Nocturna (A Forgery of Magic #1)(19)

Alfie opened his mouth, but no sound came out. Reflexively, he moved his hand to pull the books closer to him, but Paloma wrenched them away. Her lips disappeared into a hard line when she saw what they were.

“Paloma—I can explain—” Alfie sputtered.

“Luka came to find you and found an empty bed instead,” Paloma said, her eyes narrowing. “You’re lucky he called upon me first instead of your mother and father.”

Even while being caught, Alfie couldn’t help but feel a spark of hope knowing that Luka had sought him out. His stomach dropped at the thought of missing it.

“I know what you’ve been up to. I enlisted a sailor on your ship to report on your doings. I’m glad I did,” she said before he could protest.

A flush prickled his neck. She’d collared him like a dog too foolish to find its way home.

“How dare you even think of dabbling in Englassen magic?” she snapped. “I thought you would get it out of your system and return home. But now this! Luka was beside himself—”

Alfie’s face reddened further. “You told Luka?”

“He begged me to tell him anything I knew. You hadn’t sent word in months!”

Luka was loyal enough not to tell his parents a word about his doings, and Alfie couldn’t even send him a letter. Guilt sank into his bones, but he refused to let it smother his anger.

“What I do is not your concern. Or Luka’s,” he said through gritted teeth.

Paloma looked at him like she would when he threw mid-lesson tantrums as a child. It was infuriating. “The king and queen don’t know, but if you put one more toe out of line I will tell them. I will not let you trifle with forbidden magic in some fool’s errand to bring back the dead.”

Alfie closed the distance between them, anger clawing his insides. “Falling into that void doesn’t mean he’s dead. You have no proof! No one has proof!”

Paloma’s eyes widened with a flash of alarm. It was the same look she’d given him one day soon after Dez’s disappearance, when he’d grabbed her by the shoulders and shoved her against the wall in a fit of rage. Shame welled up within him and spilled over, embarrassment sticking to his skin in an oily sheet. It was fear of that anger within him that had led him to drowning himself in the flask at his hip. He would not let himself become that person again, the person whose anger would incite fear in those he cared about. He would much rather be numb than feel himself break open from the heat of his fury again.

Alfie took a step back. “Perdóname, I didn’t mean—I wasn’t going to—”

“Alfie,” she said softly. “I know you weren’t. But you must listen to me now as you did on that day. Dez is gone. That girl’s propio was to create voids—endless, dark, empty places with no food, no water, no time, no magic. She disappeared Dez into it. Your father forced her to open that void again under the pain of death, and he sent bruxos into that dark hole to find him. Just as the girl had warned, none of them came back.”

Alfie shook his head, not wanting to imagine Dez starving to death in the darkness. Men and magic needed each other to survive. This was an undisputed fact. Magic flowed through the air and men took it in like flowers took in sunlight. Without magic, the human body would wither away. And Alfie remembered what it felt like to stand beside the black void that had swallowed his brother. He’d felt no magic coming from it. Since then, he hadn’t been able to even set foot in the Blue Room. It had once been a parlor where they’d played as boys. Now it would forever be the last place Alfie saw Dez. That wing of the palace had since been closed to all, left to sit in the silence of their loss.

But Alfie refused to let what had happened in that room go. He couldn’t.

“None of the bruxos my father sent to find him were me. And Dez isn’t just anyone,” Alfie said, but his confidence was deflating at the look on Paloma’s face.

“Dez’s propio was extraordinary, but it cannot bring him back.”

“You don’t know that,” Alfie seethed. “No one knows that for sure.”

If anyone could survive this, it would be Dez. As a child, Dez would carve animal figurines out of wood—web-toed water foxes, quilbears, red-bellied wolves. When he finished a carving and held it in his hand, it came to life. There was no other way to describe it. The wolves would chase their tails, the puffer pigs would puff up to twice their size when startled, the quilbears would raise their hackles. Each figure had its own personality, its own will. He’d kept his figures in a glass cupboard in his room where they roamed and slept, pressing their paws to the glass whenever Dez came near.

The day Dez had been taken from them, all his figurines froze, motionless. Alfie couldn’t help but hope that if Dez could breathe life into the lifeless, then he somehow could survive what had happened. He had to be alive, waiting for Alfie to find him.

Alfie didn’t notice he was crying until a tear ran down his lip and he tasted salt.

Paloma touched his shoulder with an awkward hand. She was never the sort to initiate touch. Due?os weren’t the touching type. So Alfie knew he must look pathetic beyond words. He shook her hand off, and she let it hang in the air for a moment before pulling it back to her side.

“Your mother and father cannot take another loss, Prince Alfehr,” she said, her voice quiet. “This is your last warning, entiendes? If you continue down this path, I will tell them.”