“To torture you, of course!” A wave of laughter from the Mouth.
“You know he picks them every time,” Carter says, facing us. “Even at the cost of the bathing chamber and the nose of his personal valet.”
Lila covers her mouth. Something in my mind shifts another degree, just as it did with the smell of the king, that no matter how powerful and beautiful, he still has a body. And all bodies bleed.
“Well, I should get going,” he says.
“Do you want to come in for a snack?” Lila asks me. “There should be leftover custard.”
I look between them. “Is that…allowed? We can eat their food?”
“Food is food, of course. Well, we have to wait until they’re done, but Fern always keeps extra of everything so that there’s leftovers.”
This is how I could start a network of my own. This is the answer, and yet I cannot stomach it now, when it’s right before me. The more I learn about other practices in the palace, the less my upbringing makes sense. How small was my world before? How small is my perspective still?
Suddenly, it is all too much. Lila’s eager face and Carter’s grin, the slippery gold silk on my skin, the heat of the ovens on myneck, the aroma of tomorrow’s bread that will never be broken and shared with my oldest friend.
“I think I’ll just wash the dishes and head back home,” I reply, my voice faltering on the last word.
“We have someone to wash them,” she says. “But I can help lace you back?”
I step back. “It’s okay. Thank you, though.”
“Are you sure? Lacing can be complicated. You have to perfectly picture where you want to go, a path to get there.”
“I understand.”
“Are you feeling all right?” the male asks. “You look like you’re going to be sick.”
“This is just how I look.”
If they are taken aback, they say nothing.
“Thank you again for training me today,” I say to Lila. “Sorry, I just—I need…sleep.”
“Of course.” Her wide mahogany eyes roam over my face, and my throat thickens because it is sonice. She seems nice, and Carter seems fun and even Chef Fern makes others laugh, and it is all so bright and loud and joyful and smothering like gorging on a feast after starving, and I cannot breathe, I cannot think, it hurts unbelievably so.
“I’ll see you tomorrow night,” Lila says as I turn.
“Nice meeting you,” Carter adds.
“You too.” I hurry away, wondering if I have ruined this, too, like a reeking creature whose touch spreads rot across everything good.
My genius collides with the golden ring, and the metal warms and warms and warms, a tingling back up my arm, across my chest, like insects buzzing in my bones, rattling my teeth, and it hurts, this confluence of my root energy and Reign, but it is a good hurt, a powerful one, like the bellyache after all that sickness, a magical fever that vibrates everywhere until the two energies connect with the plane of magic.
I disintegrate into nothing.
I sigh into it, spooling out into the blankness of being as my consciousness zips along the plane, picturing, as Lila said, home. The smell and taste, the feel, the aching for what never was.
I sprawl out onto stone, limbs snapping back into place, mouth tasting blood, ears ringing. Cracking my eyes open, I am not greeted with my empty chamber.
Several familiar male faeries stare down at me, all with tattoos up to their shoulders. The hairs on the nape of my neck rise.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” one of them sneers.
“How’d you do that?”
I scramble to my feet, adjusting my Reign clothes, surveying the bunkroom.
