She soaks in my furious reaction without so much as a flinch. “If the rumors are true, there's no morality in the Savage Prince either. I must believe you are every inch the monster that they say you are.”
The lower she aims, the lower I’ll descend right after her, to the very depths of Elysium should I need to. “And yet I've heard nothing of you. Suspicious, considering how much power you have.”
The corner of her lips only quirks up a little further, until there’s a proper smile on her face. I find myself eager to reach forward and break it, to wipe it from her features, to have them slacken forever in the cold embrace of death.
She nods at me slowly, the smile slipping away as she watches me as though watching a circling dragon. “I feel as though we should attempt to reach some form of compromise, or we’re going to do nothing more than this. Don't you want your throne?”
“I don't compromise with my own people—why would I ever compromise with a filthy witch?”
She shakes her head slowly, her gaze tracing the scar on my face. “You're not going to be a very good king.”
“How would you know what a good king is?”
She shakes her head at me once more. “I just returned from the Northern Lands, didn’t I? I watched a high-fae king giveeverythingfor his people. You don't have an ounce of his integrity or backbone, Savage Prince. You're nothing but a pouting royal demanding what you suppose is owed to you by blood, forgetting that it's not just a crown but a position of power.”
My temper flares once more, and with it, a ripple swells under my skin, tingles shooting down my arms, and I watch as her gaze drops to them as though she felt it too. My hands clench into fists to hide the way they shake as a killing rage bubbles inside me. I want the witches gone from this earth, and so I must submit to my fate, no matter the price I must pay.
There’s a knock at my chamber doors, and I take a moment to collect myself, to stop the heated rise of rage from bubbling over even as a dash of frustration adds to the mix.
There's only one person who knocks like that, a delicate rapping of knuckles against the wood in a particular pattern designed just for me. It sounds as though she's trying to make music with it, every part of her life fanciful and pretty, and I have to remind myself that she doesn’t know better. She’s the product of her upbringing, and I shouldn’t blame her for that failing—her heart is better than most.
My eyes flick toward the witch, but there's nowhere to hide her, not without moving her into my inner chambers, and my reception room is as far as I’ll allow her to go. The pull of her magic on me—or maybe it's the threads of the Fates insistently binding us together—fills the space around us both. I know the feeling will linger after she’s gone; the other times she’s been let out of the cell, I’ve been stuck feeling her absence for hours after we parted, and I don’t want that magic following me to bed.
I pointedly never think of the witch in my bed and what a betrayal of my kingdom it will be when the fires of my anger for her twist into something different. If the Fates would allow, I’d find someone else to pour that rage into and maybe finally get some sleep, but the thought of touching another female also curdles my gut.
The only speculation worse to me than that is the one I have about the witch’s life in the Northern Lands and withwhomshe shared it.
The darkest, most vicious depths of my mind keep whispering that it’s Kharl, that she’s been sent here by her lover to fulfill our fates and bring him the throne by a knife to my gut the moment she earns my trust. I have no evidence of him traveling to the Northern Lands but there’s nothing to say that she hasn’t traveled between the two kingdoms, or that he’s found a way to open his own fae door to stay in contact with her.
It takes a very deep breath to clear those thoughts away and fix a blank mask over my face.
“Come in,” I call out, shuffling some of the papers to ensure that Sari—and whatever guard her father left behind with her—can’t see my correspondence.
My cousin flounces in.
There's no other word for the way her entire body bounces with glee and her skirts ruffle like frothy nightmares. She has one of her maid servants with her, a half-sister who doesn’t look up from the floor even as she walks alongside her mistress, and of course there's the guard her father left behind with her. I don’t recognize him, but that’s not unusual. The regent picks his guards for their loyalty to him and their hatred of me, none of it earned from firsthand experience. They’re fed a stream of his propaganda until they’re molded into the sneering form in front of me now. Watching over the regent’s beloved daughter means the guard doesn't have to hide his contempt for me—there's no law or social reason for him to pretend to feel anything else.
Only the risk of the consequences once I become king, a probability he foolishly rejects.
I shift my gaze back to my cousin and find a vacant sort of joy in her eyes as she smiles across the desk at me. There are only a few decades between Sari and Airlie, and yet there might as well be thousands of years, all of Airlie’s maturity and sophistication in stark contrast to Sari’s naïvety.
Despite our opposing sides of the court, she’s always sought me out and spoken to me with affection, more insistently as the years have gone on. I’ve handled her carefully but never turned her away either, and not just because her father would twist my action and every last word I’ve ever spoken to her. There’s something about her that I question—something behind those vacant eyes and childish demands that has never sat right with me—but no poking or coaxing has revealed an answer.
Sari looks around the room carefully, her eyes flitting over the witch as though she doesn't care about her any more than she cares about the color of my drapes.
“We've been holed up in here all day, Cousin! Father said that you’d take me for a walk around the garden while I was here, if only I asked, but every time I've sent Malia to find you, your soldiers or the servants send her away.”
She pouts and bounces forward to take a seat in one of the chairs across from me. Malia and the guard step forward so they're still within an arm's reach of her. Malia drops onto her haunches to fuss with her lady’s dresses and skirts, always ensuring she looks perfect enough for a portrait.
She doesn't ever look up.
“Have your guard escort you there. I have an entire castle to run, Sari, I'm sorry. I’d take you there now if I didn't have pressing issues. Maybe Airlie can go with you—she's supposed to get some exercise each day, and I'm sure she’d love the company.”
Airlie can barely tolerate Sari, seeing far too much of her own mother’s vanity within the female, and I mentally make a note to apologize profusely to my cousin for putting her neck on this chopping block.
Sari only sighs at me, the pout on her lips growing bigger. “I don't want to walk with Airlie. She bumbles along too slowly, and she spends all her time telling me off. I suppose that’s what my life would be like if I had a mother.”
For all her innocence and naïvety, she wields guilt like a sword. She knows her pretty face and everyone's perceptions of her as the poor orphaned princess are the best weapons she has to get what she wants. Her life with the regent hasn’t been an easy one, and though he showers his heir with every pretty trinket and luxury she could possibly want, I’ve never seen them interact with any sort of warmth.
