Page 18

Chapter eighteen

A Fall From Grace

T he King of the Bone Court had kept his promise. My room was lavishly decorated and equipped with any imaginable luxury I might want during my stay, however long that may be. But I didn’t take as long to explore it as I might have done before when academic curiosity got the better of me.

Instead, I paced across the plush black carpet, chest heaving with the deep, shaky breaths that I was forcing myself to take. Was I truly his guest? Or was I his hostage? Because of my blood, because of who I hadn’t even known I was related to, he would hold me here. Maybe he would even use me to get revenge on his would-be assassin, on the ancient king that had cursed him, on my grandfather.

I felt ill. I slid to the floor in front of my bed, keeping my back to the mattress, and stuck my head between my legs. I focused on my breathing, trying to calm down, trying to rid myself of the nausea passing through me. It might not have mattered if I vomited all over their fine carpets but it couldn’t possibly make things any better either.

Lark had known. They all had. He knew it was my mother who he had betrayed over half a century ago. He knew who I was from the moment he met me. He knew exactly how I would fit into his plans, how he could use me, and I had let him. I had gone along with it, all of it, and I hadn’t even questioned him. I’d felt so lucky to be allowed in his exclusive group, so exhilarated to be studying the people I had spent my whole life wondering about. I hadn’t allowed myself to really question why he was letting me get so close, why he was convincing me to stay. But he’d known. He had known all along who I was. I only wondered what he had intended to trade me for. A certain gorgon jumped to mind and I shuddered.

“I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” a familiar feminine voice spoke suddenly and I froze, still sitting on the floor beside my bed, knees up to my chest, as Cass entered the room.

She glanced around, taking stock of the amenities, before striding to the decanter in the corner and pouring herself a glass of the sloshing amber liquid.

“Sorry it took so long,” she muttered, annoyed. “Father can be so irritating when he wants to.”

I didn’t say a word, didn’t even breathe. At my silence, she looked over and, when she saw me there, her head cocked slowly to the side.

“Ren?” she asked, taking a step forward.

I scrambled to my feet, pulling from my sleeve the only thing I had found in this room that could be used as a weapon. A hairpin made of sharp bone.

“Ren,” Cass said again, more slowly this time, her brows furrowed in confusion.

“Stay back,” I snapped.

To her credit, Cass stopped, raising her hands slowly.

“Ren, what are you doing?” she asked.

My chest was heaving, my eyes darting around the room for an escape, as if I had any chance of outrunning a Fae princess. As if this insignificant little hairpin could actually offer me even a sliver of defense against her might. She knew that too but she was playing along, always playing along.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked, my voice barely a whisper as a tear slid down my cheek.

“Ren, please. I didn’t realize you didn’t know. I mean, she was your mother. I thought—”

“Not that,” I snapped. “About him. Lark.”

Cass blinked, her lips parting slightly as if in genuine confusion.

“About what he did,” I spat. “About why he got banished in the first place.”

“Oh.”

“Oh? That’s all you have to say? Oh?”

“Ren, listen. I don’t know what my father told you but I’m sure it isn’t the whole story. If you would just—”

“Take me back.”

She blinked at me again.

“Take me back!” I shouted.

“I… can’t,” she said and I deflated, shoulders slumping. I dropped the shard of bone to the carpet and sank to my knees. “I’m so sorry, Ren. If it was up to me, I would take you back right now if you wanted to go. I swear it. But my father has… forbidden it. He sent word to your grandfather. The King of the Court of Peace and Pride knows you’re here. Your mother knows you’re here. You are—”

“A hostage,” I breathed the word with all the hopelessness I felt in my heart.

I had known it. I had known it would go this way. I was too valuable a piece for the King of the Bone Court to let slip through his fingers. I might have avoided it if I had known, if they had told me.

“No,” Cass tried to argue. “We’re going to get you out. We’re going to—”

“You have done enough,” I hissed, glaring at her. “You’re the one who brought me here. I thought you were my friend. I thought we were all becoming friends but I was never free to leave, was I? If you couldn’t have convinced me, you would have just trapped me. It would have been easy enough.”

“No,” Cass was arguing, shaking her head. “No, Ren, that’s not true. You are our friend.”

“No, I’m not.”

Cass’ lips opened in surprise. She started to say something, but changed her mind.

“Get out,” I spat.

“Ren—”

“Get out!”

That time, she obeyed. She turned on her heel and left my room, setting her glass on the table as she left. And when she was gone, I finally let myself sink back onto the plush carpet below and collapse into a puddle of tears.

