27. Chapter 27

Chapter 27

S omewhere in the dancing and music, in the drifting blur of faelights, Mikael lost track of Cyril and Dion.

The lockmead might’ve had something to do with it too.

He was just looking for a window of opportunity. Just a sliver of time to convince her to come to the barracks tomorrow night, after the merchant’s death sent his last attempt up in smoke.

Watching Cyril drift around the party hadn’t been a chore either.

She’d left her hair down, like a sheet of black silk, and the dress she wore was flattering in all the right ways. Gods, maybe the wrong ways too.

Mikael was certain he’d never felt so invested in a damn article of clothing before. The blue, or green, or whatever damn color the dress was, did something to her eyes that he didn’t quite understand, but was happy to look at regardless. The gold was so bright it was fucking mesmerizing.

Were there more poetic ways to describe a woman’s eyes?

Probably.

But the guard started its celebrations early, and words were not Mikael’s strength even on the best of days. He might’ve honestly been halfway back to sober for the second time when his mother brought Cyril and Dion down to the back lawn at sundown.

That was the first time her uncle caught him staring.

Hells, he wouldn’t have even realized if Ari didn’t discreetly suggest Mikael perhaps find something else to occupy his eyes. He hadn’t meant to look at Dion, but that’s where his eyes landed next, and he was looking right back at him.

Dark and unimpressed.

The second time happened when he heard Cyril laugh.

He didn’t even know at what or why, but she was standing with his mother a few tables away, and the noise garnered every bit of his befuddled attention. He watched them shoot back what could only be lockmead—a rare thing to see his mother do—and then Dion’s disapproving glower stepped into his field of vision.

Ari kept an eye out for him after that and only goaded him mildly about taking such a keen and dangerous interest in the Rhodea woman . He let him know the moment it looked like Dion cleared out for good, and Cyril was still walking about the party.

But some force of fucking nature did not want him seeing Cyril tonight.

Mikael was halfway across the lawn when his father decided that was the exact moment they were going to have some father-son bonding. He wanted to talk about their hunt, and the lands, and how he felt about the more administrative turn his responsibilities had taken as commander.

Lars, too, was deep in his solstice cups.

His mother showed up sometime later, just as their topic of discussion slid dangerously towards futures , and she sidelined their conversation entirely.

He wasn’t sure how long he stood there, humoring his liquored parents, but it felt like hours . Thankfully, they didn’t seem fussed when he finally made his polite escape under the guise of wanting to get back to celebrating with the guards.

Mikael wove through the dozens of tables and mostly devoured spreads of food and drink, scouring for that damn green dress. But he couldn’t find her anywhere.

Maybe not surprising, considering it was late .

The sky was that shade of deep, consuming black that only came in the middle of the night, and the sea of stars was out on full display.

Cyril probably made the wise decision to just go to bed, as she often seemed inclined to do. Mikael was going to have to drag his inevitably hungover ass out of bed at the crack of dawn to go down to the stables and invite her to the barracks, again .

He needed to go to sleep.

Mikael was most of the way back up the winding pathway alongside the royal gardens when he was certain he had gone a little heavy on the lockmead.

He blinked and rubbed at his eyes.

The swath of pale blue-green laid out on one of the terraced steps of grass up ahead stayed firmly in place.

“Cyril, are you…?” He stopped a few feet away from the woman flat on her back on the ground, looking up at the stars with half a smile on her face. “You’re alright?”

Cyril laughed—no—she fucking giggled as she swept her arms through the grass and said, “I’m great , Your Highness.”

Oh. She was great alright. She was right fucking hammered too.

“Lady Cyril, did you get into the lockmead?” Mikael asked with a chuckle. He took a spot on the grass beside her, leaning back on his palms and rolling his shoulders. They still ached from the solstice hunt.

Her golden, glossy gaze drifted over to him, lips parted like she had some sort of retort ready to fire back at him. Instead, a grin crept into her face, and she nodded. “Maybe a little.”

He cast a bit of skeptical side eye her way. “Maybe a lot?”

Cyril’s nose wrinkled, and she nodded. “Maybe a lot.”

Mikael shook his head.

He wasn’t about to burst her euphoric little bubble, but lockmead-induced hangovers always swung towards the more miserable end of things, especially if you weren’t used to it. She could figure that out on her own in the morning.

“Did your chaperone abandon you again?”

An indignant snort left her.

“Of course he did. Pretty sure he took a nymph and some friend of his back to his room and I—” A shudder ran through Cyril as she cringed. “Don’t want to be anywhere near that .” She waved a hand vaguely towards the palace.

“Oh.”

