Page 33 of The Crown the Fae Forgot
But I didn’t have an eternity. I didn’t even have an extra moment to spare.
There wasn’t even time to tell Shiel or the others what the advisor had whispered to me when she saw the face now looking back at her—the greenish eyes and hair so close to the color of the flaming sun rising that it even now looked like flames every time I caught sight of it tumbling over my shoulders out of the corner of my eye.
Shiel burst through the trapdoor first, followed closely by Zev and Finch. From the urgent flash in the lord’s eyes, I expected the guards to follow next, swords at the ready, but instead they hung back, the silver of their armor glinting in the darkness where they hung back along either side of the stairs.
For one, single second, Shiel’s eyes glanced over me as he searched the tower for the girl he wouldn’t find. But then that gaze swung back to settle on me, and as Finch’s jaw dropped open behind him, he reached out his hand to me, unphased.
“Come now, Aurra,” he said, as if nothing about me had changed at all. “Lady Phyrra has demanded we leave now, before the crowd recognizes you.”
She must have felt the spell work, too.
If it weren’t for the way the advisor had already reacted, I’d have wondered why this would be her next order.
I felt, rather than saw, the way eyes followed me as I took Shiel's hand and allowed myself to be led back down the staircase. More than that, however, Ifeltthe way they looked at me. I felt the heaviness that followed the advisor's whispered warning.
The advisor's whispered threat.
Because she might have been the one calling me a traitor, but if she knew who she was speaking to, then she'd be the traitorous one.
Something had started to come over me since the moment the bell tower stopped tolling and the weight of my mother's spell had been lifted. I hadn't felt it the moment it happened--not in the traditional sense. I'd felt it being ripped from me, out of me, from the places where the spell had dug in it's claws and melded with the very fabric of my being. But rather than lifting a weight from me, it was as if something buoying me had been removed. The fabric I was made up of--reallymade up of--weighed me down like lead flowing through my veins.
It spread further through me with every blind step I followed down, down,downtowards the mouth of the beast that had only just swallowed us. The entirety of our journey, from Lady Phyrra's side to the top of the tower where I was transformed, couldn't have taken more than a few minutes. But in that short time, one fae had died, and another had been reborn in her place.
And by the time I had stepped foot once more at the base of the stairs, my feet treading a path towards the lady of this courtand all her own threats and promises, I was not the fae that she'd once made them too.
Royal blood, it seemed, was a powerful thing indeed.
And a reckless thing, too.
The doors to the main square were thrown open at the end of the hall, the bright light spilling in from the middle of the day along with the sound of the raucous crowd beyond. Or--what should have been raucous, anyway.
Instead, something strange was happening in the crowd beyond.
The guards were trying to shuffle us towards a side door, but I found my feet unwilling to obey. Shiel's grip grew tighter when he felt me resist him, but he didn't force me. Instead, his own footsteps slowed, his head turning back so our eyes could meet.
Shiel hadn't let go of me from the moment he'd once again taken my hand. I still kept catching both Finch and Zev eying me when they thought I wasn't looking, but Shiel remained as unchanged as he had from the beginning. It lent me a confidence that none of the other hurried glances did. I might have transformed, inside as well as out, but at least one thing remained the same.
"What is it, Aurra?"
My gaze flickered from his honey eyes to the too-bright patch of sunlight at the end of the hall.
My lips parted--a foreign feeling, once again--but I only found myself able to shake my head. Another feeling had settled in the pit of my stomach, one that had nothing to do with the rearranging of my organs to fit the body that had always actually been mine.
"I...I have to see what's going on," I said, finally, in an equally foreign voice. Even to my own ears, I heard the command running beneath the surface. I felt the power that was inherently mine in a way that I'd never felt before. In a way I'd neverimagined. Beneath the thinnest sheet of still water raged a racing river. I need only dip my finger in it to feel its full power.
The sound of my voice made the soldiers stiffen again. I saw glances pass between them, felt that string of tension tighten. More than one hand twitched towards the swords strapped to their sides.
It was only the guards, at first, but I saw the way Zev and Finch did it, too. Even Shiel's gaze flickered between the men flanking us, as if sizing them up in case of a fight.
I couldn't blame them, really.
I finally understood the hatred for the crown.
By the time that hatred reached humans, it was diluted, turned into something far more palatable than the truth. The humans hated the fae in a general sense, as any servant grows to hate an unjust master.
But the humans should have hated the fae in a far more specific way. Humans weren't just prey, weren't just weaker. The fae were predators. And this fae, the one now shivering slightly in boots to small for her new feet, was the greatest predator of all.
The problem with predators, however, is that they're led by instinct.
