by Violet Grace
It feels good to issue a threat, but the truth is I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to exact revenge. Now they’ve worked out how to contain my powers, I’m just any other prisoner. I could spend the rest of my life in a cage.
‘What is the nature of this weapon?’ my father says to the guards.
It’s interesting that he doesn’t know about it. I guess Agent Eight must have brought it to Venice with her.
‘A CR disrupter, sir.’
My father continues to watch me, as if I’m a particularly knotty problem he can’t quite work out.
I wonder what my mother saw in this man. He’s clearly smart. And he’s okay-looking, I guess. Square jaw, defined features. But she could have chosen anyone. Why would the headstrong Queen of the Fae have settled for this liar? It’s hard to tell, but he doesn’t strike me as a smooth-talking charmer. If anything, he seems awkward, a little eccentric even. It’s not like she would have been swept off her feet by his charisma.
I retreat behind my wings again, and he looks at the weapon, pressing his lips together nervously. I guess he’s had a front-row seat to Fae power – probably more than any other human – and is wary. He crouches next to the gun, peering along the barrel. He gently taps on what I’m guessing is a glass panel on top of the gun. A meter of some kind, maybe.
‘Interesting,’ he mutters. His eyes dart to the guards and then back to me. ‘The filament in the wings.’
‘Sir?’ says one of the guards.
‘Her wings. They’re filled with fluid. The fluid must play with the radio frequency, disrupting it somehow to give some measure of protection. Fascinating. Quite fascinating.’
‘I see,’ says one of the guards, though he clearly doesn’t.
Samuel Maxwell takes one last look at me and, just like that, he’s gone. Again.
Alone once more, I crawl over to the cell door, keeping my wings around me, to examine the lock. It’s set into thick metal on a plate welded between the bars. Such a basic lock; I could pick it with my eyes closed if I had the right tool. A hairpin would do. I scan the cell, looking for something to use. But I already know it’s futile.
I lose track of time. The guards don’t talk and barely make eye contact. How long does it take to arrange transport to London?
I know it’s perverse, but part of me hopes that my father will come back.
He doesn’t.
I sit, enfolded in my wings, oscillating between freaking out that I’ll die in here and dreaming up escape fantasies. Most of my plans involve cracking the guards’ heads against the cell. But they never come close enough. And even if they did, I’m weakened by the continual barrage of radio waves and not sure I’m in a state to do much harm.
I drift in and out of sleep, unable to sleep deeply because of the pain and dripping sound from the leaky pipes. I’m beset by fitful dreams, filled with visions of my mother – of her face, her voice begging me to save her, to go to the Grigios. I see images of her body, dead, because I failed her. Because even though I came to Serenissima, I could not do whatever it is she needs me to do.
Other times, it’s Tom who torments me – our final words, his cold and formal bow. I’m lashed by thoughts of Tom flying with other girls. Girls less complicated, more carefree and more fun than me. It makes me ache like my heart’s been carved out, leaving nothing but a sea of emptiness for me to drift away on.
Something on the edge of reason flickers to life in my mind. The steady sound of the leaking pipes falls away into the background as I search for the answer to a question that I haven’t yet formed. I’ve felt this before. It’s not the Art, but a sense of flow, of ideas merging and connecting. My mind’s racing, but in that calm, lucid way like when I’m working on an algorithm, when I can feel the solution but can’t yet describe it, or write or articulate it.
Drip, drip, drip.
Every time I try to focus on it, it slides out of view. I force myself to relax, allowing my mind to go blank. I narrow the focus to just the cell door, looking through my wings.
Drip, drip, drip.
Samuel’s face momentarily enters my thoughts. I keep staring through my wings, and then at my wings. The filament. That’s what Samuel called it. Fluid. Water.
Drip, drip, drip.
I look up.
The pipes.
Water pipes.
Leaking water pipes.
If the fluid in my wings disrupts the frequency of the weapon, then what would a deluge do? For someone so smart, Samuel’s pretty dumb. His idle musings have given me an idea.
