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Chapter twenty-one
A Different Kind of Fae
“I f it’s fear you need, then feel it, but block this one.”
Ursa flicked her wrist and another half dozen shards of hardened night materialized in thin air and shot toward me at high velocity. I focused on their approach, lifting my hand to block them, and hissed when I failed to produce an adequate shield and the black daggers pierced my skin, slicing me from wrist to elbow on my left arm and piercing my right shoulder. I staggered back a step, biting back the curse on my tongue.
“No,” Ursa barked. “Again.”
She waved her hand and the daggers from before disappeared, the skin of my arms healing itself, though the pain remained. I grit my teeth and faced her again, fighting back tears as another round of knives shot forth, one of which plunged deep into the tissue of my thigh. I roared in agony, falling to my knees.
“No!” Ursa snapped, a thick cloud of darkness emanating from her in her fury. “It’s just a shield, Seren. This is the most basic thing I can teach you and we’ve been at this for two weeks.”
“I just… I need a break,” I wheezed, kneeling.
She just shook her head, turned on a heel, and stormed from the training room. She waved her hand on the way out and the dagger was gone from my thigh, the gash already closed and healing. I rubbed the spot where I’d been struck, staring down at my arms where they had bled before, again and again.
The King had disappeared after his son’s execution, the last of his orders appearing to have been for his daughter to train me to use my newfound magic. But Ursa only knew one way to train, through torture, and it wasn’t working for me. It was exhausting me, all the healing, the split second concentration, the agony. I wasn’t able to use any of my emotions because she wasn’t allowing me to feel anything but hurt.
I wondered if they had trained Lark like this, in this court, if they had cut him apart just to piece him back together again, stronger than ever. Cass too. I wondered if Rook had suffered the same strict regiment from Ursa or perhaps even the King. I wondered if this was the only way the Bone Court knew; pain and torment, exile and executions, blood rights and sacrifice. And then I remembered what he had said, so long ago, when we had sat across a dinner table in the Court of Wanderers and looked to the future with bright eyes and high hopes.
If Taurus or Ursa took the throne, things would get even worse than they have under my father. I can’t let that happen.
Would he have been a better leader? Would he have been kinder? Would he have taken away the suffering, made the world a better place? Now, we would never know.
The moment he died, Rook had disappeared and no one had seen him since. That fact seemed to irk Ursa. She had gone on a tirade the first day of our training when I’d brought him up, claiming that he should have known he would always be welcome at the Bone Court, with or without her brother. I had made the mistake of pointing out he had been banished for sixty years and she made me pay for the remark with a shining black spear through my calf.
Cass was gone too. They had taken her to her rooms afterwards. The guards outside claimed they’d heard sobs for hours but then they suddenly stopped and, when they entered the room to check on her, she was gone. And that was that.
So all the people I had believed once were my friends were gone, had abandoned me again as they had before. And I was here, under the tutelage of Ursa and the dominion of the absent King, a hostage because of my blood, because of my ancestry. I spent my days training with Ursa and my nights staring at the stars, trying to shatter them into a million pieces as I had the glass before.
But my magic hadn’t returned to me since that day, not even a trace of it. I hadn’t even felt it coursing through my veins. And that emotional connection, those visions of auras and feelings of spiritual bonding with the people and the world around me, they were all gone. As if Lark’s final breath had stolen all my power away. As if his death had been mine as well.
I felt more mortal than I ever had.
And I felt more lonely than ever before as well.
I grabbed the rag from the nearby bucket of water mixed with cleaning solution that the servants had learned to leave behind for all of mine and Ursa’s training lessons. One of her more tedious lessons was that I had to be the one to clean up the blood left behind from my injuries. She healed the skin, the muscle, the tissue. But she didn’t wipe away the blood. That was for me to do at the end of a failed lesson. To get on my hands and knees and scrub my own blood from the obsidian floors. So that I would remember the consequences of my failures as if I didn’t feel them in my burning limbs enough as it was.
“The method works,” a deep voice spoke and I froze, white rag turned red beneath my palms. “You may consider it barbaric, something you once called our succession rites as well, I believe, but it works.”
I plunged the rag into the bucket and watched the water turn red.
“It isn’t working for me,” I snapped.
“So what would?”
I turned to face the King, wiping my wet, blood-stained hands on my borrowed tunic, and stood.
“You said it was interesting that my power was tied to emotion,” I said. “Why is that interesting?”
He clasped his hands behind his back and strolled forward to meet me in the center of the room.
“Because your mother’s is tied to thought,” he answered. “And thought and emotion seem like two sides of the same coin to me.”
I cocked my head to the side, brow furrowed.
“Thought?” I asked, because I knew he wanted me to.
“Yes, thought,” he said, nodding his head and circling me, looking down at the puddles of my blood on the floor. “The strength of one’s thoughts, the strength of their will, she pulls her power from that. She’s amassed quite the collection of cunning advisors over the years. She can identify them easily enough, read the patterns of their minds and compare them to others.”
“She can… read minds?”
“No. She can read the patterns.”
My lips parted as I went to ask another question but wasn’t sure how to phrase it. He seemed to anticipate my confusion, though, and continued his explanation.
“Alban explained it to me once,” he said. “They both have the same ability, you see. He said he can see the patterns of thought like a musician might identify notes. There’s a particular flow, a rhythm. Everyone’s rhythm is different and the directions of their thoughts can indicate the state of their mind. Short, staccato bursts might mean someone is angry or impulsive. Cautious rests and holds might mean someone is paranoid or calm. A steady, thrumming rhythm is usually happiness and so on. I confess I can’t envision the matter myself but he says he sees it in the air around a person, it flows from them.”
I froze.
“You’ve experienced something similar?” he asked, raising a brow when he noticed my hesitation.
