Page 52 of The Heir the Fae Forgot
Icarus tilted back his head then, his face catching the light of the moon as he watched it settle into its place at the apex of the sky. When he looked back down to me, a wicked gleam was glinting in his eye.
“The hour of the deal will soon be up,” he said. “What’s to stop me now from trying to force you to stay, then?”
His wings began to beat again, and we began, once more, to rise.
“What would it take you to stay, Aurra?” he called out above the swelling sound of the wind in my ears. “Would you stay if I offered you everything you saw before you? Would you stay if I offered you my kingdom?”
The forest began to fall away beneath us, and as it did, something swelled inside me, something far stronger than simple fear. Icarus’ hands tightened on me slowly, and my mind began to race.
“Would you stay if I threatened your life?”
All of a sudden, his grip on my tightened again, one moment before his beating wings stopped and we dropped. I was too terrified to scream, too terrified to look. I buried my face in his chest, pressing into him until he once again opened up those wings of his and dragged us to a halt, still suspended far above the trees.
I shook uncontrollably in his arms now.
“Would you stay out of duty, if you knew all I’d already sacrificed to keep you here?”
His words struck me as strange, but I didn’t have any response. I was too focused on how close I was to plummeting to my death. Icarus wouldn’t kill me, here, if he thought I was going to refuse him, would he? Surely this was all a show. A jest.
But that didn’t stop my heart from beating faster, or my head from spinning so violently I couldn’t see straight, to say nothing of thinking straight.
All at once, I was all too aware of how close to death I was. Not just one wrong step or one wrong word, but at the very hands of the only thing currently keeping me alive.
He took off yet again, flying higher than ever.
“Stop, Icarus,” I begged, but his smile only broadened again, his wings beating harder.
The air had started to thin. The forest was so far below that I could barely make out the break in the canopy that Icarus had used to carry us up from the ball below.
“Stop!” I tried again, and again, nothing.
Panic welled up in me, and as I had so many times before at times like this, I reached into my pocket for golden ribbon I’d been given long ago. But I stopped myself, remembering instead all the times it had dulled me, made me vulnerable and compliant. I was not that girl anymore. So, instead, I felt that panic grow and grow. I felt it succumb me, overtake me, take hold of my being as it raced through my veins until my shoulders shuddered and my brain flooded with something new.
Something…powerful.
“Stop this, now, Icarus! Let me go!”
Surprise flickered across Icarus’ face as suddenly, in the same moment that a terrible anxious energy burst out of me, he did as I said.
He stopped, mid-flight.
And he let me go.
CHAPTERTWENTY-TWO
There,suspended in the space between the forest and the stars, was where I found myself.
I was falling, tumbling untethered through a void of nothing but screaming wind, but I felt nothing but a burning euphoria. It flooded my body in the moment after my glamour erupted from it, seeping back into my veins like a drug made specifically, and only, for me.
Unfortunately—or rather, fortunately for my life’s sake—that feeling didn’t last.
Whatever glamour I’d momentarily broken free of slipped back in like a veil between me and my magic, and with it, the cold reality of what had just happened rushed over me in its place.
I was plunging towards the canopy below, the gnarled branches ready to tear me to ribbons any second. Even if I was lucky enough to somehow fall through the hole Icaurs had made, it would only be a short plunge after that before I fell to my death at the bottom of his cavernous court.
There was no time to make peace with this death, no time even to try and call forth the magic that had momentarily surged through me enough to break the spell binding it down. Far above me, I saw Icarus fighting with the magic that had compelled him to let me go, that held him still suspended in the air like a marionette with tangled strings.
Out of the corner of my vision, I saw the outer reaches of the forest drawing near. I refused to turn, refused to look death in the eye. Instead, I focused my face upward, on Icarus highlighted against the silver moon.
