“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.