I stand and grit my teeth, anticipating the pain. With a quick glance at the door, I unfurl my wings and jump. I grab onto a pipe with both hands. It’s old, painted off-white with speckles of rust where one section joins the other. It creaks and the brackets that hold it to the cement ceiling give ever so slightly when I pull on it.
Unshielded from the weapon, the pain comes in excruciating waves, exploding in my veins. I grit my teeth and swing my legs up and hook them over the pipe, trying to use the momentum to loosen it. It’s wet and I feel my hands slipping. I let go with a groan and drop back to the floor.
I stumble to the back of the cell again to get as far away as possible from the weapon and fan my wings around me, leaning against the wall to steady myself. I take deep breaths, expecting the guards to come and check on me, but they don’t. I gather strength for a second go at the pipes.
A minute passes. Then another.
I know that I need to try again, but I don’t want to feel that blinding pain. Another minute passes before I steel myself, unfurl my wings and jump back up. I latch onto the pipe and wrap my legs around it. I swing my body from side to side. The pipe and brackets groan, but remain stubbornly in place. I grab the join with both hands, trying to turn it, to weaken the pipe. It’s slippery with water and rust and my hands are shaking. I can’t grip it firmly enough.
I can’t stay here unprotected for much longer. I need momentum, and strength. I think of Samuel, the father who doesn’t even recognise me. In my mind I see an image of his face from below. I’m a little girl looking up at him, a towering figure of strength and safety, my hand held up above my head, trustingly nestled into his giant palm. I thought that was a memory, a cherished slice of my past that I have clung to. But now I’m not sure. Maybe that was a lie too, just like everything else. I slide around the rim of a black hole of helplessness. But instead of toppling in, I redirect my heartbreak into anger.
Fuelled by fury, I contract my wings back into my body. I hang off the pipe with my full weight and bounce up and down. My head feels like it’s about to explode; every pore of my skin is on fire. With a last desperate lurch, I unhook my legs from around the pipes and allow them to hang. Small chips of cement and dust from the ceiling fall into my eyes as the bracket gives a little. I swing my legs again, harder this time, and the pipe protests against the strain.
My hands slip from the pipe as the pain overtakes me and the bracket gives way. Without the support of the bracket, the pipe warps under its own weight, breaking at the join, and rusty water gushes out.
I stand under the downpour, shocked at first by the cold water streaming onto my head and drenching my clothes. I welcome the coldness as the pain begins to recede, the radio waves disrupted and refracted by the water. I wrap my wings tightly around my body, the pain lessening even more.
Through the sound of water I hear a siren wail to life. A moment later, there’s the stomping of boots on concrete. The guards have finally cottoned on that something’s up. Even so, I’m so relieved the pain has receded I could cry. I need to reconnect with my Art before the guards arrive.
I steady my breathing, turning my focus inwards, reaching into the core of my being, searching for the deepest embers of the Art. It’s there, stronger, but inert, distant. The pounding of feet is louder now. They’re in the corridor outside, near the door.
I pull my wings in closer, tighter, visualising the Art flickering to life, kindling into a
flame. My whole body tingles with pins and needles as my magic rises from its slumber. I will the spark in my gut to ignite.
There’s a jangle of metal on metal as the key is inserted into the lock. I tamp down the panic as I begin uttering the transfer spell, visualising the mermaids’ sunken temple. It’s the first place I can think of where I can recover undisturbed. The portal is slow to open; my magic is still so weak and unfocused.
The cell door swings open, and one, two, then three guards are in the cell. As reality ripples and blurs around me, a guard flies though the air, tackling me. I dodge his hold but I’m momentarily knocked out from the protective water. I dive headfirst through the portal just as another guard races into the cell with the weapon and fires it.
His blast hits me at close range.
I scream in agony as I tumble through the portal. There’s a sickening crunch as my body slams into something hard with a force so great that my bones and skull feel like they have shifted within my skin. Raw pain assaults me, followed by biting cold.
