“Listen.” She hoisted herself up onto the desk in front of him. “First of all, Theo is a bully.” Dax stared at her bare legs, swinging loose between them. “And second of all, there’s nothing wrong with you.”
He glanced up. “Then why can’t I do something that comes so easily to everyone else?”
Roa didn’t know the answer to that.
Seeing it, Dax turned his face away and pushed the chair out.
“It’s late. We should go to sleep. If your father—”
Roa reached for his arm, stopping him. Dax went immediately still.
“I have an idea,” she said, getting down from the desk.
He watched her build a small fire in the fire basin, then sit down on the carpet. When she told him to bring the stack of letters from the desk, he picked them up and cautiously came to sit beside her.
Roa unfolded the first one and started to read.
She read him every letter she’d written that winter. The boring ones about working in the fields. The personal ones about her fights with Essie. The serious ones about her fear of one day inheriting the House of Song. And even the one where she admitted that she missed him—or at least, missed playing gods and monsters with him.
As she read, she followed each word with her finger, so Dax could know both the shape and the sound of the words. She read until her voice grew hoarse and her eyes grew heavy. She read until her head started to droop.
They fell asleep there, on the carpet of her father’s study. And when Roa woke at daybreak, the sun hadn’t yet risen, but the world hummed blue-gold in anticipation. She turned to find Dax fast asleep beside her.
Roa watched his chest rise and fall. He was thirteen this summer, just two years older than her, and not only was he taller, but his shoulders were wider than she remembered. She could see the curve of muscle as his elbow cradled his head.
A startling warmth spread through Roa as she watched him sleep. Her gaze traced the arc of his throat. The line of his jaw. The soft shape of his mouth.
She felt guilty about it.
It was Essie who liked Dax, not her.
She should have risen right then and slipped silently away. That would have been the right thing to do.
But Roa didn’t do the right thing.
Instead, she pushed herself up onto her elbow, studying Dax’s face in the early-morning light. Again and again, her gaze moved to his mouth.
What would it be like, she wondered, to kiss the son of a king?
Roa leaned in.
As if sensing the breach, Dax stirred.
Roa tore away, heart thundering, and lay back down, pretending to sleep. She could hear Dax wake beside her. Her pulse pounded out its betrayal as she listened to him turn and stretch.
Roa opened her eyes and saw him look away, rubbing at the back of his neck, as if it were sore.
From the gardens, the roosters crowed, heralding the start of day.
“We should get out of here,” he said, looking to the windows, where the smoke from several chimneys curled across the morning sky. “Before your father finds us and chases me out of his house.” He half smiled, half winced at the thought.
Heat rushed up Roa’s neck at the implication. He was right. They were no longer children. They couldn’t be seen like this. In here. Together.
Roa rose first.
Together, they crept to the door. Roa opened it and peered out, butthere was no one in the hall. Dax would have gone straight through the central pavilion, but Roa grabbed his hand, stopping him. He looked down at her and she shook her head. The servants would be lighting the fire in there, warming the room up for her father. Her fingers slid through his as she tugged him the other way, to a darkened hallway nearer the guest wing.
Their hearts hammered in unison until they arrived at his bedroom door, where Dax let go of her hand.
