Page 16 of The Crown the Fae Forgot
Fatigue weighed the lord down, dragging down his shoulders so that his robes barely kept from sliding off his emaciated form. The muscles in his broad chest and arms had been replaced by bone and sinew, blackened and twisted the way his hand had once been.
Only his face remained the same, but even there, black veins snaked beneath the surface of his skin like fingers digging deepinto the last part of him that hadn’t been claimed by whatever great and terrible magic had done this to him.
“My Storm.”
His voice rasped out, foreign, from a blackened throat. He sounded like a man who’d not known a drop of water in weeks, each breath drawn into his withered lungs whistling between hollow, crackling ribs.
“I thought you’d be in the Eastern Court by now,” he said, head cocking to the side as he looked me over. “Princess.”
I shrank back from him, heart thumping, refusing to speak.
No, no…no.This was not Icarus. This was not the fae that had invaded my waking hours as well as my dreams over the last months. This was an imposter, a fake, another figment of my twisted tea-addled mind.
This false Icarus stopped, his hand frozen where it reached out to me as he looked down at the withered state of his arm as if seeing it for the first time. He turned it over slowly, each movement strained and slow as he beheld the mangled flesh.
For a moment, my heart skipped another beat—but this time not out of fear, but out of concern.
Despite the fact that Icarus had deceived me, I felt something for the way the fae looked down at himself, as if he too comprehended himself like a stranger. I felt a pang deep in my gut to see him so, but before I had the chance to even reach for him, the darkness around me was suddenly banished as the door to the hallway was flung open.
For a moment, it was all I could do to throw up an arm to shield my eyes from the light.
A figure stood frozen in the door when my eyes finally adjusted to make her out.
It was Vestele, and she wasn’t frozen, looking at me.
She was staring, wide eyed, at Icarus…as if she saw him too. Her lips parted, but just as the scream tore up her throat, Icarus spotted her too.
Something in that moment compelled that fear to rise up in me again. He grew more real than a specter in that instant, and I felt my voice shake as I shouted out again, this time demanding that he go.
And then, just as I’d commanded, that cloak of shadows enveloped him once more.
As quickly as he’d come, the vision of the dark fae was gone. And so was Vestele, the door slamming shut behind her, but not before I heard the clatter of her feet as she fled back down the stairs.
In the silence that followed, at last, the room settled back in around me. There was no sign of the bodies piled so high that they threatened to block out the sun. There were no whispers, no echoing words of an oracle, no air so suffocatingly thick that it felt like hands wrapped around my neck, trying to strangle me.
I breathed, for a second, a sigh of relief.
I’d been wrong. It wasn’t real. It was just another vision. Just another part of the hallucination.
But just as quickly as that relief swept through me, it ran cold yet again…because I’d been wrong. The Oracle and what I’d seen there might have been imagined, but one thing wasn’t. One part of that dream had been very, very real.
And that was the part that mattered the most.
Icarus.
The dark fae.
I’d called on Icarus, and he’d come. He’dreallycome.
Whatever form he’d taken, it’d been real enough for Vestele to see. And now she was surely already on her way to tell the lady of this court.
We’d long awaited some kind of reckoning, and it was finally here.
There were some secrets the lady of the court might have allowed us to keep, but inviting the scorned lord of an illegitimate court into the midst of her own? That, I knew, would not go unnoticed.
But that wasn’t the idea that had consumed me.
It was, instead, what Icarus had said.
