by Bec McMaster
And Thiago’s mouth captures mine as he hauls me against him, and I wilt into his arms, wanting nothing more than to lose myself in him.
I promised my mother I would sign the marriage contract.
I never promised her I would go through with the marriage.
“Fuck it.” I’m moving before I can think my way through the entire plot. The problem is this Finn. If I renege, she’ll kill him. Painfully.
But if he’s no longer here….
Then she can’t do a cursed thing to him.
And I heard the pain in Thiago’s voice last night.
If I can do nothing else for him, then I can give him this: I can set his friend free.
There’s no one in my mother’s tent right now, thanks to a private meeting with the queens of Aska and Ravenal, and I know the guard’s rotations. Edain will be with my mother, to serve as her personal protector. Andraste will be sitting on a cushion by her knee, smiling as she drinks down their wine and their threats.
The Asturian guards are good.
They know they can’t afford to allow my mother’s precious hostage to escape.
But they’re not looking for an attack on the inside.
No, they’re looking toward the tents of Evernight or Stormlight.
I need a cloak, I need a knife, maybe some of those hair pins that I learned to pick a lock with, and gloves, for the iron. Half a minute later I have everything I need and then I’m slipping from the tent and pulling the hood of my cloak up over my dark hair.
Night’s not far away. More bonfires. Middenmarch tonight. We will sing to the ancestors who fled to this world, and burn the pyres to remember them. Blessed Maia. Blessed Selena. Blessed Ambryn.
This is the night the queens plot.
This is the night accords are made, and treaties formed.
Nobody will be looking for me. I’m in disgrace with my mother. Forgotten. Barely watched.
I count to three as a guard strolls past, wait until he’s around the corner of the tents, and then I slip into the shadows. Five seconds later, I’m inside my mother’s tent.
A single torch burns. Veils of fine linen hang to separate rooms within the tent.
My mother’s bed is opulent—all red and gold cushions, with fine silk sheets and furs cast there.
Edain’s chambers settle off hers, with a neat pallet laid out on the floor. It barely looks used.
There’s a cage within his chambers, a shadowy figure curled up on the floor within it. I ease through the linens, pressing a finger to my lips as Finn’s eyes blink open in surprise.
It’s dark back here. I can see the shadowy figure of a guard pass by outside, carrying a torch.
Finn peers at me through his sweat-dampened hair, straining to see who just entered. His eyes widen in recognition and he opens his mouth, before he sees my finger. His mouth closes, but his surprise remains apparent.
The torch fades. The guard walks away. We’re as alone as we’re ever going to be, and we have three minutes until the next guard circles around.
A heavy iron ring circles his neck, and someone’s bolted it to the side of his cage.
Iron. This might be a problem.
I can pick a lock, but even touching those bars will burn my hands. The gloves will help, but iron seems to emanate with its poison and though my tolerance for it is higher than most, I’m not entirely immune.
“Well,” Finn says in a roughened whisper as I circle the cage. “I can’t say I expected to see you here. Princess, was it? Princess Iskvien?”
“Be quiet.” I kneel down. There’s a lock on the cage, and I’m sure the key is hidden somewhere in Edain’s chambers, but the problem lies with what I can’t see.
The cage will be warded.
The second I touch that lock, the owner of the ward will know about it. The question is, did my mother lay that trap? Or was it Edain?
How fast can they return?
And why the hell does my magic elude me? If I’d been able to wield it, I might have been able to break these wards with none the wiser.
“What are you doing?” Finn sits up, frowning a little.
“Isn’t it obvious? I’m rescuing you.”
Apparently, it isn’t obvious, because his eyebrows almost meet his hairline. I study the lock and then realize those gorgeous blue eyes are searching my face.
“What?” I whisper.
There are shadows in his expression. “What’s the cost of this, Princess?”
“There is no cost. Not to you.”
