ARWEN
I KNEW MY LIGHTE HAD returned the moment I’d opened my eyes. It had only been four days since my last harvesting. Usually it took a week.
This was some kind of record.
The days in which my lighte regenerated were the most hopeful, and thus the very hardest, and I took steadying, soothing breaths to remind myself of that fact before I got carried away.
Just the tingle of power at my fingertips was enough to send my mind down a thousand varied, unorganized paths: Set the entire room ablaze and make a run for it when they come for you. Use your round lighte shield as a battering ram and bowl yourself through the locked doors. Hold Maddox hostage with those long strands of white sun and force the guards to let you leave.
I’d lost days swept up in those fantasies. Breaking free. Running all the way home. Scooping Leigh into my arms. Mari’s bright hair, Dagan’s loving scowl…
And then I’d have to remind myself of the reality: by the time my lighte regenerated even close to enough to enact any of those plans, I’d be harvested once again.
But the lighte in my veins didn’t only mean power. Life, strength, energy returned to my body and the urge to take off running, to move and stretch and fight was just shy of agonizing. I hadn’t run in months—maybe the
longest stretch I’d gone since childhood—and I missed the meditation most on days like this, when I knew I actually could move if I so chose. It was like being given sacks of coin and sent into an overflowing, glittering candy shop only to learn the sweets tasted of someone else’s spit.
Conjuring a similar taste in my mouth, Maddox smacked my doors open and leveled a glare at me. “The king wishes to see you in the baths.”
My heart darted like a hare from a hawk. “Now?” A stupid question.
Maddox’s expression told me he agreed. “Yes, now.”
I crawled from the bed, still in one of the fussy collared nightgowns I’d been gifted. When I’d searched the suite my first week here, I’d found drawers upon drawers—an entire closet—piled high with finery of every dense fabric and opulent, jewel-toned color. Teal and caramel and emerald dresses, gold-threaded shoes, diamond drop earrings.
I’d never wanted to set so many nice things on fire so badly.
Swatting away the fog of sleep, I made my way to the armoire and scrunched my nose up at the scent of apricot syrup that permeated the wardrobe. I could only imagine the entire castle had been spelled to make all the dust and cobwebs smell like pungent fruit, and I’d come to despise the fragrance. I missed mothballs.
I’d just wrapped a hand around one dresser knob when Maddox called out, “You won’t need to change.”
I sucked in a shaking breath, still facing the armoire. Don’t give that gargoyle the satisfaction of your fear, Kane’s voice commanded in my head.
Maddox and Wyn escorted me down a hallway I’d only pictured for two months on end. I’d been stored in that tower like supplies for the winter— and the new sights were as unnerving and exquisite as I’d imagined.
A feat of industrial power and intricacy: wheels and cogs, iron and steel, gold and diamond and rubies. The marble floor, red and reflective as glossy blood. Impossibly high ceilings, interior archways that served as bustling bridges from one wing to the next, balconies and windows offering glimpses into elegant, manicured courtyards absent of flowers, ringed instead with immaculately sheared hedges. Not a single leaf out of place.
The scent of ash was thick in the air. My nostrils stung as I asked Wyn, “Was there a kitchen fire?”
His limp appeared to be bothering him today. He favored his good leg as he struggled to keep up with Maddox and me. “Sometimes it rains right after dawn.”
I blinked at him, though he kept his soft hazel eyes ahead of us. “Sometimes it rains…ash?”
Wyn shook his head like that would’ve been ridiculous. “Fire.”
Of course. Of course it rained fire in Solaris. I didn’t even bother to ask how Lazarus convinced his court that it was nothing to concern themselves with. How the people outside the walled city protected themselves. I didn’t care to hear the truth or the lies.
I’d noticed handmaidens in those dark uniforms slip through passages that blended seamlessly into the walls, or open doors that were made to look like bookshelves, or move aside statues that sat atop entire hidden sets of stairs.
A winding palace of tricks and lies. I shouldn’t have expected anything else.
But after being bound like veal in that suite, I was grateful for the exposure. I was grateful even for the long distance between wings. The castle’s bridges and pathways were like a twining labyrinth and must’ve spanned more miles than all of Abbington. My tower seemed at the very opposite of wherever these baths were.
Baths. And Maddox telling me not to change out of my nightgown…The time had likely come. Despite the roiling nausea, I kept placing one foot after another. I had to be strong if I wanted to live.
