Page 39 of The Heir the Fae Forgot
Or, at least, as silent as any room could be when Finch was in it.
The longer we waited, the more nervous energy seemed to overtake him. It wasn’t long before he was up on his feet, pacing in front of the windows until I was worried he was going to wear a path along the ground in front of them. He stopped every so often to peer out between the filmy panes, his eyes narrowing as he soundlessly mouthed something towards that false starry sky.
Just watching him made me feel anxious, too. It mightn’t have been too bad if every time his foot made a slightly louder scuff, or every time he pressed a little too close to the window so that he made the sill creak, it made me jump. Every time, my head snapped towards the door, expecting it to burst open, or worse still, for Icarus to simply ignore the Western Court’s privacy as he had mine, and simply appear in their bedroom, too.
It was only a matter of time before Icarus came looking for me again.
He didn’t seem the type to simply lets someone like me slip away, not when he’d already spent so much time laying his trap.
Eventually, it seemed even pacing wasn’t enough to keep Finch preoccupied. He whirled suddenly, the light of what little afternoon sun made it through the canopy illuminating him from behind as he clapped his hands together once, decidedly.
“You know what wecoulddo?”
“We don’t have any money to gamble, Finch.”
Zev didn’t even look up from where he’d started sharpening his sword. From the looks of it, he’d been doing a lot of that lately. It was already razor sharp, so sharp that it had started to look a littlethin.
Finch’s face fell, but only for a moment. He started reaching for the half bag of coins beside his bed.
“We can split this and—”
“And you’ll end up with it all either way?” Zev cut him off again. “We’re not taking your money, Finch, even if you lose.”
Finch’s lips pressed together. “It would still be a game.”
At last, Zev’s eyes flickered up to meet his. “You’re a sore loser,” he said. “And an even more insufferable winner.”
Finch threw up his hands in frustration. “So, what are we going to do here for the next two, three days, then? Putter around, waiting for the Dark Lord or one of his cronies to come use their shrivel magic on us?”
I had to choke back a laugh, and nearly gagged in the process.
“What did you just call him?”
Both Finch and Zev looked first at each other, and then at me. Zev looked nervous, but Finch beamed with pride.
“The Dark Lord?”
“Yeah,” I said, stifling a laugh again. “Is that seriously what you call him? Are you scared of Icarus or something?”
“Scared of Icarus?” Finch let out a scoff and waved me away. He started turning around, only to suddenly stop and whirl back to face me, finger wagging. “But the Dark Lord?” He let out a long, whooshing breath. “Now that, that sounds like someone to be afraid of.”
I couldn’t stifle my laugh a third time.
Leave it to Finch to somehow lighten even the darkest of moods.
Even Zev’s face softened, his hand finally stilling with the whetstone still clutched between his fingers. “What is he like, in person?”
The question caught me off guard. I wasn’t sure how to answer it, but from the way both Zev and Finch were looking at me now, I didn’t really have any choice but to try.
I was tempted to spew words likebastard, liar,andevil…but I stopped myself. It would be easy to fall into a trap of my own where I demonized the lord of the Wildness just as he’d said the other courts had. Sure, I might have reason, maybe even more reason than some of those courts, but was that really what I wanted? I had the choice now to decide what kind of fae I wanted to become.
The last thing I wanted was to admit that Icarus was right about anything, but he’d been right about that, at least. He’d been focused on the glamour, and how I had the rare opportunity to shape the way it flowed through me. But more than that, I had the chance to shape the way I chose to look at this new world. At the fae. At its courts. At its magic.
Allowing myself to be shaped too much byanyone thing the fae did to me, whether it be betrayal or forgiveness, cruelty or kindness, was letting the lords shape me, it was letting them control me, just as Shiel had warned me.
So, instead of allowing myself to feel the well-deserved spite I currently held for the Lord of the Wildness, I forced myself to focus, instead, on the more objective things I knew to be true of him.
“Well…Icarus…”
