Page 23 of The Queen The Fae Forgot
“Stop that,” I snarled, teeth baring.
It was exactly the response Icarus was hoping for.
“Oh, I’m sorry, do you preferMy Storm?”
The sound of the familiar term, the name he gave me in a moment shared beneath the trees, back before my life was marred by prophesies and pretense, had an effect on me it had no right to. Just like that, I was nearly undone. A weaker, more naïve version of me would have been. She almost was, once.
Even now, even after everything, it was all I could do to ignore the way the sound of the name he gave me melted that icy cage I’d placed around the part of my heart that tried to beat too fast in the dark fae’s presence.
“So … you admit it?”
It was impossible to keep the surprise from my voice this time. “You admit you’re here to find someone whose powers are untrained and vulnerable enough for you to be able to control them.”
He didn’t answer me directly, but the wicked gleam in his eye said more than enough.
“That’s the aim of all rulers ruthless enough to realize it’s the only way to get done what needs to,” he said, slowly, purposefully. “But fear not, I’m not on the hunt. Not yet. Somehow you’ve managed to thwart me without even realizing it, I think.”
Once again, I was caught off guard, until I realized the obvious.
I narrowed my eyes. “You’re lying.”
It was almost relieving to realize it until once again he battled off any sense of familiarity with a helpless shrug.
“I wish I was,” he said. “But that spell you placed, for I assume it’s your glamour that has this entire court spellbound, it seems to have stopped any of the fae here from exploring their new … natures.”
This entire court.
That wasn’t entirely true. It was just the castle—but I wasn’t about to tell him that, not when, for once, I seemed to have the smallest advantage over him.
I shouldn’t tell him that, anyway. Despite that bond between us that urged me to be his confidant, I was not. I couldn’t be. I wouldn’t be. Not so long as I could help it.
“How could the glamour I cast dothat?” I asked, knowing there was, at least, no point in denying the existence of my spell.
“Unless you tell me the exact words you were instructed to use, then I can’t answer that, can I?” Icarus responded. His brow raised again, ever so slightly, but something about the movement, however small, irked me. It was a challenge, and I didn’t like backing down from challenges.
But I also knew better.
I pressed my lips together for a moment as I looked the rest of him over, considering.
“Does the queen know, you think?” I asked, instead of answering him. “Does she know her court has access to the old glamour?”
“The real question,” Icarus said, “is why does it matter? You see …” he set down the scroll he’d been reading, unnoticed to me before, and started a slow sideways step around the room, almost as if he was beginning to circle me. “Even if they do, even if the queen has figured it out and planned to build herself a little army of these new-glamour wielding fae, she’s facing the same problem I am.”
He stopped moving, this time sizing me up instead.
“And what is that?” I asked.
“You,” he said, simply. “The fact that you exist. One word from you, and anything any one of us truly tries to do against you … it’s undone. Surely, Aurra, you’ve realized that by now.”
I knew, at least, that it was part of the reason I still stood. The queen had seen me pull magic from a place I shouldn’t have been able to, called forth the wells of my glamour even when they were run dry. I’d thought she was compelled by duty, at least a little.
It hadn’t occurred to me that she was compelled, instead, entirely by fear.
“Why are you even telling me this?” I asked, all of a sudden. “Doesn’t it work to your advantage to lie to me?”
Icarus shrugged. “I’ve always promised to be honest to you where no one else would.”
Honest.