I can’t see anything. After a moment, I pat my fingers on the ground and feel grit and rock around me. Cold cobblestones. They press into my legs. I have no idea where I am. It’s not the mermaid temple, that’s for sure. I don’t even know which realm I’m in. I make out the sound of lapping water.
My vision begins to return, blurry at the edges. It’s night time. Shapes melt into images. Flickering oil lamps light the pathway beside a canal, creating ghostly shadows.
I try to get up but my body it too numb with cold to cooperate. The best I can manage is to curl into the fetal position.
I need to sleep.
I want to forget.
And then I hear the swooshing of powerful unicorn wings. For an instant I find myself wishing, hoping, that it’s Tom. But it’s not him. Tom is gone.
Out of the corner of my eye, I spot enormous honey-brown wings. The unicorn circles down in my direction, catching the air, his ears flattened and his neck and head angled towards me.
I don’t recognise him. He’s not one of my Protectorate guards. My stomach knots. This could be one of Damius’s minions. It’s possible, likely even, that Agent Eight is feeding information to my uncle.
The unicorn’s feet clop on the cobblestones in front of me, as if alighting an invisible staircase. I’ve grown used to the size difference between unicorns and regular horses, but this one would make most unicorns look like ponies. He canters two steps more, before seamlessly transing to two legs and striding towards me with thighs like an Olympic sprinter. He’s built with a square jaw and no neck, like one of those guys who lives at the gym and isn’t afraid of anything. Except maybe carbs.
I ponder just how quickly he could snap my neck with his bare hands and, on instinct, I play dead. I know it’s stupid and pointless but a small part of me holds out hope that he won’t recognise me, that he’ll lose interest and will move on.
‘Queen Francesca?’ he asks in an Italian accent.
No such luck.
I struggle to lift my head off the cobblestones. ‘Who’s asking?’
The lamplight catches on the emblem pinned to his navy-blue military uniform. Waves on a rough sea. House Grigio’s insignia. He lifts his wrist to his mouth and speaks into his cufflink. The only words I understand out of his rapid-fire Italian are ‘Principe Victor’.
The wall of a nearby house begins to tremble, as if there’s a highly localised earthquake. Chips of blue paint flake off the wall, falling like confetti as they catch in the lamplight and gently flutter to the ground. The brickwork swirls in a haze of shimmering dust and opens into a portal.
Victor strides through, kitted out in a black armoured suit with gold trim, eyes ablaze. He’s flanked by five unicorns in battledress. Above us, the sound of thunder. I peer up to see a swarm of circling wings. About twenty more armoured unicorns and fairies circle us in tight formation. The ground reverberates as they land in unison, forming a protective perimeter around us.
I hear Victor bark orders at his people in Italian.
Another unicorn flies towards us and I instantly know who it is. The steady rhythm of her beating wings has the familiarity of a close friend’s footfalls. Jules.
Victor’s guards tense, watching her in the sky. My eyes connect with Jules’s. She flies on as if she is not interested in what’s happening below her.
‘See to the Queen,’ Victor orders.
A fairy kneels down next to me.
‘I must know what they did to you, Your Majesty,’ she says. She scans my body, searching for the injury.
‘Fried my blood, radio waves,’ I mumble through chattering teeth. ‘Cold. Want to sleep.’
‘Please keep your eyes open, Your Majesty. You will be okay, yes.’ Her words are meant to be reassuring, but they have the opposite effect. It’s what I imagine they tell people who are bleeding out in a trauma ward.
‘Freddo. She is too cold,’ the healer says to Victor.
He stands over me. ‘Who did this, Bella?’
A moment later, I hear Jules’s voice. She must have landed elsewhere and transed. A healer lifts my left eyelid, and through a blur I see Jules squatting next to me, talking. But as the frosty darkness closes in, I struggle to make sense of her words. It’s like they’re floating away before I have time to catch them.
I feel Victor lifting me gently, protectively. He turns sideways, carrying me into the portal, my head rocking gently against his bicep. The air ripples, reality folding in on itself. We’re transferring. I have no idea where. And at this point, I don’t care.