He captures my wrist through the bars, moving shockingly fast. “I’m not talking about me. I saw and heard everything your mother did yesterday.” He shakes his head. “I always knew she was a bitch, but I didn’t realize she treated her own family like that.”
I wrench my hand back.
There’s a gaping wound in my chest, an emptiness I can’t fill. It’s one thing to know that my mother despises me, but another to have others see it.
He pities me. My enemy pities me.
“It doesn’t matter,” I whisper, and then try to force a smile. “It won’t be the first time she hurts me. It won’t be the last.” And then there’s the matter of this marriage to Etan. What’s the worst thing she can do to me when she’s fucking selling me to a monster?
A hand curls around mine and I realize I slipped away for a moment.
He’s watching me. Eyes full of sympathy.
“I’m Finn,” he says, as if he’s not locked in a cage barely big enough to house a dog.
“I know.”
His smile curves, slightly wicked. “I figured a formal introduction might be in order, considering you’re rescuing me. It’s a little embarrassing, after all.”
“Embarrassing?” The word draws me out of the emptiness.
He shrugs, muscle moving in his chest and shoulders. “I’m the one who’s usually rescuing princesses.”
He has an easy charm about him that makes me relax.
“Do tell…. Ever tried to pick a lock?” I ask.
“Frequently.” He nudges the door of the cage with his boot. “Not this one though. Not yet.”
“The lock will be warded,” I murmur. “If anyone touches it….”
“It will summon a wrathful prince,” he says with a wink. “Want to know a secret, Princess?”
I arch a brow.
Finn slowly reaches out and grips the lock in both hands, gritting his teeth with pain as the iron burns through him.
But nothing happens.
Both of us breathe out as he lets go.
“I kept grabbing the lock in the first day,” he says with a smile. “Having that ward blare in his head like a horn every hour or two was annoying him. So he altered the ward.”
Finn can touch the lock without summoning Edain.
“I just need something to pick it with.”
I reach inside my pocket and produce my catch.
Finn eyes my hairpin with barely disguised disdain.
“It works,” I tell him. “I’ve done it many a time.”
“On what? Your bedchambers?”
Maybe.
“Over there,” he says, tipping his head toward Edain’s pallet and the piles of saddlebags there. “His Royal Sulkiness put the key in there.”
I scramble across the floor toward the packs.
“But you’re not going to touch the key,” Finn whispers. “It’s a trap. I saw him lay the magic on it. Something violent, by the look of it. No. What you’re looking for is a satchel of knives. He’s got an entire roll of them. There’s a dirk there. Thin enough to stab through an ear without leaving a mark.”
I arch a brow at that and find the satchel. “Plotting your escape, were you?”
A flash of a smile greets me. “Not my first time in a cage, Princess. Nor my last, I daresay. Though I wasn’t expecting a helpless accomplice to simply amble in here, and hadn’t yet figured out how to get my hands on that dirk.”
I find the dirk.
&nb
sp; The hilt of every single knife in that roll of leather is carved of something pale, like ivory. Or bone. The hilts are gold. The blades wickedly sharp. But the dirk is a thing of murderous beauty.
This was only ever created for assassination.
I know Edain works in the shadows.
There have been slips of the tongue over the years—mostly my mother—and enemies who simply… vanished. Or were found in their beds with their throats expertly cut.
“Here,” I whisper as I hand it over with the gloves. “These might help.”
“Thanks.” He tugs the gloves on, and leans as close to the cage door as he can with the collar around his neck. Absolute focus settles over his expression as he begins to work the dirk inside the lock.
“Can I… Can I ask you a question?”
A little notch draws between his brows as he tries to slip the tumblers. “I’m not married, sweetheart, but alas, my heart’s already spoken for.”
A nervous laugh tears from me. He’s ridiculous. But somehow it gives me the strength to say this. “You work for the Prince of Evernight.”
This time he looks up. “Yes.”
“What’s he… like?”
A dozen expressions flicker over his face as if I came at him from a direction he didn’t expect. “Thiago?”
