Liora said nothing, not until I sat back on my thighs and wiped at my mouth. “Is that what happens to the summer children?” I rasped.
“Do it again. Touch, but don’t taste.”
“I don’t think?—”
“Do it.”
Solaire climbed the column in slow waves as I drew my finger through it. This time I didn’t bring it to my lips; I held it while the golden light pooled on my fingertip, shimmering and alive. For one second, two, it held. It was warm and it was mine and I wanted it.
Three seconds. The light flickered. Four—it dimmed, thinned, and then it was gone. The tip of my finger was cold where the solaire had been.
“Something in you devours it.” Liora stepped closer, took my hand, turned it over. Studied my fingertip as though she could see what had happened beneath the skin. “It’s…” She paused. “Corrosive.”
I pulled my hand back. The word sat wrong in my chest. "You said I was Seelie."
“You are. I’d stake my crown on it.” Her brow furrowed, and for the first time since I’d arrived at Highmark, Liora looked unsettled. “Something else is at work.”
I stared at my hand. The fingertip that had held the solaire looked no different, but I could still feel the ghost of it—the warmth, and then the nothing. My own body, turning against a magic that should have been my birthright.
This wasn’t the mycelial knot in my belly; it hadn’t so much as twitched.
“It flickered first,” Liora said, almost to herself. “Did you feel that? For a moment, it held.”
I had. That one second when the solaire had tried to take root.
“It’s not immunity, then,” Liora said. “It’s resistance.” Her gaze drifted to the column, to the solaire still shimmering there. Her mind worked behind those bright eyes.
She never finished the thought. She turned back to me, lifted her sword, and said, “Again, from the top. If you can’t wield light, you’ll at least learn to fight it.”
I did as she asked, paid attention,learned, but I carried that word with me for the rest of the day.Resistance.And the memory of how solaire had tasted on my tongue—warm and sweet and mine—before something burned it away.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Dorian
Eurydice had been gonesince midday. She hadn’t told anyone where to, and she’d left her chamber door open to a view of an unmade bed and a disassembled trunk. Mirek’s dresses lay strewn on the floor.
Haskel, Finch, and I sat in the three armchairs beside the bookcases, all of us pretending to be absorbed by what we read. We’d long ago lapsed into silence, until?—
“She is a queen, after all.” Haskel had a book open in his lap, his finger placed under a line like he ever read. “She doesn’t answer to you.”
He resumed our conversation from earlier as though we’d just paused. Only half my attention had been onHighmark: A Gilded History, anyway.“What good is having aveyre, then?”
He glanced up at me. “You look intimidating when you’re sleep-deprived. That’s a perk.”
“You do, ser,” Finch said from my other side.
Faun shot up from her perch on the fountain’s edge. She struck into Eury’s bedchamber. “Where have you been?” Her voice echoed.
I jerked out of my seat, nearly toppling the book in my lap. When I came to the doorframe, I found Eurydice standing beside her bed in her sweaty leathers; she stripped them off piece by piece.
“I need Eleyrie to draw me a bath,” she said, looking at neither of us.
“Eury,” I said.
“And tell Mirek I’m not to be dressed again today. I’d prefer to stay in.”
Faun stood in front of her with palms out. “That’s all you have to say for your absence.”