Page 52 of Fractured
But tonight I wasn’t going anywhere, and I didn’t even have it in me to tell Vairno. I just cried my tears in silence until my mind shut down.
The nightmaresthat had become so intense so suddenly woke me just as the sun began to rise beyond the horizon. It was quiet in the bedroom, like always. I found I’d climbed all the way to the pillows while I slept. I hadn’t pulled down the covers, but I’d slept in the middle of the bed, my head over a pillow where the head of a queen—now dead—had rested, long ago.
Vair barely looked up when he heard me jumping off the bed to go to the bathroom. And when I came back, I didn’t ask the palace for breakfast. I wasn’t hungry—I was just angry. So damn angry my eyes were constantly filled with tears I refused to let out.
Slamming my fists against the windowsill did me no good. The pain was welcome, though. It was physical, so much better than everything I felt, all the uncertainty, all the time that was being wasted here. Time I could have spent by Rune’s side, figuring out a way out of this fucking realm. Going back home to Earth where we wouldn’t have to worry about curses and prophecy and magic.
And it hadn’t escaped my attention how thatcoldthat always came over me since that day Maera scratched mewas neverthreatening to spill out of me uncontrollably anymore. Since the moment I’d woken up in this placeit wastame,like something was constantly pushing it back. It was there, under my skin, only silent. Calm.
Convenient. Everything was so fucking convenient for everyone but me.
I continued to slam my fists against furniture, and I even picked up one of the empty vases and threw it at the floor, thinking it would break. It didn’t, like it wasn’t made of glass at all. It just rolled and basically hid underneath the coffee table of the first set of furniture, the one nearest the vanity table without a mirror on it. A mirror that had been part of it once had extended from the white wood—I could see where it had been broken off, probably by the queen herself. Now only cracked wood and empty drawers remained.
The moonstone wall constantly pulsated with veins of silver here and there like it wanted me to believe it was alive. The stone, as well as the palace. All those little designs on it, most of roses, that had looked beautiful to me once. Now everything had lost its shine, even though the sun was high up in the sky and the clouds that had spewed snow at the ground in the morning had moved to the sides to leave way for a few sun rays here and there.
“Are you ready to learn frostfire now, Nilah?”
Vair spoke and redirected my attention to his face. He sat on his back legs near the table, just like always, and watched me curiously, notsadnow. He was never sad when he wasn’t thinking. When he wasn’t trying to remember. When he was focused on me instead.
“Sure thing, Vair,” I said, slamming my hands on my thighs. “Sure thing—because I’m being held hostage by a fucking building! How much worse could this really get for me, huh? Not much, I bet ya. Not much, so why don’t you tell me how ahuman beingcan learn to do magic thatdoesn’t even belong to her, and she might not even really have!”
That last part was bullshit—I did have the cold.Thatwas magic, there was no doubt about it, and I felt it under my skin clearly. I just didn’t want to have to try it. I didn’t want to be part of whatever the hell this was.
“Good,” the lynx said—and he knew exactly how I felt, could see it in my face, could hear it in my shaking voice, but he pretended he didn’t.
He pretended everything was fine when he stood up and walked down the stairs, stopped a few feet away from me, and said, “Sit.”
That was certainly not what I expected. “Sit?”
“Yes. Sit. Right there, on the moonstone.”
Fuck, it was so hard to keep my calm. So damn hard not to resort to screaming and shouting and slamming my fists onto everything in this room until I bled all over.
So hard to choose to simply sit down, but I did. I’d been in the fae realm long enough now to know that I couldn’t force my way out of this, not now.
“Here I go, sitting down like a good little pup,” I said with fake sweetness, sitting cross-legged at the side of the room with the windows at my back.
“Now, speak,” Vair said, ignoring me completely.
“Speakwhat?”
“Your truth, Nilah Dune. Your truth about the magic that is inside you.”
I flinched. “I really would rather you did the talking. You use my voice anyway.”
But Vair wouldn’t have it. “Speak, Nilah. From the beginning, tell us of your magic. The truth.”
The way he said it—the truth.It pissed me off and I didn’t even know why. But I told him the truth.
The damn truth about how Lyall had transferred his magic to me when he healed me, and how I’d been able to make things float in the air since. As I spoke, I was reminded of the many times Ipunishedmyself for it, the many times I chose not to believein my own eyes because of how the people around me treated me, how I always—alwaysblamed myself, thought there was something wrong with me. The many times I wished I’d been anybody else in the world.
Fuck, if I’d heard of anybody doing this to another person, I’d have labeled themcruel.
I had been cruelto my own self most of my life.
I cried as I spoke, even when I got to the part where Maera scratched me and I began to feel the cold. I cried when I gave the talking lynx and the sentient fucking palace my whole truth, all the way to the part where I’d exploded in that forest before Vair found me.
I told them everything, and when I was done, I felt so damn empty. Like something had been pulled out of me, and I thought Vair would be sad with me. I thought he’d tell me he was sorry for the shit I’d gone through, at the very least, but he didn’t.
