“I told you he is doing his duty—”
“I’m done.”
I turned and strode toward the door that Ursa had vanished through.
“You came here afraid,” he called out behind me and I stopped. “You were a frightened little rabbit when you appeared in the middle of my dining room with my meddling daughter. Wide eyed and terrified, you were looking at all of us as if we were predators and you were just waiting for us to pounce. Do you remember that feeling, Seren? The hopelessness? The doubt? The knowledge that we could pick you apart at any time without lifting a finger?”
I took a deep breath. I remembered it well.
“You aren’t that little rabbit anymore,” he told me. “You aren’t a mere mortal. When they look at you with scorn, you can glare right back. You can hold their minds. You can break them even more efficiently than they could break you.”
“I don’t want to break them,” I said, my voice soft.
“No, maybe you don’t. But at least you have the choice now.”
Then he was gone. I didn’t see him go, just felt his absence, felt my own loneliness. I closed my eyes and took a breath before pushing through the doors into the hall beyond.
I followed the familiar tapestries to my room. The servants had lit the glowing orbs of light for me when they had gone for the evening. I couldn’t light them myself. I was a powerful empath, capable of feeling and altering emotions and auras, but I couldn’t manage even the most basic practical magic. I couldn’t clean the shards of glass I had made. I couldn’t light my room or change my clothes. I couldn’t even form a passable physical shield. The King hypothesized that my power was temporal rather than physical, that I might never manage the type of physical magic that others seemed to use with such ease. Likely because I was only half Fae and therefore did not have as privileged a use of magic as full Fae. Though personally, I believed my connection to emotion was a gift bestowed upon me by my mortal side. Humans felt more, emoted bravely. Fae hid their feelings behind impenetrable walls and empty minds.
I bathed, stripping from my brown tunic and thin leggings and changing into the silk beige nightgown. I brushed through my wet hair and tried in vain to dry it with magic to no avail. I padded, on bare feet, through my room, letting my toes sink into the soft carpet as I reached for a book written by some Fae astronomer from the Court of Scholars. I read the names of the constellations, compared them to my own, and ran a finger along the detailed drawings of each, much finer than mine, much more intricate.
I turned to the stars and stared up at the blinking night sky, memorizing the view of it so that someday I could return and tell my uncle all that I had seen. I could paint him a picture of the stars from memory and show him all the constellations in this book, their real names and the ones I had made for them myself. I could show him what I had accomplished and who I had become. I could tell him about magic, about how it was used and what it felt like.
I closed my eyes, feeling the thrum of it in my veins. A steady, near-silent hum I had ignored my entire life, that I had never heard over how loud I was being, how loud I was thinking.
I had begun a new practice lately, when no one was around and I was all alone. It was difficult to practice an ability tied to emotion when the only emotions I had to investigate were my own. But it was possible. I had found that much. I kept my eyes closed and narrowed my focus, organizing my feelings into buckets. Pride here, sorrow there. Happiness here, anger there. Some feelings were associated with people, some with places, and some were just a haze, an intangible and undefined concept flitting between the others. I arranged them, bucketed them, bracketed them out using the methods of a true type A academic.
I sifted through them all, recognizing them for what they were, memorizing the feel of them, the conceptualization of them, so that I could recognize them in others. I studied them, played with them, held them, and let them go. I dug deeper than I ever had before until my fists were clenched in the blanket beneath me, until tears were flowing down my cheeks and I gritted my teeth against the strain. I let myself feel it, truly feel it, all of those emotions I had been avoiding.
My abandonment, I toyed with that for a moment, indecisive over whether to place it with sorrow or anger. My mother I held firmly in hand, not wanting to let it go. Lark, I gripped him tightly and then dropped him to sorrow, to grief, one of the more potent emotions. Cass and Rook followed. My uncle, I missed him but he made me happy. These things, these people, they weren’t easy to categorize. They had made me feel so much, so many different things, but nearly all of them ended up in sorrow because of the betrayal, because of the hurt, the death, and the absence.
I picked up every broken piece of me and started to make it whole, started to help it mend. The categorization helped. But toward the end, I picked up a piece that didn’t go to my puzzle.
I didn’t recognize it. It wasn’t just hazy; it was obscure. It was dark and dismal and unrecognizable. I caressed it, held it, examined it. And, when I had almost given up on identifying it, I reached out with my whole heart and gave a firm tug.
My eyes shot open.
Because that piece, it had tugged back.
Chapter twenty-three
A Court of Conflict
TheLordoftheCourt of Friends was visiting.
Ursa had stormed into my room the next morning and roused me from where I had fallen into a fitful sleep on the couch, a book of astronomy laid open across my lap. She had informed me of the noble visitor and demanded that I rise and dress for the occasion.
I questioned her thoroughly the whole time. Why was I expected? I wasn’t even of this court. She explained that word had spread far and wide of my stay here since her father had sent notice of it to the Court of Peace and Pride. I had become a bit of a wonder to the lords of the minor courts, a marvel to stare at and whisper about the implications of my being here.
“Why is he visiting?” I asked as a servant worked on my hair and another powdered my face with that shimmering substance Cass had used on me before, the one that left my natural skin tone but gave me a bit of a glow.
“The Court of Friends is always the one that reaches out first when it looks like there might be a conflict between courts,” Ursa explained in a tone of irritation without even looking up from her nails which she examined while leaning against the door frame of my bathing chamber. “They always think they can help both sides make amends, mediate the conflict before it turns into something bigger.”
“Something like a hostage situation?” I asked, turning back to her with a raised brow.
She frowned, slipping off of the wall to stand at her full height as if expecting me to lunge at her. I rolled my eyes and turned forward again for the servant working on my face. The royal family didn’t care for it when I mentioned the truth of my situation here, that I could not leave even if I wanted to. And her shields were up. They always were around me now. I wondered if it was mentally exhausting, locking your emotions away from someone who lived with you. But they still had that chink in them, the one I had carved away with a simple expression of love.
“I will not go begging for asylum,” I muttered and watched through the mirror as her shoulders visibly relaxed. “Why trade one prison for another? Particularly one I know nothing about. My only interest in leaving is if you agree to take me back to the mortal plane, back to my uncle.”
