then I noticed the stars were beginning to wink out and the sky was lightening into teal above us. Belgrave was nothing but a smear of colours and shapes on the horizon. Purple and jade rooftops, yellow brick buildings, and smudges of black, brown, and white. I turned in a circle and tried to name the field in which we were standing, to recall which Belgrave family to whom it belonged. It was so familiar.

“Where are we going?” I asked Wren at last. The first light of dawn cracked over the horizon and bathed the endless long grasses and wheat stalks in the same gold of his eyes.

“To Faerie,” he answered simply.

And even though I already knew the answer, had already made my choice, it still sent a wave of dizziness rolling over me to hear that word spoken so confidently out loud.

Wren can’t lie.

Although, perhaps he was a kook. Perhaps he had stared at the flame in Belgrave’s insignia for too long and lost his wits.

Auralie’s father was from the Court of Light, too.

The words rang out in my head as I circled back to Wren and reminded myself that he was real. Thatthiswas real. And when my eyes fell upon him again, I realised that it didn’t matter whether my mother could lie or if Wren was a raving lunatic. Because he was standing a few feet away from me, the tall stalks only passing his knees where they nearly covered my waist, waiting for me to join him.

At a wall of glass.

Chapter ten

The Forest of Eyes and Ears

“Welcome to the Courtof Light.”

“This is an empty field.”

Wren’s nostrils flared. “No,” he tried again, voice straining. “This is the Court of Light.”

Fine. I crossed my arms over my chest and stamped my feet into the solid dirt.The Court of Light is an empty field, then.

It turned out that the glass wall I’d seen was not actually that at all, but rather a permanent portal into the realm of the faeries that was situated along the border of the Court of Light. According to Wren, there was an identical portal in every Faerie Court leading into some part of the mortal world, and they only existed to those who knew they existed.

When I had questioned him on how exactly I was supposed to believe that my family was safe with a ginormous portal only a few hours away from them, Wren explained thatthe Malum tended to create their own. Tiny rips in the world, he’d said, instead of the real thing.

He then suggested that I think of the glass wall as more of a gateway and refrain from using the termportalunless I was referring to illegal activity.

The real things—the gateways—were controlled by the High King of Faerie, Wren had elaborated when I hadn’t moved, and they were protected by runes, spells, and other enchantments far too complicated for my poor half-human brain to comprehend. The High King had to approve all inter-realm travel requests, and he was alerted every time someone ignored the rules and syphoned some of the gateway’s power to create a rip elsewhere.

I still hadn’t moved any closer to it.

Wren continued, blabbering that the Malum created a portal in Dante’s Bookstore through which the caenim had crossed, and John took it all in his stride because he had snuck over into Faerie through a similar rip when he was a boy. And if John could do it, Wren concluded unpleasantly without giving me a moment’s pause for breath, then I could stop standing there looking like alochgruband do it too.

Quite unceremoniously, he then proceeded to snatch my wrist, use it to pull me in front of him and, with both hands on my shoulders, the bastard practically threw me into the wall.

Throughthe wall.

It was like passing through a body of water with my eyes closed, though it happened so fast that I hadn’t had time to shut them, and I came out on the other side in the middle of what was quite literally an empty field. Lilac-coloured wheat stalks with translucent azure spikes extended as far as my eyes could see to the dark and distant horizon ahead, following the much lighter stretch of skyline in every other direction.

The glassy, wall-esque gateway reappeared behind me, rippling like the exhaust of a vehicle. And above…

“Whatisthat?”

Wren followed my upturned gaze to the star-filled sky, glittering mutely like someone had dusted crushed diamonds over the spaces normally filled by clouds in the human world. Ether tinted a nebulous shade of rainbow all the way through the spectrum from violet to green to red, the crystalline haze directly above us rippled and shimmered, diffracting in waves like an ocean of colour.

“Should you have your hearing abilities checked alongside your IQ? I told you, we’re in the Court of Light.” Wren’s golden eyes, dimming down to a pale shade of lemon, rolled halfway back into his head as he threw a hand up towards the atmosphere. “What do youthinkit is?”

Light.