I wait.
“Oh, I see now.” His smile turns into a shit-eating grin. “I thought all of this recklessness was for me, but you caught a glimpse of my prince, didn’t you? My poor broken heart.”
Heat scours my cheeks. “Your heart’s already spoken for.”
“I lied.” He shrugs. “I do that on occasion.” He looks far too interested in the topic at hand. “And you’re not going to distract me now. Tell me everything.”
“There’s nothing to tell.” My cheeks flame. “I just… wanted to know. Whether he was… kind?”
“Kind?” Finn tests the word. “He is strict. With himself,” he clarifies, when my gaze jerks to his. “It’s not kindness, so much as protectiveness. He’ll kill to save those he considers his own. And he has all these sorts of rules for himself that nobody, least of all me, can understand. But he’d never hurt an innocent. He’s loyal, and proud, and aloof, and—”
“Aloof?” That wasn’t at all the impression I gained.
Finn sighs. “Sometimes there’s a darkness within him. A distance. You’ll see him staring out over the city as if he sees something else, and you can speak his name but he’s not there. And then it’s like he breaks free of the trance, or shatters the hold of whatever’s got him distracted, and then he’ll blink and he’s back. The prince I know. The prince I’ve fought side-by-side with. The prince I love.”
Love. It’s such a strange word to hear from a male’s mouth like that.
Finn chuckles. “Not like that, Princess. He’s my brother, in the way that we chose to be family. I love him. I will kill for him. I will die for him. And I will set this world on fire if it tries to hurt him.”
I hate that I’m envious of that. I can’t remember the last time I knew such a concept.
No. I do. I remember my childhood with Andraste. Fingers clasped around a tree as we danced in circles around it, singing ‘The oaks fall down, the oaks fall down….’
Laughing and giggling with her as we rolled in the grass and picked daisies, turning them into crowns we placed on each other’s heads.
I would have died to protect that. To protect her.
But then the night came when Mother caught Nanny Redwyne reading stories to us from the book she’d banned. Stories of the old creatures who ruled Arcaedia before the fae arrived.
The Green Man that made the lands of Asturia bloom long before my mother’s ancestors came to power. Bloody Mara, who protects women against all who prey on them, and whose name could be called three times when one was in need. The Erlking, who ruled the fearful Wild Hunt which rode the forests on Samhain, and yet who could be appealed upon for his justice. His mercy.
Wondrous tales of ancient creatures that made me terribly curious about those who lived here before the fae.
Forbidden tales.
And I asked for them. I begged and Nanny hesitated, but eventually she gave in and slipped the book into my room of nights, where she’d hide it beneath my mattress during the day.
Until my mother suddenly appeared in the door one night, as if she’d been waiting for precisely this moment.
“Since you heed not my royal proclamations,” my mother had hissed as her guards pinned Nanny to the ground, “then it seems I must ensure they are heard by all who see you. Your eyes shall never read such blasphemy again. Your tongue shall not proclaim it. And your ears will not hear it.”
And then she made me watch as Nanny screamed and screamed and screamed while the soldiers removed those offending pieces of her.
That was the night I knocked over a candle and nearly burned half the tower down.
That was the night my fledgling magic snuffed itself out.
And that was the night Andraste was torn away from me, our lessons separated, our rooms moved to opposing wings of the castle.
That was the night my mother first looked at me with cold disdain.
The last time I dared love someone—the last time I was loved—was eight years ago now.
“Hey.” A gentle hand curls over mine. “Are you okay?”
I let go of the breath I’ve been holding, tears pricking in my eyes. “I was just thinking about… what it would be like to live in a kingdom where you could trust your ruler.”
Finn bites his lip. It feels weird to be holding hands like this with a stranger in the darkened chambers of my mother’s tent. It feels strange to trust him.
But I do.
Instantly.
Even more so than I trusted Thiago—perhaps because Thiago represents a seductive threat to me on some level, whereas Finn is simply… a charming stranger. A likeable stranger.
