Page 20 of The Crown the Fae Forgot
At first,I was sure that Shiel was taking me somewhere horrible to be rid of me. My mind wandered to its darkest recesses, to places where images like those the tea had envisioned for me came to life. I swore I saw bodies piling up between the townhouses stretching along either side of the dark road, swore the jolly faces of the fae out already celebrating the days leading up to Midsommar that turned our way were skeletal in the way the firelight cast shadows upon them.
Zev and Finch followed close behind, and it was only their faces that kept me from crying out in fear. Wherever Shiel was taking me—really taking me—couldn’t bethatbad if they followed too.
Any lingering injury to Shiel’s body had been banished, or at least cloaked, by the conviction that compelled us through the moonlit streets. He didn’t stop, didn’t release that vice-like grip he had on my wrist until the air had begun to hum with a new, familiar sound. Even then, it wasn’t until he’d pulled me inside and up the winding stairs to kick open the door into the message room, that he finally did it. The air exploded with a shower of feather and the noise of disgruntled birds and Shiel startedsnatching letters still tied to their feet. More than one angry pigeon squawked out its annoyance with the fae lord before he found what he was looking for.
His ink-blackened fingers unfurled the letter, eyes scanning it for a second before he shoved it out before him—towards me.
I was still reeling from the journey over here. He waved the letter in front of me again, the paper rustling as his lips pulled back in another grimace.
“Read it, Aurra. Now.”
The paper was in my hands before I realized I’d taken it. My hands were shaking so badly that I couldn’t read the words. Tried as I could to still them, I couldn’t—not until Zev stepped up behind me, his arms wrapping around me until his hands rested over mine, holding them steady.
At long last, the scrawled letters stopped blurring together, and I was able to slowly pick through the words Shiel had been so desperate for me to read.
THE LETTER THAT CONVINCES HER SHIEL WASN’T BETRAYING HER AT ALL
By the time I looked back up into Shiel’s expectant face, my hands were no longer shaking. Still, Zev held me, and as the cold realization ran through me of what I’d just read, I was grateful for his warmth.
“Shiel…” I held up the letter in one hand, the paper barely pressed between two fingers, as if it was too delicate to hold between my hands. “What is this?”
His eyes flickered from mine to the letter, and then back. His chest had only stopped heaving now too, his shoulders rising and falling more steadily by the second.
“It is what it says it is,” Shiel said, his brow furrowing a bit as if any further need for explanation pained him. “You did read it?”
“I---Shiel—” My voice cracked as I looked at him. Behind me Zev tensed slightly as Finch, who’d been pacing anxiously behind the three of us, tried to take the letter from my hand to read it.
Until Shiel, who’d happily allowed them to read the letter I’d found on his bed, I pulled this one out of Finch’s reach, my eyes still remaining trained on Shiel. He blinked back at me in confusion for a second before he understood my unspoken question.
He waved a hand dismissively. “Let them read it.”
Still, when Finch reached for it again, I hesitated.
It was my turn for a frown to pull at the inner corner of my brows. “Are you sure, Shiel?”
He nodded without hesitation. “I mean it, Aurra.”
Only then did I lift the letter up again for Finch to take, which he did, but without the same nervous excitement as had possessed him before. Zev’s hands let go of me to join Finch as his eyes scanned the hastily scrawled words of Shiel’s advisor.
Shiel and I remained staring at one another, our gaze unbroken as the others read the lord’s wishes, repeated back to him by the fae he’d left in charge of his court. I tried to read the expression on his face, to look for any hint of a lie—or worse, regret—but found none.
All I found was exhaustion. Honest, tired, done-with-it-all exhaustion.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the moment Finch and Zev looked up, their faces as shocked as I felt inside. Only then did I take in a deep, slow, breath, and then let it out all at once.
“You’d really be willing to give up your court to make sure I find my place back to the throne?”
Somehow, saying it out loud makes it all the more real.
So real that the moment the words are out of my mouth, Finch has disappeared in a flurry of movement to check outsidethe door, making sure that no one is listening in. He only returned once he was sure we hadn’t been followed, and even then, he took up a protective post between us and door, his body turned to keep one eye between the slats in the bird’s roosts towards the ground in front of the entrance down below, to be sure no one else slipped in unannounced.
“Aurra,” Shiel said, his face finally softening into something more earnest. “I’d hoped my advisor’s response would be here, so you could read it for yourself, before you could get any doubt about that I ordered him to do.”
“But that letter, back in your room…”
His eyes darkened slightly. “To my shame, Aurra, I admit, I’d had moments of weakness,” he said, his voice dropping lower. “I’ve wondered, myself, if this was the right thing to do, not only for myself, but for my court.”
“For…”