Mikael didn’t blame her for that, even if part of him had a sliver of respect for her uncle’s prowess, his less admirable qualities aside. The forest nymphs that frequented these casual celebrations at the palace were…energetic, as Mikael had learned firsthand more than once. Dion and his friend were in for a hell of a night.

He opened his mouth, ready to dole out some sort of sarcastic words of comfort, but something he’d been so blissfully fucking ignorant of hit him.

Cyril’s snow-white skin.

Her sharp, striking features.

The bones she said wouldn’t break.

“Fuck me. You’re part nymph, aren’t you?” Mikael’s revelation just sort of tumbled out without an ounce of tact.

“I… Yes?” She pushed up on her elbows and gave him a look that spoke volumes about just how stupid he was for only realizing that then. Or how poor his delivery was. Both, maybe. “The otherwise unremarkable fae of mixed race , remember? What did you think I was?”

Cyril flopped back onto the grass after she finished her entirely inaccurate mockery of him. Inaccurate, but endearing in an alarming way.

Message received, though, loud and clear.

The comments he made that night… Not exactly his proudest moment.

“Shit, I don’t know. I never thought about it.”

Mikael rubbed at the back of his neck.

For a moment, he worried that he might have veered into offensive conversation territory, but Cyril just looked bored. Like she’d had the discussion a million times. She held her hands out in front of her, flexing and wiggling her fingers up at the night sky, paying him not an ounce of heed.

He was going to regret it come morning, but Mikael let the alcohol content of his blood make a remarkably stupid decision.

He drew in a slow and deep breath, letting it fill every inch of his lungs. As he exhaled, Mikael narrowed every bit of his attention deep within himself. Down to that shallow and dark, glimmering creek of fae power that ran through his very core.

It stirred to life.

“Your mother, then. She was a full nymph, or…?” he asked, eyes fixed on her hand.

Mikael drew up from his power as he inhaled again, careful to not be greedy as his mother had told him so many damn times, and let it flow as the air left his lungs.

Cyril hummed a thoughtful noise. “She was half. And half—”

Lips parted and eyes wide, Cyril stilled as darkness coalesced in the air.

A loose, smokey tendril of it took shape on her forearm, just above where the embroidered cuff of her sheer sleeve slipped down. The wispy and inky blue-black of it was such a stark contrast to her skin.

It wrapped a slow path up and around the narrow column of her arm, slipping across her hand and weaving in between her fingers.

Mikael fed the manifestation as long as he could, to keep the utterly bewildered look on Cyril’s face for even a moment longer. But when the pang of an ache that he knew was a precursor to trouble throbbed in his chest, he let the darkness dissipate.

Every bit of his manifested magic drained in a matter of moments.

“What the—” She examined her hand, turning it back and forth as she wiggled her fingers, and her eyes shot up to him. With her voice full of what sounded like spite, she said, “What the fuck was that?”

“Party trick.” Mikael shrugged like the exertion didn’t leave his hands shaky.

Even for all the years he’d spent training and refining his physical form, tapping into that sliver of his darkness wrung him out like nothing else. It would get easier with time, or so his mother had spent the last ten years telling him…

Cyril gaped, looking from him to her hand and back again.

“It…it was warm ,” she breathed, full of disbelief. Then her eyes went wide and words tumbled out of her like cracks of lightning.

“Are you—? Have you—? When— ?”

“Ascended?” he laughed. “No. Gods, no.”

Hells, he feared ascension more than he looked forward to it happening. In the decade he’d worked with the guard, they lost three of their numbers to injuries from inopportune moments of ascension and, in his opinion, that was three too many.

“Just a mostly unremarkable fae over here.”

Cyril plucked a handful of grass from the ground and aimlessly flung it towards Mikael, scoffing. “Alright, Prince of Darkness. Go show off somewhere else.”

“I would, but you never finished answering my question, Lady Cyril .”

He threw a handful of grass back at her. The outraged sputtering that came out of her was more than he could have dreamed of.

“You arse ,” Cyril hissed, sitting up to brush all the blades off herself. And oh, if looks could kill. It probably wasn’t a great time to point out all the debris in her hair. “And what—what question?”

“Your mother…”

“ Oh , uh—” Her eyes screwed shut, like thinking took an unreasonable amount of effort. Lockmead did that. “She was a half nymph. Water. And half moon-fae.”

“The spitfire is part water bearer, interesting…” Mikael mused, more playful than anything, but Cyril’s features narrowed in challenge. He couldn’t even imagine how much more temperamental she’d be if it wasn’t for that streak of tranquility that water nymphs bore.

“What do you mean interesting ?” she said slowly.

Oh. He was toeing a dangerous line now.

“Just an observation,” Mikael chuckled, and Cyril rolled her eyes. He’d push her temper another day. Now? He was more interested in enjoying the alcohol-fueled ease that settled in between them. “One more question, if you’ll humor me?”

