Page 33 of The Court the Fae Forgot
Unfortunately, blushing as a human was something I was all too familiar with.
The room fell into silence like the morning after a large snow in winter.
“Can someone please tell me what’s going on,” I said, taking my hand back. The three fae shared a look before Shiel locked his own glowing eyes onto mine.
“My dear lady, we believe that you are fae, like us, wrongly sold into servitude at this mill. We’re here to rescue you.”
Of all the things they could have said, that was the last thing I ever would have guessed.
Me? A fae?
I stood in silence for so long that finally, someone else had to dare break it for me.
“She’s … what?” Ada’s voice sounded from across the room. Her face was swollen and red from crying when I turned to look at her. I had to fight the instinct to run to her side, remembering that there were still three very impressive and very dangerous fae warriors barring the path between us.
“We’ve come for you, Aurra,” Finch answered, a little more gently. His hand twitched at his side, as if it ached to reach out for me, but I caught him exchanging a look with the fae that had led the others inside, the fae that called himself Shiel from that first day in the village.
One look was all it took for him to still, for his posture to straighten and that mischievous smile of his to fade—however much I found I missed it when it did.
Not that I wouldeveradmit it to him.
My throat was thick with the emotions warring inside me as I still tried to process what they said.Fae?This had to be some kind of cruel joke. I’d spent my whole life here at the mill, grown up beside a sister who resembled me.
But when I looked at my parents, they didn’t deny what Shiel said.
They just stared blankly ahead, their hands clutched together as if preparing to face a judgement they knew was coming all along.
The sight of it made my head spin even more than it already was.
Was what Shiel said true, then? Had my parentsboughtme?
Even if that horrifying idea was true, that didn’t mean I was fae. Did it? More than that, though, was being fae actually any worse?
Were the fae the monsters my parents had made them out to be, or was that all another lie, too?
Shiel continued speaking, addressing only me.
“I sent Zev after you that day in the village. He was supposed to fetch you, bring you straight back to me, but when you met, he found evidence of something else instead. We had to check to be sure before we made our move.”
“Zev? We didn’t …”
I stopped, the words dying in my throat the moment I spotted what Shiel had taken from my father. In the flurry of his earlier arrival, I hadn’t seen it happen. But now, as he held out his outstretched palm, there was no mistaking what it was. It was the smallest scrap of that golden blanket, the one that I’d used to tie the purse of coins the fox stole.
Or, as I looked up at Zev and saw his face redden again with embarrassment, I supposed it washewho stole it.
So, I wasn’t meeting him for the first time tonight, after all. I was only meeting him in his human form—or the closest thing to it. He was still a specimen of a man, a creature that made humans look like a rough draft of themselves in comparison.
I took the ribbon of fabric from Shiel, winding it instinctively around my fingers.
That familiar sense of calm washed over me when I did—but this time, something about it was wrong. It wasn’tcalmthat I felt.
It was … something stronger, something thick and cloying. It settled over me like syrup, dulling the pain not only in my body, but in my mind. All of my life, I’d clung to the dwindling remnants of that blanket for comfort, all the way down to the final remaining scrap. I’d thought the relief I drew from it was no more than a childish coping mechanism I’d never bothered to grow out of.
But now that I’d been separated from it for so long, now that I’d felt the same power I felt emanating from it in other ways, I understood it for what it was.
Glamour.
Recognition glowed in Shiel’s eyes when I lifted mine to meet his again.