“I can kidnap you when I leave,” he says. “Put my knife against your throat and drag you out of here and make it clear you’re not coming with me of your own volition.” There’s a sudden twinkle in his eyes. “Maybe it will give you a chance to see if my prince is ‘kind’ enough for you.”
“That sounds like a terrible plan.”
“But you’re tempted—"
I don’t know what it is that alerts me, because there’s no noise. But I have a sudden, wretched feeling we’re no longer alone.
“Stay still. Don’t move. Don’t say anything,” I hiss in his ear, stealing the dirk from his hands.
“What’s going on?”
I scramble through a slit in the canvas walls, finding myself in what appears to be Mother’s wardrobe. Slipping beneath the enormous drape of the skirt on one of her dresses, I crouch low and peek out from under the hem.
Finn clearly realizes what I’m doing because he sits up straighter.
Just in time.
The tent flaps fling open and an enormous shadow appears.
Edain.
My stepbrother freezes in the opening to this section of the tent, his gaze raking the shadows. Every inch of him is coiled with tension; a predator just waiting to strike. Just my luck. He may have changed the wards on the cage, but something must have set them off.
“What’s wrong, pretty boy?” Finn taunts abruptly. “Come to find your balls? I believe your queen has them locked away in a chest in her room.”
Edain cuts him a look, and then stalks inside, his shadow rippling over the walls as he lifts his torch high. “Who’s been in here?”
“Me and all my merry friends.”
Through the linen, I see Edain’s lip curl in frustration as he sets the torch in its ring. “Someone was picking the lock on your cage. I set wards within it.”
Finn holds up a hair pin. “Can’t blame a lad for trying.”
Edain snatches it. “Where did you get this?”
“Have you seen the elaborate coiffures your queen wears?” Finn gives him an arrogant look.
“Maybe you didn’t notice when she shook them from her hair last night, but I did.”
Edain lashes through the cage and grabs a fistful of his shirt. He swiftly pats him down.
“Here now,” Finn protests. “A man likes a little sweet talk first.” He flinches as Edain’s hands slide through his back pockets. “The real weapon’s in the front.”
Edain freezes.
Their faces are inches from each other, and I’m trying not to breathe under my nest of skirts.
Fuck. This is awkward.
They stare at each other through the bars on the cage, and then Finn shivers. “Stop looking at me like that, Pet. Your queen wouldn’t approve if she caught you feeling me up like a lecherous barmaid.”
“Maybe I should have let her whip you bloody,” Edain says in disgust as he sinks back onto his knees. “You have a mouth on you.”
“Oh, I do.” They’re still staring at each other. “Want to try it?”
Finn bursts out laughing as Edain shoves to his feet, scrubbing at his mouth.
“I’m starting to realize why your prince hasn’t made a counteroffer yet,” Edain says. “Maybe he doesn’t want you back. Maybe we’ve done him a favor.”
It cuts through Finn’s laughter. “My prince doesn’t negotiate with blackmailers.”
“How’s that make you feel?” Edain sneers. “You’re worthless to him.”
Finn merely crosses his legs and rests his hands on his thighs. “I know my worth,” he says simply. “Do you?”
There’s a stillness within Edain. For all that he appears to hold the upper hand, I can see Finn scored first blood.
“Whether you know your own worth or not,” he finally says, “if your prince doesn’t give us what we want, then she will kill you. Slowly. Painfully.”
“You mean she’ll make you kill me. Slowly. Painfully.”
Edain gives him a long, heated look.
Finn sighs. “You hate it, don’t you? What’s she have on you?”
Bleakness darkens my stepbrother’s face. “Everything.”
“Then why don’t you—"
“Edain?”
The sound of his name echoes through the enormous tent.
I freeze as I recognize my sister’s voice.
But curiously enough, so does Edain. His head tracks toward the sound, all his attention focusing upon her. “Andraste?”