“You… glow,” I said, trying very hard not to think about this very similar conversation I’d had with his son not so long ago.
“A glow?”
“Yes. It’s—I thought it was tied to your power. The brighter the glow, the more significant the power. But your glow isn’t so bright and you’re the King—”
“A King without his magic,” he corrected me.
“True,” I said, “but Ursa’s isn’t that bright either. Lark’s could be blinding. Cass’ was radiant. Even Rook had his own signature. Maybe it was connection, maybe it was how well I knew each of them, maybe—”
“Maybe it was emotion.”
I stopped, watching him as he rested his chin in his hands and paced before me.
“These auras, are they different in ways besides brightness?” he asked.
“Yes. Some are more solid, some are flowing. Their rhythm is different too. Some pulse, some are constant. But it’s not just that. It’s—”
I stopped myself, watching the King, unsure if I wanted to tell him this much. I was his hostage, not his citizen. I wasn’t just some half Fae he was training to see what she could do. I was the daughter of his enemy, the girl he had exiled his own son for stealing. And I didn’t trust him. I didn’t trust anyone, not anymore. But I was thinking about this relationship in terms of what I could gain from it. So maybe I would give up a secret but I would gain answers in return, a better understanding of who I was and what I was capable of. That benefit seemed to outweigh the cost. At least, for now. And I was growing used to living moment to moment.
“I can feel other people’s emotions,” I told him then, my voice hardly above a whisper.
I had never spoken it aloud before, the suspicion I had that my sensitivity to other people’s feelings was more than just heightened mortal empathy. I knew exactly what the people around me were feeling, particularly those closest to me, and I was never wrong. Because I didn’t just feel it. I saw it. Radiating from them in waves of living color. Anger and sadness and excitement and love. All of it at once, all the time. I hadn’t known it wasn’t normal, this almost omnipotent empathetic awareness, until I was a teenager and all of those raging hormones from my peers had become so much that I would go home and shut myself alone in a dark room just to feel my own feelings for a while. But I had grown with it and learned how to tune it out, how to ignore it, and I’d gotten so good at it that I hardly saw that glow at all anymore.
And then Lark came.
He and Rook were so foreign, so strange, so other. Their power called to mine and drew it outward in a way it hadn’t been pushed in decades. It had been dormant and they had awakened it. The colors had returned and I had found them beautiful and ethereal just like this strange place and its strange people. But it had dimmed again when Lark had died and, even though I was trying now, even though I wasn’t trying to hide it away again, I couldn’t find it. I couldn’t reach it. It had buried itself within me somewhere so deep even I couldn’t find it. And Ursa would not unearth it with her daggers and the King would not unearth it with his questions. I knew that. With all of my heart, I knew that, but I wanted him to try anyway. Because I couldn’t allow myself to believe that I needed Lark for anything, that he had stolen this from me as well.
“Can you control them?” he asked, curtly.
My brow wrinkled.
“I’ve never tried,” I answered, horrified by the very suggestion.
“Try.”
He stood in front of me, arms raised in surrender, showing me it was okay to try. My chest heaved and I took a deep, shaky breath. The King of the Court of Blood and Bone was standing before me, commanding me to manipulate his emotions, to try to control them.
“I don’t know how,” I told him, feeling a disappointment in myself for how often I was speaking those words to him lately.
“I can’t tell you,” he replied. “Because I don’t know either. But if you can see them, you can try to manipulate them. Reach for them.”
I focused on that dim glow coming from him, closed my eyes and searched the darkness. It wasn’t nothing, like I had expected. When I turned my full focus to one person, to their aura, their emotions, I felt something. It was quiet, still, a whisper like a caress against my soul. I reached for it, gave it a tug. The King grunted.
My eyes flew open to find him watching me, hand on his heart and gaze boring into me.
“Again,” he snapped.
I closed my eyes, widened my stance, and focused. His feelings were there, buried beneath the thick veneer of his authoritative shell. I prodded his anger. He pushed me aside. I searched for it because I knew it was there and I needed to see it for myself. The sorrow, the despair, the horror at what he had done to his son, what he had ordered himself. It was there, buried deep, hidden away and locked so far within him I knew he wasn’t feeling it now. I reached for it, brushed against it lightly. He tensed. Then I snatched it and yanked it forward.
The King crashed to the obsidian floor on his knees. Guards in the shadows that I hadn’t even realized were there charged forward, half of them running to his aid, the other half grabbing my arms and pinning them behind my back. Foolish, since I hadn’t used my limbs at all in the assault.
The King waved them all away and, when he looked up at me, I saw the tears streaming from his eyes.
“Take it away,” he begged through gritted teeth.
I didn’t remove it. I pushed it back within him, back into that locked box, back into his favorite hiding place, where it could lie dormant until he needed to feel it, until he deserved to relive it.
He gasped for air as he rose to his feet on shaky legs.
“How did you do that?” he asked. “How did you make me feel that?”
“I didn’t create the feeling,” I told him. “It was already there. I just pulled it out of you.”
His wet eyes were wide, his lips parted in a perfect O, and he was watching me as if I was something he didn’t recognize, something he didn’t understand. A chill ran down my spine at that look.
“Well, you’re right about one thing,” he said then, clearing his throat and straightening his lapel. “Ursa’s training will not work for you.”
With that, he and his guards left me standing alone in the training room, a bucket of bloody water by my feet and now-dried blood to clean from the floors.
Table of Contents
- Page 1
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- Page 4
- Page 5
- Page 6
- Page 7
- Page 8
- Page 9
- Page 10
- Page 11
- Page 12
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- Page 14
- Page 15
- Page 16
- Page 17
- Page 18
- Page 19
- Page 20
- Page 21 (Reading here)
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- Page 27
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