He probably has a lot of letters that he receives and sends every day as part of being a king. I shouldn’t feel so sensitive about it. Like we said, we still have a lot of work to do in peeling back each other’s layers.
I follow after him, my eyes latched onto his back while I try to shrug off these swirling scruples. After all, he’s a king, and that’s something I keep forgetting. He’s a king, and I’m…
I’m about to fail miserably at using my magic.
Therein lies the heart of my troubled thoughts. I haven’t said anything to anyone, haven’t even let myself really face it. But the fact of the matter is, my gold isn’t working right. Not only that, but I murdered people with it left and right, without a single thought of hesitation.
What if I do that again?
When Slade finally leads me off the path and brings us into a cave, I’m in my own head so much that I don’t even take in the space until I nearly walk right onto the gold-stained floor.
I suck in a breath, eyes sprinting from one end of the cave to the other. I recognize it immediately. It’s where I first woke up. Where I blinked and I was already moving, power already coursing through my veins.
Too late, I realize I’m staring at the hardened gold that’s splashed and splattered over the walls and floor, lost in its shallow depths while Slade watches me.
Blinking, I shake myself, pasting on an unaffected expression.
“We’re training here?” I ask, and though I try to keep it steady, my voice sounds heavy with the weight of the implications.
Slade continues to study me for a moment before he dips his head. “We are,” he tells me, his tone heeding something I can’t quite catch.
Those anxious nerves, those curled and twisted strings I’m all tied up in, they pull taut, making even my throat too tight to swallow.
He walks a few feet away and kneels down, right where a wave of gold has frozen, and he drags a finger over the hardened crest.
I don’t know why, but I shiver.
He cocks a brow. “Cold?”
“No.”
He stands again and removes his coat, but just as I try to insist that I’m not cold, he places it on the ground. “Come sit.”
I hesitate for a moment, but my feet lead me to him, and then I lower myself onto his coat, tucking my legs beneath me.
He sits down too, and even though we’re two feet apart, the distance feels inconsequential. Slade’s presence—his attention on me—it’s always eaten up the space between us.
“It’s daytime,” he says, motioning toward the cave’s opening where daylight still spills in. “Your power has always been uncontrollable during the day, right?”
“Right. Normally, as soon as something touches my skin during the day, my gold comes rushing out.” My eyes fall to the black leggings and gloves on my body. “But ever since I woke up, it’s different. Nothing is being gold-touched.”
“What do you feel?”
Worry bombards me, and I lift my hand as if I can see what lurks inside while flashes of memory of that night in Ranhold ping against the backs of my eyes, shooting scene after scene through my vision.
I quickly bury my hand beneath my leg. “Nothing. I feel nothing.”
“Try to gild the rock.”
With wary weight, I slip off my glove and press my palm to the jutting stone just to my left. It should be instantaneous. Gold should immediately spill out of me.
But it doesn’t.
Slade cocks his head. “Are you trying?”
My eyes slash up. “What’s that supposed to mean? Yes, I’m trying.”
“Are you sure? Because you say your gold-touch was always uncontrollable during the day, but you could control it, to an extent.”
“What are you talking about? Of course I couldn’t.”
“But you did,” he argues. “You could gild things so they were only plated in gold. Or you could make things completely solid gold. Remember the coat you wore? You managed to keep your magic only gilding the inner lining so it didn’t spread. That was you controlling it.”
I blink. “I’ve…I’ve never thought about it that way.”
“You’ve always had control. You just need to learn how to wield it. I think you’re scared. I think you’re holding yourself back, and that’s why your gold isn’t coming—because you’re blocking it.”
Anger trips up through my veins, making my mind stumble. “I’m not.”
“Auren…” I don’t care how persistently calm he still is, that tone rattles me down to my bones. “I know you.”
“Maybe you don’t,” I spit back with far more vitriol than I intended. I’ve gone as stiff and as cold as the frozen gold, caught in my own momentum. I steel myself, readying for the backlash, preparing for the fight.
But he doesn’t give it to me.
Instead, Slade watches me with that unerring green gaze, face betraying nothing.
“Maybe you’re wrong,” I go on, wanting to break that shuttered expression, wanting to crack open the eggshell view that he has of me and show him the rottenness inside. Prove that he didn’t put it there. “Snippets and unanswered questions—that’s what we have. So don’t sit there all superior and act like you know everything, because you don’t.”
I don’t even know all of me.
And that’s the splinter that’s caught in my chest, unable to be plucked free.
My magic changed—so wholly that I’m terrified of it. My ribbons are gone. Like leaves stripped from a vine. And I…
“I am not the same person I was when I walked into Ranhold.”
“That’s true,” he concedes. “But I still know you.”
A balking, frustrated laugh tumbles out of me. “Are you out of—”
“Let’s talk about that night.”
My words lurch to a halt. My heart does too. I feel it snag against my throat. “We don’t need to talk about that night. We were both there.”
A look of frustrated sadness lines his face. “Talk to me, Auren.”
“What do you want me to say?” I demand. I’m up and on my feet before I even realize I’ve moved. “This.” I gesture around the room, at all the gold that doesn’t feel like me. “This doesn’t make any sense. That night at Ranhold doesn’t make any sense. My gold isn’t working right, and what I did that night…I never should’ve been able to do that.”
“And what did you do?” he presses, and I curl my hands into fists because I—
“I killed.”
That’s the thing that nobody is saying. The thing that I haven’t been able to face.
“How did I even do that? I felt my power leave me when the sun set,” I say as I begin to pace around the cave, skirting the solidified splotches. “I shouldn’t have been able to use any part of my power, but that...” I stop, looking down at the ground. “There was something inside of me that just snapped open.”
“It needed to happen.”
My head shakes, voice cracking, and my anger cracks with it.
Because I’m not angry at him. I’m angry at me. And it’s easier to hold that anger than to feel anything else, because I don’t know how to navigate these other emotional landscapes. They’re dark and terrifying and rocky, and I feel lost as I try to cross them.
I hate my snappish tone. Hate how the first thing I do is try to push him away because of some internal feeling like I’m going to lose him anyway.
“I’m sorry,” I tell him. Sincerity fills my tone, and I drop my guard, drop my snappishness that he doesn’t deserve, and I tell him the truth.
“I became a beast. I killed a lot of people that night, and I could do it again. What if I go full fae here?” I ask. “What if I lose control and gild all of Deadwell, and you can’t stop me? I remember what I did that night, just like I remember what happened leading up to it. How I was on that mezzanine. How confused and helpless. I felt angry and alone, and then I finally found you…”
Slade’s eyes are an empty, starless night. “I want you to ask me, Auren.”
My brows scrunch up in confusion. “Ask you what?”
“I want you to ask me those questions that have been on your mind since you woke up. I deserve to hear them. You deserve to voice them. One in particular. So ask me.” His gaze is dark, his tone hard. But not with the fight that I was trying to pick. Not with anger at all. With anguish.