The side-eye she cut him was lethal, and he fucking loved it.

“What?” she grumbled, and Mikael stared for just a touch longer than he should have.

She raked her fingers through her hair, shaking all the grass and debris free, and gods… It was probably best for the sanity of anything with a heartbeat and a sex drive that she rarely wore it down.

He cleared his throat.

“Does it bother you, when people talk about your parents, since you never…”

Cyril raised a perfect, angular brow at him.

Shit.

He hadn’t thought about just how personal of a question it was until the words started leaving his damn mouth. He should have just asked her about her damn hobbies again.

“Since I never knew them?” She exhaled sharply through her nose and looked away. “Here comes the Prince of Darkness, trying to unpack all my fucking baggage. First, you flaunt your magic, now this.”

Oh, for fuck’s sake.

That was not a nickname that could stick around in any capacity. If either of his parents found out he let that bit of information slip…

“You can tell me to fuck off.”

“Does it bother me?” she mused, like she hadn’t heard what he just said. Her eyes were turned absently ahead. “Sometimes, I guess. Depends on who, or why. People get some weird fucking enjoyment out of telling me I have my father’s temperament, like it isn’t a backhanded comment. Or, fuck —”

A dry, bitter laugh left her.

“They love to tell me how much I look like my mother. And it’s usually just creepy old men like what’s-his-fucking-name”—she threw a hand back towards the palace—“telling me I inherited my mother’s best assets like that means fucking anything. I don’t know what she looked like.”

Cyril’s entire body sagged as she sighed.

In hindsight, that was more of a loaded question than he had any right asking her, especially this deep into solstice night. Mikael wasn’t sure he had enough wits about him still to manage this conversation with tact, and he knew woefully little about Cyril in the grand scheme of things.

A smarter man would have worked on that first.

Would she prefer he ply her with some dark humor? Get her laughing, take her mind off the uncomfortable topic he broached. Or was she the type to look for words of reassurance and comfort? Hells, did she want a fucking hug ?

Physical contact seemed like the last thing he should even think about with Cyril, even if that urge was an undeniable thing.

“You’ve never seen a painting of her?” he asked because it felt safe . The Rhodea family seemed to be one of no shortage of means. They must have had a portrait or two at least…

“There was a fire. My father, he, uh—” Cyril shook her head. “We have nothing of hers.”

This was getting worse by the minute.

That starry shine to her eyes turned into something dull and sad, and some inarguable beast in his blood demanded he fix it. So, naturally, Mikael asked her another question with catastrophic potential.

“Would you even want to see what she looked like, if you could?”

A wistful look settled on her face, and she nodded.

“ Gods , more than anything. My father too, I…I don’t remember much about him honestly, other than I think he looked kind of like Dion. But to find a weaver that met both of them?” Cyril’s laugh was dry, pained. She tipped her face up to the stars, hair slipping over her shoulders like threads of silk. “Talk about abysmal odds. I’d be a fool to get my hopes up about something like that.”

Well, shit. She didn’t know.

Or the liquor in her system was preventing her from connecting the dots that Mikael thought someone had to have told her about by now. Either way, it wasn’t his place to inform her those odds weren’t anywhere as abysmal as she thought.

“Ah, good point.” He nodded slowly, and Cyril said nothing.

She just stared up at the stars with something uncomfortably neutral on her face. He’d gone and made her sad on fucking solstice night, like the absolute moron that he was.

And Mikael?

He couldn’t fathom what it would be like to be in her situation, to not even have memories of the people who brought her into this world. For better or worse, he’d never spent more than a couple of months away from his parents. They were just these stationary figures in his life, always there, even in moments when he wished they weren't.

But that was a luxury Cyril never had.

No nurturing, warm hug of a mother to turn to with any and all worldly woes. No rough-around-the-edges father to, well…Mikael didn’t proactively go to his father about anything, truthfully. But the option was always there if things became dire.

All Cyril had was Dion and, based on what Mikael had experienced so far, that said little. The sort of molten-hot volatility he exuded had no place in a parental figure. It was no wonder his mother seemed so keen to take Cyril under her wing and forge a relationship with her.

“I’m going to bed,” Cyril declared, already half pushed off the ground by the time Mikael blinked up at her.

That was probably for the best. Things were beyond salvaging, and he was bound to ask more stupid questions if they kept at this.

“I’ll walk you back?” he asked, like he wouldn’t be walking in the same direction to the same place anyway.

Gods. Damned. Lockmead.

But Cyril just stood there.

She blinked at the pathway with her hands fisted at her sides.

Silent.

Mikael stood and cocked his head at her. “…Everything alright in there?”