Page 29 of The Queen The Fae Forgot
Guilt refused to let me use my powers, so I had to hope he didn’t tell anyone what I’d asked.
I was supposed to be studying still, after all.
But I couldn’t go back to my lessons, not now. Not while the image of my sister’s shocked face was still burned into the back of my eyelids, even as Icarus’ touch still burned on my skin.
This time, I hesitated before bursting inside the room. I’d wanted to catch Icarus by surprise, hoped to find him doing something that perhaps he shouldn’t, but Shiel didn’t deserve that. I deserved that, and that was just what I’d gotten.
I cringed, waiting for a beat before I allowed myself to knock, until the pain of that mental reminder faded enough for me to hide it from my face, even if there was no hiding what had just happened between Icarus and I from myself.
Shiel’s voice called out, bidding me enter, and I shoved my way inside with a desperation that somehow only managed to knock a couple of books off a shelf placed a little too close to where the door swung open.
I was already gathering these up, glad for the excuse for why my face had turned so red, by the time Shiel looked up from where he scribbled at a desk strewn with papers the way his sick bed once had been.
His own voice was breathless when he saw me. “What is it, Aurra? Are you alright?”
Of course, I wasn’t alright. Now that I was here, however, I didn’t know how to answer.
What did I want from Shiel, really?
I wasn’t sure. I came here on instinct. That was all I knew.
“I—I’m fine. I just had a break in my lessons, so I wanted to see you. I haven’t so much as seen you, Zev, or Finch all week. I had some … thoughts … I wanted to run by you.”
He stopped in his tracks, and for a moment, I saw him struggle between the paper still grasped between his fingers, and me.
“It’s fine, Shiel,” I said, my own steps slowing. “It’s not urgent. You can finish what you’re doing, first.”
For a second, he struggled still, but then he just nodded at me, glanced once at the door to make sure it was shut, and then stepped back to where his pen had been abandoned and returned to his hasty scribbling with a furrowed brow.
I, meanwhile, was too relieved for a moment longer to gather myself to feel jilted.
Something about Shiel’s presence, or perhaps the warm western light that cast all the room in a golden glow, had begun to settle the pounding of my heart. It was hardly the warm welcome I might have wanted, but it was always this way with Shiel. He was hot and cold, it was his nature. It was better not to dwell on it, better to just hope he warmed again on his own once he’d had time to finish whatever task it was he was so hell-bent on accomplishing.
He was a single-minded fae. Sometimes, it worked to my advantage.
Others, it left me scuffling my feet as I wondered what to do with my own wandering mind.
Shiel had been given a suite far smaller than mine, or even Icarus’, small enough that if I were him, Lord of the Western Court, I’d have been offended.
Maybe he was offended, maybe that was why his desk and floor were littered with papers only loosely bundled into piles that may or may not at some point be sent back to his advisors on raven wing. Or, maybe they were just more drafts like the one that had nearly driven us apart not so long ago, remnants of a mind that seemed always so torn between one thing and another.
This was the same kind of madness.
Shiel had multiple tables pulled together to make one large one and across all of it were different parchments, scrolls, books, and inkwells. He stood in the midst of all these papers, his hair unruly, matching his rumpled clothes. Dark circle had taken up residence beneath his eyes, all too telling.
“You look awful. Have you slept at all?”
His eyes slowly raised from the scroll he’d been scribbling on to look up at me before they fell back down on the parchment.
“You’re not the only one who’s been keeping busy. Believe it or not,” he said, “it’s not easy to keep an entire court in line when you haven’t so much as stepped foot in it for months.”
A slight pang of guilt settled into the pit of my stomach, but it didn’t last long, not when it was swallowed by the enormity of the rest that had already settled there. Just because Shiel had promised he would give up his court, in the end, if he needed to—if that was what it would take to see me seated on the Eastern Throne—didn’t mean I wanted him to have to do it.
And from the looks of the fervor with which he was trying to keep up, he wasn’t willing to give it up without a fight.
A proper fight.
But would he go so far as Icarus was willing to?