But Maddox’s atonal humming didn’t help. It rang through the now- empty, echoing halls like a death march as the three of us walked, my soft- soled slippers light next to Maddox’s and Wyn’s heavy boots. I waited to be led before doors that would open to a damp, darkened bathhouse like the one where I’d grown up. Waited for the smell of stagnant water and sweat and furtive joining.
Instead, I was brought before an entire wing guarded by at least twelve more kingsguards.
Maddox and Wyn guided me past the silver sea of men, and the wing yawned open for us. A sterile glass atrium—cold and spare. A few marble pillars, to hold the impossibly high ceilings upright. Iron bookcases. Twin white chairs without a single divot or stain, made of the fur of something once woolly and tufted and thick. Likely a creature I couldn’t conjure even with my imagination at its most boundless.
And five glossy black doors inside all that glass. Each with one ruby-red handle that made me think of a bloodied hand desperately attempting to pry it open. That, and a different golden symbol affixed to each door’s center: a moon, a sun, a wave, a leaf, and a flame.
We walked toward the middle door, the one with the wave insignia, just as two kingsguards passed us by, each with a hulking glass barrel of white, shimmering lighte. I could have sworn the essence was humming through the drum, and the meager lighte in my veins pulsed, as if like could call to like.
My lighte. That was my lighte—
My neck craned so I could watch them heft the barrels through the entry affixed with the marking of the sun.
“Lazarus keeps all the harvested lighte in his own wing?”
Neither guard bothered to respond to me, and I was ushered inside.
Lazarus’s private baths were nothing like my childhood town’s bathhouse. Where Abbington had one single rectangular bath under stone pillars and faintly mildewed wood, before me sprawled dozens and dozens of steam-hazed, opaque blue-green pools of water, stretching on and on like rolling hills. Some as still as a frozen lake, some undulating despite their emptiness of bodies, a current gently rocking the water’s surface from deep below. Some even bubbled raucously, sputtering droplets into the moist air.
We stood on a white stone balcony, and I inhaled minerals and sulfur and marble and soap as my eyes pored over all the milky turquoise water. Like everything I’d seen in Solaris, the baths were a showy, excessive extravagance. I’d take Kane’s peaceful porcelain tub any day.
The balcony split on either side into two sets of hazy stairs that wove deeper and deeper through the baths, working their way around to its center, where the largest pool lay. Rippled and misted with steam, the pale blue water was held without edges and cascaded into all that surrounded it.
And in the heart of all that effervescent, peaceful jade water—Lazarus.
His undeniable beauty was possibly the most vile thing about his appearance. He had Kane’s granite-carved jaw and piercing slate eyes. After a millennium alive, his thick, dark hair had grayed a bit, but he still wore it confidently overgrown like his son. But Lazarus had none of Kane’s warmth. None of his joy. That grim-set mouth, steely lowered brows, and broad rippling chest made my stomach heave. I was grateful I hadn’t eaten this morning. I would have retched.
“Arwen,” he said, and though he hadn’t spoken loudly, the echo of the rushing water carried his words right up to the shell of my ear. “Care to join me?”
I set my jaw. “I’d prefer not to wet my hair, thanks.”
He said nothing from the center of that enormous, undulating pool shrouded in steam, and Maddox and Wyn dragged me down the set of stairs closest to us despite my flailing, depositing me at the overflowing lip.
Warm water seeped into my slippers, and I curled my toes as if I could spare them from the heat.
“Join me.” His voice was deeper than when it summoned me in my nightmares. Harsher than even my own fear could replicate. His silver eyes bored into my own, and I tried not to dwell on the physical similarities between him and his son. Neither to mar Kane’s beautiful image in my mind nor to endear me to the beast I beheld.
Would Lazarus truly force himself on me here in these baths? In front of all these men? My eyes cut to the handful of silver-clad guards standing watch. To Wyn and Maddox behind me, the latter’s hand still a vise around my arm.
“Don’t be modest,” Lazarus cooed. “You’ve nothing they haven’t seen before.”
With a nod of his head to one straight-faced guard, my frilly nightdress and undergarments were sliced down along my back. The guard’s lighte scented the air as satin and errant buttons pooled around my ankles on the wet floor.
I clenched my fists until they ached.
He wanted me to squirm. Wanted to strip me of not just my clothes but my dignity.
Yet so much had changed since the night I was mortified to take my mere tunic off in front of Lieutenant Bert. All those months ago—knees wet on a blood-soaked cottage floor…
I let that weak glimmer of lighte I’d woken up with zip through my body as I resisted the urge to cover myself. Instead, I stepped from the puddle of garments, wholly bare, and glowered at the Fae king as I entered his bath.
