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“Do you like it?” The soft, velvet voice sounded pleasantly in her ears, dark and rich and entirely at home.
She halted and turned. Prince Numair stood behind her, just far enough away not to trigger her personal boundaries, his black eyes at once warm and distant. He wore all black, as if dressed for his funeral rather than his nameday.
“Yes.” She met his gaze as she answered him, looking for that hint of mischief, that readiness to verbal sparring she’d seen from him earlier. But the only thing she found in the black depths of his irises was endless melancholy. She glanced at the maze entrance, then back to him. “It’s…oddly peaceful.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Most people tell me it is wild and disturbing.”
“And yet you invite Veralna’s nobility into its heart for the evening. Tell me, do you enjoy making them uncomfortable, or is it that you do not wish to have people in your home? Or,” she continued when he remained silent, “is it both?”
He shook his head. “You ask a lot of questions.”
“Because they tend to get me answers, whether people give them or not.”
He laughed and the melancholy in his eyes receded a little. He was young, she realized, hardly older than herself. If she had to guess, she would not put him at more than twenty-five winters. Yet he seemed—like she felt—centuries older.
And he was nothing like she’d expected—nothing like she would expect a prince who had a pretty woman alone in a secluded place to be. For a man who’d paid an extraordinarily large sum of money to put her in the dress she now wore, his eyes had never once left her face.
“Why did you bring me here tonight?” she asked softly. She was not quite certain when they had moved closer together, nor which one of them had done the moving, but they stood a mere foot apart. The air between them had taken on a charged quality, as if a storm would break at any moment.
Shadows clouded the prince’s eyes, and she had the horrifying sense that whatever words came out of his mouth would be the absolute truth.
His lips parted and, like most truths, the answer he gave didn’t readily appear to be a response to the question she’d asked. “Have you ever seen a place that has been utterly ravaged? Razed to the ground until nothing is left alive? Not a person, nor plant, nor any living creature?”
She hesitated, not because the question was strange, though it probably was, but because she wanted to answer with the truth, and her truths could not be told in full. “I’ve seen…something like that,” she hedged. Renault County wasn’t razed, wasn’t obliterated, but she wouldn’t call it living either.
“I saw El-Dennon after it fell.”
El-Dennon. The last kingdom that had resisted falling under the control of the Faelhorn Provinces.
“I was fourteen at the time. My uncle butchered it.” He swallowed, a harsh bob of his throat. “He didn’t do it because he needed to. He did it because their defiance infuriated him. And he did it well.
“I wandered through the wreckage for hours. I don’t know why. There was nothing to save, nothing to be done. But I felt like I owed it to the dead. To remember they’d existed. I was in the remnants of the town square as night fell, and in the center of so much dust and death, a single night orchid unfurled its petals. Everything around it was beaten and broken. It had seen what happened, been exposed to it, and yet somehow it lived. It bloomed.” A brief hesitation clouded his eyes before he plunged ahead. “Seeing you was like seeing that orchid all over again.”
If anyone else had spoken those words to her, she would have laughed. To compare her to a single spot of beauty in a sea of destruction was the type of thing poets did to flatter court women. But no one standing in Numair’s orbit, hearing him talk, feeling the intensity that rolled off him, could take his words for contrivance. He looked at her like he was a drowning man and she something to cling to.
Foolish, foolish man. Didn’t he know that she was drowning too? That life was drowning, and that if two people clung to each other too tightly in rough seas, they only drowned faster?
“You asked me why I wanted you here,” he said finally, when the silence between them had stretched long enough that it risked growing into something else. “I answered. It’s your turn. Why did you accept?”
“Do you want honesty?” she asked.
The right corner of his lip curled up in a half-smile. “If such a thing can be said to exist, yes.”
Smart man. Because she wasn’t going to give him honesty. At least, not all of it. “For one, you are the prince of Faelhorn.”
“Second prince,” he corrected.
“Why is that?” Everyone seemed always to point out that he was second, yet she hadn’t heard tell of a first.
“My cousin is first.” There was something in the set of his jaw that spoke of unpleasantness.
“Does it bother you? Being second?”
“Hardly. I wish there were a thousand princes in front of me. What other reasons do you have?”
“You didn’t bore me to tears in Galina’s.”
“And?” He was closer now—or she was closer, she wasn’t sure which.