No one but my servants came to see me for days. They washed me, fed me, dressed me, and hardly said a single word the whole time they did. I bore it all in a silence of my own and, when they were gone and I was alone again, I crawled back between the sheets in the fine dresses they put me in, hoping I would venture out into the court.

I slept, mostly. When I got restless, I paced or plucked a book from the shelf and tried to read it in those rare moments when I managed to remind myself that was I still a scholar, that I could still study something even if I didn’t have the courage to actually walk about the court itself.

But most of my energy was spent on keeping the thoughts at bay, distracting myself long enough that I wouldn’t let my mind wander to the mother I had never met and the shock the news of my sudden appearance in the immortal plane must have given her. Nor did I wish to consider my supremely powerful grandfather and whether he cared about the threat of my capture or not. Because I imagined it was the latter and my heart simply couldn’t take any more abandonment from these people.

Mostly, I stood out on my balcony when the night grew deep and dark and stared up at the stars, identifying constellations. I drew them in journals, on any scrap of paper I could get my hands on, anything that my servants brought me. I named them all and counted their connections. An entirely new sky, a whole new set of stars, and I was the only astrophysicist here to see them. Maybe they already had names. They probably did. But I didn’t want to know them. I just wanted them to be mine. I wanted something to be mine.

Cass didn’t try to see me again. Nor did anyone else though I imagined the males were imprisoned somewhere for their crime of returning and unable to venture about the palace the way the princess could. It didn’t matter. I did everything in my power not to think of them at all.

After a week of never setting foot outside of my room, the door opened again and I didn’t even look up to see who had entered. It would be my servants. It was always my servants. So I stayed where I was, sitting cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by my dozens of drawings of stars and constellations and cosmos, staring down at one that looked peculiarly like a hummingbird, rather than standing to greet the King.

“My children are named after the major constellations of your world,” he said and I stilled, holding the hummingbird picture in my hand. “A tie that binds them to the mortal world, to remind them of where we came from, where we all come from.”

I did not respond.

“I had hoped a week of luxury would convince you to speak to me, you know,” he told me, settling into the black sofa nearby and crossing one leg over the other. I had seen that posture before in his son. The reminder of the man set my blood boiling and I snapped a glare in the King’s direction.

“Yes, you treat your hostages quite well,” I snarled.

“Who said you were a hostage?”

“For someone who banished his son for kidnapping an infant, you seem to have no trouble holding a woman captive yourself.”

“I take great issue with it, I assure you. But I take even more issue with being cursed by a fellow King and a man who I believed, frankly, was my friend. I am sorry, Seren, to make you a pawn in our political game. But he has given me no choice.”

I frowned, deflating somewhat at his rational argument.

“Have you heard from him?” I asked even though I hated myself for caring.

“No,” he answered and I hated myself even more for the disappointment.

I turned away from him then, back to my drawings.

“You are half Fae, Seren,” he said then, leaning forward and getting on with whatever business had brought him to visit me in the first place. “Have you ever attempted to use magic?”

I shrugged.

“Once or twice when I was a teenager and the whole thing had a Sabrina vibe,” I told him and watched as his brow furrowed at the pop culture reference of a world separate from his. I sighed. “No. I haven’t tried it. Not really.”

“Why not?”

“I wanted no part of this, of you. I didn’t even want to be one of you. So trying to use magic felt like admitting to what I was. And if I tried and failed, then… it would be proof that I wasn’t actually special. That I truly had no connection to my mother. That she had given me nothing at all.”

He nodded, considering.

“Try,” he said then and my gaze snapped back to him.

I blinked.

“Excuse me?” I asked, uncertain if I had heard him correctly.

“Try,” he repeated.

“I—I don’t know how—”

“Do you see the glass on the table here?”

My eyes flicked to the glass, half full of water.

“Move it,” he told me.

I stood, brushing myself off.

“No,” he said, stopping me. “With magic.”

“But I don’t understand how I—”

“You’re thinking too hard. Just move it.”

I sighed, letting my shoulders droop. Then I turned to face the glass and focused. I imagined it moving from one side of the table to the other. I narrowed my gaze and emptied my mind. I thought of nothing but the movement of the glass, the water inside. Nothing.

“Keep trying,” the King said, standing from the sofa and walking toward the door. “Tell me when you manage it.”

When. Not if.

I watched him, lips parted slightly in surprise, as he wrenched open my door and stepped through the threshold to the hallway beyond.

“And Ren,” he added, turning back over his shoulder before he left. “You’re expected to be in the throne room this afternoon when I sentence my son.”