Page 32 of The Crown the Fae Forgot
But when I stretched my little pinky, that perfect, white, unmarked pinky moved too.
When I moved my right thumb, so did the thumb in front of my eyes.
I could have gone on for hours, admiring—as much as disbelieving—the proof of the change before my eyes, if it weren’t for the jarring noise that drew me back to the present.
I must have madesome sound, some sign that I was, in fact, alive, because the furious shouting and pounding on the other side of the trap door had stopped.
Shiel’s voice, muffled but close, as if his lips were pressed the other side of the wood, reached me once more.
“Are you alright, Aurra?”
Once more, those strange, foreign lips parted to answer him, but I found myself still unable to speak.
“Please, Aurra.”
This time, Finch’s voice joined Shiel.
“If you don’t answer, we’ll break down that door.”
Zev’s threat, at last, seemed to scrape the frog from where it’d lodged itself inside my throat.
“Yes, Shiel, I’m fine.”
Finewasn’t quite the word for it, but I wasn’t dead—and in my world, that was about as close tofineas I might ever get again.
In the momentary silence that followed, I could imagine the sighs of relief—or at very least, the looks of relief—sharedbetween the three fae that stood behind the trapdoor. There was the sound of more shuffling down below, and then another heavy thud as the door rattled beneath me once more.
“Aurra, are you laying on the door?” Shiel’s voice broke through that silence after a moment.
I murmured out a hasty apology and started to crawl off the wooden planks when something—or rather someone—in front of me made me freeze once more.
It was one of the advisors, and then the next, and the next.
All three of the fae that had worked the Midsommar glamour to lift the spell once binding me now stood at odd angles, watching me with a look I couldn’t read. That wasn’t quite true, however. It wasn’t that I couldn’t read their expressions, it was that I couldn’t understand them.
Each one of them stood with their backs pressed to the short ledges of the windows making up the outer walls of the tower. Their eyes were wide and trained on me with an all-too-careful watchfulness. All this could have been explained away as some kind of exhaustion, if it weren’t for how those eyes suddenly narrowed as I scrambled forward and started to straighten up to my full height.
A height that, even as I stretched out a suddenly aching neck and shoulders, seemed as strange as the milky white perfection of the hands I still looked twice at each time I had reason to lift one of them into my line of vision.
The advisors should have been congratulating themselves. Their spell had worked, hadn’t it?
In the moment before the silence could be shattered once more, this time by the sound of the trapdoor finally banging open to let the three golden Western Court fae storm out of it at long last, a hissed voice broke it first.
“Traitor.”
I lifted my eyes to see the advisor that had spoken it, but it was not one of their faces that made me freeze again.
It took me a moment to realize who it was looking back at me with eyes the color of a turquoise sea, so wide and piercing that they could nearly hypnotize on their own, no glamour required.
But that alone was enough to make my mind register who it was who looked back. Who it was that looked into my very soul with one glace.
It wasme.
I was looking at myself, but like the hands that had mesmerized me, I was no longer myself.
Because the face looking back at me was a stranger.
It already would have taken an age for me to come to terms with my own hands being mine, but that face? I could have stared at it for an eternity and never been entirely sure it was myself looking back at me.
