A Court of Blood & Mercy || Elriel Dual POV

Chapter 5 - But This Was Autumn

Elain slipped out of the party before the rest of the extended Vanserra family recognized her arrival. Winding down the dark corridors of the sprawling house, Elain walked swiftly, putting distance between herself and the noisy bustle as she let out an exhale, tugging the gauzy veil up over her curled hair and away from her face as she paused, resting her shoulders against the gilded wall.

She was in the hall of history, a corridor filled with paintings outlining the great Vanserra lineage and legends.

Glancing back toward where she had come from, Elain knew she was alone in the shadows.

For all her hatred of the customs of Autumn, she had to admit that the veil had given her something she had never before experienced in her short life— the ability to go unnoticed.

Because Elain Archeron Vanserra had, for all her life, even before the Cauldron, been an attraction to both the male and female eye. Her mother used to tell her, "She who is born a beauty is born betrothed."

And it had been such a delightful little idea to Elain's girlish and childlike mind— that her beauty could fetch her a marriage someday. She grew up imagining the Mother cutting her story from the stars, reserving Elain for an enchanted love story for the ages... all she had to do was bloom and grow like the flowers in her garden, biding her time before love would find her.

Her mother was right in a way— Elain was indeed born betrothed. Spat out of the Cauldron, made and reborn as a high fae and mated before she could take her third breath.

Looking up from her resting place against the wall, Elain let out a half-hearted chuckle as she gazed at the imposing aristocratic features in the painting gazing back at her.

The Cauldron always brings us together doesn't it clover?

She sighed, her eyes scanning the oil-painted likeness of her mate, Lucien atop his prized horse, its blackened hooves grinding into the gored and decaying bodies of some foreign low-fae enemy as the male gazed off into the distance, his right hand holding the reigns as his left hand lifted an enormous flag with the golden flame of Autumn shining brightly.

Beron had commissioned new portraits of his seventh son after the great unification of the House of Vanserra two decades ago.

It was actually what they had first spoken about, that day he had come to visit her in the gardens at the river mansion. Lucien stumbling into her flowerbeds that Spring, after the war and Solstice and all those months of monotony and grief... he was suddenly there before her, freshly returned from another diplomatic trip to the human lands, his eyes wild with travel and his heart apparently open to give things another try... another attempt at establishing some sort of positive common ground with his Cauldron-chosen mate.

And some sort of... understanding... was reached.

Lucien had been permitted to visit her, so long as she was not expected to engage with him.

But he softened her somehow. Or maybe she was worn down like the bank of a river... unable to resist the pull and rush of the universe. Really, she knew why she began to answer his long stories with a question, beginning even to speak about her own past absentmindedly as she puttered about the weeds and the seeds.

It was because she was lonely.

After Solstice. After the necklace. After the mistake.

As the charm and whimsy of an unexpected love had dissolved, so had Elain's magic, until she found herself wilting again, dying inside little by little as she watched her sisters' lives pick up, the speed of Nyx' growth and Cassian and Nesta's life taking off like a Pegasi in flight.