We emerge to the sound of more voices, but I close my eyes and give up trying to work out who and what.
And then I’m being lowered onto a bed, my head touching down on a soft pillow.
A woman is saying ‘Hurry, hurry,’ in a thick Italian accent. It’s Mama. I’m back in the Grigio castle.
Mama orders Victor out of the room.
‘She is my betrothed,’ he retorts. ‘I stay.’
‘You do not argue with Mama.’
A door slams shut.
Hands are undoing my buttons and laces and my wet clothes are being peeled off. Callie and Brina. A thick woollen nightdress is yanked over my head and blankets are piled on top of me, one after another.
A woman I don’t know is standing above me with mesh gloves on her hands. She tells me her name is Carlotta, that she’s a healer, that she’s going to warm me with the Art. I feel her fingers probing at the back of my head, where skull gives way to neck. She moves her hands to the front, her mesh-covered fingertips resting on my temples. Her lips move as she silently conjures her spell. I feel warmth emanating from the mesh as the room fills with golden light. The warmth flows through my body like a warm fire on a frosty night. My senses light up, connecting.
Carlotta releases her hands, and the golden light subsides. I feel the familiar stirring of the Art but it sputters and dies out. Blistering cold returns and I’m shivering once more. Hands return to my head. Again, I feel the warmth, but as soon as Carlotta removes her hands and her incantation stops, the cold returns.
‘It’s not working,’ I hear her mutter. Panic rises within me. Maybe this is it. The end of me. But I can’t die, not yet. I need to find my mother.
A babble of voices. Mama is ordering my maids to conjure a spell to heat the room. Jules is telling someone called Maria to clear some space on the bed for Abby’s apothecary chest.
‘A warming elixir?’ Jules asks as Abby bursts through the door.
The smell of sulphur tickles my nose as Abby brews her potion. A moment later she’s at my bedside.
‘Open wide, Queeny.’ She pours a bottle of God-knows-what into my mouth. It’s her most vile potion yet. ‘Swallow or I’ll be forced to pinch your royal nose.’
I cough and splutter as it scalds all the way down.
I open my eyes to find my bed surrounded by concerned faces. Carlotta’s fingers, gloves removed, are on my wrist, monitoring my pulse, or per
haps my temperature. I close my eyes again. I have no idea how much time passes before Carlotta announces that I’ve stabilised and need to sleep.
Mama orders everyone to leave the room. I hear the shuffling of feet and curtains being pulled. The room darkens, the door clicks shut, the sound of footsteps disappears into the distance.
Silence.
I lie for the longest time, staring up at the stars twinkling on the magical sky ceiling and listening to my teeth chatter.
Birds are chirping when I wake. I squint my eyes open. The magical ceiling is azure blue.
My first thought is that I’m alive. But my relief is short-lived. Black clouds descend as memories of my father flood back, leaching out the beauty of the birdsong and the sky above. Tears well in my eyes and stream silently down my cheeks, soaking my pillow.
The tears only stop when, on the edge of awareness, I notice something. Or, to be more precise, the absence of something. The Art, that reassuring background hum – it’s not there. Panic rises within me and I have to force myself to relax. I calm my mind and summon my power. Tiny sparks of pale blue light flicker around my fingers and quickly peter out. I try again, with the same result. Trying to quell my growing terror, I concentrate my attention and try again.
Nothing.
Escaping the Agency exhausted something in me, or broke something in me. I don’t know if it was the sustained exposure to the weapon, or perhaps the close-up blast I caught as I was escaping, but I feel empty. Naked and vulnerable. I’m nothing without the Art.
There’s a knock at the door and Mama bustles into the room, carrying a tray. I slip my Artless fingers under my blankets, like a child hiding a guilty secret.
‘Prince Victor came to see you, but I send him away,’ Mama says as though she shooed away a pest rather than her future king.
‘Thank you,’ I mumble. I want to thank Victor for saving me but I can’t do it now. Not when I feel so fragile that I could burst into tears at any moment.