“How else would we feel alive?” Kassandra asks.
Maxian barks a laugh. The air behind him darkens. Smoke with no source pours onto the gravel, wisping across grass. The plane petrifies. The king’s executioner emerges from the black cloud.
My vision swims, my legs weakening.
“What’s that smell?” the king announces. “It’s like a bloodbath out here.”
A bloodbath.My fear saturating the plane, bloody as the gentle mist my friend became.
My knees sink into damp soil, my fingernails digging into grass. Someone clutches my elbow to keep me from collapsing entirely. A phantom hand, firm but assuring.
A familiar, cold voice says, “She’s unused to lacing, you see. A weak thing.”
“Faeries always fold to great power,” Maxian says. “It’s simply their nature.”
A new emotion rises from the depths of the swamp, like a shoal, like anger. I lean into that sensation, like trekking onto a desolate island where the sand burns the arches of my feet. It is grounding, painful. I breathe again, and this time my head steadies, my vision coming back into focus.
When I glance up, the king stares down at me, his golden skin seeming to glow in the evening light. Draped on his arm, small fingers trailing along his muscles, is Kassandra, her face impassive once more. They are like a marriage portrait, striking and grand and distant, and I feel like a thief caught with a blade in hand before I could cut the canvas.
Something must shift in my face, because the king quirks a brow.
“She’s back,” he mutters, then waves a hand. A goblet of water appears, and he holds it out to me, lips twitching into a smile. “Here you are, faerie.”
My hand itches to smack the glass from his grip, shatter it across the ground. How dare he? How dare he bestow charity upon me as easily as he sent my friend to death and a child to impossible debt? As if I could forget his malice in the face of a smiling offer.
“Avery,” Kassandra quips, voice tight and high. “The king is gracious enough to overlook your blunder and even seeks to aid you. Do not insult him with your slowness.”
I lean back onto my feet and stand. Head down, brushing dirt off my palms, I mumble, “My apologies, Your Magnificence. It was the grandness of your power that overwhelmed me.”
“I can understand that,” the king acknowledges, like a benevolent handler.
The goblet of water floats before me, but not on some precarious phantom wind like Illusion magic. My ears roar with Reign power as one side of the goblet is blurred, as if stitched into the plane itself. He is, in a way, lacing again.
I take the crystal, surprised to find it heavy, the real thing, and take the expected sip. Cool liquid calms me. The king nods in approval, and Kassandra tugs him toward the bench once more.
“That wasn’t necessary, Max, but it is appreciated,” she coos as they sit side by side. Across the garden opposite me, the king’s executioner watches the scene.
“You seem surprised,” Maxian says.
“More so impressed. Even as king, you have kept your kindness.”
“My mother wouldn’t have allowed me to be any other way.”
“May she wander well.”
“May she wander well,” he echoes. “How is your father?”
“Aging.”
“As we all are. Though I can’t complain in your case. You’ve grown into a magnificent female.”
“As magnificent as you?”
“You tease, but I see you’re already flushed.”
I wrinkle my nose. Glancing away, my eyes catch the amber ones of Death, glowing like coals in a dark hearth. I push my repulsion back like bile.
Kassandra clears her throat. “Some privacy, perhaps.”
