Magic's Memories

Chapter Thirty-seven

Feyla stared at the door barring her from the pained man within. Her fists rested at her side in a tight clench. The back of her throat felt raw and the cry fighting its way past her control didn't help. She spun away from the door and ran down the palace hall.

The cry escaped sooner than she'd planned. Sedgewick might still be able to hear it. A petty part of her hoped the sound gnawed at him but she shoved that thought back violently. Oh, his face, his cries, the things he'd said, she'd done that to him.

Feyla ran faster, skidding around a turn, the speed causing her lungs to ache as much as her throat did. Moonlight poured in through the tall glass windows on her right, making bright steppingstones along her path. Finally, something in her snapped and she collapsed into one of the pools of light.

He'd hate her now. Hate her like—like he did Bilara. They'd never dance together again. Or hold hands while eating breakfast. She'd never watch his eyes light up when she brought him coffee. They'd never cuddle on his settee, his arm draped over her while they talked about curtains and baby name or work and new theatre shows.

Sedgewick would never...kiss her again in that half-desperate way that reached into her heart and begged for her love while apologizing for needing it. He rarely talked about it, but she rarely needed him to. Feyla had seen it. She'd felt that fear from him like it was her own and she'd been so diligent in drowning out that voice in his head that said she couldn't really love him and be trusted to stay. And to Sedgewick's credit, it had started working.

But now she'd shattered that into dust-sized pieces and left him worse than before.

"You betrayed me to get back into your mother's good graces," he'd said.

"I didn't want to!" Feyla shouted into the echoing halls. He didn't understand, she'd known he wouldn't understand. How could he know what it felt like to wobble on the knife-edge of her mother's approval, always one false step or one embarrassing word away from Arilla's rebuke? How could someone who'd flung his father's name in the man's face and vowed to never go home again grasp the crushing weight on her chest, the sickness rising in her stomach, whenever she dared think of doing the same?

Her mother had been there when Feyla's own father hadn't even wanted to be. It had always been just the two of them. What kind of daughter abandoned the mother who'd cared for her when no one else would?

Feyla's nails bore into the palms of her hands. Emotions twisted and writhed within her. For once, she didn't automatically sort out their source and note their names. They rolled over her, rising into her throat and washing out a high-pitched cry. The lines of shadow from the window panes separated the pool of moonlight on the floor with dark, iron-colored streaks broken by her white cloak against the floor and her own shadow. An image rose to her mind of a bird flapping its wings against the bars of a cage, unable to escape as water flooded in.

She was trapped, trapped by the things she wanted most in the world and all her attempts to fix it were failing.

"You should be careful lurking in my halls at night," a cool, commanding voice spoke into the silence. "The guards might think the worst."

Feyla's head snapped to her left. A frightened squeak left her mouth and the air around her shifted.

Eleyna stepped into the light of a different window. It highlighted the sharp cut of her chin and the arch of her brow. Her eyes should have been shadowed but dim starlight shimmer at the edges of them like it was greeting a familiar friend.

Feyla had thought —a little proudly—that she'd become...inoculated to her friend and queen's effect on people. She'd been wrong.

A deep, ancient instinct crawled through her magic and made her freeze like a dumb, helpless sheep before a wyrm. A voice inside her whispered warnings that the Eleyna-as-she-saw was not the Eleyna-as-She-is. There was something else under the fey woman. Something dangerous.