A Court Of Shadow and Blood

☆ Mind Play ☆

A small, house-cat sized shadow brushed against her leg with a wisp of cold.

She unraveled Feyre from her hiding place after a few moments of pained silence that she soaked in. Eblis rose only to seat herself on the edge of her bed and stare down the female who watched her carefully. Feyre’s eyes were wary. “Before you ask: I didn’t kill them. I would never do that to my friends.” She would sooner jump off the castle cliff. 

“Why does everyone believe that you did, then?” Feyre asked, sitting up.

She smiled ruefully, so in contrast with her previous, frightening countenance that she winced. “Better to paint me as the bad person than the King.” 

Anger ignited in the young female’s blue-gray eyes. “So people would think twice about befriending you,” she said, as if connecting the dots. “He was isolating you to make you more vulnerable.”

She shrugged, unable to come up with a response.

“There is so much, Eblis, that we do not know,” Feyre murmured, brows scrunching with sadness. She sat on the edge of her small cot on the floor, tucking a single leg beneath herself as she did. Her gaze sobered, as if sensing she would speak no more on the subject. “Alright, how did the Loyal Guard sense me?”

Eblis welcomed the question, glad to answer it than face her past any longer. “Your mind has too much presence.”

“How can my mind have a presence?”

“Well,” Eblis said, considering her word choice, “I guess it really doesn’t. We daemati of the Council and Loyal Guard have been trained extensively on how to sense that sort of thing through someone’s mind alone. Master Tazad was a great elder who taught me and Reneau—the male who was just here—how to do such a thing. Tazad is long since dead, but we’ve passed on our knowledge to our fellow members.”

Feyre frowned. “And how do I shut mine off?”

“Let me show you something. Enter my mind.” She felt Feyre in the antechamber of her mental barriers, the endless stretch of ocean before her.

Aloud, Feyre murmured, “Rhysand showed me but...it’s eerie feeling it in person.” 

“You don’t feel me anywhere in there, do you? I at least allowed my brother that because I needed to talk to him.” Feyre shook her head but said nothing, her eyes distant as she surveyed Eblis’s mental barriers. “You see—I’ve pushed my mental barriers so far back within, that you can’t even sense me; though, I must admit that you’re not quite...attuned to noticing those kind of things, so it is not much of an accomplishment.”

Feyre’s eyes snapped back to the present, the sun gilding her shoulders from where she sat. Her brown-gold hair became burnished with light. “So that’s all it is? Just pushing them back?”

“Essentially, yes. There is more to it, but for short notice purposes, I would have you do only that.” It had taken her decades to master the skill, but being able to do that alone had not kept Master Tazad from breaking into her mind. That was how she’d come up with the ocean and the wind barrier—the faux one, because far behind that wall was her actual, mental wall where her thoughts and emotions were secreted.

Silence stretched for several moments as Feyre focused, her hand unconsciously straying to pet a shadow feline’s back as it stalked past. Eblis glanced out the window as she waited, her eyes catching on the way the sun lit the surface of the distant, cold ocean aflame. The sky was clear for once, though still a muted blue that made the Queen’s colors seem all the more inviting. She remembered some even claiming the Queen had been cut from the cloth of the sky, and the world had become muted so she could shine among the people.