Cambria’s voice is robotic, stiff; devoid of emotion and fight. “Of course, milady. Benevolent as always.”
She rises to her feet without sparing a glance our way and walks out of the room, leaving me confused as hell. A few moments later there’s a lurching feeling in my stomach threatening to make me throw up and I blink several times to take in my new surroundings.
We’re in a dimly lit room easily as big as the one we just left, though this one has tiled floors and cement columns lining a path. Each is wrapped in twining ivy and flowers like the exterior of the castle, reaching from floor to ceiling. They run the length of the room, leaving the center open, and have just enough space for guards to lean in the shadows against the walls.
At the far end of the room is a small stage, three steps above the ground. The wall behind it is solid glass, letting the setting sun shine directly in and cast the majority of the room in shadow.
The guard still holding a knife to my throat slams my back against the nearest pillar and the vines crawl down to wrap around my waist, wrists, and legs. Piper, Apollo, and Elorie sit in a row of elegant chairs in the center of the room, several of them empty.
Atlas and Lucien are in similar positions and looking like they are handling this far worse than I am. Atlas appears two seconds away from trying to chew his way out, and Lucien looks like one more incident will push him past the point of no return.
Even with the sun casting her as nothing more than a silhouette, I can tell it’s Cambria sitting at the white piano up there. Her dress and hair are the only splashes of color, and it’s hard to make them out in the lighting, but I’d recognize her no matter what glamour she used to obscure her features.
Those fuckers constructed this place just for this reason. Putting her up there like this, they can pretend it isn’t her. They don’t have to look at her, just hear the music. Why go through so much effort?
But then she starts to play.
From the first note as her fingers begin to dance across the keys, all other thoughts rattling around in my mind cease to matter. I’m caught in the moment, hardly able to breathe. With each swell of sound, she has me completely in her thrall. The emotions pouring into her song, they’re all I can feel, the only part of me existing in the moment an extension of herself.
It starts soft, sad and haunted. It’s like I’m seeing the world through her eyes and everything else ceases to exist beyond the next note, needing it as much as my next breath. As the song swells, gaining speed, my heart races, beating in time with the music. Slowly, her posture becomes less stiff and her fingers race faster. She starts to let go, forgetting she’s performing and losing herself to the sound.
The piece becomes increasingly more complicated, yet she never falters, never misses a single note. As her fingers dance across the keys, a shadowed silhouette against the sunset, she comes alive in a way I’ve yet to see until now.
The glaring white piano starts to fade, no longer reflecting the harsh sun. Color drains away, leaving it nothing more than a glass piece, translucent. It becomes as transparent as the soul she puts on display. The outline wavers with the illusion, the only way to see the shape. The light pours into the room, bringing with it the harsh gold, orange, and hint of purple of sunset. Her fingers fly, making it appear as if she were coaxing the colors into creation.
Faster and faster, the sound echoing around the room as my heart races to keep up, to not get left behind. My nerve endings prickle, skin feeling too tight as my palms start sweating. She pushes the song to new heights before it slows, transforming back into the haunting piece she began. Yet now, it seems even more desolate than before, more tragic. As if she wove a story with the notes, only to find our hero fought as hard as he could, yet it wasn’t enough.
I’m not sure how long passes between when she finishes playing and I’m able to wake up from the trance she put me in. I bring my hand up to my cheek only for it to come away wet, but I don’t feel like I’ve been crying. There’s a disconnect in my brain that I’m struggling against, my reality spun that I’m trying to make sense of.
Belatedly, it occurs to me that at some point the other fae in the room must have fallen under the same spell, the hold the guards had over us weakening. The vines are slack, pooled at my feet. For who knows how long I could have run or fought if I so chose, and I wasn’t even aware.
Could have stabbed her parents in their backs and no one would have been able to stop me.
There’s a brief moment where it’s clear the others are still under the spell that I’m emerging from, one where I see the look on the faces of the royals. For just that brief moment, Piper doesn’t appear like a smug bitch, an extra glow to her serene skin. Apollo is in a similar state as I was, a single tear snaking down his otherwise stoic face to splatter on his lap. And Elorie, with her eyes closed, still breathing in the after effects, forgetting for a brief moment that she despises her daughter.
And then the moment shatters.
Cambria stays seated at the piano, white once again, all of the magic she poured into the world fading away more with every passing second. “Was it enough?” she asks on a whisper, yet the sound echoes around the room like a gunshot.
Elorie’s eyes fly open and she schools her features, while Piper’s lips flatten into a tight line, leaving me unable to get a read on them or anticipate what’s to come. Apollo rises to his feet and stalks out of the room without a word, the door closing behind him like the final nail pounding into a coffin. Hers, if he had any say in the matter.
“It will suffice. Take your pets and return to the hole you crawled out of, but know this, Cambria.” Elorie is up and moving towards the door, tossing a look over her shoulder. “You may not live here anymore, but that doesn’t equate to free reign. You were thrown from these halls because my mates couldn’t stand to look at you anymore, but you still exist on my mercy and mine alone. Try my patience, and I will find great pleasure in disemboweling your humans while you watch. Then we will see how long it takes you to fade away without them by your side. You condemned yourself to a slow death with this tethering. I hope you’re proud of yourself.”
She blinks out of existence, there one moment and gone the next. Hers must have been the power teleporting people and the number of ways she could use that gift to ensure she holds her position are too numerous and horrifying to dwell on.
Piper rises to her feet, her personal guard falling into step behind her. “You forget what happens to baby birds, little cousin,” she taunts, never once looking at Cambria as she walks out of the room. “Their own parents shove them from the tree, knowing full well the fall might kill them, yet doing it anyway. Yours just so happened to clip your wings first to hope it would.”
Four guards stay in the room with us, but they stay posted against the walls. Lucien was closest to Cambria, now climbing the steps and offering her a hand silently. She takes it with a soft ‘thanks’ and rises from the bench following him down the stairs and out of the glaring backdrop.
“Cambria,” I start slowly as she comes into view, but she shakes her head.
“Just...don’t. It’s a long walk, we better get started.” She’s still holding Luce’s hand and her steps are slow.
Now that I can get a good look at her again, she looks just as terrible as she did our third day human side when she was so exhausted she could barely stay upright. Yet her steps never falter as we’re led out to the gates, though I attribute that to Lucien’s firm hold.
Either she decided that her mother already thinks of us as her weaknesses so there’s no point denying open affection anymore, or more likely, she really needs a hand to support her so that she doesn’t fall apart. We step outside the gates and follow the path for a bit before her steps start to slow.
“Here,” Atlas offers, crouching down slightly in front of her. “Hop on.”
