Page 42 of Bedeviled

The gleaming white walls are stacked high, the stones seamlessly fitted together. The bones of an arched roof sit atop the main portion of the structure, and closer to us, the columns have been restacked. There are even a few windows fitted with panes of glass.

There are still whole sections of the palace that haven’t been touched, and the Otherworldly detailing of the structure is still absent, but it’s far more rebuilt than the half-buried rubble I remember from the last time I came here.

Even as I think it, I hear the distant sounds of tools striking rock. There must be workers here even now, reconstructing this palace stone by stone.

If Eislyn is only now putting this effort into rebuilding it, then…

“She forgot this place,” I breathe.

“You made her forget,” Memnon emphasizes.

He must be right. Two thousand years ago, I cast a spell to erase Memnon’s memory from all minds. Apparently it must’ve been enough to erase her memory of this place. And that erasure lingered until Memnon lifted the curse the night of the Samhain Ball.

I imagine the Khuno River palace was not just important to Eislyn but also likely beloved. It’s a small comfort to know Eislyn lost something herself when she ruined our lives all those years ago. Her palace, no less, the one thing given to the exiled fae princess.

My eyes move over the partially rebuilt structure once more.

Now that we’re here, I feel unsure what to do next.

Memnon, however, doesn’t share my same uncertainty.

He presses a hand against me, and the other he splays across his chest. “Hide us from all eyes but one another’s,” he incants in Sarmatian.

I glance over at him as his magic billows out, the smoky, indigo plumes of it wrapping around the two of us.

“We cannot properly sneak around if we can be seen,” he explains as he crouches down in front of Nero.

Laying a hand against my panther’s neck, he repeats the spell, and his power washes over my familiar. It flattens and thins as it settles until I can only see the barest edge of it along Nero’s fur.

“Now,” Memnon says, straightening up, “let’s see what our enemy has been up to while we’ve been away.”

Memnon, Nero, and I walk up to the palace slowly, taking in all the renovations. The mud covering the ground has been washed away, revealing gleaming marble floors beneath. Stacked to the sides are broken slabs of marble, waiting to either be spelled or shaped into something useful.

The place isn’t just littered with broken bits of marble. It’s also covered in spells.

“Careful where you step,” Memnon warns, nodding to an archway that gleams with a somewhat obvious spell. Low to the ground, there appears to be another layer of spells, this one containing what looks like a wisp of smoke within in its matrix. It’s dark enough to at the very least be a hex.

A chill runs through me at the sight. That was how the Fortunas captured us not even a week ago. They’d placed a spell in the elevator shaft, and we descended into it.

“It’s probably worth going in there,” I say.

We do step into the room once we remove the spells. Though it’s one of the more completed spaces in the palace, it contains nothing but some discarded tools and a desk covered in a drop cloth.

Nothing of obvious importance.

Back out again we go.

I run my fingers over a marble wall with text that I think might be Old Fae etched into its surface.

“Translate,” I incant in Sarmatian.

A plume of my magic leaves my hand and rolls over the stone. The letters shiver, then shift, morphing into text I can read.

Judgment lies beneath the earth.

A shiver rolls through me when I think of exactly what dwells beneath my feet. I wouldn’t call it judgment. No, the deities that lurk there are far too unethical for that.

I drop my hand from the words and turn to my soul mate. “I know fairies can live a long time, but two thousand years?” I say. It seems impossibly long.