A harmless, lovely package, perfect for a High Lord to mount whenever he wished.
Brannagh’s lip curled as she glanced at her brother. The prince deemed the same thing, judging by his answering sneer.
Tamlin snarled softly in warning. “If you’re done staring at her, perhaps we can move on to the business between us.”
Jurian let out a low chuckle and strode up the stairs without being given leave to do so. “They’re curious.” Lucien stiffened at the impudence of the gesture, the words. “It’s not every century that the contested possession of a female launches a war. Especially a female with such … talents.”
I only turned on a heel and stalked up the steps after him. “Perhaps if you’d bothered going to war over Miryam, she wouldn’t have left you for Prince Drakon.”
A ripple seemed to go through Jurian. Tamlin and Lucien tensed at my back, torn between monitoring our exchange and escorting the two Hybern royals into the house. Upon my own explanation that Azriel and his network of spies were well trained, we’d cleared any unnecessary servants, wary of spying ears and eyes. Only the most trusted among them remained.
Of course, I’d forgotten to mention that I knew Azriel had pulled his spies weeks ago, the information not worth the cost of their lives. Or that it served my own purposes to have fewer people watching me.
Jurian halted at the top of the stairs, his face a mask of cruel death as I took the last steps to him. “Careful what you say, girl.”
I smiled, breezing past. “Or what? You’ll throw me in the Cauldron?”
I strode between the front doors, edging around the table in the heart of the entry hall, its towering vase of flowers arching to meet the crystal chandelier.
Right there—just a few feet away, I had crumpled into a ball of terror and despair all those months ago. Right there in the center of the foyer, Mor had picked me up and carried me out of this house and into freedom.
“Here’s the first rule of this visit,” I said to Jurian over my shoulder as I headed for the dining room, where lunch awaited. “Don’t threaten me in my own home.”
The posturing, I knew a moment later, had worked.
Not on Jurian, who glowered as he claimed a seat at the table.
But on Tamlin, who brushed a knuckle over my cheek as he passed by, unaware of how carefully I had chosen the words, how I had baited Jurian to serve up the opportunity on a platter.
That was my first step: make Tamlin believe, truly believe, that I loved him and this place, and everyone in it.
So that he would not suspect when I turned them on each other.
Prince Dagdan yielded to his twin’s every wish and order. As if he were the blade she wielded to slice through the world.
He poured her drinks, sniffing them first. He selected the finest cuts of meat from the platters and neatly arranged them on her plate. He always let her answer, and never so much as looked at her with doubt in his eyes.
One soul in two bodies. And from the way they glanced to each other in wordless exchanges, I wondered if they were perhaps … perhaps like me. Daemati.
My mental shields had been a wall of black adamant since arriving. But as we dined, beats of silence going on longer than conversation, I found myself checking them over and over.
“We will set out for the wall tomorrow,” Brannagh was saying to Tamlin. More of an order than a request. “Jurian will accompany us. We require the use of sentries who know where the holes in it are located.”
The thought of them so close to the human lands … But my sisters were not there. No, my sisters were somewhere in the vast territory of my own court, protected by my friends. Even if my father would return home from his business dealings on the continent in a matter of a month or two. I still had not figured out how I’d tell him.
“Lucien and I can escort you,” I offered.
Tamlin whipped his head to me. I waited for the refusal, the shutdown.
But it seemed the High Lord had indeed learned his lesson, was indeed willing to try, as he merely gestured to Lucien. “My emissary knows the wall as well as any sentry.”
You are letting them do this; you are rationally allowing them to bring down that wall and prey upon the humans on the other side. The words tangled and hissed in my mouth.
But I made myself give Tamlin a slow, if not slightly displeased, nod. He knew I’d never be happy about it—the girl he believed had been returned to him would always seek to protect her mortal homeland. Yet he thought I’d stomach it for him, for us. That Hybern wouldn’t feast on the humans once that wall came down. That we’d merely absorb them into our territory.
“We’ll leave after breakfast,” I told the princess. And I added to Tamlin, “With a few sentries as well.”
His shoulders loosened at that. I wondered if he’d heard how I’d defended Velaris. That I had protected the Rainbow against a legion of beasts like the Attor. That I had slaughtered the Attor, brutally, cruelly, for what it had done to me and mine.
Jurian surveyed Lucien with a warrior’s frankness. “I always wondered who made that eye after she carved it out.”
We did not speak of Amarantha here. We had never allowed her presence into this house. And it had stifled me for those months I’d lived here after Under the Mountain, killed me day by day to shove those fears and pain down deep.
For a heartbeat, I weighed who I had been with who I was now supposed to be. Slowly healing—emerging back into the girl Tamlin had fed and sheltered and loved before Amarantha had snapped my neck after three months of torture.
So I shifted in my seat. Studied the table.
Lucien merely leveled a hard look at Jurian as the two Hybern royals watched with impassive faces. “I have an old friend at the Dawn Court. She’s skilled at tinkering—blending magic and machinery. Tamlin got her to craft it for me at great risk.”
A hateful smile from Jurian. “Does your little mate have a rival?”
“My mate is none of your concern.”
Jurian shrugged. “She shouldn’t be any of yours, either, considering she’s probably been fucked by half the Illyrian army by now.”
I was fairly certain that only centuries of training kept Lucien from leaping over the table to rip out Jurian’s throat.
But it was Tamlin’s snarl that rattled the glasses. “You will behave as a proper guest, Jurian, or you will sleep in the stables like the other beasts.”
Jurian merely sipped from his wine. “Why should I be punished for stating the truth? Neither of you were in the War, when my forces allied with the Illyrian brutes.” A sidelong glance at the two Hybern royals. “I suppose you two had the delight of fighting against them.”
“We kept the wings of their generals and lords as trophies,” Dagdan said with a small smile.
It took every bit of concentration not to glance at Tamlin. Not to demand the whereabouts of the two sets of wings his father had kept as trophies after he’d butchered Rhysand’s mother and sister.
Pinned in the study, Rhys had said.
But I hadn’t spotted any trace when I’d gone hunting for them upon returning here, feigning exploration out of sheer boredom on a rainy day. The cellars had yielded nothing, either. No trunks or crates or locked rooms containing those wings.
The two bites of roasted lamb I’d forced down now rebelled against me. But at least any hint of disgust was a fair reaction to what the Hybern prince had claimed.