Page 14 of The Crown the Fae Forgot
“We’re not only healers of the body,” she said, her voice—I admitted, however reluctantly—surprisingly soothing. She turned for a second to beckon her partner over to her side, and held out her hand. “The mind is a powerful thing. You, Aurra, have been through something few fae ever have to face. It’s natural for you to struggle with your new life and all the changes that come with it.”
Her companion handed her a small cup, heat causing steam to rise from in cloudy tendrils.
“This will help open your mind. It will make you more receptive to the change, to new ideas. It will not ease your pain, only time can do that…but it may help you accept it.”
I looked down at the cup, still hesitant. “And if I don’t want to accept it?”
“Well then,” she said, head bowing slightly. “No tea, magical or not, can force you to do anything you don’t want to do. But this will, at the very least, help you sleep.”
No, the only magic that could force anyone to do something against their will so easily was the one I possessed—and yet had no way to use, and no one to teach me how to. But the promise of sleep was good enough for me, especially if it would ease the worried faces that had peered too often in at me from the hallway.
It took a surprising feat of strength to sit up in bed high enough to take the tea as it was handed to me. Four eager sets of eyes watched as I brought the cup to my lips, the bitter tea not hot enough to scald me. I’d almost have welcomed the pain, if it gave me something to distract from the one that had lodged itself so deep inside my chest.
I expected the bitterness to turn my empty stomach, but instead, each sip seemed to soothe the cramp of hunger I’d grown used to. I drank the cup as fast as I could, before my stomach decided to change its mind.
“And now,” the healer said, taking back the cup as she and her companion started to back away, “sit back, relax, let the tea do its work.”
“Aren’t you going to stay and make sure it works?”
“This is an adventure you’ll want to take alone,” she said, one hand reaching out to stop Finch before he could barge in, as his bright eyes clearly revealed he wanted to. “We’ll be nearby if we’re needed, but right now, all you need is already inside you.”
There was nothing inside me but darkness, and as soon as the door shut, the last sliver of flickering light growing slimmer inch by inch, darkness was outside of me too. I expected the tea to take some time to take effect, but with nothing but hungry bile in my stomach, I’d barely had time to readjust myself to the dark when I felt that very darkness begin to shift.
The empty vault of the space above my head grew thick and viscous, the very air, warm and suffocating as it was, writhingwith a life of its own. It slithered across my skin, its caresses both calming and unsettling at the same time.
From the silence, next came the whispers.
I thought, at first, that it was the voices of the healers on the other side of the door, or of Finch and Zev waiting impatiently beside them. But it didn’t take long in the strange, living darkness before I realized the voice whispering to me weren’t the voices of any fae I knew. They whispered like a quiet chorus, their words not really words, but more of a call—a noise that drew my eye to the bedside table, where the stack of children’s books had grown, untouched, since Finch began quietly adding to their number.
In the darkness, it was all I could do to make out the shape of them—shapes that had grown wavering and uncertain, ever-changing and only more difficult to make out the harder I tried.
I felt the instinct to reach out to them, but found my arms so heavy that they were difficult to lift, as if that thick black, living darkness was tar, and I was a creature trapped within. The longer I resisted that urge, however, the longer I let that heaviness settle onto my chest and weigh me down, the more the whispers grew. The shapes of the books became distorted, growing and changing before my eyes until they filled the entire room, towered far above me, pushing the ceiling higher until it stretched into the sky itself.
The whispers had grown, not in loudness, but in number, until the soft hiss of the voices had become so deafening I couldn’t hear my own thoughts. The compulsion to reach for the books had grown so great that I had no choice but to fight my way through the syrup of the air or be crushed beneath it. I hadn’t realized I was reaching for them until my fingers were brushing the leatherbound spines of the books once again sitting in the still darkness of a normal sized bedroom, the air nothing more than air, the whispers quieting as I finally pulled from thestack a small, illustrated volume that had been read so many times that the title had been worn from the cover.
I peeled it back, only to find the pages so old that they had to be carefully pried apart, the paper feeling ready to turn to dust between my fingers. It didn’t help that they’d grown numb from the inside out, the muscles seeming to work of their own accord and not my own volition, while at the same time, my outward sensations were so heightened that the rough texture of the paper almost hurt to the touch.
The first page I was able to open to was so beautifully illustrated, it nearly took my breath away, even in the dark. Precious metals—gold and silver and copper—had been brushed onto the paper, making it shine. At first that was all my eyes were drawn to, the sparkle seeming so bright it was nearly blinding. But then, as my eyes adjusted to the contrast of their gleam, the rest of the illustration began to swim into view.
But more than that, by the time I was able to blink the rest of the page into focus, the illustrations were growing. They shifted, the lines growing larger until, as I fell back into my bed with the book still clutched tight between my hands, the pictures grew to fill the entire room, expanding out as the tower of books once had until I was not looking at simply a page in a children’s book, but rather, at an entire scene unfolding before my very eyes.
All around me, black pinpricks of light sparkled like stars in an endless void. But then, from that darkness, new shapes began to emerge. They were shadows at first, nothing more than tired, hunched shapes appearing from the night sky. Slowly, they began to take on new shapes as my eyes adjusted to the darkness.
Fae. Adults, mostly, but some children huddled close between their arms.
They looked scared, but not with the kind of terror that came from impending danger, but from uncertainty. It was the kindof fear that came after the battle had been won, but the future was still unknown—and from their dark-ringed eyes and ragged clothes, from the scent of smoke and iron that invaded my nose as they grew and grew, it was a battle they’d come from.
Just as my eyes were beginning to adjust, however, the scene shifted.
My stomach lurched as the room brightened, turning red with those first rays of sunrise as the fae rose, it seemed, alongside it from a dark pool at the edge of a rocky sea. The sun illuminated the fae from behind like a golden halo.
Four fae stepped up from the throng, and on their heads appeared four crowns.
The bright golden sunshine grew, and with it, any beleaguered signs of war disappeared from the fae that had followed them from the darkness.
I fumbled eagerly with the next pages, my fingers moving with their own desperate desire, but they moved too quickly. The next pages stuck together, and in my absentminded haste, I accidentally flipped all the way to the end of the book.
My body froze, swallowed whole, by the scene that fell all around me.
